Extra from what others said above, my gripes with the game include the grindiness of the mode (coupled with the wasted time in menus and such), and the fact that the meta was already solved in pvp apparently. The latter point doesn't affect me since i'm gonna stick to just pve most likely, but it's a clear way to take a lot of fun out of the game for some.
Also, the fact that we don't have specific quest screens/branches for the main game modes (hs+arena+brawl, BGs, Mercs) is really annoying. Being limited to 3 dailies/weeklies that can be totally random is just sad. 1 more permanent slot for each game mode would've been nice to have, and the ability to complete the quests in any mode, FROM LAUNCH.
Or simply have a different number of quests for each mode, with the ability to complete them in any mode (maybe with some exceptions).
Wow, amazing! Do consider learning to code in Unity - might be doable by yourself (the core game), then hire some artists for the drawing part.
Few questions (as for the AMA):
1. which are the turn phases?
2. Are there blockers or only minions with "taunt"? Any kind of spell protection (like divine shields, immune, etc)?
3. Please explain more the idea behind Basic and Virtual. Which are the core cards? Will you consider a different path of making new content than Blizzard did(i.e. standard vs wild)?
Let's say that I can accept the fact that there have been very large changes and some imbalances were prone to happen no matter what (unsurprisingly for Blizzard, "a bunch" of fixes are required as opposed to just a few).
Hopefully, when they do much smaller changes, they will be capable of proper testing instead of having to do a huge balance patch after a month.
well then how about you come up with a plan on how to do it, because clearly you are convinced that it's possible in the first place.
Actually it was done. During the earlier days/first few expansions of HS. You had aggro, control and combo in a decent amount. Sure, there were polarized matches (freeze mage vs warrior) but those were not the majority of games.
Don't get me wrong, perfect balance is indeed impossible. I'm not asking for that.
It's also not my job to fix their design issues after lots of expansions that each introduced more and more powercreep, to make sure at least some of the cards from the new expansions get played.
I know this is why you believe it is impossible - otherwise we'd end up with new content that doesn't get played at all. No one wants that.
What i'm saying is to move away from direct or indirect stat increases (and/or cost decreases) and into the realm of "fun" effects and minions that force board interactions most of the time. Remember the general outcry when the 4 mana 7/7 shaman card was released? And it was more or less OP for that time, when supported correctly. Now we have had extreme mana cheating for a while. This means a disproportionate ratio between cost and power, and of course it's overpowered. At least the 4 mana 7/7 had overload.
How should they do it? I don't care nor am I paid to think about it. Here are a few free ideas: a complete power reset every 1-2 expansions, properly testing the damn game before launching an expansions, tweaking the average game time to 15 turns(from the previous testing), no more 0 cost cards unless designed that way, assigning proper costs to abilities and minion stats and then to the card itself, designing nice looking efects that *feel* more powerful than they are stat-wise(see the winrate of caverns rogue vs how powerful the effect felt in the game), focus a lot more on making cards and decks fun to play *against* - more meaningful matches that you remember longer vs more matches that you don't give a crap about, etc.
There's a lot of psychology needed, including for educating the playerbase. Yet they are doing things directly opposite, probably for financial gain. I'm sure a good balance for everyone can be achieved.
It's not like the rest can't net-deck them and still play them.
I'm simply asking for statistics that are relevant to the whole player base, not just the top 1%. Imagine a real life example - setting the minimum wages based on the top 1% richest people in that country. Bankruptcy says hello.
And again, i'm talking about the usefulness of the provided statistics, not the numbers. It makes it very easy to show only what you want to show, while not caring about what happens with 99% of the playerbase. I could even argue that card changes should be based on what happens in the (higher) brackets leading to Legend, with a lower focus on what happens in Legend. But never just the top 1%...
Quote From No Author Specified
So don't you worry, the whales are leaving. And so is everyone else. But don't go complaining after we've left if the game doesn't become more fun.
That's ok. I haven't played Standard nor wild in a few years. Got fed up with the way they design things. Classic was fun to me for a bit, but the whole direction the game is taking made me drop the game fully. BGs still suffer from too much highrolling or "fun" combos.
