I expect we'll continue to be given them since most rewards in each bounty are tied to specific trios of mercs, but being given a way to 'dust' them into coins of other mercs feels likely and consistent with how normal HS works. It would probably be at the usual ~25% return, which isn't great but at least we'd then know all coins we get are going somewhere useful. It would also help alleviate the issue of it being more and more difficult to find coins for crafting newly added mercs, since even at 25% return grinding for them in bounties would be much quicker than it is now.
The prices are often ridiculous, but it's the inconsistency that really befuddles me. Right now I have the shop offering me a skin and 5 packs for Diablo and the Lich King, at the same price as just a skin for Anduin. Just, why?
I haven't looked into what exactly they do, so you can fill me in on the specifics, but from what I can tell they are either bypassing the animations involved in shuffling Ignite and drawing a card, or skipping the finite turn timer itself. Without doing one of those they cannot queue enough actions regardless of how many actions the game allows you to queue.
I feel like I must be misunderstanding your question here... You can queue cards while other cards are animating as long as the card is in your hand, and every animation may get desynced by default by the simple difference between the person playing the card and the person watching the card get played.
I hadn't expressed it particularly well, but I was working on the basis that the time it takes to actually draw each card* sets a limit on the number you can add to the queue. Really it limits the rate, but multiplying that by the turn time would gives a total number you can add to the queue legally (after adding the max 10 cards initially in hand).
If you reduce the card draw animation time to 0, that rate can be set arbitrarily large, and hence so can the number added to the queue. Or equally you can just have an arbitrarily long turn time.
* I'm not overly familiar with how APM-Ignite mage plays out, but I suspect if you play it honestly you'll have to watch the Ignites shuffle in before they can be drawn, hence the shuffling animation would also be involved in setting the rate. But again, I'm no expert on the specifics here; I'm just someone who has plenty of experience coding projecting his expectations onto the situation. I could be miles off.
Its hard to call this a cheating, because it has much to do with hardware and the fact that the most common 'cheat' is not something that requires a third party software or any coding experience at all. Also, the game clearly allows you to queue more actions than the timer theoretically allows (hence skipping your opponent's turn) so its not even to do with the game timers, its just players exploiting how the game is built, which consequently makes it hellish for their opponents at times.
If team5 wouldn't or couldn't address it because its too deep in the code, then do the next best thing: design your game to do without it. Its not like there's going to be a riot because we're not going to see anymore mozaki mages or test subject bs. I think the game is better off without it.
I haven't looked into what exactly they do, so you can fill me in on the specifics, but from what I can tell they are either bypassing the animations involved in shuffling Ignite and drawing a card, or skipping the finite turn timer itself. Without doing one of those they cannot queue enough actions regardless of how many actions the game allows you to queue, and by meddling with either of those they are changing the time-based rules of the game (i.e. cheating).
If it's a repeat of the old Noz + Joust issue where you could use animations to skip your opponent's turn, then I thought they fixed that years ago by making sure your own turn timer doesn't start 'til the animations have stopped (far from a guarantee it hasn't reappeared, I know). Unless they only half-fixed that so it only actually applies to Noz's 15 second (give or take :P) time limit, in which case copying the same code over to normal turns should be pretty easy.
I personally wouldn't be the least bit sad to see APM decks disappear, but that is subjective and hence isn't a reason to remove them. At least not with such a minuscule sample of opinions. They'd need a convincing majority of players to really dislike them before there is a real case to remove them, and I'm not sure we have that. Now, if we want to instead discuss changing cards that are repeatedly central to problems (in this case Sorcerer's Apprentice), then there we have an over-abundance of evidence that something ought to be changed.
Bottom line for me is that team5 really should avoid designing decks that tests APM skill because every time one such deck appears the whole argument about animation starts raging and people start noticing that the nicely made, very intricate animations which makes the game a joy to watch is actually a hindrance rather than something to be celebrated.
I'd argue the animations are just part of the game's rules, and them being a hindrance doesn't make them problematic. Most game rules can be considered a hindrance, be it summoning sickness, only attacking once per turn, having finite mana etc. in the same way the animations are attributes of the cards, not ones that are stated explicitly on the cards, but valid attributes within the game nonetheless, and relevant in a game which imposes a finite turn timer.
