The game itself, as a literal, is only ever going to be ruined by Blizzard and they will never get a pass on it if they really mess up.
However, the game when you involve the community, because lets face it, community and the game itself make up the overall game, that's when we start to run into problems. When folks get discouraged because of the people that are being toxic in replies or they drop an N-slur to them via in-game message, that's ruining "the game" too. Its 100% clickbait to say players are ruining the game itself, that was my intention and it clearly worked and got people interested which then blew up a discussion here so I'm happy about it. Perhaps we could have had a slightly different discussion if that overall topic was a bit different.
I can't agree with you that the base of Hearthstone, a card game, is a cash grab. A cash grab is something that is garbage and is created purely to make money. There are many games out there that are like this, like many of the mobile games from Asia where the only way you can realistically play the game at all is to just keep injecting money and hoping you get a good sword, but Hearthstone is a legitimately good product. If Hearthstone's wasn't, this game would have been abandoned a long time ago. We get pretty damn good value in Hearthstone though, more so when you consider its a card game and how card games traditionally work.
Mercenaries could definitely be garbage and if it is, then the pre-order bundles are any other monetization is indeed a cash grab. We can't label it as such though because we still don't have a full picture of the game, which is a mega fail on the part of Blizzard.
Finally, there are plenty of folks who for literal years have been crying about Hearthstone. These are the people that really need to just cut their losses and leave. If you have zero fun in the game, and the only fun you have is complaining, you need to find something else to do with your time. Context is important. Notice how I said beforehand devs don't deserve to be harassed? People that are doing that clearly have had enough and it would be better for everyone if they did leave.
I think it worked out pretty well, it got a discussion going! Sure, some folks don't agree, others are doing exactly what I'm saying is a problem, but then we also have some that do agree. Its made for a great read so far!
Yeah, some of the little details like headings and flavor are a bit out there and we could have easily gone without them, but I think it adds a bit to the piece and I have no regrets for adding them. There are plenty of folks out there being incredibly childish about Wild. Anyone that isn't should know that they aren't being included in that group.
Games are an incredibly passionate bunch and I'd hate to see it any other way. Everything we do is out of love for the games and communities we hang out in - there are just several people who need to get better at communicating their thoughts and I feel that many of us can do a better job and telling people when they walk over that line.
The rewards track is an interesting one because although there were tons of people that were being really dumb about it, we also had lots of voices that were being very smart and being constructive about it. We had folks doing the deep math, providing their own previous stats to match up with the new one. Blizzard really screwed that one up by not including the full picture when they first talked about the track, which, surprise, is the same problem we have with Mercenaries (as you've said).
Most of the Mercenaries negativity could have been avoided if Blizzard god better at painting the full picture.
Definitely don't intend to blame all the players, I even called out Blizzard's poor management of Mercenaries so far. Players do need to grow up a bit though.
Hearthstone itself is not a cash grab, nor do I have any reason to believe at this time that Mercenaries is. Hearthstone is a good product and its worth buying into. Hell, you can be successful as a free to play player too!
Cash Grabs, as Caro said before me, are bad products that are produced to take advantage of the market. Hearthstone built this damn market and the reason it is a powerhouse is because of how good the game itself is. The big card games are not cash grabs.
Every company is out there to make money. Some of them are going to monetize the entire game, some are going to monetize the contents (which has been a thing forever in card games, thats always been the way they work), and others will just monetize cosmetics over the core gameplay loop (see Legends of Runeterra).
If you release a game and you want to make the most money possible, doesn't it have to be a good game? If Mercenaries is trash tier, people are going to play it and then move back on to whatever they were playing before within Hearthstone. Maybe they suck some money in from folks during pre-orders, but that is not going to last and it isn't going to create loyal customers.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
They have one opportunity with this mode to make it standout. If they screw everything up, mark my words, they won't get a second chance.
Mercenaries would have been a fantastic opportunity to run a Hearthstone Public Test Realm. Keep everything separate from the main game so people understand they're going to lose any progression when it goes live.
It would have let people give proper feedback and then we'd better understand the value.
Players are always going to have lots of reasons to complain, they should do so though while being constructive. If you want to say something sucks, go for it, but tell people WHY it sucks. The why part of it matters so much to moving conversations forward. The devs don't want to talk to people who are just being negative and as the negativity compounds within the community, everything just feels like shit.
Yeah, its a shame that there isn't a linear relationship between the number of members of the team and the amount of content going out. The larger it gets, the harder it is to get anything done. That's why its important to very slowly add people and make them productive members of the team instead of mass hiring, which they have definitely done in the past. Damn, Hearthstone was so messy in the start!