Here's hoping they won't botch mercenaries. Gonna try it and see what it's about. If it doesn't pan out either, probably gonna uninstall and be done with it.
So don't worry,i'm not complaining. Whales leaving is the best thing that can happen, to force Blizzard into rethinking design choices (and i bet stakeholders are not gonna allow them to come back to such decisions either).
Why should we care about the top 1% of players when the rest of 99% are what 99% of the players face?!
At least provide the statistics for all the "brackets"(where a meaningful number of players reside). Those numbers are completely useless to below diamond.
But of course Blizzard only says half the truth, the one that suits them best (i.e. "hey look, our nerfs had the intended effect! But guess what?! Only for 1% of the playerbase because the others are too bad at the game to care about them").
I still question my sanity for paying for some arenas, with $, a few years ago when I was playing the game. It's sad that the HS whales don't find better games out there to invest into :(
What you said directly points at the fact that the core design of the game is flawed (or at least had become like that). The pipe dream you are talking about should be what happens in most cases, except for the standard deviation/fringe cases.
Think of it as an inverted U curve where around 70% of its area represents what you call the "pipe dream". That is the sweet spot in my opinion.
My honest opinion is that HS had been in dire need for new designers for a while now. Starting with Ben Brode, there has always been power creeping and faster and faster games.
This is the pinnacle of it all. These guys don't really know how to tone back the game anymore. It needs a hard reset (i.e. rotate ALL cards after an expansion and start fresh) and a lot of courage to do it.
I'm also worried that this is what they intended for the game and not something they don't know how to solve. It's like they embraced their failure. Also, very likely, monetary reasons prevailed.
Think of it like this: didn't ANYONE in the team find out all these broken bullcrap before they shipped out the cards?! I'm really sick and tired of this incompetence (which was also clearly visible when they introduced quillboars in BGs).
Most likely the new Mercenaries will be the go-to mode for people wanting to play longer games (e.g. control decks). HS in itself has become just a shadow of the game I played in beta and shortly after. And while I can understand mistakes and some form of inexperience (e.g. naxx Undertaker), this keeps happening for a while now, in every mode. And let's not even talk about all the leaks and stuff.
We really need fresh (designer) blood for this game.
The problem is they don't care to do any kind of meaningful testing. It's all done by the players, for free. Or, I should say, the players actually pay to test the game :)))
And it's not a good enough excuse if everyone in the gaming industry does it too. It's just something that shows how the carelessness and idiocy of players has increased in ~10 years or so, provided that almost everyone is simply ignoring this fact instead of "taxing" the companies for their brutal cost reduction (at the expense of quality).
Wow, just wow. The BGs damage cap they are talking about is completely useless. In almost every BG game there is at least one player that quits quickly or simply AFKs or is a bot.
For it to be of any use, 10 players should be in the lobby for the first 8-9 turns at least, to have any impact on the "fun" factor. And even then, a cap of 15 is way too high and won't change much with the amount of highrolling.
The problem's always been catching up and playing against the top 2-3 people more often than your opponents. To me, this 15 damage cap is not gonna do anything. What big difference does it make if you die on turn 9 instead of 8?! If they kept an 8-12 damage cap every time, it would actually be something.
I'm sorry, but I'm not feeling this game anymore. Not that it matters to anyone anyway... Very disappointed in the way they are going about this :(
What do tribes have to do with anything when the problem is the damage taken (a lot of times 15-20 on turns 7-8)? It's just about the amount of fun some people get to have. It's like these designers don't realize you can have fun even when losing if the journey (to the end) was interesting enough.
I tried some time ago (i think WoW related) and they always dodged the questions. And no, it wasn't asked in a toxic way. Also, i don't have a twitter account nor do i want to make one just for this (especially when there are a lot of people complaining about the same thing that do).
Why doesn't anyone ask him about making BG changes to increase health points or reduce the damage in every turn? :( or maybe he just skips these questions...
Holy crap! :O
Extra from what others said above, my gripes with the game include the grindiness of the mode (coupled with the wasted time in menus and such), and the fact that the meta was already solved in pvp apparently. The latter point doesn't affect me since i'm gonna stick to just pve most likely, but it's a clear way to take a lot of fun out of the game for some.