APM is consequently a relevant property of the game, even if you remove animations because of the turn timer and the fact humans take time to perform actions. That doesn't make HS better or worse for having it, just different. Bypassing that is essentially playing a different game, and hence cheating, no matter how one feels about hypothetically having an infinite loop.
I must thank you once again, this time particularly for letting me hear Valeera the Nice's "Greetings (Mirror)" emote, which I'd probably not encounter otherwise. The "ugh, you're too much" shows she's just as sickened by her own saccharine act as we are, and is a beautiful complement to her attack voiceline ("No more Mrs Nice Elf") showing she's had enough of this job :P
Now it seems like every other week there's a bundle of 5-8 dropping, or maybe two bundles. I don't feel compelled to collect them, and don't care if other people want them. And hey, if you don't want the bundles, there's the 14 or so on the rewards track. Plus the 200 level portraits. Go Nuts with trying to get them! No complaints.
...
I think not feeling compelled to collect them is an important part of why I'm actually more on-board with the flood of them than the relatively small number a year+ ago. Once it became pointless to own them all (since there are too many to realistically make good use out of them), I started only getting the ones that genuinely interest me, which is a healthier approach to it.
Solitaire play won't be fixed with this patch, simply cause we don't have cards that counter your opponent hand, and thus very few lines of play other than just "make the best turn every turn"
I've been so glad burgle rogue has Savory Deviate Delight and Parrrley. Watching those questline rewards, Mozakis, owls etc get torn away from the opponent has been so satisfying and has enabled me to properly enjoy a slow value deck for the first time in ages. That's good for meme rogue players like myself; perhaps not so much for everyone else.
I took Vanndar purely because I don't think I've ever made a deck with no 4+ cost minions that wasn't an all-spell deck, so I knew I'd never actually care about Drek'thar. Not that I've actually used Vanndar yet either :P
Great! It was jolly frustrating going into bounties with the sole purpose of getting coins for a specific Merc but not making any progress at the end. It's not so bad with Mercs you already own since there are other reliable ways to get their coins, but it sucks when trying to grind coins to craft new ones.
If the story was about Arrana finding herself, I can think of plenty of other things, other than going into outland and being a dhunter. I mean, the very reason why she's in outland to begin with is suspect, and the fact that illidan took her in despite her having little to no motivation to defeat the legion is also another plothole. There is a reason why most dhunters are angsty and always on about the legion - most of them have tragic backgrounds relating to demons. Arrana might as well have slipped on a banana skin dropped by a littering imp. That forms a better motivation than what we're stuck with.
Also, Im no lore specialist, but Im pretty sure fighting one another until you dropped your eyes and sprout horns isn't how one becomes a demon hunter.
As for mercs, well beats me. Far as I know the entire story is about helping kazakus and prestor with the naaru shards. As to why we have to go through so many bounties to do that? Not a freaking clue. Does it even have a story? I mean, we're basically beating up boss after boss, but with no dialogue anywhere to go through. Feels a lot like the early megaman games where bosses are beaten because the final boss wouldn't show up otherwise.
IIRC Aranna wasn't in Outland to become a DH; she just wanted to get as far away from her sister as possible and finding the Illidari was somewhat accidental. So I guess they were going for not knowing where you'll end up in life, but eventually you'll find your calling?
Lore-wise, the most important (and dangerous) part of becoming a DH is absorbing a demon's soul and controlling it. That has a pretty high mortality rate, and Aranna's story brushed it all under the rug. I suppose they were trying to make it a more friendly, and whimsical telling to fit HS's usual setting, hence all the rhyming. Interestingly, the best place I know to see how tough that process should be doesn't come from a DH at all, but from Valeera who got lumped with a powerful dreadlord's soul as a teenager. She wasn't trying to control it like DHs do, just suppress it, but I assume the tough part is largely the same: keeping control of yourself. The comics go to great lengths to show how much she had to do to handle it, and if Aranna's story was striking a less whimsical tone I'd expect her to have to do the same at bare minimum. On the bright side, Valeera's success came largely through the aid of friends, especially Broll and Aegwynn, which is something I expect to be largely absent in the brutal canonical Illidari training. So maybe Aranna's friends really did make it easier for each other?
