Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
Arena really needs some detailed page with ALL offering rules currently in effect
Over the last year and a half, a bunch of exceptions to offering rules have accumulated and it has become really hard to keep track of it, even if you are constantly playing the arena.
Now I do fully agree that these informations should NOT be accessible inside the game client. I am not saying this for the "confusing new players"-meme but because I feel like those details do not belong there.
What I am asking for is a page that collects all the rules that are applied and that you can check for any updates. Right now, I am sure you could find all the rules if you googled them, but they will probably not be listed on an official site of blizzard. If you would like to collect the rules from official sources only, your only cholice would be to read through evry changelog existing.
What rules are in effect?
- Standard - The arena does not contain any sets that left the standard format. These cards will no longer be offered and can not be created by random card effects and discoveries either. This also includes the Hall of Fame cards.
- Banned cards - these cards include C'thun cards, a list of very specific banned cards from last year as well as Quest Cards. Of these, you will still find all of them by discoveries or random cards effects EXCEPT for quests which do not show up at all (this might be also true for constructed but I am not sure)
- Reduced cards - Last expansion, Flamestrike and Abyssal Enforcer specifically recieved a multiplicative offering malus of .5 which lasts to this day even with their respective set offering bonus not existing anymore.
- Class Cards - Any class cards get offered more frequently than a neutral card from the same set.
- Spell Bonus - Historically, there has always been the bonus to class cards, but with 7.1 spell cards recieved a bonus on top. This does not include weapons.
- Neutral Classic (and Basic?) cards - On the top of my head, I am not even sure if Basic cards are included here, but there exists some offering malus to no-class classic cards.
- Latest expansion The latest expansion always comes with a set bonus which sometimes expires or diminishes over time.
Again: I do not think that these informations should be included inside the game, but there should really exist some kind of official webpage for it. Even for hardcore tryhards like me it is really hard to keep all these occurances bonuses and maluses together - you might realize that I very rarely put numbers on my points above, well that's because even I do not know any better.
Edit: Mentioned class cards in "spell bonus" but forgot to include it in the list as its own point. Fixed now. Edit2: Detail fixed (see comments)
Iksar
This is pretty reasonable. We are currently working out a bunch of adjustments for a future patch and going back and forth on what is the most digestible way to view the 'arena rules'. What you have listed I think is very reasonable, some people would like more detail and I think some people would prefer less detail. The rules I think that are most important are the ones that might actually impact any of your gameplay decisions. A card like Flamestrike never showing up in arena is very relevant information, while a decrease in draft appearance rate of 3% on Primordial Drake in Mage is less relevant. One of the ideas on the table for arena balance specifically are thousands of very small changes to the appearance rate of a card in each individual class. I think if we move forward with that it is unlikely to list those thousands of individual changes, but likely to summarize what the goal of that strategy might be. Always happy to hear more feedback on this topic.
Iksar
It is not, was just an example. In terms of playing around anything, the hope is that the differences are small enough they should not impact your gameplay decision making. When Flamestrike shows up 50% less I would expect that to make an impact on your decisions on turn 7 vs a Mage. If it showed up 1% less that decision is essentially no different.