Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
Blizzards strategy with hearthstone has a lot of similarities to their strategy with WoW
So I was thinking about blizzard's situation with its poor reputation in the hearthstone community, particularly Team 5s stubborness and Ben Brode talking a lot but not really saying much and it really opened my eyes to how this isn't the first time we've seen Blizzard do this and maybe it's time they actually opened their eyes on this based on how it went down last time.
I remember when WoW went through a similar phase very recently where Blizzard released expansion after expansion of bullshit cashgrabs and PR nightmares. They expected people to play a facebook game with their subscription mmo and when people got fed up and tried to bring back old WoW they went: "no, you can't do it because it's what you think you want but isn't what you really want. What you really want is warlords of draenor and garrisons". Their subscription count dropped to god awful amounts - a small fraction of what it was and they stopped reporting it. Luckily through merit of being very dominant in non-competitive market they were able to stay on top but FFXIV and other mmo numbers spiked hard in that period. They eventually opened their eyes to the bullshit and released Legion because why not try giving the players what they "think" they want.
Hearthstone is gonna go through the same cycle from what I see. Their playerbase will start dwindling. Still competitive in the market because they got here early, just like WoW, but a fraction of what it could be as people move over to games like shadowverse after frustration with their poor decision making every expansion.
Blizzard seem to have employed the strategy of "we have a dominant share of the market and therefore we can get greedy with the cashwhoring". Their constant mention of statistics and research and catering to the lowest common denominator hurt them last time so why do they not see the parallels this time. Both WoW and HS have a majority casual playerbase. Blizzard's logic was to make the game built around the casual playerbase because that's what their research said was the best demographic to focus on. And yet, they didn't understand that though the more dedicated players may be smaller in population, they're definitely louder and more influential. HS didn't get its big playerbase now because all the casuals picked it up. No, they got it because of a very successful closed and open beta campaign, where top streamers built the game up. It started getting a lot of views on twitch. What a lot of new casual players will see is the popularity of the game. They see it's top of twitch, they'll play it. They see it as one of the most downloaded games in the app store, they'll download it. If players see good reviews they will get the game. One of the big reasons players flocked from WoW to FFXIV is because of the universal praise it got in the media while WoW was constantly being slated. Both games actually are very casual focused, but the FFXIV team is still committed to their raiding scene and regularly hosting holiday and crossover events. Balance patches are far more frequent and though they're far from perfect, actually seem to listen to their players a lot more than the WoW team does.
And yet, despite seeing this happen before, the people that have helped them are the ones they want to screw over because the casual playerbase is more important to them because they're a bigger population. I really hope they come to the same realisation the WoW team did as quickly as possible.
Tl;dr: WoW went through a phase where the playerbase was getting dissatisfied with the new expansions not being what the less casual playerbase wanted while similar games were being universally praised and when they realised this they released Legion which helped regain a large amount of lost subscribers. HS going through something similar at the moment.
Ben Brode
I posted this elsewhere but I'll paste it here:
Ben Brode
We are still planning on making an announcement in the week or so leading up to the patch.
Ben Brode
I posted this elsewhere but I'll paste it here:
Ben Brode
The intent of that video was to explain why we had made those decisions in the first place, not why we wouldn't change them going forward. In fact, I said "Help us figure out whether you think we should be going this direction going forward".
We have adjusted Druid of the Claw's wording in an upcoming patch.
Ben Brode
I don't think it does, and I didn't when I made the post. The attempt of my post was to discuss the issues, given context to players, and give as precise a timeline for a potential change as I can.
One of things I'd seen some players claiming are things like "Shaman is 80% of the ladder." I think my post helped focus the discussion onto the real issues. If '80% Shaman' the issue, the solution is very clear. If the problem is, "pirates are too good", or "no matter the level of balance, the game stagnates and is less fun after 2 months of a content release", I think you have a different bunch of options available. We've been pitching some internally (what if you get bonus stars for winning with the worst class?), but discussing what the problems are with the community gives us opportunities to hear new ideas from players.
Nerfing cards is a seemingly obvious solution to reduce stagnation - does that mean we should always nerf cards at the 2 month point, even if, in the future, the game is otherwise balanced? Last time we nerfed cards, it felt like the amount of stagnation didn't change very much. The meta settled very quickly into Midrange Shaman. That could be poor choices of nerfs on our part, but we did nerf 7 cards that were seeing a lot of play.
I chose to post the Pirate statistics because I think they are unfavorable, and I was hoping to prepare people in case we nerf their favorite Pirate deck. I think 50% pirates is too high. I tried not to offer my personal feelings on the data, letting it speak for itself, but I think that was a mistake. I should have just made it clear that we're not happy with that number.
We usually tend to look at the meta over a two-week period. And we usually tend to look at folks in 3 buckets: Legend; Rank 5-ish and up; and the whole population. We didn't look at several data ranges and pick the best case. We just looked at our normal data views. Were there specific pieces of data that looked especially 'cherrypicked'?
I certainly do not believe we've made only correct decisions that we now need to force down players throats. I really do believe that exposing some data and sharing our philosophies can foster constructive discussion about solutions.
I understand that posting a blog talking about the problems and not fixing the problems also contributes to this feeling like we are trying to convince players that problems don't exist. I was hoping this bit at the end would help with that.