Re Mercs: I think a lot of the bounties were just Valeera running a mercenary company and helping the world out. At least that accounts for a lot of the stuff in the Barrens, Felwood and Winterspring. Once you get to Blackrock it feels like you'd probably want to do it all in one go a la the BRM adventure. That's just somewhere where game mechanics and the (limited) story-telling are in conflict with each other.
While I'm here having brought Valeera up twice, I was surprised she was treated as a Horde character in Mercs. Since I was expecting her to be faction-neutral (because she very explicitly IS), it only helps her as she gets some buffs in bounties she otherwise wouldn't, but it did strike me as a questionable choice flavour-wise. Her neutrality is the whole reason she is able to get on with people from both factions in WoW, and by extension why it made sense she would be running the show in Mercs. Oh well.
- TbFF has, in my opinion, poor characters, poor development and is tainted by an incredibly shitty ending. Rikkar, from rumble run, is a blank character of unknown origin (the very definition of a nobody) but it works because the story is about him rising to the top. Arrana on the other hand is the sister of a known character, with a defined character and arc (Far as I know, she starts wanting to escape from her sister's shadow) but by the end we're left scratching out heads as to what has actually been accomplished here. It doesn't help that the story keeps piling on the bs that she becomes completely unrelatable. She's basically Rey from starwars; a character which experiences hardship only in theory but not in action. Its like a 10 yr old's self-insert fanfiction ideal which is sympathetic to its creator but not to anyone else.
Oh and the shitty ending? Illidan being beaten both in power and angst. By someone who literally became a demon hunter yesterday.
Wasn't her story primarily about finding solid friends in her own way and as far away from her sister's influence as possible, and hence finding herself in the process? Beating Illidan through the power of friendship (yuck :P) obviously shouldn't happen, but as much as I hate the trope, at least it was different from the usual DH story (i.e. every DH except Aranna) of "the Legion did me wrong and I have the emotional range of an angry potato so I guess I'll join Illidan". Man I wish DH had an once of diversity; it's frustratingly narrow in every respect.
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Otherwise, I broadly agree with the order OP used, though I would include most of the Dungeon Run-esque modes, even if you're only going to state there's not much story there for some of them. I would also personally promote Blackrock a bit though since I very much enjoyed the process of Nefarian and his dragon homies beginning to realise we weren't just there for Ragnaros.
That reminds me, what on earth happened in the Mercenaries (game mode) story? In particular, why did Lady Prestor hire us to take out her brother? I understand why Valeera would want him removed, but Onyxia? Hmm. Maybe it was all just an alternative perspective on the exact same events as the Blackrock adventure? It would certainly explain why Nefarian was surprised when we started taking out dragons...
I had not forgotten it at all! The swap mechanic was fine and flavourful for worgen, and I remember Spellshifter actually being used in the meta, while the others (especially the rush ones) were great arena cards. Keep in mind it was only 5 cards in an expansion that was aiming to reduce the power level of the game (give or take Genn and Baku...), so it is hardly surprising they didn't see much play when they were designed to be weaker than things from the Year of the Mammoth.
In the end, the swap mechanics is one of many small, non-keyword set mechanics that get put in promotional material but only actually have a few cards. They are also often spread across classes so you'd never have enough in a deck to consider the mechanic significant. You can include ogres and troggs from GvG, joust in TGT, plagues in SoU, mounts in UiS etc.
But, WW has one of my favourite themes of all the HS sets. The point being it is really subjective, and if theme is the basis for Dean's comment, then he would have only been using a limited perspective too.
I'm sure the murder mystery theme would have been dropped early in the design process and long before any of the promotional stuff was in the works. Though it didn't disappear completely. the Monster Hunt (WW's Dungeon Run) was set up as a bit of an investigation as the Gilneans worked out who was making their forest all spooky. They even had the Murloc Holmes treasure. So the mystery theme bleeding into promo images is surprising.
Yeah, WW isn't one of the sets that I would have thought was 'low excitement' (though I am a low sample size of 1 :P). Between 18 new odd/even decks (they were exciting before we grew to loathe some of them!), Shudderwock, Tess and the long-overdue introduction of rush, WW did an awful lot more to excite me than any recent expansion has.
I'm going to add to what @anchom4n said by pointing out you recently opted to make a troll post when prompted to give a genuine answer to the thread in question (about people's favourite Merc character). I know nothing about you personally, but knowing that you are more than happy to make troll posts hardly makes me want to take what you say seriously.
