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What is exactly Team 5´s strategy in the long-run?

Edit: I am actually amazed by the feedback you have given me! I would have never thought that my first post would give me so much feedback! Reddit is really awesome! Even though my post is already long, I am going to extend my thoughts a bit further, since its probably the one and only time where so many people care about my opinion ;-)

Edit2: Man I wish I could answer all of you guys, but it´s just too much. I will try though! You are really incredible!

I have played this game since late Alpha and this is actually the first time I am really disappointed with the whole game environment. I have seen the old Molten Charge Combo, the old Leeroy Combo, the Undertaker craziness, Patrons, Secret Paladins and what not. But despite all of the crazy combos that we had, I never felt that the Developers were more disconnected to the fan base than they are right now.

Nerfing

I cant remember a single game, not even in the Blizzard universe, where the developers were so reluctant to adjust flaws in the meta. They have two big arguments that hinder them from nerfing:

First argument: "We dont want to disappoint those who crafted the cards and suddenly had them seen nerfed"

Sorry, but this is just a bullshit argument and laziness in its finest. If you want to nerf a broken card, just nerf it. Give people the full dust back, they will get over it. You didnt have to wait six months to realize that the Patron Combo was broken, you didnt need five months to realize that Undertaker was too strong. I dont feel that they are doing any good by not nerfing cards. Nerfing cards shakes up the meta, makes decks possible that werent good enough before, balances classes and overall keeps the game fresh.

Second argument: "We are sure that the next expansion/adventure/patch will sort things out. We always like it when the meta regulates itself without us intervening"

In an ideal world, I would say yes, that is true. But this is not the case in Hearthstone. The game itself may not be competitive, but people are. Everyone wants to win, even at the expense of having a stale meta. The time between the release of new cards takes a while, and the meta actually doesnt sort itself. Patrons were not contained. Secret Pally was not contained. Since WoTG, Aggro Shaman was a thing and it was never contained. With Karazhan, even Hunter came back strong, and again, no meta shake up. The same decks are strong for a while now, and they will keep being the best decks until the next expansion. So I wish Blizzard would be more aggressive on nerfs, just for the sake of keeping the game fresh. I am not sure which one of the team is the self-regulating Adam Smith guy, but the market doesnt fix itself. You need to intervene.

The amount of developers working on the game and the outcome

In the beginning, many people were comprehensive to justify slow development because the team was small. But right now, as far as I remember, more than 80 people are working on the game and it´s making more than 200 million dollars a year. What exactly are the developers doing really? I dont mean it in an offensive way, but how are the resources allocated? It still feels to me as if the developers are overwhelmed with the success with the game and cant keep up with the community. And I dont have the feeling as if the additional resources were able to achieve more than the dozen of guys in the beginning. So what exactly are all the newly hired guys doing? Are they working on more content? If yes, how Karazhan did exactly come through the Q/A? Or social media? I dont want to be a dick, but compared to Overwatch or HoTs, the Social Media Team of Hearthstone is slow and terribly vague. So are they trying to establish a tournament scene? As many have seen, the tournament scene right now is terrible, many teams dissolved, many players stopped going to tournaments, even famous streamers stopped playing because of the stalement. I am very curious to know what exactly that big team is doing because I dont get the feeling that they are progressing much in terms of maturity of the game. And if they have their focus on other things, maybe they just reconsider and put more resources into balancing.

Also, I am very annoyed by the features that this game is still missing.

Replay-Function: You need Open-Source-Software to have a way to safe replays, and that´s after 3 years. Saving replays in a digital card game isnt something that is just nice to have, it´s an elemental way of sharing your games with the community. How many times did you think "Wow, what a move" or "I wish I could have shown this game to friends/forums/whatever", but you just could not. Is it really too much to ask for a replay-function? As someone coming from the IT-industry, I can safely say that you dont need hundres of man-days to accomplish this. If your servers will reach their capacity, upgrade them. If you dont want to invest in new servers, keep them in a local file on the players device. If you are hesitant because mobile users cant save megabites of files on their phone (which is not true as everyone already has gigabytes of pictures on his phone), make it only happen on stationary devices. BUT DO SOMETHING. If you dont, THEN COMMUNICATE AND SAY WHY NOT.

