If you think for one second that I'm bitter about not being in their pocket, you are an idiot. Do you know how easy it is to be in Blizzard's pockets? Because anybody can do it, you just have to be willing to play by their rules. I've never played by their rules.
The stakes were never very high though. Hearthstone was young, they needed the big people in the community more than those people needed them so as long as you weren't hosting your own cosby suite that the world knew about, they didn't care and would work with you.
I have a record of calling them out on their bullshit, I have a record of datamining their games, and I have a record of ignoring their requests because I value independence. The new guard on the Hearthstone team doesn't like that and they really don't like when they make mistakes (like uploading their data to a public cdn) and then people talk about them publicly.
The Hearthstone team has every streamer in their corner, deciding what they can and cannot say. Notice how quiet people are during leaks and datamining? Yeah, it's not allowed to be talked about because people know if they do they risk ruining their relationship with the company and then they won't get invited to events. I'm not going to hold stuff back from being published, that's how you make money.
Out of Cards has always been for-profit and independant. No one dictates what we post and it isn't possible to run large websites anymore without a business model in mind. Companies can ask us if we'd like to post about a certain topic, and they do, but they don't dictate if the message goes out or what the message looks like. That's shitty content. Blizzard's Gear Store team regularly talks to me about the new products they have. Sometimes we post about them, but it's rare. In that scenario it has to be products I think would fit well with the audience and I'll tell you, Overwatch merch does not fit with the audience here.
They're more tight-lipped in a lot of the data in the client these days. Sometimes we see stuff that could be interesting, like the DK Location image, and I think I screwed up by not posting about that particular asset this time around because ultimately is gave us DK and it would have been a killer headline. I ended up not though because I didn't think about it very much.
I wrongly assumed they were just catching their assets up as a precaution. I would not have ever predicted a class at the end of the year, though it does make sense with Wrath of the Lich King back on and alive and the end of the Hearthstone year always being weaker for them than the start. It'll be very interesting to see the numbers and what the start of next year looks like.
Datamining though. Definitely my favourite type of content to talk about!
I'm very well aware of what their intention was - to do something silly. They clearly had a second-thought about it though because the tweets referenced in the article have since been deleted.
I'm not at all embarrassed and never will be. I'll continue to hold Blizzard to a higher standard. Their staff complained on Twitter about news outlets dropping bombs on them when the company was up to no good during the start of a card reveal season, well, in my eyes, they're now the people that are putting up junk in their reveal season.
And because I said it in another reply here but want to really hammer it home:
Misinformation is when you post something that isn't factual but your intent was not to deceive people. Disinformation is when there is deliberate deception involved. I don't believe Blizzard created disinformation here which is why it solidly falls into the misinformation category. Intent it what matters here. They made a mistake and they got called out on it.
Misinformation is when you post something that isn't factual but your intent was not to deceive people. Disinformation is when there is deliberate deception involved. I don't believe Blizzard created disinformation here which is why it solidly falls into the misinformation category.
While Hearthstone may just be a video game, that doesn't mean the community shouldn't be held to a higher standard. I've been saying for years that gaming should remain fun and that isn't something I'll ever disagree with, but that also doesn't mean we can't have serious conversations when people mess up.
And honestly? Blizzard messes up a lot. A lot of that I don't even talk about publicly because it's beating a dead horse at this point and overall we don't need that kind of negativity so consistently. Some folks call me a Blizzard shill, others call me a Blizzard hater, I just call it like I see it because we have witnessed one of the greatest gaming companies become a tenth of what it used to be. I really hope that Microsoft's acquisition of their IP and talent ends up being a positive for their titles because they certainly need all the help they can get.
I've been off their list since Alkali took over - the promotion company that was sending stuff out already had my information for the remainder of the sets they figured their gear out for.
Hearthstone is anti-datamining now and their repeated asks for me to take content down, which was denied, resulted in them saying no more free stuff. Which isn't that big of a deal, I don't have room for it all anyway. They believe stuff on a public CDN is private.
This was done to make sure that we don't have any old assets cached anywhere.
Members may experience slightly longer load times when they first visit pages due to static assets needing to be cached locally, though this is not likely to be disruptive to the end-user experience.
Hearthstone
Added Death Knight Icons across the site.
Added March of the Lich King Icons across the site.
Updated Navigation for new expansion.
Expansion pages will no longer display classes if no cards have been revealed for that class.
The exception to this new rule is if we have "placeholder cards" which we haven't used in a while due to significant bulk early in a reveal season that doesn't add much to the guides themselves.
Bug Fixes
General
Fixed an issue where some RSS feeds on the site were returning 500 errors.
Our Discord bot is back up and running and is correctly giving out roles again.
Hearthstone
Fixed an issue with card reveal notifications not going out on Discord.
