I'm going to assume whatever dumps on Nov 24 will be the "pack filler" and the cool cards we'd normally see during a stream, like a few remaining legendaries and epics, will end up in creator hands.
The only question I still have is when do the reveals start. Not likely to be the weekend because Blizzard has mostly stopped doing weekend reveals (bless) and Thursday+Friday is probably out of the equation due to American Thanksgiving at the Hearthstone team being on vacation for the week. So, early Monday is possible.
I would never have guessed the site would be online. It was slow, but it managed to stay afloat which was impressive to see. In the years of doing card reveals and them getting so many of them, I've never been able to post one of their reveals within 5 minutes.
FWIW I think this is going to be called Horrid Abomination. Basing that on some World of Warcraft data and figured I'd comment here just in case it ends up being right.
People on our current staff don't understand how to fully do a card reveal and they are already familiar with several of the systems we have on the site, so it wouldn't be something very accessible. As cool as it would be to have the community take care of it, and it is something I've thought about for other titles (allowing some form of community involvement in reveal seasons) but ultimately, its just too complicated and the either there is too much freedom available which ends up being a liability issue or there's no freedom and its impossible to react to differences in reveal periods.
It sucks for everyone, not just the people running community sites.
This is a complete departure from the norm for reveals with no communication about what is going on - though the bad communication part isn't exactly new for the Hearthstone team.
Card reveal season exists for one sole reason: it sells the game. No one is going to buy Hearthstone packs if they have no idea what is going to be inside of them. One can count that as publicity or good will for sure, but there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't make it known where these reveals are going to take place.
As of right now, we know where the next two reveals are coming from - Lt. Eddy and PCGamer. Maybe we'll get lucky and a couple of more will be added afterward, but if my suspicions are correct, we'll go into the night without knowing where anything is coming from.
All they need to do is fill out the URLs of where we can find reveals and there would be zero problems. If they don't want to tell us, then drop the countdowns since they are absolutely pointless. Last night when we had the Chinese reveal at 3 AM, it wasn't like the countdown meant the card magically appeared in the gallery afterward - that was many hours later. It's sad.
I appreciate you (and everyone who liked your comment) for the kind words. I know, and plenty of folks on the team took over some duties earlier over the past few days. We don't have people for around the clock coverage with stuff though and not all of our card reveal tooling is very accessible to the team so I sort of have to be here (plus there are bills that need to be paid).
I am proud that we've got a great enough team that I can bow out if needed as proven earlier this week and past weekend. I'm hoping to take a week off come December, as I'd like everyone else on staff to as well, right around the holidays, where anything we do publish on the site will all be pre-scheduled - just a bit of a shame since December is the best month for ad revenue lol.
Since starting the site, I haven't had any time off even though I've had a few attempts to make it happen. At the end of the day though, we're behind in the grand scheme of things and any time taken off just delays stuff even more and its a bummer. I know how important it is to take time for yourself and I certainly don't practice what I preach, but it really does just come down to there is no good time. If I get deep into something that isn't immediately content related, which happens more than I'd like but that's also just the reality of wearing many hats, usually our front page takes a hit for the day.
I'm tired of Activison Blizzard being run by a bunch of asshat clowns. I'm tired of bad communication. I'm tired because its card reveal season. I'm tired because there's some shit going on in my life right now and I really wish it wasn't a card reveal season right now.
Fixed the link so it didn't have the space at the end!
Also, fun fact: There was a reddit mod who won't be named that cried about us never linking our sources and we were a bunch of scumbags because of that. They were clearly too stupid to click on the author of the blue post block - and you just proved that the links are readily available.
Your frustration makes sense. This is also the first inn-vitational where we have a smaller overall team and up until a couple weeks ago I was the only publishing person. Thankfully we have a new social manager that was able to promote this at all. It’s not ideal to us either.
