I think this is a very high quality thread. I think Hearthstone could benefit from having variance particularly in the start of the game reduced by a little bit. Examples of this:
* Players start with one or two more cards each.
* Players start the game with a little bit more life, like 35 (To reduce the chance of noninteractive early game steamroll matches).
However I am a huge fan of the emergent complexity and gameplay that arises from mechanics that include a degree of randomness. This is why discover is my favourite mechanic.
Edit: Maybe also relevant to the discussion: I play wild exclusively.
Getting steamrolled due to bad draws certainly sucks, although I expect increasing the opening hand size will have some complications beyond just improving early draws. I'm not entirely sure whether it would favour aggro or control, since aggro has more fuel while control has better odds of having answers. I guess it's a good sign that it is not obvious who benefits most.
I would be most wary of both suggestions for combo decks. Having 1 extra card at the start reduces the clock for decks to beat them in by 1 turn, which is occasionally a huge deal. Meanwhile, having a higher health total will make combo decks who don't already have 35 damage reach fall off the face of the game completely. Ultimately, I think cards for combo decks are balanced so much around the size of the starting hand, the starting health total and the maximum 10 mana crystals that changing any of them might cause balance problems even if all other archetypes are fine with it.
Since I actively avoided touching on the variance in card draw in my initial post, I haven't given full thought to whether early game variance could be optimised. It's certainly an interesting topic of discussion, especially with regards to how the game has evolved since the simpler days of Classic.
This brings me to another flaw with the game, as I see it: The lack of options for interacting with your opponent's game plan. I can see why one would be wary of introducing cards like these: losing key cards due to discard mechanics or similar is not fun, and one could certainly make a case that too much meddling with your opponents' resources could in itself result in a non-interactive game environment. For instance: There are decks in MTG whose plan is to discard their opponent's entire hand and thus leave them with no ways to interact. That has the potential to be oppressive in and of itself.
I think the key word here is 'moderation'.
Having some viable ways to interact with the hands and decks of your opponents I imagine will create an environment where people are less inclined to zero in on a deterministic, non-interactive game plan where your entire deck revolves around building up to one key turn while minimizing the ways in which your opponent can interact with you. Conversely, if you lose one of your key cards, you more or less lose the game. I am not opposed to these "tunnel-vision" combo decks in principle, but I do think there needs to be reasonable answers to these decks for every class and archetype. Otherwise, in theory at least, we end up in a rock-paper-scissor environment where combo beats control, control beats aggro and aggro beats combo. My philosophy is that any class or archetype should have a reasonable chance to win against any other class or archetype.
By introducing some more disruption tools we encourage players to diversify their decks, including a number of threats instead of throwing every apple in one basket. Personally I like the idea of that.
I think this is a very high quality thread. I think Hearthstone could benefit from having variance particularly in the start of the game reduced by a little bit. Examples of this:
* Players start with one or two more cards each.
* Players start the game with a little bit more life, like 35 (To reduce the chance of noninteractive early game steamroll matches).
However I am a huge fan of the emergent complexity and gameplay that arises from mechanics that include a degree of randomness. This is why discover is my favourite mechanic.
Edit: Maybe also relevant to the discussion: I play wild exclusively.
Getting steamrolled due to bad draws certainly sucks, although I expect increasing the opening hand size will have some complications beyond just improving early draws. I'm not entirely sure whether it would favour aggro or control, since aggro has more fuel while control has better odds of having answers. I guess it's a good sign that it is not obvious who benefits most.
I would be most wary of both suggestions for combo decks. Having 1 extra card at the start reduces the clock for decks to beat them in by 1 turn, which is occasionally a huge deal. Meanwhile, having a higher health total will make combo decks who don't already have 35 damage reach fall off the face of the game completely. Ultimately, I think cards for combo decks are balanced so much around the size of the starting hand, the starting health total and the maximum 10 mana crystals that changing any of them might cause balance problems even if all other archetypes are fine with it.
Since I actively avoided touching on the variance in card draw in my initial post, I haven't given full thought to whether early game variance could be optimised. It's certainly an interesting topic of discussion, especially with regards to how the game has evolved since the simpler days of Classic.
Hero Powers - "They like the idea of having unique hero powers locked behind owning certain cards." But... why? How? If you want to help players feel rewarded for their accomplishments, lock hero powers behind something in Duels, please, not behind how much money you've given to Blizzard.
Miniset - I've still got the same feelings about the miniset - shaking up the meta is a great idea, but you don't need to print legendaries for that to happen. Buying 20 packs midcycle is well worth the fun. Spending thousands of dust is not. Like all HS players, I am a territorial dust bunny.