There was a catch-up period where old notifications went out late. Shouldn't happen again.
Watching Twitter fall apart since Musk took over is hilarious. 44 Billion for a site that'll be worth a tenth of that in 5 years. It's Yahoo and Tumblr all over again.
The only reason I call it misinformation is because we are in a card reveal season. They really should consider their card reveal season sacred and with Blizzard having poor communication, it is my belief they deserve to be scolded for it. The only way they learn is if people are willing to talk about it.
There were so many different ways they could have gone about promoting the fact that card reveals were starting today. They could have showcased a piece of art and asked people what their favourite cards revealed so far are. Or, if they really wanted to dive back into Knights of the Frozen Throne's adventure, they could have easily done a "Card reveals are starting today, and we'd love to see Death Knights pull x from the past. What cards are you hoping DK gets?" which would have let them be silly (100 Armor, lol) but also encouraging people to talk about the new set and what they want to see.
I generally believe that people should do their own research before doing anything. But, I know that I'm definitely not in the majority when it comes to this line of thinking. Because of this, I do think companies should keep their communications factual as much as possible.
That's the fun thing about everything in life though.
George Carlin put it best. "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Everyone has a different frame of reference. Folks that are most hardcore about Hearthstone don't really see the game in any other light. "Oh but people will know x y z", except they don't. This is something I've had trouble communicating to our writers about over the years because it isn't something people remember about. Creating content has to be done in an accessible manner. Sometimes it is worth pointing out "obvious" things because although we may think they are obvious, they really aren't Learning how to think like other players is super important.
I honestly don't believe Blizzard puts a lot of thought into their social campaigns. I also believe they are very bad at promoting their stuff and this certainly didn't help their case.
Deficiency? No, everything here is working as intended. We don't have a collectible version of Frostmourne in the database yet so it isn't going to show up via BBCode. BBCode prefers the collectible version and then it'll default to whatever is highest cost, followed by the oldest id in the database.
You have to understand that there are very different audiences in games.
First, you have your ultra hardcore players that are dialed in to the point where they don't miss a thing, they know everything there is to know about the game, and they are ultimately super passionate even when they stop playing.
Then you have your casual player who goes "oh I love game" and they login to play for a few days when new content comes out and then maybe randomly a few more times before another set, and that's that.
Misinformation like this doesn't harm the first kind of player, but it harms the second.
Imagine a scenario where a second player sees that tweet, thinks Death Knight is super overpowered. There is a chance they buy products based on what they see. A product that Blizzard ultimately will refuse to refund because card packs aren't eligible for refunds (though they have done this in rare circumstances for unopened packs). I'd also be willing to bet some people might not even bother with coming back to the game if they see another hero class getting OP stuff, but this probably wouldn't be that many people.
So you're 100% right, this is a non-issue for 10%, maybe 15% of the playerbase. The overwhelming majority of players in any game though aren't hardcore about it and misinformation is bad.
Blizzard taints their card reveal seasons with asinine bullshit and it makes no sense. We're already getting cards with the wrong stats, old cards mixed in with new (they addressed this saying well some people might not have seen the other cards), and the countdowns all being wrong because Blizzard doesn't understand how timezones work.
There are so many other ways they can hype stuff up. Putting out old cards masquerading as new ones isn't it.
Twitter was great when there were people talking about random topics and chronological news. You'd go and see what going on in #Warcraft or such and maybe have a conversation with randos. Now? Political cesspool, regurgitated spam, and with Twitter not even showing you everything you follow, what's the point?
I totally understand why the landscape changed, people learned to more effectively monetize the platform, but damn I miss the old days.
The page load delays are still happening after the update :(
At least pages loads :P
There are some slow load times in places right now and they're being investigated. The site actually being online though is more important than load times.
There has been a partial rollback due to some data integrity issues. If anyone lost any comments or decks, I apologize. To say our migration could have gone smoother is quite the understatement!
For Hearthstone folks, our content should be going live soon for the new expansion. I'll be starting work shortly on making Death Knights and such work with the site as well. We've got a long list of things to get out so thank you for your patience.
This is an announcement to let everyone know that Out of Cards will be down on Halloween night at 11 PM Eastern. Spooky!
We're doing a major migration to new hardware to help improve site performance and make way for a large site update. This will also give us more room to grow going forward as our previous solution has been at its limits for a while now.
Estimated downtime is less than an hour, but no matter how many tests you do, real-world may take longer.
During our downtime, all services operated on Out of Cards will not be available.
Yo for real though, Halloween Cosmetics get me every damn time in every game.
I do like that they're giving big discounts for cosmetics if you just play the game, which is a great way to keep the queues quick. I do worry that some people aren't going to fully understand it though and end up getting screwed over due to the RNG nature of it and them being very casual. Will need to wait and see their in-game messaging on it though - which hasn't been a strength of Hearthstone ever.
