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Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Why has it been eight months since the last card nerf?

I really don't understand what's going on here.

Hearthstone is a frustrating game. We get that. I think Blizzard keeps pushing the RNG aspects of the game too hard in each expansion, making the game far less about skill and far more about luck than it used to be, but that's just my personal opinion and it's not the point of this thread.

The point of this thread is the last card that was nerfed was Undertaker back in January. I'm tempted to give a trigger warning for people who have memories of that card here, but Undertaker was often times an auto win card if you could play it on turn 1 and then follow up with several small deathrattle minions. It dominated the meta for months on end before Blizzard finally listened and nerfed it. That took way too long, but hey, they did it so that's fine.

Now we have new broken decks. I won't name names other than Patron Warrior, which is disgusting, but there are broken decks in Hearthstone that the community almost wholeheartedly agrees are stupid and anti-fun. Back in beta, when all Mage freeze spells cost one less mana and Pyroblast cost 8, Blizzard did not take long at all to nerf it. They said "nope, sorry Mages," and fixed the deck. Now it's one of the most balanced archetypes in the game today.

Remember charging Molten Giants? Oh yeah, that was fun. It was a stupid 6 card combo, but it worked for OTKs and was hard to beat sometimes. Blizzard took only a couple of weeks to get rid of it.

You cannot rely on new expansions alone to bring balance. New expansions happen once every six months, and without some adjustments made inbetween, we're going to see the same pattern as we've seen repeatedly since Naxx: a new deck is discovered in the first couple of weeks, polished over the next months, and then that deck and its counters become the only viable decks at high ranks until the next expansion, and sometimes beyond.

It's really fine to nerf things sometimes Blizzard. That's part of the game balance process. You have an entire community of hundreds of thousands of players who give you input all the time.

  • Iksar
    Posted 10 years, 4 months ago (Source)

    That was an awfully long and well thought out post that didn't really end up going anywhere. Of course we don't know how exactly the profits of the game shake out and what Blizzard's ideas are for extracting maximum profit.

    That still doesn't add any value to the statement that "Blizzard technically has no obligation to F2P players." That's a semantic and irrelevant statement.

    Freemium games are dominating right now (League, Hearthstone, etc.) and regardless of the specific method the developer uses to best monetize the game, the business model operates by the same basic principle; make the game accessible for enormous numbers of players by making it free, then figure out ways to get people to buy things in the game and ways to turn free players into paying players. That's the definition of a freemium game. How they go about doing that is unrelated to the original statement that I take issue with. No matter what you decide to do, F2P players are a core part of the game, the foundation even. That's where you start, before the "figure out how to get money off them" part. No F2P players, no step 2 - profit.

    Neglecting them is not a legitimate option. Saying there is no obligation to them because of their lack of monetary contribution is nothing but a useless technicality.

    Hmm. I enjoy reading thoughtful conversations like this. There are many considerations that go into deciding whether or not to change a card. A lot of that is balance or (more likely) the perception of balance. Some considerations aren't to do with balance at all. That said, the only goal is to ensure the best long term experience possible. All the feedback is appreciated, I find myself digging through buried posts on second page threads quite often and am always happy to read and learn more.

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