It begs the question of why they reported battlegrounds differently from all of the other stats. It's literally the only stat that says anything about hours at all.
My job involves making a lot of decisions over how best to present data to maximise clarity, and I completely agree with Blizz' choice on this. I guess the first thing to establish is which is the most natural unit to use to measure the amount of stuff done in Hearthstone? Is it player hours or matches played? You can come up with arguments for both, and under different circumstances they each seem more appropriate than the other. For example, if you hop on just to do a daily quest, you maybe turn up for 3 games, irrespective of how long that takes. On another occasion you might have set aside 2 hours to play in, and the number of games in that time is actually unimportant.
In the end, I lean more towards matches played being the most natural unit because that is how the game is discretised. Also, aside from other things going on outside of the game, players don't choose to leave mid-game, even if that game crosses the end of the time they set aside to play in. So ideally, I'd put all relevant data in terms of the number of games played, and be content that converting it to player hours is quite easy with a quick estimate of the time spent per game.
Quite easy, except in BG that is. We obviously cannot treat it as 8 players from start to finish, making it a complicated matter to try to estimate the typical time per game per player. And that's before worrying about up to 6 of the players going on to start a new game while the original one continues, giving potentially 7 simultaneous games involving the players that started in 1, even before that 1 has finished. Working all of this out for BG is surely a fun endeavour for the mathematically minded among us, but for most people the number of games played in BG is really difficult to interpret despite it looking simple initially. As a result, BG falls back on hours played.
Having done that, it is reasonable argue for doing everything in terms of hours played to keep everything consistent, but since BG is the odd one out I'd prefer to leave the rest of them in their own natural units without BG complicating it for all game modes. This is doubly true since past year reviews discussed the number of matches played, so being consistent with BG comes at the cost of making it difficult to compare across time.
You can already upgrade normal cards into golden. You disenchant the normal one and use the dust (plus a ton more dust) to make the golden one. You can also already use gold to do this. You buy some packs, disenchant what you get, and craft what you want from the dust.
I have trouble believing their "upgrade" system would actually be more cost-effective than that, so I really don't see much point in designing a whole new UI around the process.
I would expect the upgrade cost to be the difference on golden and non-golden crafting costs, rather than golden crafting minus non-golden disenchant.
So you'd have:
Rarity
Dust for gold - normal disenchant
Dust for gold - normal crafting
Common
395
360
Rare
780
700
Epic
1500
1200
Legendary
2800
1600
That difference is quite significant and makes it a worthwhile feature, but still keeps golden versions expensive.
I don't dislike Defile at all, but I also wouldn't want it back in Standard. Perhaps I'd be more happy to see it return if I didn't currently hate control warlock because of Tickatus, but as it stands that piece of s*** makes me wish warlock removal was less efficient, not more.
Defile was absolutely fine alongside Rin, the First Disciple (a.k.a. the fair version of Tickatus), who is conveniently on the list, but is probably too good when control warlock's win condition is already so strong and rage-inducing.
Edit: OK, so Bloodreaver Gul'dan was another piece of s*** win condition that was around with Defile... man, I hate warlock designs sometimes -_-
Edit 2: Yeah, I knew I'd get a few downvotes for this one. No regrets though. Tickatus can burn in a pit with all the cards he destroys. I'm (not at all) keen to see how the devs' plan to return control games to their hay day of having to save up resources and removal for specific threats works out when Tickatus stops you being able to play the long game anyway.
I'm normally very skeptical of adding Classic versions of games precisely because those games had to keep adding things to keep it fresh, so the Classic mode seems doomed to fail unless it innovates. However, I do think Hearthstone has enough formats and game modes now that Classic can get away with being a static format that people can return to when in the mood for it, but go elsewhere when they want a change.
So in a twisted sense, Classic's best feature will be the existence of the other game modes.
A major issue with limiting the number of classes is that some classes are natural counters to others. You need a whole spectrum of classes - all having pros and cons against each other - to avoid one becoming top dog by default.
