I pushed out an update and I hope this resolved the problem with cards not loading. I was able to find a couple of conditions where data wouldn't load correctly. Please let me know if you, or anyone else reading this, has a problem going forward.
So, I'm currently unable to build decks, like, at all. The cards just won't load. Is there anything I can do about this? I assumed it was something on my end, but I've never had it happen before.
Could you be more specific about your device and browser you are using? Essentials for any bug report!
Been a while since we've posted a set of update notes, though we haven't done anything super crazy for a while so it hasn't really been needed. I figured there may be some questions also I'm looking for targeted feedback so this thread will hopefully help with that.
Additions & Changes
General
New Out of Cards Logo!
Removed some advertisement slots.
I needed to test some new slots recently to see performance and have ultimately decided to remove our left side rail. The site felt a little too "boxed in" with it and overall, it wasn't a major change in revenue.
Mobile users will no longer see the static header advertisement.
The homepage no longer displays an advertisement at the top of the sidebar. (This has effectively been replaced by the right siderail.
There is a chance that the top sidebar ad gets removed across the site, I'll be paying attention to performance metrics over the coming weeks to make an informed decision.
Video ads are now served by a new provider.
If you notice anything funky compared to before, please let us know.
The homepage no longer displays deck lists.
This is one of the first steps we're taking to clean up the homepage.
I know this is going to be controversial, but the homepage is not the primary way our community members are clicking into decks.
The game portal pages are more relevant for deck lists.
Not all our users care about all the games we have coverage for and because of this, decks takes up a lot of scrolling space on the homepage.
Our homepage should be more of a portal into our different titles that are covered, and this will become more apparent in future site updates.
Portal links have been removed site-wide.
This may sound counter-productive to our overall goal with sending people towards portals, which they are already going, but the next site update will be bringing back a portal switcher. It will instead be found in a new menu at the very top of the site, and not be a part of our navigation.
Hearthstone
Deckbuilder Changes
How we load and organize card data in the deckbuilder has changed.
Please report any issues you find with the deckbuilder so they can be investigated.
Everything should be much quicker and subsequent uses of the deckbuilder are much faster.
Collection Manager Changes
How we load and organize card data in the collection manager has changed.
Please report any issues you find with the collection manager so they can be investigated.
Bug Fixes
General
RSS feeds have been fixed for all games.
Hearthstone
All collectible cards now properly appear in the deckbuilder.
There was an issue during the Throne of the Tides mini-set update that prevented us from showing certain cards.
Our redeveloped internals make this a non-issue going forward.
Known Issues
General
If you have ads disabled on the site due to having a Premium membership, the top of the site looks a little out of place with its wider header.
A solution will be implemented, however, if you are using ad-block you will be stuck with the wide header. Surprise, we don't support blocking our ads, which feed our content creators =)
Hearthstone
Deckbuilder shows all Duels heroes, powers, and treasures regardless of class.
This will be "fixed" in a larger deckbuilder update.
Our intention is to allow Duels players to correctly create decks that are not tied to a single class.
We've still got some UI work to do before this will be finalized, but this is temporary measure to let it work.
We still need to flag Duels Heroes so we know which powers and treasures they work with, which is why we just dump them all out at you instead of filtering.
Some Duels content is not appearing in the deckbuilder.
We're a little behind on flagged data. This won't require a new site update to fix, we just need to go through and get our data up to date.
Dean has previously stated that if they go to 4 expansions, the mini-sets are gone.
I think 4 sets per year could work pretty well since they can do a lot more variety with the extra set. Mini-sets are currently just building on the set that it comes out with, so let's throw in another whole new theme of fun instead. I think it would give the game more staying power.
Though, with that said, they need to figure out the legendary situation.
~25 legendary cards in each set, we'd be getting 100 legendary cards in a year, whereas now its ~87 with the 25 from a main set and then 4 from the mini-set. The big problem Hearthstone has with their design now is that each class always gets 2 legendary cards, and you have to also have some legendary cards that are neutral. The problem only gets worse once the next class shows up within the next couple of years.
I'm not saying people need full collections to enjoy the game, but it is very unfortunate that players would be even more limited in what they could obtain - assuming nothing changes.
