I still think we could have done a better job at dropping more content for everyone since we clearly can't rely on Blizzard to paint the real picture. Is it actually our problem? No, not at all. But whenever we have the data, I believe we should do the absolute most with it.
Heya! Its certainly interesting but not something that needed to be covered for the launch. There's tons of stuff to sift through in the original patch of Mercenaries data, I recommend looking through it if its something that interests you!
It is something we'll report on on the coming week or two when things calm down and we do some more cleanup on all the Mercenaries stuff across the site. I wish I had infinite time in the day (and the audience had an infinite attention span) to make good use of it all.
There was a comment someone left on a previous article about similar stuff with Mercs datamining and I had responded to it as well but I just wanted to make it clear - us not covering something was not done because of Blizzard asking us not to. Just a time or scheduling thing! You might actually be surprised to know how often we just schedule stuff in advance, but that's another bag of worms for another day, lol.
They were pissed because they didn't get to control something they wanted control over. And, yeah, that's shitty.
Though, looking at the messaging they did put out, I don't really feel that bad for them. Folks would have gone into Mercenaries with even less information. I especially "enjoyed" the part where they, on launch day, decided to push out info on freebies, twitch drops, and login bonuses in a big mega post right when the game went live.
I fail to comprehend how that was a good idea. You offered not much in the run up, why not drum up some excitement and hour or two before the launch so people could focus on, you know, the big launch. Instead, you've put content out that is going to get missed by people. You could have prior communicated the questline to folks so they got to be excited about the free packs they'd soon open. Gaaaah!
Yeah, streamers aren't very critical of the game and it's kinda sad. I'm not saying people should be causing unrest for the sake of drumming up toxic mobs, but you know so many people are too afraid to comment on anything remotely negative. Everything is perfect in Hearthstone! And hey, not every audience needs to be aware of stuff thats bad with the game, not everyone needs to be like the Kripp and Zeddys, but it really feels like some people have their noses so brown that it gives the community team a power over the rest of the bunch. I'd just love to see people not pretending everything is so perfect. Social media is such a shit show. Everyone protects themselves in their own bubble and forgets about the rest of it. Watching the "Hearthstone is perfect" echo chambers is sad. Great game, but far, far from it.
Although I am disappointed by how bad Blizzard is at managing the public part, I'll never let them get me down. We're in it for the long haul with a community I'm happy to be a part of and if they continue to make blunders, I'll make sure we're there to hold them accountable.
Gaming overall does need less negativity, but damn there's something important about telling it like it is sometimes.
Yeah, there's definitely a ton that is involved. I am incredibly thankful that we have so many other wonderful people on the team that help with the coverage and great content that gets pushed out. I'm proud that my name isn't attached to everything anymore because I know alone, I simply couldn't do it. We've been getting better, more regular, and in general stronger as time goes on at figuring out exactly what we want to be and that's great. With others on the team focusing more than ever before on content, it has allowed me to fix some of our tech debt, work on new features, and most importantly, give the business side of the site more attention.
I appreciate you not running adblock. I know how bad the experience can be at times and I wish it didn't have to be. I don't regret adding our video unit to the site because it doubled the amount of money the site brings in, which in turn made it much more viable for folks to work on content, but damn was that tough from a "pain in the ass" standpoint. I find ads insufferable and wish we didn't have to run them but at the end of the day, I think folks understand that and if they don't, they join the adblock party anyway and are somewhat oblivious to it all. Though, I do sometimes wonder how much better we could be doing if it wasn't for adblock.
As far as growth on the Hearthstone team goes though, yeah, they've been doing a ton of it. I know they've had a lot of problems over the years just because they grew so fast. There was also some hesitation to touch the game, see little to no balance changes for so long when it was very clearly needed. I don't know if that came from papa Blizz that wanted stuff to stay the same because it was still consistently bringing in money or if it really was the developers at the time feeling like things were fine and they really truly believed in the "digital but we want it to feel like paper" aspect of Hearthstone. Or, maybe something else entirely.