Progression - And like others said, I wish they'd just show us the progression track instead of continuing to promise, promise, and promise. It makes me suspect that they know it's worse and plan to release everything at once, so that bad publicity gets drowned out by new expansion giddiness.
That said, I'm excited to see how this all goes. I can't wait to put all four old gods in a deck! I wonder if we'll have enough tribal Corrupt minions to make Y'shaarj and N'zoth work together?
I think the problem with randomness in hearthstone is the amount of variance.
You get the point. Basically a deck designed to be as annoying to play against and luck dependent as possible to win with or win against. And it was fun to play. But do you see the difference? On each of these cards me and my opponent know the outcome of every effect. It's either one thing or another. That's why cards like First Day of School and Magic Trick, i think aren't as oppressive as say Primordial Glyph(excluding magic trick into Evocation obviously) I never had an opponent concede against me out of pure frustration when i played many games with this yugioh deck. That is because me and my opponent knew the odds, and the die rolls or coin flips weren't in either of our favor. Or if they were locked out by particular effects like Tour of Doom or Fairy Box they knew they had potential draws that would negate these effects. But in hearthstone it's different. The amount of variance you can bring forth just by a 1/1 minion that was randomly generated off another minion that discover's a spell, is ridiculous, and there is nothing your opponent can do to limit that effect.
Walk the Plank is considered a joke card to many people that play hearthstone, but i doubt there's not a single person that has fought against a lackey rogue, that hasn't had their lackey rogue opponent discover it from a randomly generated witchey lackey and won the game off it. The variance is too high.
I don't personally have much of an issue with the size of card pools, but perhaps that is because I have spent years working with statistical physics and its continuous distributions (i.e. infinite possibilities). I instead view things more as a comparison of the variance (or strictly the standard deviation = square root of variance) and the mean (average) value.
For example, if you have 100 possible 2-drops to get from Piloted Shredder, and nearly all of them have a sensible 2-drop stat-line (e.g. 2/3, 3/2, 2/2 etc) with mild effects, and there's only a small handful of outliars (e.g. Millhouse Manastorm and Doomsayer) then the ratio of average to variance is actually quite small. The end result is that you know to expect a sensible 2-drop, even if you need to keep contingency plans in the back of your mind for rare outliars.
To me, that is more predictable than a coin flip on whether something happens or not, as happens with Time Wizard and is common in physical card games. Setting heads = 1 and tails = 0, that's a mean of 1/2 and a variance that ends up 1/4 (hence a standard deviation = 1/2). That's a standard deviation as large as the mean, so while I might know exactly what the two outcomes are, I don't actually have any idea which to expect.
There is a definite matter of preference in there, but in the end I'm glad HS has so few coin flips.
As for issues with Walk the Plank being generated: I'm surprised it catches you off-guard so much. If there is any type of spell/effect I would expect a rogue to discover it is hard removal. Meta decks might not play them very often, but the class has a ton of them. Also, when was Walk the Plank a joke card? I seem to recall it being played for a little while, and a 4-mana destroy a minion spell with only a minor restriction is pretty solid.
One think that i like from OTK is you have to play some specific play-pattern (mechathun: draw and clear ur hand board n deck, mogu cultist: copy card, draw and play them, exopally: survive and HP 4 times) instead of pure face for aggro and remove anything for control.
Ofc i don't like it to get beaten up in 1 turn, but OTK decks have some refreshing feels to it.
It's not a subtle hint - it's almost an explicit statement that 10 gold is done. Which I'm fine with - bring on the new system! I think it's better in every way.
I think this is a very high quality thread. I think Hearthstone could benefit from having variance particularly in the start of the game reduced by a little bit. Examples of this:
* Players start with one or two more cards each.
* Players start the game with a little bit more life, like 35 (To reduce the chance of noninteractive early game steamroll matches).
However I am a huge fan of the emergent complexity and gameplay that arises from mechanics that include a degree of randomness. This is why discover is my favourite mechanic.
Edit: Maybe also relevant to the discussion: I play wild exclusively.
That was what i thought as well. The 10g per 3 wins is replaced by a little xp at the end of each game. How much xp you get should be calculated from time spent or if you win or lose
You are saying that "To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well." which is right, but does not that into account that besides the amount of RNG there is also the "quality" of RNG which matters. As described above some RNG just gives you an advantage while other forms completely negate any skill.
I completely agree, and this touches very much on @Dapperdog's comment too.