I like to think that Blizzard has been doing a decent job over the past couple of years and shifting a large amount of their monetization over to cosmetics, so it might make sense to look again at the base pack system. Maybe Legendary cards become a bit easier to obtain (pity timer to 30?), maybe their dust cost gets reduced a chunk, or maybe we just go back to having 1 legendary for each class in each expansion. Hell, fewer class legendaries might break the game less too.
Now what might take the sting from this issue would be to not rate them card for card anymore, but instead ordering them from first place to last (or maybe just picking the top 3). That's what most people seem to do anyway: pick your favorite and downvote all the rest to oblivion. KANSAS' idea of having "card battles" where you always see two cards and pick your favorite would be another iteration of the same concept. Do you think this would be possible from a programming point of view?
So, I'll respond with the typical "anything is possible" line because I love to use that internally as well, even though I know the staff must groan at me quite a bit when I do so.
Personally, I like the idea of doing a "pick your top 3 cards and rank them". It would be not as high effort as ranking all the cards, and it would force people to actually have a top 3 instead of the possibility of the downvote frenzy. Card battles sound like fun too, but I think there might be too much RNG factor there and without enough people going through it, we might end up with less than optimal results.
Either of these would be fairly easy to implement though on the backend. Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!
Regarding prices, maybe we can talk Flux into dishing out a bronze Premium membership for a year for the person who accumulates the most wins during one season.
I don't have a problem with us offering something like this, it would be a pretty sweet reward for the top competitor of the season. I've wanted to do another kind of reward (physical) as well, for each individual competition, though never got the time to fully flesh that one out. No spoilers in case we do end up doing it.
When it comes to encourage participation, most of the above aims at just that. Picking up what Wailor said, I'd encourage Shadows to reach out to the winner of each competition and let them share their thoughts about their card in a weekly article like in the spotlight articles Demon does but smaller. This could be seen as some further encouragement and a reminder at the same time. Should be completely voluntarily of course.
We 100% could be doing more in our news feed for promoting the competitions and winners. We certainly push out enough content on Out of Cards that anything Fan Creations wouldn't become a huge wall of FC-only content on the homepage. We had that issue on the last site we were on due to the stupid rules we had to follow for posting content and all I could remember were the consistent complaints about "so much fan stuff omg". People still clicked on it though, to complain, so the metrics were still good lol. Granted, we'd probably still get the occasional complaint here, and honestly, I don't really care. Skipping content you don't like is easy enough and if all you want to do is complain, maybe we should do more FC content on the homepage to get them to leave, making the community more positive overall.
Realistically, HearthStation was more of a beta test than anything and while I have addressed it in the past, I do consider the official birthday of Out of Cards to be when Out of Cards first came online.
I'd love for us to have a larger focus on MTG. The reality is though we just don't have anyone that is able to cover it from a news perspective. I'd love to change that of course because there's a lot of content that happens with that game from just the news side of things, nevermind the wide variety of decks thanks to so many different formats.
Our forums are going to receive an increased focus though across the board in the future. We just need to improve sending people to a place to have discussions and the forums are a great place for that.
We still don't know for certain if it is just going to be a footnote in the patch notes. I half expect to see a dedicated article focused on mercenaries. They're probably going to hype up said article with a social push too.
Blizzard definitely sucks at comms, there is no doubt about that. I just don't see a reason to complain about something that hasn't happened yet.
Thanks! I'm still recovering from covid (been out all week really) and left quickly after the stream ended to get some more rest in. (I've found that I can now get some stuff done in shorter bursts instead of just being completely devoid of energy). I should have proofread better!
I really enjoy this card. With the 5 energy it'll cost, we won't get to play it until late-game, but that isn't a problem when we consider that we're going to be playing this either to simply block late-game options for our opponent, or turn the tides in a location that we didn't invest much into early on. I could see Hobgoblin being a key part of winning games.
We missed posting about this - source is the announcement video!
Everything should be starting in 34 minutes!
I pushed out an update and I hope this resolved the problem with cards not loading. I was able to find a couple of conditions where data wouldn't load correctly. Please let me know if you, or anyone else reading this, has a problem going forward.
Could you be more specific about your device and browser you are using? Essentials for any bug report!
Been a while since we've posted a set of update notes, though we haven't done anything super crazy for a while so it hasn't really been needed. I figured there may be some questions also I'm looking for targeted feedback so this thread will hopefully help with that.
Additions & Changes
General
Hearthstone
Bug Fixes
General
Hearthstone
Known Issues
General
Hearthstone
Dean has previously stated that if they go to 4 expansions, the mini-sets are gone.