If you are genuinely annoyed with how people respond to your comments, then you have been shooting yourself in the foot for a while and would benefit from taking a more genuine and respectful tone in future. You reap what you sow, so to speak.
If you don't actually care then fine, I guess. That's my baseline assumption anyway.
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FWIW, as a burgle rogue main, I actually think it has been the most consistently well-balanced archetypes in the game. It has never been prominent in the meta, but it is the sort of deck that we don't really want to be either lest things devolve into completely unpredictable RNG fiestas. They make some popular Tavern Brawls, but not constructed metas.
Ultimately, burgle rogue is a meme deck that manages to retain a following pretty much regardless of what the Wild and Standard metas are doing, and generally does so without inviting calls for nerfs or buffs. That's a lot more than most archetypes can claim, and makes it one of the most successful archetypes they have ever designed.
That was an impressively comprehensive account of it all!
I know which side of the debate I stand on, though blame isn't wholly on Stormwind. Over the course of 2021 I've gone from enjoying playing enough to finally reach Legend with my casual decks (twice!) and owning practically every card in each set, to being a Gold rank player who is disinterested enough to not even be sure I want to bother spending enough gold to get all the rares in AV. If it wasn't for burgle rogue being my bread and butter, I'd probably just leave.
I'm not going to say the recent design direction has been wrong since it's subjective, but it feels like they must have goofed somewhere if a dolphin (semi-whale?) veteran player becomes an apathetic F2P player despite genuinely wanting to keep playing the game. Maybe Stormwind just expedited a process that was going to happen anyway, but I doubt Blizz' shareholders will thank it for that...
I expect we'll continue to be given them since most rewards in each bounty are tied to specific trios of mercs, but being given a way to 'dust' them into coins of other mercs feels likely and consistent with how normal HS works. It would probably be at the usual ~25% return, which isn't great but at least we'd then know all coins we get are going somewhere useful. It would also help alleviate the issue of it being more and more difficult to find coins for crafting newly added mercs, since even at 25% return grinding for them in bounties would be much quicker than it is now.
The prices are often ridiculous, but it's the inconsistency that really befuddles me. Right now I have the shop offering me a skin and 5 packs for Diablo and the Lich King, at the same price as just a skin for Anduin. Just, why?
I hadn't expressed it particularly well, but I was working on the basis that the time it takes to actually draw each card* sets a limit on the number you can add to the queue. Really it limits the rate, but multiplying that by the turn time would gives a total number you can add to the queue legally (after adding the max 10 cards initially in hand).
If you reduce the card draw animation time to 0, that rate can be set arbitrarily large, and hence so can the number added to the queue. Or equally you can just have an arbitrarily long turn time.
* I'm not overly familiar with how APM-Ignite mage plays out, but I suspect if you play it honestly you'll have to watch the Ignites shuffle in before they can be drawn, hence the shuffling animation would also be involved in setting the rate. But again, I'm no expert on the specifics here; I'm just someone who has plenty of experience coding projecting his expectations onto the situation. I could be miles off.
I haven't looked into what exactly they do, so you can fill me in on the specifics, but from what I can tell they are either bypassing the animations involved in shuffling Ignite and drawing a card, or skipping the finite turn timer itself. Without doing one of those they cannot queue enough actions regardless of how many actions the game allows you to queue, and by meddling with either of those they are changing the time-based rules of the game (i.e. cheating).
If it's a repeat of the old Noz + Joust issue where you could use animations to skip your opponent's turn, then I thought they fixed that years ago by making sure your own turn timer doesn't start 'til the animations have stopped (far from a guarantee it hasn't reappeared, I know). Unless they only half-fixed that so it only actually applies to Noz's 15 second (give or take :P) time limit, in which case copying the same code over to normal turns should be pretty easy.
I personally wouldn't be the least bit sad to see APM decks disappear, but that is subjective and hence isn't a reason to remove them. At least not with such a minuscule sample of opinions. They'd need a convincing majority of players to really dislike them before there is a real case to remove them, and I'm not sure we have that. Now, if we want to instead discuss changing cards that are repeatedly central to problems (in this case Sorcerer's Apprentice), then there we have an over-abundance of evidence that something ought to be changed.