I personally take issue with how Puzzle Box, Amazing Reno and Solarian Prime work. In general I am in favour of RNG to hand much much more than RNG straight to the board. I attempted to separate them in the "Relating these to Hearthstone" section, but since the aim was to take the side of RNG on the whole my disdain for on-board RNG was muted a bit. I tried to convey that there is some skill that can be associated with this type of RNG, but the bigger and flashier versions do go way too far, to the point where variance far outweighs the influence skill can have.
Hearthstone often called an RNG fiesta, and the prevailing wisdom is that it takes less skill to play than other TCGs/CCGs because of it. I’m not here to argue whether HS, MtG, LoR etc. is the more skilful since as far as I know the concept of ‘skill’ cannot be quantified, so we’d be stuck using opinions and gut feelings which get us nowhere.
No, the purpose of this thread is to make the case that RNG, in HS as well as other (card) games, should not be regarded with the surface-level analysis that it usually receives. Namely: “you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill”. To escape the ever-present debate of whether RNG in deck order counts, I'll focus more on randomness outside of card games, which helps shed a different light on things.
In principle I agree. I would like to adress one point however. RNG in HS often does not mean having less control of the outcome of a situation, but having no control at all. One (quite extreme) example would be the new Yogg card. Play it and you can instantly win or lose the game. There is absolutely no skill or control involved here, just pure randomness. There are different levels of RNG, some just influence the current game situation to varying degrees and some decide the game outright. The latter pretty much negate any skill.
You are saying that "To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well." which is right, but does not take into account that besides the amount of RNG there is also the "quality" of RNG which matters. As described above some RNG just gives you an advantage while other forms completely negate any skill.
I mean maybe there is a deck that cares, you're not wrong. So far I don't feel like it is good enough in most decks though, and at least with the hero powers we have right now none of them are really worth using right away on turn 1.
Over the course of an expansion how many "10 golds" do you get? I don't know. But now, you can actually see how may packs, how much gold, et cetera that you end up getting.
I think that's a subtle hint that that 10 gold every 3 wins is kaput in the new system.
In my mind, iv always expect that to be true from the beginning to be honest. I dont think it would matter much if they left it in and could be a nice addition, but i can understand them wanting to "clean up" the process.
I think you hammered that nail nicely on the head.
But then again, I just came back from a game where my opponent (who by my judgement makes too many small mistakes) just beaten me because he managed an rng ride from a solarian prime (into puzzlebox, no less) that completely flip the board in his favor, then proceeded to taunt me with Jaina's trademark 'hello's.
Was it skill that got him that win? Not by my judgement. Could I have possibly played better? I was in the lead all the way up until then, getting him to 5 health, so my answer is no. How many evocations was played that game? Three. How often have this happened? Way too many times over the last 6 months.
You're right in pointing out the flaws in the statement 'you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill'. Unfortunately, that doesn't detract from the point that that outcome was entirely out of my hands (and my opponent's hands as well), my opponent was not as skilled and yet still won, and no amount of mathematical equations could have saved me from my untimely fate.
Often its not merely rng. Its also the amount, and its impact. And there are quite a few rng card generators in hearthstone that wins games on its own. That I think is the real issue at heart. There's no playing around with cards like puzzlebox. If they play it, then its time to start praying.
I'm in the middle of a Turalyon run right now, and experienced two empty buckets (i.e. an empty bucket with no name, and one intentionally empty "no more" bucket) and I played against someone with Robes of Gaudiness (though I guess maybe they started their run before the fix?). Seems like this isn't really resolved yet.
It's explicitly early access, so everyone playing obviously knows they're effectively beta testers. They have weeks to tweak and/or fix it before it really needs to be ready for prime time.
side
Don't put this deck public please, it's not a funcional deck
side deck
Don't put this deck public please, it's not a funcional deck
RNG vs skill: a false competition
This brings me to another flaw with the game, as I see it: The lack of options for interacting with your opponent's game plan. I can see why one would be wary of introducing cards like these: losing key cards due to discard mechanics or similar is not fun, and one could certainly make a case that too much meddling with your opponents' resources could in itself result in a non-interactive game environment. For instance: There are decks in MTG whose plan is to discard their opponent's entire hand and thus leave them with no ways to interact. That has the potential to be oppressive in and of itself.
I think the key word here is 'moderation'.
Having some viable ways to interact with the hands and decks of your opponents I imagine will create an environment where people are less inclined to zero in on a deterministic, non-interactive game plan where your entire deck revolves around building up to one key turn while minimizing the ways in which your opponent can interact with you. Conversely, if you lose one of your key cards, you more or less lose the game. I am not opposed to these "tunnel-vision" combo decks in principle, but I do think there needs to be reasonable answers to these decks for every class and archetype. Otherwise, in theory at least, we end up in a rock-paper-scissor environment where combo beats control, control beats aggro and aggro beats combo. My philosophy is that any class or archetype should have a reasonable chance to win against any other class or archetype.