Tournament Mode: This is something the community clearly wanted and still wants. Why is it such an issue to introduce that? Shouldnt they be glad that the players actually tell them what would be awesome? They even said themselves that a tournament mode would be awesome, yet its not here. Are they lacking resources? If that is the case, why not hire more people? Making 200 million dollars a year should really be reason enough to justify adding features that the community wants.

Bugs": There are still a shit-load of bugs and disconnects in the game, the spectate mode still isnt working properly. Does the team know about that? How is it possible that every patch brings so many bugs with it? Can you please test your patches more before you release them? It´s okay if you have bugs with new content-releases, you are human beings after all. But at some point you should really realize that introducing patches should not include already fixed bugs.

Additional Slots: We wanted more slots for two years and then we finally got them. They always said that if they give us more slots, it´s going to be in an intuitive and nice way. In the end, they just added 9 more slots within the same interface. I really felt as if they were mocking us, because I didnt feel it was funny to always delete decks just because there was not enough space. And I certainly wasnt confused by the amount of decks I had before and after. This was actually one of the very first moments where I was like "Come on, seriously? Is that really the Blizzard I fell in love with when I started with Warcraft2?"

Casual: I am still waiting to understand what exactly Team5 wants to accomplish with the Casual mode. Casual was actually cool in the Alpha, because people were playing gimmicky decks. But right now? Just play five games and see what is waiting for you. It´s very similar to the constructive environment and I feel that casual should not be that. We already have ladder, so please either remove casual for another mode or change casual so it actually IS a casual mode. Right now, it feels like a mode where people grind gold without the punishment of losing ranks. I have seen so many times that Secret Paladins were obviously grinding gold and straight up condeded on an empty board because they didnt draw the way they wanted. Remove the possibility to get gold through quests in casual if this is what it needs to be a fun mode.

Legend: The Legend mode obviously needs a rework. Actually I think that grinding to legend is one of the main reasons why this game has become so unforgivable. I do understand, being legend is a great accomplishment. I was so proud and happy when I first got legend two years ago. But currently going for Legend means that the meta will always be dominated by the deck that can be abused the most, just so they can achieve legend the fastest possible way. In my opinion, the ladder should not reset every month. Because this would not make this terrible grind necessary and many people who want to be legend, would not have to rush to actually make it before the end of the month. If you reset ladder every three months, I am pretty sure that more people would try fun decks after they reached legend. And people who dont have much time, could take it slower and play more creative decks to reach higher rankings.

The design philosophy on cards

The HS team often enough said that they think its a crucial part of a learning experience to have bad cards in an expansion/adventure. Even though I heavily disagree, I can take that point if you have enough good cards to support at least two archetypes per class. But currently, this is not the case. Maybe they are still reluctant after the Naxx-Powercreep that they dumbed down Karazhan so much that most cards are not worthy to be played in a constructive environment, but there is no justification to include bad cards in an adventure. Karazhan is undoubtely the worst adventure so far. It is well designed and the chess-challenge was actually amazing but the output on cards is just awful. It didnt support a single new archtype, but only made existing ones better. Priest is still bad, Taunt Warrior still not a thing and even the heavily anticipated Beast Druid is seen nowhere. Why? Because by Turn 6 you might copy your Tiger, but by that you will be so close in lethal range that your 3 5/5´s will only go to the gallery.

With only having 40 cards released, you dont need Moroes. You dont need Purify. You dont need Pompous Thespian. You dont need Kara Kazham. Silvermoon Portal. Runic Egg. All those cards might be good for a jiggle or a bad arena player, but in a meta where you cant afford to skip the first two turns without taking 5 damage, there is no way you would play Silvermoon Portal as a Paladin. On what exactly? In the rare occurence that you actually have a minion on turn 3, playing Silvermoon Portal will accomplish nothing to gain Tempo. You could argue that you still have casual/arena, but honestly, casual does not differ from ladder anymore and publishing bad cards for arena does not make much sense to me.