If you think for one second that I'm bitter about not being in their pocket, you are an idiot. Do you know how easy it is to be in Blizzard's pockets? Because anybody can do it, you just have to be willing to play by their rules. I've never played by their rules.
The stakes were never very high though. Hearthstone was young, they needed the big people in the community more than those people needed them so as long as you weren't hosting your own cosby suite that the world knew about, they didn't care and would work with you.
I have a record of calling them out on their bullshit, I have a record of datamining their games, and I have a record of ignoring their requests because I value independence. The new guard on the Hearthstone team doesn't like that and they really don't like when they make mistakes (like uploading their data to a public cdn) and then people talk about them publicly.
The Hearthstone team has every streamer in their corner, deciding what they can and cannot say. Notice how quiet people are during leaks and datamining? Yeah, it's not allowed to be talked about because people know if they do they risk ruining their relationship with the company and then they won't get invited to events. I'm not going to hold stuff back from being published, that's how you make money.
Out of Cards has always been for-profit and independant. No one dictates what we post and it isn't possible to run large websites anymore without a business model in mind. Companies can ask us if we'd like to post about a certain topic, and they do, but they don't dictate if the message goes out or what the message looks like. That's shitty content. Blizzard's Gear Store team regularly talks to me about the new products they have. Sometimes we post about them, but it's rare. In that scenario it has to be products I think would fit well with the audience and I'll tell you, Overwatch merch does not fit with the audience here.
They're more tight-lipped in a lot of the data in the client these days. Sometimes we see stuff that could be interesting, like the DK Location image, and I think I screwed up by not posting about that particular asset this time around because ultimately is gave us DK and it would have been a killer headline. I ended up not though because I didn't think about it very much.
I wrongly assumed they were just catching their assets up as a precaution. I would not have ever predicted a class at the end of the year, though it does make sense with Wrath of the Lich King back on and alive and the end of the Hearthstone year always being weaker for them than the start. It'll be very interesting to see the numbers and what the start of next year looks like.
Datamining though. Definitely my favourite type of content to talk about!
I'm very well aware of what their intention was - to do something silly. They clearly had a second-thought about it though because the tweets referenced in the article have since been deleted.
I'm not at all embarrassed and never will be. I'll continue to hold Blizzard to a higher standard. Their staff complained on Twitter about news outlets dropping bombs on them when the company was up to no good during the start of a card reveal season, well, in my eyes, they're now the people that are putting up junk in their reveal season.
And because I said it in another reply here but want to really hammer it home:
Misinformation is when you post something that isn't factual but your intent was not to deceive people. Disinformation is when there is deliberate deception involved. I don't believe Blizzard created disinformation here which is why it solidly falls into the misinformation category. Intent it what matters here. They made a mistake and they got called out on it.
Misinformation and Disinformation.
Misinformation is when you post something that isn't factual but your intent was not to deceive people. Disinformation is when there is deliberate deception involved. I don't believe Blizzard created disinformation here which is why it solidly falls into the misinformation category.
While Hearthstone may just be a video game, that doesn't mean the community shouldn't be held to a higher standard. I've been saying for years that gaming should remain fun and that isn't something I'll ever disagree with, but that also doesn't mean we can't have serious conversations when people mess up.
And honestly? Blizzard messes up a lot. A lot of that I don't even talk about publicly because it's beating a dead horse at this point and overall we don't need that kind of negativity so consistently. Some folks call me a Blizzard shill, others call me a Blizzard hater, I just call it like I see it because we have witnessed one of the greatest gaming companies become a tenth of what it used to be. I really hope that Microsoft's acquisition of their IP and talent ends up being a positive for their titles because they certainly need all the help they can get.
We should hold them to a higher standard.
We let people tell others they're crybabies. That's why comments here are still posted.
I've been off their list since Alkali took over - the promotion company that was sending stuff out already had my information for the remainder of the sets they figured their gear out for.
Hearthstone is anti-datamining now and their repeated asks for me to take content down, which was denied, resulted in them saying no more free stuff. Which isn't that big of a deal, I don't have room for it all anyway. They believe stuff on a public CDN is private.
Oops. I forgot to carry these over to the live site. The following Archetypes were added:
I'm also moving this to the Feedback forum.
Oh boo hoo.
People should grow a pair and call it like they see it more often. Go get your pre-order in - Bobby Kotick needs another yacht.
Additions & Changes
General
Hearthstone
Bug Fixes
General
Hearthstone
Site deploy going out to fix the rss feed.
In the future, please make a new thread =D
Watching Twitter fall apart since Musk took over is hilarious. 44 Billion for a site that'll be worth a tenth of that in 5 years. It's Yahoo and Tumblr all over again.