Besides, class balance during Classic was pretty finely tuned such that all the classes were perfectly playable (it would have been a disaster if the game launched and some of the classes were notably weaker than others!), so you don't need to come up with solutions to the more narrow metas we are used to in modern Hearthstone.
I presume by a 'powercreep deck' you just mean a meta deck? In the context of the Classic format there is no powercreep there since everything is at its original power level by definition.
People were hopelessly confused about how the Galakronds would work, but everyone understood them just fine as soon as they were able to test them out. Given there seems to be much less (Edit to actually finish the sentence:) confusion here overall, I'm sure it'll be easy enough to follow once we see it all in the collection manager.
Agreed, the HoF cards should be given priority if they are considered equally, especially as they will actually be usable in the Classic format whereas their replacements won't be.
However, the maths changes if you have (almost) all the HoF cards but lack lots of their replacements. Or of course if you have all of Classic and HoF, you might as well open the packs now. So I'd encourage everyone to decide based on their own circumstances.
You can take shots at Blizzard's 'laziness' if you want, but in truth the players make this problem for themselves. While it is true that there are occasionally metas where decks are truly dominant (e.g. DH at the start of Ashes of Outland), most of the time there are actually plenty of viable decks that people choose not to play, as they insist on only net-decking the top few.
So the issue is not that cards aren't usable, but that competitive ranks are dominated by 'Spikes' who most enjoy maximising win-rates and inevitably skew the meta to look like there's only 3 or 4 viable decks. As a result it wouldn't matter if Blizz buffed cards more often, because there's always going to be a bit of variation in win rates and Spikes will still end up only using the top 3 or 4 decks.
Now, in an ideal world competitive ranks would look like low ranks just with better players, and the 'Timmy's and 'Johnny's will help populate the meta with the full spread of viable decks. Then the players who care lots about winning but also really want to play with their full collection can rejoice that the illusion of there only being 3 or 4 viable decks has been broken.
But that's a naive pipe dream. In reality those players need to see through the illusion for themselves, and be willing to just play the decks they enjoy. Either those decks end up performing much better than you were expecting anyway (case in point: I reached Legend in December with unrefined shuffle rogue and token DH decks), or your MMR falls enough that you encounter more like-minded players and you actually begin to see more diverse decks being played.
Wild is a great example of this. People always point out the top few decks and lament the 'fact' that 99% of their cards are useless, but at low(ish) ranks most people are just playing their own janky decks without a care in the world for the meta, and it's brilliant down there!
---------------------
Tl;dr: Spikes kinda ruin the game for players with different mindsets, but not nearly so much as it sometimes seems.
I think the heart of @LilianVoss' comment is that Blizz has been clear on this, but streamers/youtubers have been too hasty in discussing it before they have taken in all the details themselves. This has apparently led to some of them spreading a bit of misinformation about whether it is a good idea to disenchant original versions of cards that will in the Core set.
Classic packs won't have anything to do with the Core set, even with some Classic cards being in there, because we'll be given the full Core set for free regardless.
The only reason to hold onto the Classic packs is to try to take advantage of the pool of cards inside them reverting to the original Classic set: everything that got Hall of Famed will be back in Classic packs (except the odd/even stuff from Witchwood and presumably the old 'Reward set'), and everything that replaced them will be taken out of Classic packs. So wait if you want to open something that's currently in the HoF, but otherwise you can just open them now.
I wonder if they bring back the achievements for all the golden murlocs/pirates awarding golden Murk-Eye/parrots. I know my Classic collection is a whole lot shinier than I had pieced together before they disappeared...
It looks like they chose the last balance patch before Naxx, which would theoretically be when Classic was the most balanced within itself. As I recall, class balance was actually really good back then, which will be a nice change from Standard and Wild which are much harder to achieve that with due to the larger card pools.