The boost of aggro/tempo decks and the disappearance of control cards

This is the part that bugs me the most. I dont really care if people like aggro, I think its good for a healthy environment to have several archtypes. No one wants to see a meta full of control decks, but no one wants to see a meta of fast decks as well. With Standard, we lost Zombie Chow, Healbot, Belcher, Deathlord, Light of the Naaru, Shieldmaiden, Loatheb and Explosive Sheep. We did not get good control cards in return. In fact, right now there is NO good early/mid neutral taunt in a game. There is no way for most classes to relevantly heal up. You dont need to give every class every tool so they feel similiar, but how do you ever want to introduce a controllish Hunter-Archtype if Hunters cant heal? Or Control-Rogue? It is such a pain in the ass to make aggressive/tempo-orientated classes to be more controllish, just for the only reason that they cant heal up. And more and more tempo-cards are being released, but good aoe is not keeping up. What exactly are the developers expecting? That people try bad controls decks, win 2 in 10 games and feel good? Or that they want the community to be creative by dealing with Aggro Shaman? If even the traditional Control-Classes cant keep a positive winrate without making an anti-aggro deck, how are other classes suppose to work it out?

The apparant disconnect between the developers and the community

It is actually mind-boggling how disconnected to the reality the developers seem to be. /u/bbrode said this week in an interview that he feels like RNG is good for the game. Does he even follow the community? Does he know that a lot of people are tired of the crazy rng? Didnt they learn anything from GvG? Im seriously speechless to what extent it has become. You really get the feeling as if they a) just dont understand or b) dont care. Discover was amazing, it was praised throughout the lines. Why not focus on discover instead of pure rng? Why not push Inspire/Joust if you feel its not good enough? Why do you have to ignore the good and focus on the bad? I just dont get it.

The lackluster development of new abilities

Inspire and Joust were two abilities that were introduced with TGT. And both seemed to be underwhelming, yet Blizzard did nothing to fix that.

Inspire - there are actually no good inspire cards to be played in a constructed environment besides Thunderbluff Valiant. And even he is only good because Shamans are in the lucky spot that they have enough early to actually never be behind when they drop him. Every other Inspire card is too slow. How can you justify to actually have the main focus of an expansion to be bad? One argument was that they didnt want Inspire to be abused so you could snowball. But we were not even REMOTELY close to see Inspire creating a snowball. Frankly speaking, Inspire sucked. Apart of very few cases, it was not caught up by the community. So why not change that? Why insist on Inspire being fine as it is even if it clearly isnt? The additional expense for activating the Inspire ability already leads to a huge tempo loss, isnt that fair enough? For Inspire to be good, the minion would need to have above average stats and probably still wont see enough play. Make Murloc Knight a 4/4 and it still wont see play. That is how punishing the environment has become.

Joust - Joust is even worse than Inspire. Because Joust actually relies on RNG and 98% of the outcomes, you will be behind after losing a joust. Only Kings Elekk and Healing Wave are good joust cards, every other card is bad. If you play Master Jouster and you lose, you will be behind. If you lose the Tuskarr Jouster Joust, you will not only be behind, but probably lose the game. Why not give every Joust card additional value even in a lost joust? Make Master Jouster a taunt, regardless, give Tuskarr Jouster at least 3 HP gain in the event you lose the joust. And then maybe people will try to pick up on those cards. It´s very frustrating to see a team publishing bad cards with bad effects and not doing anything about it. What are they going to lose? No one is playing those cards anyway. Buff some cards a bit and see if the community picks them up. If they dont, at least you tried.

RNG

I know, this has been talked alot lately but I have to mention it. The RNG in the game is really at a point where you dont feel like you accomplish anything by making good plays. I have witnessed an overwhelming amount of games where I was actually happy with my lines of decision and was very much ahead until the opponent dropped Yogg and suddenly won the game. I dont play Yogg in any of my decks anymore, but even when I somehow play him, I dont even feel like I accomplished anything after finishing off an otherwise superior player. Yogg is not only bad for tournaments, its bad for the game. And if they dont somehow nerf Yogg I bet this will be the gravestone for Hearthstone.

