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It's one of many little things that, when combined, maybe could have made a difference. The lack of polish at launch did the mode no favors: there was a lot of hype at launch, but players dropped off very quickly.

In particular as someone who never played WoW, it was hard to remember which mercs were Horde, which were Alliance and which were neutral. Some patterns are easy: humans and draenai are generally Alliance and orcs and trolls are generally Horde, but what about an elven druid like Malfurion?

Traditionally Blizzard games stood out in terms of polish, but that was missing from Mercenaries. As you said, the launch was very incomplete, with many tasks not working as stated in their descriptions. Some little annoyances were never fixed, such as bounties that require you to visit healers or buff nodes not showing a completion notice until after the next fight, even though they can be completed if you navigate to them manually.

The recently extended areas seem to lack any original design, just putting dragons in all of them. There is no storytelling going on there, it's just filler. Even if they didn't have a budget for designing entirely new enemies, they could have remixed existing ones in more interesting ways.

I don't know if the devs were severely understaffed and therefore only able to focus on the bare essentials, or if they were assigned to a project they didn't really care about, but it is clear that they didn't give it the attention to detail that players expected. I think it could be the latter (maybe not for all devs, but for some of them) because the entire mode's existence feels like it was motivated by monetization rather than by a creative drive.

And that monetization was done terribly. Everything was way overpriced, even relative to other Hearthstone modes. The algorithm for pack contents was too complicated for the average player to grasp: it is completely counter-intuitive that you can get a portrait of a certain rarity instead of a merc card, just because only one slot per pack has duplicate protection. The issue of useless coins was addressed way too late and the solution was much too stingy. Even though I put quite a few hours into Mercenaries, I never felt like spending money on it after the first few days, because everything they were selling felt like a terrible deal.

I think it's a pity, since its core mechanics are enjoyable. The main problem is not there, but in its poor execution.

Regarding a lack of enthusiasm from streamers though, the mode just isn't great streaming material, so I think that was always going to happen. You can't really grasp what is going on in PvP unless you know the abilities of every merc by heart; this was a problem even for players and it would be worse for a viewing audience. Streaming PvE would be easier to follow, but not varied enough to keep viewer attention for long.

Of course it shouldn't be possible to just invite any two accounts into a match, players would have to indicate their approval in advance, for example by subscribing to a particular event first and confirming that via OAuth. With such precautions, the potential damage from abuse is limited.

It is possible that people will make other things than tournaments with such a generic API, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Entire game genres like MOBA and auto-battlers were started by modders, which can benefit the original game's publisher as well. While Blizzard was too slow in launching Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone Battlegrounds is doing quite well in terms of player count (not sure about monetization, but they're trying).

But I don't think it's going to happen: thinking in terms of APIs is not in Blizzard's DNA. For example, deck trackers and sites like this one have to data mine all their card info, instead of Blizzard doing a full JSON dump of all card info at the end of the reveal season.

This should have been a thing from the beginning…

Yes I 100% agree that these factions should've been included in Merc since inception. Maybe the mode wouldn't have died then 😅

I'm a little torn between laughing and annoyance from this news. The laughing part is that we all knew this would happen some day, I just didn't expect it to be so soon. The annoyance is that if Team 5 didn't invest so many ppl in this mode, Constructed and other modes would have been better off, especially in a time where United in Stormwind was ruining Constructed. My assumption is that Mercs was bringing in probably 1% or less revenue so the Execs just killed it. 

Now lets hope with Mercs out of the way, Team 5 can focus more on creating better constructed/bgs content AND FIXING THOSE DAMN BUGS!

I would love to remove them for the client and thus save space on my device

They trying to milk this mode as hard as they can even before it can be a popular mode. What a joke.

I hope this turns their sight to make another mode, maybe tournament mode, as players have asked for this in a long time.

I Know What You Did this Last Summer-

Paying So Much to Hit for So Little.

Like Dr. Strange You Trapped them in Wonder:

You Left and Came Back, Murdered and Giggled.

Wheres my fucking announcement already...

Father, is it over?

The meta is more tolerable than the one previous. At least this time you're not really being scammed out of the game because your opponent drew or discovered specific cards.

DK remains a problem in my eyes though. I've stated it from the start that their cards are much more powerful than other classes, the only thing holding them back is funnily enough the rune system.

Team5's endeavor to make that rune system work will eventually cause an imbalance, because right now each of the DK decks are simply extreme versions of archetypes. If they go further with this we'll reach a point where the game is over as soon as it starts.

