Snowballs should have been available a long time ago. Shit. I fixed the issue, our new shop needed something else selected vs how it was done last year. Sorry about that!
Thanks to Demon for organizing our treasure hunt and for the others who helped put clues together (I'm afraid I might forget to list someone so I won't list them all).
Going to add some new stuff to the shop to spend snowflakes on - sorry if some of it is a bit more Christmassy-themed.
FWIW mini-sets are always worth buying. The value for the legendaries alone is insane. Now, from a gameplay perspective, we won't definitively know for at least a week or two if the cards end up being meta staples. If a couple of rares do, then crafting them manually or opening some packs will be the way forward.
We'll likely investigate this late next week to look at value.
I'm aware but do appreciate other folks wanting to see stuff up to date : )
We've got a problem with our card back rendering right now that is being worked on. Those 7 are all queued to get uploaded once the renderer issue is resolved.
Update: Updated with renderer fixes. Also been wanting to adjust our sorting of the gallery for a while now so I'm mostly happy with our new categories. I do want to split the rewards track stuff up though. Also, I'd like to eventually have the gold prices for each card back as well so that we could show people which ones they can buy in-game. Lot of cool stuff we could do, so little time.
I don't believe Maiev and Illidan have a canonical love connection, just fan theories. If there is evidence in one of the books though, there's a chance I haven't read that one!
The mini-sets always have fast reveal periods and then launches.
Now, sure, it isn't life or death, but you know what it is? Inconsiderate. The Hearthstone Community Team is going about this all wrong. Dean wants to see them win a best community award and I'll tell you right now, this isn't it. As someone who has been in community management and development since I was in high school, and knowing there are people much older than I on that team with more experience in years on that professional game studio level, I am constantly impressed by their inability to push forward a coherent release of content.
This isn't how you community manage. They clearly all sit around the table and act like an echo chamber with no one being willing to say "hey, maybe that's not a great idea" or "have we considered this reaction". You will always get a negative reaction, it's the internet, but super basic stuff like calling a teaser a "card reveal" shows the community team's lack of knowledge.
It's pretty fucked up when you think about how much of Hearthstone's negative attention over the years could have been avoided by better community management. The game growth they could have seen from it too... maybe they wouldn't have crashed so hard the year after Old Gods if they just knew how to engage with people. There have been good people on the team and I'm certain people on the team now have certain skillsets, but they're missing out on basics. I worry they're going to continue down the route of "okay our community is the streamer population so let's ignore what's happening everywhere else". I don't need them to pay attention to Out of Cards, but they should put more effort into their own channels. We've seen some more blue posting on their forums, communicating about issues and when hotfixes go live which is awesome, and we've also seen some activity on their social accounts which is good, but that activity just feels so misguided at times.
I wish I had the team to just go through the entire history of Hearthstone and create a massive list of constructive feedback about how they've done things. Not only could that be an interesting article to write but it would be something that could be used to showcase what we could even avoid.
AAA game companies shouldn't be given a pass at this point for bad communication.
That's why the portal system is in place - HuntardHuntard has the links you'll want to use. You'll only ever see that game's content on those pages.
I know that some folks might want to see 2 or 3 games but filter out another. Nothing is on the roadmap yet for a feature for a custom homepage feed. There's a lot that would go into that but it's definitely not out of scope. If such a thing does happen, there's a chance it becomes a premium feature, at least to start, to gauge what kind of performance impact it'll have on the site with way more users.
I'd really love it if Blizzard, just once for a reveal season, could get their communications in order and put something out that wasn't dog shit. It's bad enough they don't understand how to encrypt their CDN builds so we can leak contents ahead of release, but this was so easy to not fuck up since it just required a couple of humans to know comms.
"Let's put out the card reveal schedule but some time slots aren't actually card reveals".
They said no new class though, so maybe this is them getting Pandaria out of their system a bit, introducing these characters into the game so the non-WoW players get familiar with them, and lining up the new class for next year with established lore and maybe even mechanics.
I think major changes require a much longer timespan to implement. A lot of this content was likely already done or close to it when Mercenaries launched - they actually came up with a content plan for a change.
I fully expect to see a lot of the art available in the shop for regular portraits though in the future. Double dipping on art assets is awesome ROI and I know there's a few art pieces I wouldn't mind as a playable hero.