Well, Valeera got possessed during the story arc of identifying and defeating Onyxia, long before Me'dan entered the story. I'm pretty sure that arc is completely canon, and her mana/fel addiction - along with the curse of Kathra'natir - is a major sub-plot across that entire arc. So I'd be very surprised if it wasn't included in the BoH.
As a bonus, we might well see Aegwynn appear too, since she helped Valeera out multiple times, and not least with suppressing the demon.
/* Side note: I was reading these comics over the Christmas period, hence why the details are all fresh in my mind. */
There's a good chance Valeera's Book of Heroes will bring Meryl into it (likely as a minion in her deck), since he took over as host to the dreadlord Kathra'natir from her.
How the Hearthstone team plans on handling the (not entirely canon) surrounding story with Me'dan is up to them, but Kathra'natir's possession of Valeera is not something they can really skip. Not least because that'll set us up for an awesome demonic Valeera skin :P
Even those three can be argued to dabble in magic within warcraft canon. E.g. magic arrows with Arcane Shot, and rogues can canonically go invisible which surely requires some sort of magic.
The Jade Lotus was only a thing in 1 expansion, so I wouldn't expect it to have any influence on cosmetics 4+ years later unless it was explicitly tied to the Jade Lotus, e.g. if Aya Blackpaw herself was to make an appearance as a hero skin.
That's not actually preposterously unlikely if we suppose a Pandaria expansion might be on the horizon, and Aya would fit the tease that the next rogue hero would be 'legendary'. But who am I kidding? Pandaria and rogue hero skins don't exist in Hearthstone.
Anyway, I'm much more bothered by Garrosh riding a horse!
I don't think you are interpreting him correctly. He's not upset that players are hoarding gold for the next expansion, because when the next expansion comes that gold gets spent. That's expressly saving up for something, not just hoarding it because you don't know what to do with it.
What he's more bothered by is gold/dust that just never gets spent and keeps rising over time. Take @forcemajeure's comment above as an example: that's >100k dust that they (presumably) don't spend because there is nothing compelling enough for them to craft. If they never spend it, then that dust might as well not even be there.
There are various reasons why players might accumulate these resources and never use them up, but Dean's point is that they could do better at giving players something to use their growing reserves on.
Something with Alarm-o-Bot. I miss the days when there was a genuine hope that it would survive for a turn...
My job involves making a lot of decisions over how best to present data to maximise clarity, and I completely agree with Blizz' choice on this. I guess the first thing to establish is which is the most natural unit to use to measure the amount of stuff done in Hearthstone? Is it player hours or matches played? You can come up with arguments for both, and under different circumstances they each seem more appropriate than the other. For example, if you hop on just to do a daily quest, you maybe turn up for 3 games, irrespective of how long that takes. On another occasion you might have set aside 2 hours to play in, and the number of games in that time is actually unimportant.
In the end, I lean more towards matches played being the most natural unit because that is how the game is discretised. Also, aside from other things going on outside of the game, players don't choose to leave mid-game, even if that game crosses the end of the time they set aside to play in. So ideally, I'd put all relevant data in terms of the number of games played, and be content that converting it to player hours is quite easy with a quick estimate of the time spent per game.
Quite easy, except in BG that is. We obviously cannot treat it as 8 players from start to finish, making it a complicated matter to try to estimate the typical time per game per player. And that's before worrying about up to 6 of the players going on to start a new game while the original one continues, giving potentially 7 simultaneous games involving the players that started in 1, even before that 1 has finished. Working all of this out for BG is surely a fun endeavour for the mathematically minded among us, but for most people the number of games played in BG is really difficult to interpret despite it looking simple initially. As a result, BG falls back on hours played.
Having done that, it is reasonable argue for doing everything in terms of hours played to keep everything consistent, but since BG is the odd one out I'd prefer to leave the rest of them in their own natural units without BG complicating it for all game modes. This is doubly true since past year reviews discussed the number of matches played, so being consistent with BG comes at the cost of making it difficult to compare across time.
I would expect the upgrade cost to be the difference on golden and non-golden crafting costs, rather than golden crafting minus non-golden disenchant.