The only reason I call it misinformation is because we are in a card reveal season. They really should consider their card reveal season sacred and with Blizzard having poor communication, it is my belief they deserve to be scolded for it. The only way they learn is if people are willing to talk about it.
There were so many different ways they could have gone about promoting the fact that card reveals were starting today. They could have showcased a piece of art and asked people what their favourite cards revealed so far are. Or, if they really wanted to dive back into Knights of the Frozen Throne's adventure, they could have easily done a "Card reveals are starting today, and we'd love to see Death Knights pull x from the past. What cards are you hoping DK gets?" which would have let them be silly (100 Armor, lol) but also encouraging people to talk about the new set and what they want to see.
Today was a poorly executed April Fools joke.
I generally believe that people should do their own research before doing anything. But, I know that I'm definitely not in the majority when it comes to this line of thinking. Because of this, I do think companies should keep their communications factual as much as possible.
That's the fun thing about everything in life though.
George Carlin put it best.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
Everyone has a different frame of reference. Folks that are most hardcore about Hearthstone don't really see the game in any other light. "Oh but people will know x y z", except they don't. This is something I've had trouble communicating to our writers about over the years because it isn't something people remember about. Creating content has to be done in an accessible manner. Sometimes it is worth pointing out "obvious" things because although we may think they are obvious, they really aren't Learning how to think like other players is super important.
I honestly don't believe Blizzard puts a lot of thought into their social campaigns. I also believe they are very bad at promoting their stuff and this certainly didn't help their case.
Deficiency? No, everything here is working as intended. We don't have a collectible version of Frostmourne in the database yet so it isn't going to show up via BBCode. BBCode prefers the collectible version and then it'll default to whatever is highest cost, followed by the oldest id in the database.
You have to understand that there are very different audiences in games.
First, you have your ultra hardcore players that are dialed in to the point where they don't miss a thing, they know everything there is to know about the game, and they are ultimately super passionate even when they stop playing.
Then you have your casual player who goes "oh I love game" and they login to play for a few days when new content comes out and then maybe randomly a few more times before another set, and that's that.
Misinformation like this doesn't harm the first kind of player, but it harms the second.
Imagine a scenario where a second player sees that tweet, thinks Death Knight is super overpowered. There is a chance they buy products based on what they see. A product that Blizzard ultimately will refuse to refund because card packs aren't eligible for refunds (though they have done this in rare circumstances for unopened packs). I'd also be willing to bet some people might not even bother with coming back to the game if they see another hero class getting OP stuff, but this probably wouldn't be that many people.
So you're 100% right, this is a non-issue for 10%, maybe 15% of the playerbase. The overwhelming majority of players in any game though aren't hardcore about it and misinformation is bad.
Misinformation is always bad.
No, I'm quite serious about it.
Blizzard taints their card reveal seasons with asinine bullshit and it makes no sense. We're already getting cards with the wrong stats, old cards mixed in with new (they addressed this saying well some people might not have seen the other cards), and the countdowns all being wrong because Blizzard doesn't understand how timezones work.
There are so many other ways they can hype stuff up. Putting out old cards masquerading as new ones isn't it.
280 now, but yeah, Twitter is shit.
Twitter was great when there were people talking about random topics and chronological news. You'd go and see what going on in #Warcraft or such and maybe have a conversation with randos. Now? Political cesspool, regurgitated spam, and with Twitter not even showing you everything you follow, what's the point?
I totally understand why the landscape changed, people learned to more effectively monetize the platform, but damn I miss the old days.
At least pages loads :P
There are some slow load times in places right now and they're being investigated. The site actually being online though is more important than load times.
Hello all,
There has been a partial rollback due to some data integrity issues. If anyone lost any comments or decks, I apologize. To say our migration could have gone smoother is quite the understatement!
For Hearthstone folks, our content should be going live soon for the new expansion. I'll be starting work shortly on making Death Knights and such work with the site as well. We've got a long list of things to get out so thank you for your patience.
This is an announcement to let everyone know that Out of Cards will be down on Halloween night at 11 PM Eastern. Spooky!
We're doing a major migration to new hardware to help improve site performance and make way for a large site update. This will also give us more room to grow going forward as our previous solution has been at its limits for a while now.
Estimated downtime is less than an hour, but no matter how many tests you do, real-world may take longer.
During our downtime, all services operated on Out of Cards will not be available.
Yo for real though, Halloween Cosmetics get me every damn time in every game.
I do like that they're giving big discounts for cosmetics if you just play the game, which is a great way to keep the queues quick. I do worry that some people aren't going to fully understand it though and end up getting screwed over due to the RNG nature of it and them being very casual. Will need to wait and see their in-game messaging on it though - which hasn't been a strength of Hearthstone ever.