Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

It really upsets me how horrible Blizzard is with communication with Arena Players. (rant incoming)

I'm a fairly hardcore Arena player, was #4 in December, I've written numerous stats articles in the past, and I've even typed up mini-articles on the change in offering rates for Wildfest and looking at the changes/relevant cards coming back when Wild comes back to the arena. This is not a stats post, although stats will be a part of it, but more a post about Blizzard's horrible communication with the community.

Before I get into the post: I'm excited for Wild Arena, I'm happy about the changes like micro-adjusts and synergy picks, which even if they didn't work out, are at least attempts to spice up/fix the Arena. I'm just upset about how, in all of these cases, the communication from Blizzard has been abysmal.

1: Micro-adjusts

Micro-adjustments are a boogeyman for Arena players, especially in Twitch chat. If anything happens, any streaks of luck one way or another, it gets blamed on micro-adjustments. A large part of this is that Blizzard has done a shit job of communicating, and accurately implementing, micro-adjustments. Their first post about it was that it would only be 1-5% changes to the cards, which ended up being 10-20% or more to cards. People still don't know how they're implemented, and I've heard Kripp on his streams talk, incorrectly, about what micro-adjusts are. More importantly, Blizzard is horrible at communicating that they're happening. There have been, to my knowledge, 5 micro-adjustments done since they were implemented, and only two of them have had any Blizzard communication that they happened. And, on top of this, no one knows what has been micro-adjusted, or to where its been micro-adjusted. The only reason we have knowledge of this is HSreplay stats to show something has been done, and the occasional stats request from arenadrafts.com to check on specific things.

All of this would be fixed by simple communication. If Blizzard had a website which just took the calculated offering rates for cards that were changed and posted them, the players would know what is going on. If we even knew there were changes, the players would know what is going on. But, for whatever reason, Blizzard will not do this. And this creates this paranoia among the entire Arena community that every weird thing or lucky/unlucky streak is because micro-adjusts are happening. Even when they're right about something, there's little to no interaction to correct inaccuracies. For example, shortly after KnC came out, I made a post about how offering rates on HSreplay were screwed up. Even outside my mistake in calculating offering rates (CotW was being taken ~25% more than it was offered, not 50%), I ended up being wrong on the various neutral/class offering rates (turns out HSreplay people just draft weird), and had to go digging and get stats from Arenadrafts to find out that the stats in-general are correct, even if there's weird things like neutral cards being +/- 20% from their expected rates from class to class. Again, with better communication about micro-adjusts, things like this can be avoided, but instead, even when Blizzard is right about something, people think they're wrong because they don't know any better.

This is not something that Blizzard does not know about. From about a month ago, an editor from the Chinese website Yingdi, where I go to pull the Netease arena numbers from China, made a post about Blizzard's lack of communication about micro-adjusts. The Lightforge arena podcast consistently criticizes Blizzard because of their lack of communication, and takes pot-shots, deservedly, all the time because we know nothing about what they're doing. Among the community, there's been a consistent call for Blizzard to improve their communication. You would think that Blizzard would care about the community, listen to the community, make an effort to improve things with the community.

Instead, they did the same fucking thing that pissed the community off a month ago, again, by making micro adjusts and not telling anyone. In the 10.2 patch, Priest cards such as Drakonid Operative, Potion of Madness, Dragonfire Potion, Mind Control, and Kabal Songstealer, among other cards, saw decent sized dips in their pick-rates, while cards like Psychic Scream show no change (because it got micro-adjusted and no one was told about it before), which is a sign that Priest got micro-adjusted. And this was reflected in the stats, from HSreplay, Priest was over 52% winrate before the 10.2 patch, and is now 51.1%.

A lot of hardcore players have noticed the changes that came from Priest getting weaker. Just because this wasn't as egregious as Blizzard cutting off Hunter's balls in the Arena and telling no one doesn't mean that people don't notice this or adjust. I've seen a lot fewer Priests in Arena in the last week when I made my Leaderboard run, and its changed how I draft and how I construct my decks. Shadybunny, one of the best Arena players/streamers there is, had developed a Shaman drafting/playing style based around sniping Priests with it that he was averaging over 9 with over nearly 20 runs, and in the last few runs after the 10.2 changes, and no noticeable changes to Shaman cards, has been performing much worse with. This shit matters. The reason Kripp's averaging 6 and I'm averaging 7.5-8 in KnC is because I'm aware of these tiny changes and adapting to them, not because of any difference in skill in play.

A lot of this is the principle of the matter. Name another game in the world where the devs make stealth changes to the game that impacts how you play, and they don't tell you about it. I can't think of a single one that makes any money. Its completely disrespectful of the Blizzard team to the players that they consistently fail to inform them on changes. I can get not having a list of all the changes, I think its unfair to the players, but they have to actually invest resources into it. But, fucking patch notes. I almost get the Hunter change because there was no patch, but 10.2 had fucking patch notes. And, they made changes, and couldn't be assed, either though laziness, through a complete lack of communication with the patch team, or through sheer incompetence, to include 10 words in the patch notes, saying cards changes happened to balance Arena. That's flat out insulting to me as a player.