So you'd have:
That difference is quite significant and makes it a worthwhile feature, but still keeps golden versions expensive.
I don't dislike Defile at all, but I also wouldn't want it back in Standard. Perhaps I'd be more happy to see it return if I didn't currently hate control warlock because of Tickatus, but as it stands that piece of s*** makes me wish warlock removal was less efficient, not more.
Defile was absolutely fine alongside Rin, the First Disciple (a.k.a. the fair version of Tickatus), who is conveniently on the list, but is probably too good when control warlock's win condition is already so strong and rage-inducing.
Edit: OK, so Bloodreaver Gul'dan was another piece of s*** win condition that was around with Defile... man, I hate warlock designs sometimes -_-
Edit 2: Yeah, I knew I'd get a few downvotes for this one. No regrets though. Tickatus can burn in a pit with all the cards he destroys. I'm (not at all) keen to see how the devs' plan to return control games to their hay day of having to save up resources and removal for specific threats works out when Tickatus stops you being able to play the long game anyway.
I'm normally very skeptical of adding Classic versions of games precisely because those games had to keep adding things to keep it fresh, so the Classic mode seems doomed to fail unless it innovates. However, I do think Hearthstone has enough formats and game modes now that Classic can get away with being a static format that people can return to when in the mood for it, but go elsewhere when they want a change.
So in a twisted sense, Classic's best feature will be the existence of the other game modes.
Well, that's all pretty inconvenient for us in Europe. I'm sure OoC has got it covered though! :)
Am I right in thinking Blizz will be making it all available afterwards?
A major issue with limiting the number of classes is that some classes are natural counters to others. You need a whole spectrum of classes - all having pros and cons against each other - to avoid one becoming top dog by default.
Besides, class balance during Classic was pretty finely tuned such that all the classes were perfectly playable (it would have been a disaster if the game launched and some of the classes were notably weaker than others!), so you don't need to come up with solutions to the more narrow metas we are used to in modern Hearthstone.
I presume by a 'powercreep deck' you just mean a meta deck? In the context of the Classic format there is no powercreep there since everything is at its original power level by definition.
People were hopelessly confused about how the Galakronds would work, but everyone understood them just fine as soon as they were able to test them out. Given there seems to be much less (Edit to actually finish the sentence:) confusion here overall, I'm sure it'll be easy enough to follow once we see it all in the collection manager.
Agreed, the HoF cards should be given priority if they are considered equally, especially as they will actually be usable in the Classic format whereas their replacements won't be.
However, the maths changes if you have (almost) all the HoF cards but lack lots of their replacements. Or of course if you have all of Classic and HoF, you might as well open the packs now. So I'd encourage everyone to decide based on their own circumstances.
My counter rant
You can take shots at Blizzard's 'laziness' if you want, but in truth the players make this problem for themselves. While it is true that there are occasionally metas where decks are truly dominant (e.g. DH at the start of Ashes of Outland), most of the time there are actually plenty of viable decks that people choose not to play, as they insist on only net-decking the top few.
So the issue is not that cards aren't usable, but that competitive ranks are dominated by 'Spikes' who most enjoy maximising win-rates and inevitably skew the meta to look like there's only 3 or 4 viable decks. As a result it wouldn't matter if Blizz buffed cards more often, because there's always going to be a bit of variation in win rates and Spikes will still end up only using the top 3 or 4 decks.
Now, in an ideal world competitive ranks would look like low ranks just with better players, and the 'Timmy's and 'Johnny's will help populate the meta with the full spread of viable decks. Then the players who care lots about winning but also really want to play with their full collection can rejoice that the illusion of there only being 3 or 4 viable decks has been broken.
But that's a naive pipe dream. In reality those players need to see through the illusion for themselves, and be willing to just play the decks they enjoy. Either those decks end up performing much better than you were expecting anyway (case in point: I reached Legend in December with unrefined shuffle rogue and token DH decks), or your MMR falls enough that you encounter more like-minded players and you actually begin to see more diverse decks being played.