I'm excited to see the next 6 months of Hearthstone now that Mercenaries is going to be coming out. It'll really tell us what the next zodiac year is going to be like as far as content drops go. I'd love if they could give us a dive into what the team is prioritizing post-mercenaries. Like, is someone already starting to look at what new kind of brawls we could see or should we expect new heroes in Duels? It'll be a good question for the next Dean AMA.
Mercenaries was definitely more than they could chew though with their team size. Its so crazy how much content Hearthstone pumps out now. If you asked me 3 years ago if anything we've seen in the past couple was possible, I would have laughed. The game has come such a long way - I honestly wanted to give up on it before "Hearthstone 2.0" hit because I was just drained with nothing new and exciting happening.
If you know me, you know I'm an advocate for more introducing Constructed Formats, not Modes, into Hearthstone.
Yeah, I'd love nothing more than extra ways to play with our cards. I really don't know why they won't just add in an extra rotating format where they can constantly change which expansions are in it. Imagine a meta that would be tough to solve completely due to sets being rotated every month or two. Keep the newest 3 expansions in the format so they remain valuable.
Quote From Author
If we go down the path of balancing Wild, choices and changes should be made with the intention of being impactful and encouraging a healthy meta that changes as much as the Standard meta does when new cards are released. It would be a disservice to balance the Format just for the top decks to still dominate the meta.
For sure! A properly balanced Wild, although difficult, is going to need so many buffs as well. There are so damn many old cards that should be allowed to have a chance at seeing light but when they were originally printed, they weren't even good. I think that would help with bringing forward new decks quite a bit, more so than a round of nerfs on current content.
You could do special events/patches where they focus on certain parts of the game to dish those buffs out to. Rise of Mechs was a neat event, what if they did something similar where the mech-focused sets would get retuned so that they became more viable.
Haha! It takes about 15 minutes, less time if you are lucky with card draws.
That is, if you have a second monitor so you can quickly go between the game and the tool. Tabbing out and back in might add some extra time to that. I don't even want to think about how bad it would be on mobile...
I think the AH would be more of a spend your gold and dust. It would make any real-money related stuff much harder to do since it then involves account trading. Also, if it isn't direct player to player trading and done through an AH with anonymous purchases, you just pay the lowest price for a card that is currently on the market, its not like someone could sell you a card in real life by putting it up for an absurd amount of gold, letting that player buy the card out and then returning their gold by doing the same thing with a crappy common. World of Warcraft switched to a commodities auction house which was such an incredible change when buying goods, it would work well for a card game.
One thing that I thought would always be a good idea, though it would be way too complicated for players and the interface would be to have it so cards you get for free through gameplay are trade restricted but ones you get with real money packs would be freely tradeable. Or free ones require equivalent trades.
Some form of obtaining cards from your draft would be an amazing addition to the mode. It would be very tricky to figure out the economy of it, but damn, it would be so much more thrilling to play it if you didn't have much of a collection.
She'll still end up getting vacation, its just that some folks take an extended vacation instead.
I know it can be very rewarding to get to work on something out of passion, so much so that it can in itself feel like a vacation. I try to carve out some time every week to work one something passion related instead of necessity for this very reason.
Of course, I'd also like her to not feel like she must go and work on it and to take that time off if its needed.
I have like 18 tickets on the US server atm, lol. I spent one the other day to check out a thing in Heroic duels and I'm glad I can do that from a content perspective whenever I want.
I'd love to see more use cases for them though. Maybe improvements to Arena will get me interested in the mode again.
Yeah that was such a great use of the tech when the entire Ashes of Outland expansion launch felt like such a bad experience with the crazy strength Demon Hunters had. I know they've said they learned a lot from that new class launch so whenever we get Death Knights or Monks it'll hopefully go a bit smoother.
I completely forgot that packs were originally listed as a launch celebration, damn, why time gotta full Sonic and go so fast?
Thanks for sharing the story about Greenskin, I can only imagine how awesome it must feel to complete the original classic set since I sure haven't been able to yet =D. Its always great to hear when people have good experiences!
Yeah its insane to me that people will complain about absolutely everything. Don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of complaining in gaming over the years, and still do grumble about World of Warcraft at times, but it is so important that people realize you aren't the target audience for everything that goes into a game.
I think the most laughable is thinking that every player would enjoy every class. If you don't like the way Druid plays, don't play it, there are NINE other options out there with different playstyles. Like look at Duels, that was not meant to be a mode for every single player, yet, complaint city! We know there are still a ton of Duels players out there though with how much traffic some of our articles get for the mode so its great that Blizzard provided some players an avenue to continue to enjoy Hearthstone.
Mercenaries, and even Battlegrounds, is exactly that. A way to keep enjoying our favourite characters in a card game format.