I'd argue the animations are just part of the game's rules, and them being a hindrance doesn't make them problematic. Most game rules can be considered a hindrance, be it summoning sickness, only attacking once per turn, having finite mana etc. in the same way the animations are attributes of the cards, not ones that are stated explicitly on the cards, but valid attributes within the game nonetheless, and relevant in a game which imposes a finite turn timer.
APM is consequently a relevant property of the game, even if you remove animations because of the turn timer and the fact humans take time to perform actions. That doesn't make HS better or worse for having it, just different. Bypassing that is essentially playing a different game, and hence cheating, no matter how one feels about hypothetically having an infinite loop.
I must thank you once again, this time particularly for letting me hear Valeera the Nice's "Greetings (Mirror)" emote, which I'd probably not encounter otherwise. The "ugh, you're too much" shows she's just as sickened by her own saccharine act as we are, and is a beautiful complement to her attack voiceline ("No more Mrs Nice Elf") showing she's had enough of this job :P
I think not feeling compelled to collect them is an important part of why I'm actually more on-board with the flood of them than the relatively small number a year+ ago. Once it became pointless to own them all (since there are too many to realistically make good use out of them), I started only getting the ones that genuinely interest me, which is a healthier approach to it.
I've been so glad burgle rogue has Savory Deviate Delight and Parrrley. Watching those questline rewards, Mozakis, owls etc get torn away from the opponent has been so satisfying and has enabled me to properly enjoy a slow value deck for the first time in ages. That's good for meme rogue players like myself; perhaps not so much for everyone else.
I took Vanndar purely because I don't think I've ever made a deck with no 4+ cost minions that wasn't an all-spell deck, so I knew I'd never actually care about Drek'thar. Not that I've actually used Vanndar yet either :P
Great! It was jolly frustrating going into bounties with the sole purpose of getting coins for a specific Merc but not making any progress at the end. It's not so bad with Mercs you already own since there are other reliable ways to get their coins, but it sucks when trying to grind coins to craft new ones.
That, or there is a silent majority of players who didn't know or give a sh*t who was stronger, and just think Vanndar is more interesting.
IIRC Aranna wasn't in Outland to become a DH; she just wanted to get as far away from her sister as possible and finding the Illidari was somewhat accidental. So I guess they were going for not knowing where you'll end up in life, but eventually you'll find your calling?
Lore-wise, the most important (and dangerous) part of becoming a DH is absorbing a demon's soul and controlling it. That has a pretty high mortality rate, and Aranna's story brushed it all under the rug. I suppose they were trying to make it a more friendly, and whimsical telling to fit HS's usual setting, hence all the rhyming. Interestingly, the best place I know to see how tough that process should be doesn't come from a DH at all, but from Valeera who got lumped with a powerful dreadlord's soul as a teenager. She wasn't trying to control it like DHs do, just suppress it, but I assume the tough part is largely the same: keeping control of yourself. The comics go to great lengths to show how much she had to do to handle it, and if Aranna's story was striking a less whimsical tone I'd expect her to have to do the same at bare minimum. On the bright side, Valeera's success came largely through the aid of friends, especially Broll and Aegwynn, which is something I expect to be largely absent in the brutal canonical Illidari training. So maybe Aranna's friends really did make it easier for each other?
Re Mercs: I think a lot of the bounties were just Valeera running a mercenary company and helping the world out. At least that accounts for a lot of the stuff in the Barrens, Felwood and Winterspring. Once you get to Blackrock it feels like you'd probably want to do it all in one go a la the BRM adventure. That's just somewhere where game mechanics and the (limited) story-telling are in conflict with each other.
While I'm here having brought Valeera up twice, I was surprised she was treated as a Horde character in Mercs. Since I was expecting her to be faction-neutral (because she very explicitly IS), it only helps her as she gets some buffs in bounties she otherwise wouldn't, but it did strike me as a questionable choice flavour-wise. Her neutrality is the whole reason she is able to get on with people from both factions in WoW, and by extension why it made sense she would be running the show in Mercs. Oh well.
Wasn't her story primarily about finding solid friends in her own way and as far away from her sister's influence as possible, and hence finding herself in the process? Beating Illidan through the power of friendship (yuck :P) obviously shouldn't happen, but as much as I hate the trope, at least it was different from the usual DH story (i.e. every DH except Aranna) of "the Legion did me wrong and I have the emotional range of an angry potato so I guess I'll join Illidan". Man I wish DH had an once of diversity; it's frustratingly narrow in every respect.