I understand they're short staffed, but I just find it so hard to believe there wasn't anyone who was able to put something small together to just tell people it was happening via an official blog. Blizzard has such an unbelievable amount of red tape they can't get anything done. Which is very funny considering the thread that Dean wrote late tonight which has as a part of it:
The group ultimately responsible for making a decision on a given feature should be small. Really small. Like 1 person, maybe 2. Not a voting system, not a design leadership group, not even a a director group. One or two people who are actively working on the thing.
Now, of course, they are completely different teams at the company, but its just such an entertaining yet bewildering contrast. I'm so glad I'm not in that kind of position and I hope that anyone else on staff here never has to go through a million processes to get something live.
There's a ton of extra stuff to spend stuff on this year. It wasn't really our intention to let you get everything, it's stuff to work towards in the future and I expect our Winter event this year will be much the same. I believe giving people more options is nice because they can pick their own priorities of what is the coolest to them and that means we might end up seeing quite a bit of variety across the site for the next year.
Everyone who participated every day should have been able to earn over 1000 candy, which is enough for all 3 borders and a couple of extra things. The Little Devil Teemo stuff sitting at 666 candy was there as an "ultra-rare" fun thing to do and I would not have expected many people to go for it.
So here's the Candy breakdown (Oozefest lasts 28 days):
560 Candy from Trick or Treating
Everyone was able to visit 20 houses per day. (28x20)
400 from Scavenger Hunt
40 clues in total x 10 Candy each. (Last year we did 1 Candy per)
~80 from Random Events
This one would definitely vary for folks but the very active people should have received around 80 Candy in total by the end of the event from just random events.
140 from Daily Tasks
5 Daily Tasks x 28 days.
On Halloween, October 31, we ran a "Big Bar" event where all Candy gains were doubled on the site so it was like having a 29th day and I didn't include it in the calculations above. Also, folks who participated in our Card Design Competition received some Candy too.
So that's 1180 with full completion every day.
On Wordsearches
Word searches rewarded gold instead of candy so there was some potential candy there but we didn't do it. The reason being is these word searches are available year-round but our candy purchases in the shop will not be so we can't really give out candy for them. And I think it would be unfair to change the currency rewarded after the events ends.
Last year's Candy earning breakdown was:
20 per day for passively browsing the site.
64 clues that could be solved for 1 Candy each.
2 daily tasks.
The event ran from October 25 until November 3 which was 9 days of gains.
That was 180 Candy for browsing, 64 Candy for clues, and 18 Candy for daily tasks for a total of 262 Candy. (Borders were 75 Candy each or ~1/3 of your candy earned. Was about ~1/4 this time).
Things We Could Have Done Better
One of our biggest failures IMO was being more transparent about your progression. I would have loved to do a little "story line" showing the houses you visited throughout the day and how much more "energy" you had to visit more. I wanted to push something out for this during the event but stuff just gets too busy to reliably get stuff done. Maybe if Hearthstone hadn't of dropped that huge patch.
I think we should have allowed for passive gains as well as the active gains through Trick or Treating. I think it was a very cool flavor thing to do and the possibility of increased community interaction was neat, but some folks who are more passive users on the site lost out since our random events although flavorful, didn't exactly bring in enough Candy. Balancing the two together would be a good idea for next year.
Also, things should have started in October and stayed in October. Wasn't much we could do about that one, but I laugh a bit each time we push out a spooky-themed word search and its clearly November.
Things I'd Love to Know
Did the event feel too grindy relative to previous events?
There was certainly more interaction required on everyone's behalf rather than the passive gains of last year.
Was there any aspect you felt could have been communicated better?
Was the event too long?
What sucked? What rocked?
We'll do another post-event survey to collect feedback so I'm not too worried about being responding here (and if you do, please do our survey when we post it as well so feedback can be collected in a central location).
We'll get a fix out this week to deal with the format - honestly, I wasn't even aware that people were using it still since the majority of the syncs come from either our HS Deck Tracker plugin or Firestone.