The game itself, as a literal, is only ever going to be ruined by Blizzard and they will never get a pass on it if they really mess up.
However, the game when you involve the community, because lets face it, community and the game itself make up the overall game, that's when we start to run into problems. When folks get discouraged because of the people that are being toxic in replies or they drop an N-slur to them via in-game message, that's ruining "the game" too. Its 100% clickbait to say players are ruining the game itself, that was my intention and it clearly worked and got people interested which then blew up a discussion here so I'm happy about it. Perhaps we could have had a slightly different discussion if that overall topic was a bit different.
I can't agree with you that the base of Hearthstone, a card game, is a cash grab. A cash grab is something that is garbage and is created purely to make money. There are many games out there that are like this, like many of the mobile games from Asia where the only way you can realistically play the game at all is to just keep injecting money and hoping you get a good sword, but Hearthstone is a legitimately good product. If Hearthstone's wasn't, this game would have been abandoned a long time ago. We get pretty damn good value in Hearthstone though, more so when you consider its a card game and how card games traditionally work.
Mercenaries could definitely be garbage and if it is, then the pre-order bundles are any other monetization is indeed a cash grab. We can't label it as such though because we still don't have a full picture of the game, which is a mega fail on the part of Blizzard.
Finally, there are plenty of folks who for literal years have been crying about Hearthstone. These are the people that really need to just cut their losses and leave. If you have zero fun in the game, and the only fun you have is complaining, you need to find something else to do with your time. Context is important. Notice how I said beforehand devs don't deserve to be harassed? People that are doing that clearly have had enough and it would be better for everyone if they did leave.
I think it worked out pretty well, it got a discussion going! Sure, some folks don't agree, others are doing exactly what I'm saying is a problem, but then we also have some that do agree. Its made for a great read so far!
Yeah, some of the little details like headings and flavor are a bit out there and we could have easily gone without them, but I think it adds a bit to the piece and I have no regrets for adding them. There are plenty of folks out there being incredibly childish about Wild. Anyone that isn't should know that they aren't being included in that group.
Games are an incredibly passionate bunch and I'd hate to see it any other way. Everything we do is out of love for the games and communities we hang out in - there are just several people who need to get better at communicating their thoughts and I feel that many of us can do a better job and telling people when they walk over that line.
The rewards track is an interesting one because although there were tons of people that were being really dumb about it, we also had lots of voices that were being very smart and being constructive about it. We had folks doing the deep math, providing their own previous stats to match up with the new one. Blizzard really screwed that one up by not including the full picture when they first talked about the track, which, surprise, is the same problem we have with Mercenaries (as you've said).
Most of the Mercenaries negativity could have been avoided if Blizzard god better at painting the full picture.
Definitely don't intend to blame all the players, I even called out Blizzard's poor management of Mercenaries so far. Players do need to grow up a bit though.
Hearthstone itself is not a cash grab, nor do I have any reason to believe at this time that Mercenaries is. Hearthstone is a good product and its worth buying into. Hell, you can be successful as a free to play player too!
Cash Grabs, as Caro said before me, are bad products that are produced to take advantage of the market. Hearthstone built this damn market and the reason it is a powerhouse is because of how good the game itself is. The big card games are not cash grabs.
Every company is out there to make money. Some of them are going to monetize the entire game, some are going to monetize the contents (which has been a thing forever in card games, thats always been the way they work), and others will just monetize cosmetics over the core gameplay loop (see Legends of Runeterra).
Here's my problem with that train of thought.
If you release a game and you want to make the most money possible, doesn't it have to be a good game? If Mercenaries is trash tier, people are going to play it and then move back on to whatever they were playing before within Hearthstone. Maybe they suck some money in from folks during pre-orders, but that is not going to last and it isn't going to create loyal customers.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
They have one opportunity with this mode to make it standout. If they screw everything up, mark my words, they won't get a second chance.
Saying Bliz$$ard is the same as the kids who used to say Micro$oft.
If you truly think the company is that greedy, why are you still playing their products? I honestly want to know.
Mercenaries would have been a fantastic opportunity to run a Hearthstone Public Test Realm. Keep everything separate from the main game so people understand they're going to lose any progression when it goes live.
It would have let people give proper feedback and then we'd better understand the value.
Players are always going to have lots of reasons to complain, they should do so though while being constructive. If you want to say something sucks, go for it, but tell people WHY it sucks. The why part of it matters so much to moving conversations forward. The devs don't want to talk to people who are just being negative and as the negativity compounds within the community, everything just feels like shit.
Yeah, its a shame that there isn't a linear relationship between the number of members of the team and the amount of content going out. The larger it gets, the harder it is to get anything done. That's why its important to very slowly add people and make them productive members of the team instead of mass hiring, which they have definitely done in the past. Damn, Hearthstone was so messy in the start!