Also, the fact that we don't have specific quest screens/branches for the main game modes (hs+arena+brawl, BGs, Mercs) is really annoying. Being limited to 3 dailies/weeklies that can be totally random is just sad. 1 more permanent slot for each game mode would've been nice to have, and the ability to complete the quests in any mode, FROM LAUNCH.
Or simply have a different number of quests for each mode, with the ability to complete them in any mode (maybe with some exceptions).
Wow, amazing! Do consider learning to code in Unity - might be doable by yourself (the core game), then hire some artists for the drawing part.
Few questions (as for the AMA):
1. which are the turn phases?
2. Are there blockers or only minions with "taunt"? Any kind of spell protection (like divine shields, immune, etc)?
3. Please explain more the idea behind Basic and Virtual. Which are the core cards? Will you consider a different path of making new content than Blizzard did(i.e. standard vs wild)?
Thanks for an awesome read!
Curious about the BG balance changes.
Let's say that I can accept the fact that there have been very large changes and some imbalances were prone to happen no matter what (unsurprisingly for Blizzard, "a bunch" of fixes are required as opposed to just a few).
Hopefully, when they do much smaller changes, they will be capable of proper testing instead of having to do a huge balance patch after a month.
Actually it was done. During the earlier days/first few expansions of HS. You had aggro, control and combo in a decent amount. Sure, there were polarized matches (freeze mage vs warrior) but those were not the majority of games.
Don't get me wrong, perfect balance is indeed impossible. I'm not asking for that.
It's also not my job to fix their design issues after lots of expansions that each introduced more and more powercreep, to make sure at least some of the cards from the new expansions get played.
I know this is why you believe it is impossible - otherwise we'd end up with new content that doesn't get played at all. No one wants that.
What i'm saying is to move away from direct or indirect stat increases (and/or cost decreases) and into the realm of "fun" effects and minions that force board interactions most of the time. Remember the general outcry when the 4 mana 7/7 shaman card was released? And it was more or less OP for that time, when supported correctly. Now we have had extreme mana cheating for a while. This means a disproportionate ratio between cost and power, and of course it's overpowered. At least the 4 mana 7/7 had overload.
How should they do it? I don't care nor am I paid to think about it. Here are a few free ideas: a complete power reset every 1-2 expansions, properly testing the damn game before launching an expansions, tweaking the average game time to 15 turns(from the previous testing), no more 0 cost cards unless designed that way, assigning proper costs to abilities and minion stats and then to the card itself, designing nice looking efects that *feel* more powerful than they are stat-wise(see the winrate of caverns rogue vs how powerful the effect felt in the game), focus a lot more on making cards and decks fun to play *against* - more meaningful matches that you remember longer vs more matches that you don't give a crap about, etc.
There's a lot of psychology needed, including for educating the playerbase. Yet they are doing things directly opposite, probably for financial gain. I'm sure a good balance for everyone can be achieved.
It's not like the rest can't net-deck them and still play them.
I'm simply asking for statistics that are relevant to the whole player base, not just the top 1%. Imagine a real life example - setting the minimum wages based on the top 1% richest people in that country. Bankruptcy says hello.
And again, i'm talking about the usefulness of the provided statistics, not the numbers. It makes it very easy to show only what you want to show, while not caring about what happens with 99% of the playerbase. I could even argue that card changes should be based on what happens in the (higher) brackets leading to Legend, with a lower focus on what happens in Legend. But never just the top 1%...
That's ok. I haven't played Standard nor wild in a few years. Got fed up with the way they design things. Classic was fun to me for a bit, but the whole direction the game is taking made me drop the game fully. BGs still suffer from too much highrolling or "fun" combos.
Here's hoping they won't botch mercenaries. Gonna try it and see what it's about. If it doesn't pan out either, probably gonna uninstall and be done with it.
So don't worry,i'm not complaining. Whales leaving is the best thing that can happen, to force Blizzard into rethinking design choices (and i bet stakeholders are not gonna allow them to come back to such decisions either).
Why should we care about the top 1% of players when the rest of 99% are what 99% of the players face?!
At least provide the statistics for all the "brackets"(where a meaningful number of players reside). Those numbers are completely useless to below diamond.