They've done a great job at growing with the game and having modes like Battlegrounds and Mercenaries is absolutely fantastic. Before Battlegrounds, there was little reason to login, at least for myself on the rare chance I get to play something in Hearthstone, when the meta was stale (which is like 2 weeks after an expac drops, or at least that was typically the case). Now Mercenaries makes it even harder to avoid Hearthstone since in theory, there is always something to do for everyone. Watching the platform mature has been a bit of a treat, even though it has been filled with frustration in seeing stuff one might consider to be a simple change or fix completely avoided (nothing is every truly simple).
I don't feel like I've been mistreated though and definitely do not feel like I've ever been in the wrong. When stuff be public, you got no one to blame but yourself! Though as I did say, I do regret not posting more datamined stuff and much earlier.
I won't spoil stuff too much but you can expect more. I hope by the end of it we don't have pushback telling us we are mad lads and lasses. I'm still blown away by how well they do - we definitely need to get better at doing them outside of site events.
I'd like to! The last time I did a guide though was all the way back for the Samsung promotion and I believe all the emulators have changed quite a bit so it'll take quite a bit of time to test them all out and see which one ends up being the most friendly.
I could write a client patch faster, in the same way that Hearthstone Access works. lol. The only downside is people would be sketched out patching their clients, even temporarily. The odds of Blizzard banning for such a thing, historically speaking, is 0. Though, folks, you should never download and execute code you don't trust the source for. Remember that!
I'm wrong, it looks like it is possible currently if you use an emulator.
You need to change the model number of your emulator to a huawei device id, like "RTE-AL00", which is the recently launched Huawei nova 9 Pro. If you need to enter a manufacturer and brand, then HUAWEI is the correct field for both.
Outside of Korea it won't be possible to obtain the pre-reg card back as it'll require a Korean ID and a sign-up on the One Store site. I think you have to make a purchase too.
Huawei doesn't appear to be active yet even though its in the client. Unless this ends up being a China only card back.
My expectation is that if they aren't obtainable outside of those countries, given some time, they'll be available for gold.
Yeah I can't stand everyone that keeps bringing up Gacha with Mercenaries.
Maybe if card games are a Gacha too (they aren't anywhere near it). Gacha is predatory practices, not some RNG. I still laugh at the people who were trying to call Overwatch a Gacha game when it was purely cosmetics in loot boxes.
Hey, I've made an update to the article since according to our research, we were wrong on how things worked.
This is the actual logic for the first deal, Random Legendary Mercenary:
If you are missing a Legendary Mercenary (no base or skins) you will receive one of those at random.
If you own all the Mercenaries, a random Mercenary is rolled.
If you own the base skin for that Mercenary, you will receive coins for that Mercenary.
If you do not own the base skin for that Mercenary, you will receive that instead.
I still think this is a good deal, but only in a couple of circumstances. If you are missing any base mercs though but have all the mercenaries as far as them all being playable, this "deal" really doesn't feel like a deal since now its only a chance of coins.
This is so poorly communicated in the deal. I really don't think this was the best the team could have done with how mercenaries are implemented. I love the idea of the game. I think its incredible fair for the most part and more than accessible to F2P folks. This sucks though.
I really cannot comprehend how Blizzard managed to make Mercenaries so complicated, and not for a gameplay reason. They really should have ditched the idea of a base skin when they saw how lengthy their communications on it were going to be. Maybe it was too late in the development process to do so, but that's hardly an excuse. Small indie this and that, this is something that really needed to be considered more. Kinda sad when you consider they worked on this mode for like 3 years.
As one of the Out of Cards staff put it on Discord - "dogshit".
Mercenaries are also just regular cards as far as Hearthstone is concerned. When a new patch drops, we check for all the new cards (and changes cards) and then kick off a render with all those card ids together without needing to know anything about them. Due to the thousands of cards that were in the Mercenaries patch, I definitely never saw them during the initial datamining - I was actually a little confused initially when I saw CampfireStone's images since they looked like our card images, until I went into the database and saw them.
There's no Mercenaries pages for them because although they exist as cards in the client, they have no proper mercenaries data associated with them so we don't have their level stats. I took a quick look at client data and it looks like The Black Knight and Nemsy don't have any abilities or equipment either. So it does seem like their inclusion in data was a mistake and one that Blizzard probably regrets lol.