I'm going to assume whatever dumps on Nov 24 will be the "pack filler" and the cool cards we'd normally see during a stream, like a few remaining legendaries and epics, will end up in creator hands.
The only question I still have is when do the reveals start. Not likely to be the weekend because Blizzard has mostly stopped doing weekend reveals (bless) and Thursday+Friday is probably out of the equation due to American Thanksgiving at the Hearthstone team being on vacation for the week. So, early Monday is possible.
That would be really cool!
I would never have guessed the site would be online. It was slow, but it managed to stay afloat which was impressive to see. In the years of doing card reveals and them getting so many of them, I've never been able to post one of their reveals within 5 minutes.
Mind. Blown.
FWIW I think this is going to be called Horrid Abomination. Basing that on some World of Warcraft data and figured I'd comment here just in case it ends up being right.
As expected, the official Hearthstone gallery has not been updated for overnight reveal URLs.
I'm disappointed that I called that ahead of time.
People on our current staff don't understand how to fully do a card reveal and they are already familiar with several of the systems we have on the site, so it wouldn't be something very accessible. As cool as it would be to have the community take care of it, and it is something I've thought about for other titles (allowing some form of community involvement in reveal seasons) but ultimately, its just too complicated and the either there is too much freedom available which ends up being a liability issue or there's no freedom and its impossible to react to differences in reveal periods.
It sucks for everyone, not just the people running community sites.
This is a complete departure from the norm for reveals with no communication about what is going on - though the bad communication part isn't exactly new for the Hearthstone team.
Card reveal season exists for one sole reason: it sells the game. No one is going to buy Hearthstone packs if they have no idea what is going to be inside of them. One can count that as publicity or good will for sure, but there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't make it known where these reveals are going to take place.
As of right now, we know where the next two reveals are coming from - Lt. Eddy and PCGamer. Maybe we'll get lucky and a couple of more will be added afterward, but if my suspicions are correct, we'll go into the night without knowing where anything is coming from.
All they need to do is fill out the URLs of where we can find reveals and there would be zero problems. If they don't want to tell us, then drop the countdowns since they are absolutely pointless. Last night when we had the Chinese reveal at 3 AM, it wasn't like the countdown meant the card magically appeared in the gallery afterward - that was many hours later. It's sad.
I appreciate you (and everyone who liked your comment) for the kind words. I know, and plenty of folks on the team took over some duties earlier over the past few days. We don't have people for around the clock coverage with stuff though and not all of our card reveal tooling is very accessible to the team so I sort of have to be here (plus there are bills that need to be paid).
I am proud that we've got a great enough team that I can bow out if needed as proven earlier this week and past weekend. I'm hoping to take a week off come December, as I'd like everyone else on staff to as well, right around the holidays, where anything we do publish on the site will all be pre-scheduled - just a bit of a shame since December is the best month for ad revenue lol.
Since starting the site, I haven't had any time off even though I've had a few attempts to make it happen. At the end of the day though, we're behind in the grand scheme of things and any time taken off just delays stuff even more and its a bummer. I know how important it is to take time for yourself and I certainly don't practice what I preach, but it really does just come down to there is no good time. If I get deep into something that isn't immediately content related, which happens more than I'd like but that's also just the reality of wearing many hats, usually our front page takes a hit for the day.
I thought I was missing something key that I had seen. Thanks for posting the link here, the situation really is more fucked up than I wrote.
I'm tired.
I'm tired of Activison Blizzard being run by a bunch of asshat clowns.
I'm tired of bad communication.
I'm tired because its card reveal season.
I'm tired because there's some shit going on in my life right now and I really wish it wasn't a card reveal season right now.
If you know where to look, you could have seen this a couple of weeks ago :D
But yeah, got on it as soon as we could, and now there's a larger update here! Thanks
Stuff will be in the database soon (tm)
I'm so glad we have someone who speaks spaghetti on staff. Now I'm hungry, thanks Avalon.