To give you an example of what I perceive as good and bad RNG:

Good Rng: Jewel Scarab. Ivory Knight. Varian Wrynn. Nexus-Champion Saraad. Elise. Both Rags. Burgle. Mulch.

All those cards let you discover something or give you random cards without creating unfair situations. In the case of Varian, it´s a 10 Mana card with a strong effect. The more a card costs, the stronger the effect can be, but it should never be the case that you (the opponent) have absolutely no chance to react to the outcome.

Bad Rng: Implosion. Dr.Boom. Yogg. The list could be very long but these culprits are what I probably hate the most. Implosion is one of the worst designed cards in the history of Hearthstone. Because it made sure that one player will always be salty. In some cases, Implosion just decided the game. You roll two, you dont kill the minion, you lose. You roll four, you kill the minion and take over the board control. This is not a good way of having RNG in the game because it happens on a whim. Dr.Boom was very similar, just because he could deal additional 10 damage next to his own body. He was the only reason people were running BGH. How is that a design philosophy the designers can support? So many good ideas came up how to nerf Dr.Boom, yet they didnt do anything. And I dont even want to start talking about Yogg, really. I dont think I have ever seen a card that was so unhealthy for a game as Yogg.

The lack of communication and the reluctancy of actually intervening

I have never felt that the issues in the game were bigger than right now. In the beginning, it was maybe okay to just wait for the next adventure/expansion to see things changed, but right now its not sufficient anymore. You cant expect people to wait months until bad things get fixed. They have to be faster and they have to do it fast. I am actually witnessing that most of my friends stopped playing Hearthstone. Im sure Blizzard will give you stats how many new players they have compared to last year, how much more money they are making, yadda yadda. But from my personal experience, about 70% of my friends stopped playing. Not because they dont have time , but just because it´s not fun anymore. The meta is too stale for them, every "invention" they have gets trashed by one of the established decks and it doesnt feel fun to feed others ranks. There is no room for mistakes anymore and if you dont curve out perfectly, you lose. Bad players get shit on on the low ranks, good players cant play anything but the meta decks without getting punished for being creative. So they started playing other things and dont even regret quitting hearthstone. And I am absolutely sure that most of them wont come back with the next expansion. I hope Team5 isnt so dillusional to think that people will always come back with new content. Once you lost trust, there is no coming back.

One thing about Ben Brode

I mentioned him in this post and I would like to clarify one thing. Ben seems like a really nice and smart guy. I like his cheerful and childlike attitude (in a good way). I am not sure if he is the one that is in charge of the team, but he is certainly the most famous member of Team5. But I often get the feeling as if Ben is way too naive. He thinks that people are not abusing the game as they are right now, that there is no hostile environment, that many actually try cool decks. I am not sure on which servers he is playing or if thats the case at the HS-HQ but from my experience, nothing of what he would like the game to be is matching up with the reality. I was really sad that he was like "Well if Standard doesnt change next year, we will fix it". Next year? We need changes SOON, not next year. They cant always bank that new expansions will fix things ,especially after having a history of not being able to balance cards and after failing with Karazhan so hard. So I would love him for once to shake away his over-positive attitude and talk in all seriousness about the issues and give the community the feedback it deserves.

Im not sure if this was going to be a constructive or a rant post, but I just had to write this down. I have played Hearthstone more than any other game in my life and I love the game. But I am close to being at a point where I just dont see a point in playing anymore. I already stopped my grinds to legend and I am not playing funny or creative decks anymore. I can barely bring myself over doing quests. I have played over 15000 games and I have close to a full collection. That is probably the only thing that keeps me within the game. If I was lacking a majority of cards, I would be long gone. So I wish this game would live up to its incredible potential, but its so sad to see how the developers dont seem to agree on those points and follow their own guidelines. I might be alone with my opinion, but if thats the case, so be it.

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