Fun fact, and I might regret saying this more publicly. We actually have filters in our database that categorize all the cards by the patch they were added in. Now, we don't have this data going back too far, though I'd love to get that working one day it just takes a long time to fetch all my old data and write scripts against it, but from the time Out of Cards came online, all cards are categorized by the patch they were added to the game. So, whenever we do a data import, you can easily see any new cards that get added.
So, its really easy to see the new stuff coming for modes like Tavern Brawl (since they flag those under a specific expansion, though the brawl set isn't exclusively brawl anymore so that's fun) or Mercenaries.
And, it is leaked, though only having the hero names isn't as interesting as having abilities and stats. Maybe Blizzard will slip up again in the future!
Anything we've ever made public has not been removed. There was a point where they asked if I'd stop and I asked them if they wanted to work together on something and then they ghosted me until I started posting again. At that point I got ghosted once more and I'm officially done with them.
We don't need them to survive.
Fuck Blizzard. They still have cool people that work there and they make great products but their community team leaves something to be desired - a fact that has remained true for the entire existence of Hearthstone. Just when you think they're getting better and you talk about how they're doing better, they shit the bed. I'm so done wasting any amount of energy on them.
If something was previously showing up on the site and it isn't now, if anyone knows exactly what it was, let me know and I can dig into it. All our Mercenaries stuff uses a different importer and its possible that something broke and unflagged some stuff, though it shouldn't be possible I wouldn't rule it out. (Sending me a private message is probably your best bet since I'll 100% see the notification for it)
We'll be promoting this on the main page news feed later today. If you were with us here last year, do know that there should be more candy earned in total this year so enjoy =)
More are still coming for Oozefest!
We'll try to make these a more regular, non-event occurrence too.
I know we certainly have some talented artists within our population, but give it a go anyway! Carving pumpkins is always super fun :D
I still think we could have done a better job at dropping more content for everyone since we clearly can't rely on Blizzard to paint the real picture. Is it actually our problem? No, not at all. But whenever we have the data, I believe we should do the absolute most with it.
Heya! Its certainly interesting but not something that needed to be covered for the launch. There's tons of stuff to sift through in the original patch of Mercenaries data, I recommend looking through it if its something that interests you!
Here is a link to our card database (everything in Hearthstone is basically just a card object) with the proper patch filter.
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/cards/?added_in_patch=179
It is something we'll report on on the coming week or two when things calm down and we do some more cleanup on all the Mercenaries stuff across the site. I wish I had infinite time in the day (and the audience had an infinite attention span) to make good use of it all.
There was a comment someone left on a previous article about similar stuff with Mercs datamining and I had responded to it as well but I just wanted to make it clear - us not covering something was not done because of Blizzard asking us not to. Just a time or scheduling thing! You might actually be surprised to know how often we just schedule stuff in advance, but that's another bag of worms for another day, lol.
They were pissed because they didn't get to control something they wanted control over. And, yeah, that's shitty.
Though, looking at the messaging they did put out, I don't really feel that bad for them. Folks would have gone into Mercenaries with even less information. I especially "enjoyed" the part where they, on launch day, decided to push out info on freebies, twitch drops, and login bonuses in a big mega post right when the game went live.
I fail to comprehend how that was a good idea. You offered not much in the run up, why not drum up some excitement and hour or two before the launch so people could focus on, you know, the big launch. Instead, you've put content out that is going to get missed by people. You could have prior communicated the questline to folks so they got to be excited about the free packs they'd soon open. Gaaaah!
Yeah, streamers aren't very critical of the game and it's kinda sad. I'm not saying people should be causing unrest for the sake of drumming up toxic mobs, but you know so many people are too afraid to comment on anything remotely negative. Everything is perfect in Hearthstone! And hey, not every audience needs to be aware of stuff thats bad with the game, not everyone needs to be like the Kripp and Zeddys, but it really feels like some people have their noses so brown that it gives the community team a power over the rest of the bunch. I'd just love to see people not pretending everything is so perfect. Social media is such a shit show. Everyone protects themselves in their own bubble and forgets about the rest of it. Watching the "Hearthstone is perfect" echo chambers is sad. Great game, but far, far from it.