Fixed the link so it didn't have the space at the end!
Also, fun fact: There was a reddit mod who won't be named that cried about us never linking our sources and we were a bunch of scumbags because of that. They were clearly too stupid to click on the author of the blue post block - and you just proved that the links are readily available.
Considering they couldn't even be bothered to promote the event, I'm not surprised we didn't get packs.
According to Eric from Blizzard Esports Publishing:
I understand they're short staffed, but I just find it so hard to believe there wasn't anyone who was able to put something small together to just tell people it was happening via an official blog. Blizzard has such an unbelievable amount of red tape they can't get anything done. Which is very funny considering the thread that Dean wrote late tonight which has as a part of it:
Now, of course, they are completely different teams at the company, but its just such an entertaining yet bewildering contrast. I'm so glad I'm not in that kind of position and I hope that anyone else on staff here never has to go through a million processes to get something live.
As stated in the article, no packs :P
In 5 minutes, 1 PM Eastern (10 AM Pacific, Blizzard Time), that's the normal Hearthstone time when stuff happens.
There's a ton of extra stuff to spend stuff on this year. It wasn't really our intention to let you get everything, it's stuff to work towards in the future and I expect our Winter event this year will be much the same. I believe giving people more options is nice because they can pick their own priorities of what is the coolest to them and that means we might end up seeing quite a bit of variety across the site for the next year.
Everyone who participated every day should have been able to earn over 1000 candy, which is enough for all 3 borders and a couple of extra things. The Little Devil Teemo stuff sitting at 666 candy was there as an "ultra-rare" fun thing to do and I would not have expected many people to go for it.
So here's the Candy breakdown (Oozefest lasts 28 days):
On Halloween, October 31, we ran a "Big Bar" event where all Candy gains were doubled on the site so it was like having a 29th day and I didn't include it in the calculations above. Also, folks who participated in our Card Design Competition received some Candy too.
So that's 1180 with full completion every day.
On Wordsearches
Word searches rewarded gold instead of candy so there was some potential candy there but we didn't do it. The reason being is these word searches are available year-round but our candy purchases in the shop will not be so we can't really give out candy for them. And I think it would be unfair to change the currency rewarded after the events ends.
Last year's Candy earning breakdown was:
The event ran from October 25 until November 3 which was 9 days of gains.
That was 180 Candy for browsing, 64 Candy for clues, and 18 Candy for daily tasks for a total of 262 Candy. (Borders were 75 Candy each or ~1/3 of your candy earned. Was about ~1/4 this time).
Things We Could Have Done Better
One of our biggest failures IMO was being more transparent about your progression. I would have loved to do a little "story line" showing the houses you visited throughout the day and how much more "energy" you had to visit more. I wanted to push something out for this during the event but stuff just gets too busy to reliably get stuff done. Maybe if Hearthstone hadn't of dropped that huge patch.
I think we should have allowed for passive gains as well as the active gains through Trick or Treating. I think it was a very cool flavor thing to do and the possibility of increased community interaction was neat, but some folks who are more passive users on the site lost out since our random events although flavorful, didn't exactly bring in enough Candy. Balancing the two together would be a good idea for next year.
Also, things should have started in October and stayed in October. Wasn't much we could do about that one, but I laugh a bit each time we push out a spooky-themed word search and its clearly November.
Things I'd Love to Know
We'll do another post-event survey to collect feedback so I'm not too worried about being responding here (and if you do, please do our survey when we post it as well so feedback can be collected in a central location).
Hey all, sorry about that but we've fixed an issue with "I have no clue how this hostel has a 4.3 on Yelp." from Week 4 so now it properly triggers.
We'll get a fix out this week to deal with the format - honestly, I wasn't even aware that people were using it still since the majority of the syncs come from either our HS Deck Tracker plugin or Firestone.