By introducing some more disruption tools we encourage players to diversify their decks, including a number of threats instead of throwing every apple in one basket. Personally I like the idea of that.
New Priest Minion - Fortune Teller
Unless Blizz reveals some good synergy cards with mechs/taunts/battlecry, that card will not see play, atleast until year rotation.
RNG vs skill: a false competition
Getting steamrolled due to bad draws certainly sucks, although I expect increasing the opening hand size will have some complications beyond just improving early draws. I'm not entirely sure whether it would favour aggro or control, since aggro has more fuel while control has better odds of having answers. I guess it's a good sign that it is not obvious who benefits most.
I would be most wary of both suggestions for combo decks. Having 1 extra card at the start reduces the clock for decks to beat them in by 1 turn, which is occasionally a huge deal. Meanwhile, having a higher health total will make combo decks who don't already have 35 damage reach fall off the face of the game completely. Ultimately, I think cards for combo decks are balanced so much around the size of the starting hand, the starting health total and the maximum 10 mana crystals that changing any of them might cause balance problems even if all other archetypes are fine with it.
Since I actively avoided touching on the variance in card draw in my initial post, I haven't given full thought to whether early game variance could be optimised. It's certainly an interesting topic of discussion, especially with regards to how the game has evolved since the simpler days of Classic.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
Hero Powers - "They like the idea of having unique hero powers locked behind owning certain cards." But... why? How? If you want to help players feel rewarded for their accomplishments, lock hero powers behind something in Duels, please, not behind how much money you've given to Blizzard.
Miniset - I've still got the same feelings about the miniset - shaking up the meta is a great idea, but you don't need to print legendaries for that to happen. Buying 20 packs midcycle is well worth the fun. Spending thousands of dust is not. Like all HS players, I am a territorial dust bunny.
Progression - And like others said, I wish they'd just show us the progression track instead of continuing to promise, promise, and promise. It makes me suspect that they know it's worse and plan to release everything at once, so that bad publicity gets drowned out by new expansion giddiness.
That said, I'm excited to see how this all goes. I can't wait to put all four old gods in a deck! I wonder if we'll have enough tribal Corrupt minions to make Y'shaarj and N'zoth work together?
RNG vs skill: a false competition
I don't personally have much of an issue with the size of card pools, but perhaps that is because I have spent years working with statistical physics and its continuous distributions (i.e. infinite possibilities). I instead view things more as a comparison of the variance (or strictly the standard deviation = square root of variance) and the mean (average) value.
For example, if you have 100 possible 2-drops to get from Piloted Shredder, and nearly all of them have a sensible 2-drop stat-line (e.g. 2/3, 3/2, 2/2 etc) with mild effects, and there's only a small handful of outliars (e.g. Millhouse Manastorm and Doomsayer) then the ratio of average to variance is actually quite small. The end result is that you know to expect a sensible 2-drop, even if you need to keep contingency plans in the back of your mind for rare outliars.
To me, that is more predictable than a coin flip on whether something happens or not, as happens with Time Wizard and is common in physical card games. Setting heads = 1 and tails = 0, that's a mean of 1/2 and a variance that ends up 1/4 (hence a standard deviation = 1/2). That's a standard deviation as large as the mean, so while I might know exactly what the two outcomes are, I don't actually have any idea which to expect.
There is a definite matter of preference in there, but in the end I'm glad HS has so few coin flips.
As for issues with Walk the Plank being generated: I'm surprised it catches you off-guard so much. If there is any type of spell/effect I would expect a rogue to discover it is hard removal. Meta decks might not play them very often, but the class has a ton of them. Also, when was Walk the Plank a joke card? I seem to recall it being played for a little while, and a 4-mana destroy a minion spell with only a minor restriction is pretty solid.
A Weekend of (Slightly Spooky) Wild Hearthstone Decks
One think that i like from OTK is you have to play some specific play-pattern (mechathun: draw and clear ur hand board n deck, mogu cultist: copy card, draw and play them, exopally: survive and HP 4 times) instead of pure face for aggro and remove anything for control.
Ofc i don't like it to get beaten up in 1 turn, but OTK decks have some refreshing feels to it.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
It's not a subtle hint - it's almost an explicit statement that 10 gold is done. Which I'm fine with - bring on the new system! I think it's better in every way.