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Otherwise, I broadly agree with the order OP used, though I would include most of the Dungeon Run-esque modes, even if you're only going to state there's not much story there for some of them. I would also personally promote Blackrock a bit though since I very much enjoyed the process of Nefarian and his dragon homies beginning to realise we weren't just there for Ragnaros.
That reminds me, what on earth happened in the Mercenaries (game mode) story? In particular, why did Lady Prestor hire us to take out her brother? I understand why Valeera would want him removed, but Onyxia? Hmm. Maybe it was all just an alternative perspective on the exact same events as the Blackrock adventure? It would certainly explain why Nefarian was surprised when we started taking out dragons...
I'm not defending Genn and Baku's longer term influence, but they were exciting in the lead up to the expansion when everyone expected them to suck.
I had not forgotten it at all! The swap mechanic was fine and flavourful for worgen, and I remember Spellshifter actually being used in the meta, while the others (especially the rush ones) were great arena cards. Keep in mind it was only 5 cards in an expansion that was aiming to reduce the power level of the game (give or take Genn and Baku...), so it is hardly surprising they didn't see much play when they were designed to be weaker than things from the Year of the Mammoth.
In the end, the swap mechanics is one of many small, non-keyword set mechanics that get put in promotional material but only actually have a few cards. They are also often spread across classes so you'd never have enough in a deck to consider the mechanic significant. You can include ogres and troggs from GvG, joust in TGT, plagues in SoU, mounts in UiS etc.
But, WW has one of my favourite themes of all the HS sets. The point being it is really subjective, and if theme is the basis for Dean's comment, then he would have only been using a limited perspective too.
I'm sure the murder mystery theme would have been dropped early in the design process and long before any of the promotional stuff was in the works. Though it didn't disappear completely. the Monster Hunt (WW's Dungeon Run) was set up as a bit of an investigation as the Gilneans worked out who was making their forest all spooky. They even had the Murloc Holmes treasure. So the mystery theme bleeding into promo images is surprising.
Yeah, WW isn't one of the sets that I would have thought was 'low excitement' (though I am a low sample size of 1 :P). Between 18 new odd/even decks (they were exciting before we grew to loathe some of them!), Shudderwock, Tess and the long-overdue introduction of rush, WW did an awful lot more to excite me than any recent expansion has.
I'm going to add to what @anchom4n said by pointing out you recently opted to make a troll post when prompted to give a genuine answer to the thread in question (about people's favourite Merc character). I know nothing about you personally, but knowing that you are more than happy to make troll posts hardly makes me want to take what you say seriously.
If you are genuinely annoyed with how people respond to your comments, then you have been shooting yourself in the foot for a while and would benefit from taking a more genuine and respectful tone in future. You reap what you sow, so to speak.
If you don't actually care then fine, I guess. That's my baseline assumption anyway.
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FWIW, as a burgle rogue main, I actually think it has been the most consistently well-balanced archetypes in the game. It has never been prominent in the meta, but it is the sort of deck that we don't really want to be either lest things devolve into completely unpredictable RNG fiestas. They make some popular Tavern Brawls, but not constructed metas.
Ultimately, burgle rogue is a meme deck that manages to retain a following pretty much regardless of what the Wild and Standard metas are doing, and generally does so without inviting calls for nerfs or buffs. That's a lot more than most archetypes can claim, and makes it one of the most successful archetypes they have ever designed.
I couldn't get it to recognise I had both Yetis on the board. I guess they must have been estranged and no longer considered themselves family :P
That was an impressively comprehensive account of it all!
I know which side of the debate I stand on, though blame isn't wholly on Stormwind. Over the course of 2021 I've gone from enjoying playing enough to finally reach Legend with my casual decks (twice!) and owning practically every card in each set, to being a Gold rank player who is disinterested enough to not even be sure I want to bother spending enough gold to get all the rares in AV. If it wasn't for burgle rogue being my bread and butter, I'd probably just leave.
I'm not going to say the recent design direction has been wrong since it's subjective, but it feels like they must have goofed somewhere if a dolphin (semi-whale?) veteran player becomes an apathetic F2P player despite genuinely wanting to keep playing the game. Maybe Stormwind just expedited a process that was going to happen anyway, but I doubt Blizz' shareholders will thank it for that...