I think the holiday break may have changed the patch cadence this time around. FWIW we'll always have patch notes available as soon as we're allowed to go live with them. There has been a couple of times where we've been a tiny bit late to posting about them. That's always my fault and has been due to there being an overwhelming number of other things going on at the same time - aka my whole life apparently.
There has been many Pandaria references recently, enough that I'd love to find some time to right an article about it all because it is absolutely fascinating. The upcoming Battlegrounds board, Jade Gardens, that was shared in a survey is an even bigger "we going to Pandaria" that I had initially thought before this past patch.
The only thing that I can see maybe not being us going to Pandaria is us looking too deeply into the Lunar New Year goodies. Pandaria shares so many themes with East Asian culture (I think there's a better word to describe the region, I can't think of it at the moment) so it only makes sense to use that part of Warcraft as a focus. All the new hero skins though from the last patch are super Panda themed, bringing in the August Celestials.
I'm super excited to see where it goes. If not this year, almost certainly next. As Dean even said in his Q&As, Pandaria is a "when" not "if". The only reason why I don't think it'll be this year is because they've been talking about how it's not time for a new class (source), and I can't see them doing a Pandaria-central expansion without debuting Monk. We could of course do something smaller in Pandaria; perhaps we could go chill with the Klaxxi for a bit or go jump into the Throne of Thunder (good chance to bring back the Lei Shen hero skin too).
That Q&A I sourced above about new new classes mentions for at least 2 years. Well, the Q&A was a year ago so if we get through this year, that gives us next year as the earliest available time slot.
Oh. My. God.
Snowballs should have been available a long time ago. Shit. I fixed the issue, our new shop needed something else selected vs how it was done last year. Sorry about that!
Thanks to Demon for organizing our treasure hunt and for the others who helped put clues together (I'm afraid I might forget to list someone so I won't list them all).
Going to add some new stuff to the shop to spend snowflakes on - sorry if some of it is a bit more Christmassy-themed.
FWIW mini-sets are always worth buying. The value for the legendaries alone is insane. Now, from a gameplay perspective, we won't definitively know for at least a week or two if the cards end up being meta staples. If a couple of rares do, then crafting them manually or opening some packs will be the way forward.
We'll likely investigate this late next week to look at value.
I'm aware but do appreciate other folks wanting to see stuff up to date : )
We've got a problem with our card back rendering right now that is being worked on. Those 7 are all queued to get uploaded once the renderer issue is resolved.
Update: Updated with renderer fixes. Also been wanting to adjust our sorting of the gallery for a while now so I'm mostly happy with our new categories. I do want to split the rewards track stuff up though. Also, I'd like to eventually have the gold prices for each card back as well so that we could show people which ones they can buy in-game. Lot of cool stuff we could do, so little time.
1 PM Eastern as usual is the expectation!
Our reporters found it hard to track you over those many years you were missing ;)
I don't believe Maiev and Illidan have a canonical love connection, just fan theories. If there is evidence in one of the books though, there's a chance I haven't read that one!
Lady Vashj & Kael'thas aren't a thing.
We had a typo in a previous post that got carried forward throughout. I actually just went through and corrected it
Thanks for catching that - fixed!
The mini-sets always have fast reveal periods and then launches.
Now, sure, it isn't life or death, but you know what it is? Inconsiderate. The Hearthstone Community Team is going about this all wrong. Dean wants to see them win a best community award and I'll tell you right now, this isn't it. As someone who has been in community management and development since I was in high school, and knowing there are people much older than I on that team with more experience in years on that professional game studio level, I am constantly impressed by their inability to push forward a coherent release of content.
This isn't how you community manage. They clearly all sit around the table and act like an echo chamber with no one being willing to say "hey, maybe that's not a great idea" or "have we considered this reaction". You will always get a negative reaction, it's the internet, but super basic stuff like calling a teaser a "card reveal" shows the community team's lack of knowledge.
It's pretty fucked up when you think about how much of Hearthstone's negative attention over the years could have been avoided by better community management. The game growth they could have seen from it too... maybe they wouldn't have crashed so hard the year after Old Gods if they just knew how to engage with people. There have been good people on the team and I'm certain people on the team now have certain skillsets, but they're missing out on basics. I worry they're going to continue down the route of "okay our community is the streamer population so let's ignore what's happening everywhere else". I don't need them to pay attention to Out of Cards, but they should put more effort into their own channels. We've seen some more blue posting on their forums, communicating about issues and when hotfixes go live which is awesome, and we've also seen some activity on their social accounts which is good, but that activity just feels so misguided at times.