Dean has previously stated that if they go to 4 expansions, the mini-sets are gone.
I think 4 sets per year could work pretty well since they can do a lot more variety with the extra set. Mini-sets are currently just building on the set that it comes out with, so let's throw in another whole new theme of fun instead. I think it would give the game more staying power.
Though, with that said, they need to figure out the legendary situation.
~25 legendary cards in each set, we'd be getting 100 legendary cards in a year, whereas now its ~87 with the 25 from a main set and then 4 from the mini-set. The big problem Hearthstone has with their design now is that each class always gets 2 legendary cards, and you have to also have some legendary cards that are neutral. The problem only gets worse once the next class shows up within the next couple of years.
I'm not saying people need full collections to enjoy the game, but it is very unfortunate that players would be even more limited in what they could obtain - assuming nothing changes.
I like to think that Blizzard has been doing a decent job over the past couple of years and shifting a large amount of their monetization over to cosmetics, so it might make sense to look again at the base pack system. Maybe Legendary cards become a bit easier to obtain (pity timer to 30?), maybe their dust cost gets reduced a chunk, or maybe we just go back to having 1 legendary for each class in each expansion. Hell, fewer class legendaries might break the game less too.
Laurie? What is he doing in this Hearthstone patch?
I'm certain we're going to see midsummer stuff with the patch because of this. It could be them just being "fun" though too.
I must have missed that communication regarding Old on Sunday and New on Wednesday - do you have a source for that?
So, I'll respond with the typical "anything is possible" line because I love to use that internally as well, even though I know the staff must groan at me quite a bit when I do so.
Personally, I like the idea of doing a "pick your top 3 cards and rank them". It would be not as high effort as ranking all the cards, and it would force people to actually have a top 3 instead of the possibility of the downvote frenzy. Card battles sound like fun too, but I think there might be too much RNG factor there and without enough people going through it, we might end up with less than optimal results.
Either of these would be fairly easy to implement though on the backend. Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!
I don't have a problem with us offering something like this, it would be a pretty sweet reward for the top competitor of the season. I've wanted to do another kind of reward (physical) as well, for each individual competition, though never got the time to fully flesh that one out. No spoilers in case we do end up doing it.
We 100% could be doing more in our news feed for promoting the competitions and winners. We certainly push out enough content on Out of Cards that anything Fan Creations wouldn't become a huge wall of FC-only content on the homepage. We had that issue on the last site we were on due to the stupid rules we had to follow for posting content and all I could remember were the consistent complaints about "so much fan stuff omg". People still clicked on it though, to complain, so the metrics were still good lol. Granted, we'd probably still get the occasional complaint here, and honestly, I don't really care. Skipping content you don't like is easy enough and if all you want to do is complain, maybe we should do more FC content on the homepage to get them to leave, making the community more positive overall.
Realistically, HearthStation was more of a beta test than anything and while I have addressed it in the past, I do consider the official birthday of Out of Cards to be when Out of Cards first came online.
Hopefully things only get better as time goes on :D
I'd love for us to have a larger focus on MTG. The reality is though we just don't have anyone that is able to cover it from a news perspective. I'd love to change that of course because there's a lot of content that happens with that game from just the news side of things, nevermind the wide variety of decks thanks to so many different formats.
Our forums are going to receive an increased focus though across the board in the future. We just need to improve sending people to a place to have discussions and the forums are a great place for that.
No plans to change the favicon =)
We still don't know for certain if it is just going to be a footnote in the patch notes. I half expect to see a dedicated article focused on mercenaries. They're probably going to hype up said article with a social push too.
Blizzard definitely sucks at comms, there is no doubt about that. I just don't see a reason to complain about something that hasn't happened yet.
They've got patch notes coming on May 31.
My email is quite public already so not a problem =)
For OOC specific stuff though, [email protected] or even [email protected] is preferred.
Thanks! I'm still recovering from covid (been out all week really) and left quickly after the stream ended to get some more rest in. (I've found that I can now get some stuff done in shorter bursts instead of just being completely devoid of energy). I should have proofread better!
I really enjoy this card. With the 5 energy it'll cost, we won't get to play it until late-game, but that isn't a problem when we consider that we're going to be playing this either to simply block late-game options for our opponent, or turn the tides in a location that we didn't invest much into early on. I could see Hobgoblin being a key part of winning games.