One last observation: devs have got to have a look at DK discovering cards, because I dont think it should be permissible for unholy DK to just get blood or frost cards.

Hard to say, because from my own experience running the aggro enrage build there's really never a situation where I want that card, funnily enough.

Its almost all in on Imbued Axe, Anima Extractor for the win. Light of the Phoenix is just a dead card in the early game, which you really dont want.

But seriously, with unholy DK around the best list is probably featured by VS. Enrage midrange warrior, lol.

Have to give them credit, without the boss rush this game has a definite end far as pve is concerned. So now there's more reasons for those who actually like this game to grind upwards, as opposed to oblivion.

Mercs failed but at least Mercs will be removed from the main menu soon.

Got some ideas for Anduin:

The mythic bonuses appear to be bespoke, which means that some human being had to give each and every ability in Mercenaries a pass. Ignoring the bug fiesta that will probably create (they did say they would do some bugfixes going forward, so that's fine), there's just no way that the abilities can be anywhere close to balanced with that kind of work. Which is not a big deal since this is PvE and it should create some funny moments and reliable comps.

Indeed, imbalance towards the players is even more justified as this renown system puts pressure on those trying to level-up mercs by removing a good source of upgrade points from their toolbox.

The faction insignias and multi-tribe features are examples of things that should have existed for Mercenaries and mainstream Hearthstone both and from the very beginning. Mercenaries seemed to be a more intimate exploration of the themes of the card game which made it all the more disappointing when the game dismissed details from the world background's lore in design.

Incidentally, this also means that taking the treasure that makes your mercs all pirates will no longer screw over as many comps. (Just the ones relying on faction identification, which are fewer than tribal reliance.) And fewer dumb Lich King debates.

There was never a real good-faith effort here, but I don't think that this is necessarily the fault of the devs (though I'm not in the room with them so I can't tell). It's not merely that the launch was a blatant insult -- not half-assed but an actual grim joke with incompleteness, bugs, and some terrible pro-monetization design choices dominating the experience. It was the fact that the devs had a muted response to the lack of enthusiasm from a lot of the fans -- and streamers. Tolerating that kind of negative feedback suggests that the monetezation model, the thing that had to be killed for the mode to work, was the very thing that management wanted the most.

At this point, the most reasonable thing for the team to do is to make everything in the game as accessible as possible and use the mode as a sweetner for HS content. (Actually, the most reasonable thing for them to do is to refund people's purchases, but since this was a low-key scam from the beginning, that's not happening.) The mode still has potential as a sandbox that can help showcase new characters and themes the main game wants to explore.

But its most likely future is to be quietly discontinued and pulled from the client over time.

It's time, for Arena to be back on the (Main) Menu! (I think)

Tavern Brawl. For a few years now, they barely introduced any NEW Tavern Brawls, so I call that low effort (seriously, f*** Heroic Brawl, remember, when they did NORMAL Brawliseum? Where the cost of entering was just like in Arena and not 1000 Gold?).

Single player, although very casual and enjoyable mode, it won't ever be a main focus (recently they also did not add much there).

Arena. Still quite popular, despite the (lack) of dev effort in 1-2 years now (apart from balancing). Still with potential to grow IF they put some effort. I hope it replaces Mercenaries (in main menu) :P

I only played mercenaries to get rid of the annoying quest when it was launched. There just wasnt any money to invest in another game mode.

Unfortunate. But not unexpected.

The sad reality was that this was always going to happen, especially since mercs never really did took flight the same way battlegrounds did. Couldn't really make money neither. The moment they practically removed the grind from the game I was pretty much convinced it would die off, but I didn't think it would be this soon.

Oh well, that 90 packs I saved up will be good for one last tango and then this mode will sink into obscurity, an occasional memory of me grinding up 2 hours a day back in the day when that mattered.

So sad.  I quite liked this game mode, but its been in need of an overhaul almost from day 1.  Far too grindy, far too little variety in the different regions and dungeons, not rewarding enough to re-play.  There was real potential here that never had enough resources devoted to realizing it.

I don’t think anyone is surprised. It still sucks for those who put long hours into getting this into the client and functioning (with little to no bugs on launch if I remember correctly just) to see that work go to waste.

Given how much time it was in development, it still felt rushed and unfinished at launch. Gave everything a very "naked cash grab" feel. That they never ended up rescuing it with real end-game goals tells me that it was something pitched to increase monetization with gameplay an afterthought.