RNG vs skill: a false competition
I think this is a very high quality thread. I think Hearthstone could benefit from having variance particularly in the start of the game reduced by a little bit. Examples of this:
* Players start with one or two more cards each.
* Players start the game with a little bit more life, like 35 (To reduce the chance of noninteractive early game steamroll matches).
However I am a huge fan of the emergent complexity and gameplay that arises from mechanics that include a degree of randomness. This is why discover is my favourite mechanic.
Edit: Maybe also relevant to the discussion: I play wild exclusively.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
That was what i thought as well. The 10g per 3 wins is replaced by a little xp at the end of each game. How much xp you get should be calculated from time spent or if you win or lose
RNG vs skill: a false competition
I completely agree, and this touches very much on @Dapperdog's comment too.
I personally take issue with how Puzzle Box, Amazing Reno and Solarian Prime work. In general I am in favour of RNG to hand much much more than RNG straight to the board. I attempted to separate them in the "Relating these to Hearthstone" section, but since the aim was to take the side of RNG on the whole my disdain for on-board RNG was muted a bit. I tried to convey that there is some skill that can be associated with this type of RNG, but the bigger and flashier versions do go way too far, to the point where variance far outweighs the influence skill can have.
Hearthstone's Achievements - Everything You Need to Know
but the achievement mentions Il'gynoth under Demon Hunter Achievements.
also Il'gynoth couldn't be a neutral legendary anyway because they already revealed the 5 neutral legendaries of this set.
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
Try restart the HS app with empty bucket (it will offer you all 3 then)
RNG vs skill: a false competition
In principle I agree. I would like to adress one point however. RNG in HS often does not mean having less control of the outcome of a situation, but having no control at all. One (quite extreme) example would be the new Yogg card. Play it and you can instantly win or lose the game. There is absolutely no skill or control involved here, just pure randomness. There are different levels of RNG, some just influence the current game situation to varying degrees and some decide the game outright. The latter pretty much negate any skill.
You are saying that "To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well." which is right, but does not take into account that besides the amount of RNG there is also the "quality" of RNG which matters. As described above some RNG just gives you an advantage while other forms completely negate any skill.
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
I mean maybe there is a deck that cares, you're not wrong. So far I don't feel like it is good enough in most decks though, and at least with the hero powers we have right now none of them are really worth using right away on turn 1.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
In my mind, iv always expect that to be true from the beginning to be honest. I dont think it would matter much if they left it in and could be a nice addition, but i can understand them wanting to "clean up" the process.
Event idea
Well, I'm glad you like it! Along with seemingly about 8 others.
RNG vs skill: a false competition
I think you hammered that nail nicely on the head.
But then again, I just came back from a game where my opponent (who by my judgement makes too many small mistakes) just beaten me because he managed an rng ride from a solarian prime (into puzzlebox, no less) that completely flip the board in his favor, then proceeded to taunt me with Jaina's trademark 'hello's.
Was it skill that got him that win? Not by my judgement. Could I have possibly played better? I was in the lead all the way up until then, getting him to 5 health, so my answer is no. How many evocations was played that game? Three. How often have this happened? Way too many times over the last 6 months.
You're right in pointing out the flaws in the statement 'you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill'. Unfortunately, that doesn't detract from the point that that outcome was entirely out of my hands (and my opponent's hands as well), my opponent was not as skilled and yet still won, and no amount of mathematical equations could have saved me from my untimely fate.
Often its not merely rng. Its also the amount, and its impact. And there are quite a few rng card generators in hearthstone that wins games on its own. That I think is the real issue at heart. There's no playing around with cards like puzzlebox. If they play it, then its time to start praying.
Quest progress
Got the same 'issue'.
Is this intended change or just a bug?
A Weekend of (Slightly Spooky) Wild Hearthstone Decks
I always wondered if there are more people that like OTK decks than people that despise them. I count myself among the latter.
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
I'm in the middle of a Turalyon run right now, and experienced two empty buckets (i.e. an empty bucket with no name, and one intentionally empty "no more" bucket) and I played against someone with Robes of Gaudiness (though I guess maybe they started their run before the fix?). Seems like this isn't really resolved yet.
Quest Trading - Play A Friend!
Battletag: Zeedrome#done
Region: NA
Trade only?: Yes. You go first. I can show proof of my quest
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
It's explicitly early access, so everyone playing obviously knows they're effectively beta testers. They have weeks to tweak and/or fix it before it really needs to be ready for prime time.
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
They did it to give you something obvious to complain about, and you took the bait hard.