Wild is a great example of this. People always point out the top few decks and lament the 'fact' that 99% of their cards are useless, but at low(ish) ranks most people are just playing their own janky decks without a care in the world for the meta, and it's brilliant down there!
---------------------
Tl;dr: Spikes kinda ruin the game for players with different mindsets, but not nearly so much as it sometimes seems.
I think the heart of @LilianVoss' comment is that Blizz has been clear on this, but streamers/youtubers have been too hasty in discussing it before they have taken in all the details themselves. This has apparently led to some of them spreading a bit of misinformation about whether it is a good idea to disenchant original versions of cards that will in the Core set.
Classic packs won't have anything to do with the Core set, even with some Classic cards being in there, because we'll be given the full Core set for free regardless.
The only reason to hold onto the Classic packs is to try to take advantage of the pool of cards inside them reverting to the original Classic set: everything that got Hall of Famed will be back in Classic packs (except the odd/even stuff from Witchwood and presumably the old 'Reward set'), and everything that replaced them will be taken out of Classic packs. So wait if you want to open something that's currently in the HoF, but otherwise you can just open them now.
Whoopsie-doodle!
I wonder if they bring back the achievements for all the golden murlocs/pirates awarding golden Murk-Eye/parrots. I know my Classic collection is a whole lot shinier than I had pieced together before they disappeared...
Tink was changed earlier.
It looks like they chose the last balance patch before Naxx, which would theoretically be when Classic was the most balanced within itself. As I recall, class balance was actually really good back then, which will be a nice change from Standard and Wild which are much harder to achieve that with due to the larger card pools.
Well, Valeera got possessed during the story arc of identifying and defeating Onyxia, long before Me'dan entered the story. I'm pretty sure that arc is completely canon, and her mana/fel addiction - along with the curse of Kathra'natir - is a major sub-plot across that entire arc. So I'd be very surprised if it wasn't included in the BoH.
As a bonus, we might well see Aegwynn appear too, since she helped Valeera out multiple times, and not least with suppressing the demon.
/* Side note: I was reading these comics over the Christmas period, hence why the details are all fresh in my mind. */
Nah, these guys are definitely, absolutely, bone fide invisible: Safe Haven cinematic
There's a good chance Valeera's Book of Heroes will bring Meryl into it (likely as a minion in her deck), since he took over as host to the dreadlord Kathra'natir from her.
How the Hearthstone team plans on handling the (not entirely canon) surrounding story with Me'dan is up to them, but Kathra'natir's possession of Valeera is not something they can really skip. Not least because that'll set us up for an awesome demonic Valeera skin :P
Even those three can be argued to dabble in magic within warcraft canon. E.g. magic arrows with Arcane Shot, and rogues can canonically go invisible which surely requires some sort of magic.
The Jade Lotus was only a thing in 1 expansion, so I wouldn't expect it to have any influence on cosmetics 4+ years later unless it was explicitly tied to the Jade Lotus, e.g. if Aya Blackpaw herself was to make an appearance as a hero skin.
That's not actually preposterously unlikely if we suppose a Pandaria expansion might be on the horizon, and Aya would fit the tease that the next rogue hero would be 'legendary'. But who am I kidding? Pandaria and rogue hero skins don't exist in Hearthstone.
Anyway, I'm much more bothered by Garrosh riding a horse!
I don't think you are interpreting him correctly. He's not upset that players are hoarding gold for the next expansion, because when the next expansion comes that gold gets spent. That's expressly saving up for something, not just hoarding it because you don't know what to do with it.
What he's more bothered by is gold/dust that just never gets spent and keeps rising over time. Take @forcemajeure's comment above as an example: that's >100k dust that they (presumably) don't spend because there is nothing compelling enough for them to craft. If they never spend it, then that dust might as well not even be there.
There are various reasons why players might accumulate these resources and never use them up, but Dean's point is that they could do better at giving players something to use their growing reserves on.