Oh, and in spite of the Hunter micro-adjusts being one of the most drastic changes to any class in Arena, it still, nearly two months later, has not been acknowledged in any official capacity. No comments on Reddit, nothing on twitter, nothing on the official forums, nothing, no acknowledgement whatsoever, that it happened, and the only reason we know it happened is because of 3rd party websites and Netease stats. Again, insulting.

2: Blizzard can't even keep their own stated rules correct. Flamestrike and Abyssal do not have 50% reductions in offering rates.

One of the first major changes Blizzard made to Arena was reducing the offering rate of Flamestrike and Abyssal Enforcer. Both of these cards were problematic because of how massively swingy both cards are, hence getting the 50% reduction. Yet, both Flamestrike and Abyssal Enforcer show sizeable increases in the % of decks they're in, both coinciding with the 12/20 patch that nerfed the offering rates of most Hunter cards. For actual numbers, the offering rates for Mage spells are .586 and for Warlock minions .359. From HSreplay, there's .444 Flamestrikes (24% reduction) and .277 Abyssals (23% reduction). And, because this is pick data, the actual offering rates are higher than this, so really, instead of being offered 50% less, they're being offered 20% less most likely.

Unlike the Priest changes which were relatively minor, these are major changes with noticeable impacts. Flamestrike and Abyssal were nerfed, not just because they were strong, but because they were so impactful that everyone knew they lost the game to this card, on one turn, because the opponent had this card. I didn't know about the changes until about a week after because everyone was talking about seeing a lot more Flamestrikes and Abyssals before I checked on it. These cards have large impacts on how players play in the Arena, because a 30% difference in their actual rates in decks changes your calculations on whether or not to play around these cards, and if you can afford to play around them.

Blizzard should know about this because I sent a message to Iksar more than a month ago telling him about this. I never got a response one way or another about this. I don't know if its a bug and they're working on it, if its a test to see if they can remove the rates and not have issues, I have no idea what's going on, except that things are wrong, and the only way I know about this for certain is extrapolating data on my own and comparing it to a third party website. It could be a case like when they increased the offering rates of weapons and told no one about it (imagine the shock) where they're experimenting and we as players are unaware of this. In any case, its been nearly two months, and neither card has been reverted, so if this is a bug, then they've been unable to fix it to this point.

In any case, Blizzard is aware these cards are not reduced, and has not informed the player base of this. They know their rules are incorrect, and has in no way acknowledged this. The Blizzard development teams is, in fact, lying, to the player base in one way or another. They says their rules are one way, when they are not, and being fully aware of this, are not acknowledging the issue at all, even though a lack of awareness of this makes changes to how players play around cards. Again, an acknowledgement somewhere, anywhere, would be a simple thing to communicate, but they refuse to do so for one reason or another. In turn, it feeds the narrative of the incompetent Blizzard developers who make stealth changes, which fuels the negative feelings the Arena community has for Blizzard's handling of the game and the playerbase's lack of faith in the devs.

3: Wild Arena and nothing from the Devs

So, next week on the 19th, Wildfest will happen. And from the Devs, we've gotten.... nothing about Wild Arena. There's been a lot of questions on /r/ArenaHS about Wildfest, questions which common sense dictates one thing, but there's been no communication at all from the Devs. There's no info on if Wild cards have a boost, what kind of packs the players will get, if the players will get tickets ala Frost Festival or Dual Class Arena, or if they'll unban some of the previously banned cards in Arena (Snow Chugger, Forbidden Torch, Undercity Valiant, Goblin Auto-Barber, etc.) that were banned as an Arena stopgap measure prior to micro-adjusts and wouldn't be banned in today's Arena. Again, a lot of this stuff is common-sense stuff, but people don't know 100%, and some communication to clear up the minor stuff would help a lot. Compared to the other points, its not a major issue, but I see questions about this all the time, and its frustrating that I can't really answer or have to debate people on seemingly common sense things (like, if Wild Arena is for cards that only appear in Wild or all cards) because there are no Dev comments about this.

TLDR

Blizzard made micro-adjusts again and told no one again. Blizzard heavily increased the offering rates of Flamestrike and Abyssal and has told no one. Blizzard announced Wildfest and has not answered many of the common sense questions people have. Blizzard communication fucking sucks.

Again, I have no problems with any of the changes. Wild Arena is good. Fixing 58% winrate Hunter is good. Adjusting Priest so they're not overwhelmingly #1 and the class everyone drafts/plays around is good. Doing this, not telling the players, and deceiving the players by letting them operate under false assumptions until they adjust to these changes is bad, and its the complete lack of communication that I'm upset about. Blizzard really needs to either have an official place for asking questions to the devs (as seen, Reddit or the official forums are not good enough), or they need to have someone whose in charge of communicating things with the people who write patch notes or the community in an official capacity. If someone is in charge of this, this person needs to be removed from their position, because they're clearly incompetent at what they do.

Tweet