Although I am disappointed by how bad Blizzard is at managing the public part, I'll never let them get me down. We're in it for the long haul with a community I'm happy to be a part of and if they continue to make blunders, I'll make sure we're there to hold them accountable.
Gaming overall does need less negativity, but damn there's something important about telling it like it is sometimes.
Thanks!
I appreciate your kind words =)
Yeah, there's definitely a ton that is involved. I am incredibly thankful that we have so many other wonderful people on the team that help with the coverage and great content that gets pushed out. I'm proud that my name isn't attached to everything anymore because I know alone, I simply couldn't do it. We've been getting better, more regular, and in general stronger as time goes on at figuring out exactly what we want to be and that's great. With others on the team focusing more than ever before on content, it has allowed me to fix some of our tech debt, work on new features, and most importantly, give the business side of the site more attention.
I appreciate you not running adblock. I know how bad the experience can be at times and I wish it didn't have to be. I don't regret adding our video unit to the site because it doubled the amount of money the site brings in, which in turn made it much more viable for folks to work on content, but damn was that tough from a "pain in the ass" standpoint. I find ads insufferable and wish we didn't have to run them but at the end of the day, I think folks understand that and if they don't, they join the adblock party anyway and are somewhat oblivious to it all. Though, I do sometimes wonder how much better we could be doing if it wasn't for adblock.
As far as growth on the Hearthstone team goes though, yeah, they've been doing a ton of it. I know they've had a lot of problems over the years just because they grew so fast. There was also some hesitation to touch the game, see little to no balance changes for so long when it was very clearly needed. I don't know if that came from papa Blizz that wanted stuff to stay the same because it was still consistently bringing in money or if it really was the developers at the time feeling like things were fine and they really truly believed in the "digital but we want it to feel like paper" aspect of Hearthstone. Or, maybe something else entirely.
They've done a great job at growing with the game and having modes like Battlegrounds and Mercenaries is absolutely fantastic. Before Battlegrounds, there was little reason to login, at least for myself on the rare chance I get to play something in Hearthstone, when the meta was stale (which is like 2 weeks after an expac drops, or at least that was typically the case). Now Mercenaries makes it even harder to avoid Hearthstone since in theory, there is always something to do for everyone. Watching the platform mature has been a bit of a treat, even though it has been filled with frustration in seeing stuff one might consider to be a simple change or fix completely avoided (nothing is every truly simple).
I don't feel like I've been mistreated though and definitely do not feel like I've ever been in the wrong. When stuff be public, you got no one to blame but yourself! Though as I did say, I do regret not posting more datamined stuff and much earlier.
Glad you enjoyed it, and thank you!
Shit. Detective Psymon was on the case.
Well I can tell you that all the achievements aren't in yet. Though they might be tonight so I guess that'll give most of it away.
Its against the spirit!
I won't spoil stuff too much but you can expect more. I hope by the end of it we don't have pushback telling us we are mad lads and lasses. I'm still blown away by how well they do - we definitely need to get better at doing them outside of site events.
Nothing has changed with it /shrug
Good to hear it though!
I'd like to! The last time I did a guide though was all the way back for the Samsung promotion and I believe all the emulators have changed quite a bit so it'll take quite a bit of time to test them all out and see which one ends up being the most friendly.
I could write a client patch faster, in the same way that Hearthstone Access works. lol. The only downside is people would be sketched out patching their clients, even temporarily. The odds of Blizzard banning for such a thing, historically speaking, is 0. Though, folks, you should never download and execute code you don't trust the source for. Remember that!
I can only assume that it'll make a reappearance after they better showcase how it works since their original description was bad.
I'm wrong, it looks like it is possible currently if you use an emulator.
You need to change the model number of your emulator to a huawei device id, like "RTE-AL00", which is the recently launched Huawei nova 9 Pro. If you need to enter a manufacturer and brand, then HUAWEI is the correct field for both.
Outside of Korea it won't be possible to obtain the pre-reg card back as it'll require a Korean ID and a sign-up on the One Store site. I think you have to make a purchase too.