I'm excited to see the next 6 months of Hearthstone now that Mercenaries is going to be coming out. It'll really tell us what the next zodiac year is going to be like as far as content drops go. I'd love if they could give us a dive into what the team is prioritizing post-mercenaries. Like, is someone already starting to look at what new kind of brawls we could see or should we expect new heroes in Duels? It'll be a good question for the next Dean AMA.
Mercenaries was definitely more than they could chew though with their team size. Its so crazy how much content Hearthstone pumps out now. If you asked me 3 years ago if anything we've seen in the past couple was possible, I would have laughed. The game has come such a long way - I honestly wanted to give up on it before "Hearthstone 2.0" hit because I was just drained with nothing new and exciting happening.
Yeah, I'd love nothing more than extra ways to play with our cards. I really don't know why they won't just add in an extra rotating format where they can constantly change which expansions are in it. Imagine a meta that would be tough to solve completely due to sets being rotated every month or two. Keep the newest 3 expansions in the format so they remain valuable.
For sure! A properly balanced Wild, although difficult, is going to need so many buffs as well. There are so damn many old cards that should be allowed to have a chance at seeing light but when they were originally printed, they weren't even good. I think that would help with bringing forward new decks quite a bit, more so than a round of nerfs on current content.
You could do special events/patches where they focus on certain parts of the game to dish those buffs out to. Rise of Mechs was a neat event, what if they did something similar where the mech-focused sets would get retuned so that they became more viable.
To have such little success in life that they only thing you can do successfully is be miserable. Truly incredible.
Haha! It takes about 15 minutes, less time if you are lucky with card draws.
That is, if you have a second monitor so you can quickly go between the game and the tool. Tabbing out and back in might add some extra time to that. I don't even want to think about how bad it would be on mobile...
Haha, yeah, its takes a little bit even with a tool to assist.
I think the AH would be more of a spend your gold and dust. It would make any real-money related stuff much harder to do since it then involves account trading. Also, if it isn't direct player to player trading and done through an AH with anonymous purchases, you just pay the lowest price for a card that is currently on the market, its not like someone could sell you a card in real life by putting it up for an absurd amount of gold, letting that player buy the card out and then returning their gold by doing the same thing with a crappy common. World of Warcraft switched to a commodities auction house which was such an incredible change when buying goods, it would work well for a card game.
One thing that I thought would always be a good idea, though it would be way too complicated for players and the interface would be to have it so cards you get for free through gameplay are trade restricted but ones you get with real money packs would be freely tradeable. Or free ones require equivalent trades.
Some form of obtaining cards from your draft would be an amazing addition to the mode. It would be very tricky to figure out the economy of it, but damn, it would be so much more thrilling to play it if you didn't have much of a collection.
She'll still end up getting vacation, its just that some folks take an extended vacation instead.
I know it can be very rewarding to get to work on something out of passion, so much so that it can in itself feel like a vacation. I try to carve out some time every week to work one something passion related instead of necessity for this very reason.
Of course, I'd also like her to not feel like she must go and work on it and to take that time off if its needed.
I have like 18 tickets on the US server atm, lol. I spent one the other day to check out a thing in Heroic duels and I'm glad I can do that from a content perspective whenever I want.
I'd love to see more use cases for them though. Maybe improvements to Arena will get me interested in the mode again.
Mayyyyyyybe.
Yeah that was such a great use of the tech when the entire Ashes of Outland expansion launch felt like such a bad experience with the crazy strength Demon Hunters had. I know they've said they learned a lot from that new class launch so whenever we get Death Knights or Monks it'll hopefully go a bit smoother.
I completely forgot that packs were originally listed as a launch celebration, damn, why time gotta full Sonic and go so fast?
Thanks for sharing the story about Greenskin, I can only imagine how awesome it must feel to complete the original classic set since I sure haven't been able to yet =D. Its always great to hear when people have good experiences!
Preach!
Yeah its insane to me that people will complain about absolutely everything. Don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of complaining in gaming over the years, and still do grumble about World of Warcraft at times, but it is so important that people realize you aren't the target audience for everything that goes into a game.
I think the most laughable is thinking that every player would enjoy every class. If you don't like the way Druid plays, don't play it, there are NINE other options out there with different playstyles. Like look at Duels, that was not meant to be a mode for every single player, yet, complaint city! We know there are still a ton of Duels players out there though with how much traffic some of our articles get for the mode so its great that Blizzard provided some players an avenue to continue to enjoy Hearthstone.
Mercenaries, and even Battlegrounds, is exactly that. A way to keep enjoying our favourite characters in a card game format.