But of course Blizzard only says half the truth, the one that suits them best (i.e. "hey look, our nerfs had the intended effect! But guess what?! Only for 1% of the playerbase because the others are too bad at the game to care about them").
I still question my sanity for paying for some arenas, with $, a few years ago when I was playing the game. It's sad that the HS whales don't find better games out there to invest into :(
What you said directly points at the fact that the core design of the game is flawed (or at least had become like that). The pipe dream you are talking about should be what happens in most cases, except for the standard deviation/fringe cases.
Think of it as an inverted U curve where around 70% of its area represents what you call the "pipe dream". That is the sweet spot in my opinion.
Thank you for a very nice read!
My honest opinion is that HS had been in dire need for new designers for a while now. Starting with Ben Brode, there has always been power creeping and faster and faster games.
This is the pinnacle of it all. These guys don't really know how to tone back the game anymore. It needs a hard reset (i.e. rotate ALL cards after an expansion and start fresh) and a lot of courage to do it.
I'm also worried that this is what they intended for the game and not something they don't know how to solve. It's like they embraced their failure. Also, very likely, monetary reasons prevailed.
Think of it like this: didn't ANYONE in the team find out all these broken bullcrap before they shipped out the cards?! I'm really sick and tired of this incompetence (which was also clearly visible when they introduced quillboars in BGs).
Most likely the new Mercenaries will be the go-to mode for people wanting to play longer games (e.g. control decks). HS in itself has become just a shadow of the game I played in beta and shortly after. And while I can understand mistakes and some form of inexperience (e.g. naxx Undertaker), this keeps happening for a while now, in every mode. And let's not even talk about all the leaks and stuff.
We really need fresh (designer) blood for this game.
The problem is they don't care to do any kind of meaningful testing. It's all done by the players, for free. Or, I should say, the players actually pay to test the game :)))
And it's not a good enough excuse if everyone in the gaming industry does it too. It's just something that shows how the carelessness and idiocy of players has increased in ~10 years or so, provided that almost everyone is simply ignoring this fact instead of "taxing" the companies for their brutal cost reduction (at the expense of quality).
Anyway...
The card can always be changed to form a pack from 3 random beasts, on game start
+100
These "designers" have no clue how not to design powercreep in this game... (not only BGs)...
It's not the first time it's happening. Something is definitely strange (i bet it's all marketing crap).
Why don't they just release the data now since it has become known(if it was leaked indeed)?
I wouldn't really call it "leaked" since it's blizzard who made it public.
Also, it seems they have a tendency of "leaking" stuff to the public at certain points in time, which likely means they planned it.
Well... make that ballista actually fire that (huge) arrow instead of all the others flying around it.
Wow, just wow. The BGs damage cap they are talking about is completely useless. In almost every BG game there is at least one player that quits quickly or simply AFKs or is a bot.
For it to be of any use, 10 players should be in the lobby for the first 8-9 turns at least, to have any impact on the "fun" factor. And even then, a cap of 15 is way too high and won't change much with the amount of highrolling.
The problem's always been catching up and playing against the top 2-3 people more often than your opponents. To me, this 15 damage cap is not gonna do anything. What big difference does it make if you die on turn 9 instead of 8?! If they kept an 8-12 damage cap every time, it would actually be something.
I'm sorry, but I'm not feeling this game anymore. Not that it matters to anyone anyway... Very disappointed in the way they are going about this :(
What do tribes have to do with anything when the problem is the damage taken (a lot of times 15-20 on turns 7-8)? It's just about the amount of fun some people get to have. It's like these designers don't realize you can have fun even when losing if the journey (to the end) was interesting enough.
I tried some time ago (i think WoW related) and they always dodged the questions. And no, it wasn't asked in a toxic way. Also, i don't have a twitter account nor do i want to make one just for this (especially when there are a lot of people complaining about the same thing that do).
Thanks for the downvotes!
Why doesn't anyone ask him about making BG changes to increase health points or reduce the damage in every turn? :( or maybe he just skips these questions...
Unfortunately, those new opportunities might mean a new (inferior) position in Activision. The article said he is just leaving Blizzard.
Also, I really hate the stupidity of not finding out who is actually at fault. The idea of a "fall guy" is wrong and idiotic.