Huawei doesn't appear to be active yet even though its in the client. Unless this ends up being a China only card back.
My expectation is that if they aren't obtainable outside of those countries, given some time, they'll be available for gold.
Yeah I can't stand everyone that keeps bringing up Gacha with Mercenaries.
Maybe if card games are a Gacha too (they aren't anywhere near it). Gacha is predatory practices, not some RNG. I still laugh at the people who were trying to call Overwatch a Gacha game when it was purely cosmetics in loot boxes.
Hey, I've made an update to the article since according to our research, we were wrong on how things worked.
This is the actual logic for the first deal, Random Legendary Mercenary:
I still think this is a good deal, but only in a couple of circumstances. If you are missing any base mercs though but have all the mercenaries as far as them all being playable, this "deal" really doesn't feel like a deal since now its only a chance of coins.
This is so poorly communicated in the deal. I really don't think this was the best the team could have done with how mercenaries are implemented. I love the idea of the game. I think its incredible fair for the most part and more than accessible to F2P folks. This sucks though.
I really cannot comprehend how Blizzard managed to make Mercenaries so complicated, and not for a gameplay reason. They really should have ditched the idea of a base skin when they saw how lengthy their communications on it were going to be. Maybe it was too late in the development process to do so, but that's hardly an excuse. Small indie this and that, this is something that really needed to be considered more. Kinda sad when you consider they worked on this mode for like 3 years.
As one of the Out of Cards staff put it on Discord - "dogshit".
Ah, they appear in the card database but not the Mercenary one.
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/cards/?card_set=66
Mercenaries are also just regular cards as far as Hearthstone is concerned. When a new patch drops, we check for all the new cards (and changes cards) and then kick off a render with all those card ids together without needing to know anything about them. Due to the thousands of cards that were in the Mercenaries patch, I definitely never saw them during the initial datamining - I was actually a little confused initially when I saw CampfireStone's images since they looked like our card images, until I went into the database and saw them.
There's no Mercenaries pages for them because although they exist as cards in the client, they have no proper mercenaries data associated with them so we don't have their level stats. I took a quick look at client data and it looks like The Black Knight and Nemsy don't have any abilities or equipment either. So it does seem like their inclusion in data was a mistake and one that Blizzard probably regrets lol.
Fun fact, and I might regret saying this more publicly. We actually have filters in our database that categorize all the cards by the patch they were added in. Now, we don't have this data going back too far, though I'd love to get that working one day it just takes a long time to fetch all my old data and write scripts against it, but from the time Out of Cards came online, all cards are categorized by the patch they were added to the game. So, whenever we do a data import, you can easily see any new cards that get added.
So, its really easy to see the new stuff coming for modes like Tavern Brawl (since they flag those under a specific expansion, though the brawl set isn't exclusively brawl anymore so that's fun) or Mercenaries.
The "first public build" of Mercenaries was added to the site and that's where all the Mercs data is that folks are calling "leaked".
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/cards/?card_set=66&added_in_patch=179
And, it is leaked, though only having the hero names isn't as interesting as having abilities and stats. Maybe Blizzard will slip up again in the future!
I haven't removed anything.
Anything we've ever made public has not been removed. There was a point where they asked if I'd stop and I asked them if they wanted to work together on something and then they ghosted me until I started posting again. At that point I got ghosted once more and I'm officially done with them.
We don't need them to survive.
Fuck Blizzard. They still have cool people that work there and they make great products but their community team leaves something to be desired - a fact that has remained true for the entire existence of Hearthstone. Just when you think they're getting better and you talk about how they're doing better, they shit the bed. I'm so done wasting any amount of energy on them.
If something was previously showing up on the site and it isn't now, if anyone knows exactly what it was, let me know and I can dig into it. All our Mercenaries stuff uses a different importer and its possible that something broke and unflagged some stuff, though it shouldn't be possible I wouldn't rule it out. (Sending me a private message is probably your best bet since I'll 100% see the notification for it)
Welcome to Oozefest 2(021)!
We'll be promoting this on the main page news feed later today. If you were with us here last year, do know that there should be more candy earned in total this year so enjoy =)