I wish I had the team to just go through the entire history of Hearthstone and create a massive list of constructive feedback about how they've done things. Not only could that be an interesting article to write but it would be something that could be used to showcase what we could even avoid.
AAA game companies shouldn't be given a pass at this point for bad communication.
That's why the portal system is in place - HuntardHuntard has the links you'll want to use. You'll only ever see that game's content on those pages.
I know that some folks might want to see 2 or 3 games but filter out another. Nothing is on the roadmap yet for a feature for a custom homepage feed. There's a lot that would go into that but it's definitely not out of scope. If such a thing does happen, there's a chance it becomes a premium feature, at least to start, to gauge what kind of performance impact it'll have on the site with way more users.
Don't worry, new community manager is laughing about it. Fantastic comms from the team!
Reveal schedule is a lie.
So the official schedule says we've got an 11 AM PDT reveal, which was a few mins ago. That was met with Swaybae instead introducing reveals.
So "Reveal Schedule" doesn't even mean exactly that apparently. According to Sway, she's going to be teasing cards.
I'd really love it if Blizzard, just once for a reveal season, could get their communications in order and put something out that wasn't dog shit. It's bad enough they don't understand how to encrypt their CDN builds so we can leak contents ahead of release, but this was so easy to not fuck up since it just required a couple of humans to know comms.
"Let's put out the card reveal schedule but some time slots aren't actually card reveals".
Yeah, this is getting a bit ridiculous.
They said no new class though, so maybe this is them getting Pandaria out of their system a bit, introducing these characters into the game so the non-WoW players get familiar with them, and lining up the new class for next year with established lore and maybe even mechanics.
I think major changes require a much longer timespan to implement. A lot of this content was likely already done or close to it when Mercenaries launched - they actually came up with a content plan for a change.
I fully expect to see a lot of the art available in the shop for regular portraits though in the future. Double dipping on art assets is awesome ROI and I know there's a few art pieces I wouldn't mind as a playable hero.
I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here, perhaps trying to summon changes, but there were no constructed balance changes this week.
Big regrets! I've fixed it with the correct deck. Thank you!
I think the holiday break may have changed the patch cadence this time around. FWIW we'll always have patch notes available as soon as we're allowed to go live with them. There has been a couple of times where we've been a tiny bit late to posting about them. That's always my fault and has been due to there being an overwhelming number of other things going on at the same time - aka my whole life apparently.
This is also a good opportunity for me to post Riot's live balance philosophy, since some players curious about patches may have missed that. It was a really good post they did in the 21.8 patch notes late last year and it's interesting to see how they approach patches just from a balance point of view this year.
https://outof.cards/legends-of-runeterra/3729-runeterra-patch-2180-live-balance-philosophy-detailed-card-balance-adjustments-more
There has been many Pandaria references recently, enough that I'd love to find some time to right an article about it all because it is absolutely fascinating. The upcoming Battlegrounds board, Jade Gardens, that was shared in a survey is an even bigger "we going to Pandaria" that I had initially thought before this past patch.
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/4120-hearthstone-battlegrounds-might-be-getting-a-new-jade-themed-board-jade-gardens
The only thing that I can see maybe not being us going to Pandaria is us looking too deeply into the Lunar New Year goodies. Pandaria shares so many themes with East Asian culture (I think there's a better word to describe the region, I can't think of it at the moment) so it only makes sense to use that part of Warcraft as a focus. All the new hero skins though from the last patch are super Panda themed, bringing in the August Celestials.
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/4147-new-hero-skins-coming-to-hearthstone-to-celebrate-the-lunar-new-year-include-xuen-mogushan-guldan
I'm super excited to see where it goes. If not this year, almost certainly next. As Dean even said in his Q&As, Pandaria is a "when" not "if". The only reason why I don't think it'll be this year is because they've been talking about how it's not time for a new class (source), and I can't see them doing a Pandaria-central expansion without debuting Monk. We could of course do something smaller in Pandaria; perhaps we could go chill with the Klaxxi for a bit or go jump into the Throne of Thunder (good chance to bring back the Lei Shen hero skin too).
That Q&A I sourced above about new new classes mentions for at least 2 years. Well, the Q&A was a year ago so if we get through this year, that gives us next year as the earliest available time slot.
I believe the next patch will be the new expansion that drops in February. Afterward, we'll be getting a 2022 roadmap too which is exciting!