Yup, it has allowed certain groups of people to connect that otherwise would not be able to in day-to-day life since it is such a small portion of the population. Now, this has also been a positive because there are some great social causes out there that have benefited greatly from this power, propelling knowledge into the greater public, but it's when this is used for evil that it becomes a problem.
Shit, the majority of my friend group is digital and I would never have known they were out there had it not have been for the internet. Such a great tool for meeting people that are close to you in niche interests!
Is it too hard to have a laugh these days? I didn't realize that one part of the community was strictly off-limits.
Similar jokes have been made at the expense of standard players as well, which greatly outnumber every other type of player in Hearthstone. People are passionate about the modes they like and I respect that, but at the end of the day, Hearthstone is meant to be fun and if we can't laugh together about how the community reacts to stuff, I really don't know what else to say.
This is the problem with the internet in general these days. People take stuff too seriously, are too polarized with their opinions, and it's too risky to say anything at all anymore. Well, that's one thing I'm not okay with and it's why we actually write opinion-based content on Out of Cards (you'll see writers give opinions fairly frequently whereas when we ran HearthPwn, that was a big no because how dare we possibly upset someone). Shit, comedians can't even say anything anymore because there is always a group of people that will get upset and cancel culture goes hard after them.
I think it's absurd that Blizzard won't make changes to cards that are clearly overpowered and hurting the game. But, Dean Ayala also said in his recent Q&A that maybe they need to gather more opinions of wild players to see if they're wrong. I can tell you, based on the years of talk about wild that I've been a witness to, Blizzard is wrong.
I'd like to do some consumer research on wild to see if our thoughts are validated on the 'just want to play my favorite deck' front. There are some, sounds like you, that want this curated experienced where the meta shifts and different decks are in power all the time. (Source)
And although I may not play the format, because it is absolutely too much of a hassle to get into, I don't hate wild. If I had that much disdain for it we wouldn't spend time every week working on content for it on the site and I certainly wouldn't have put the time in to make sure that in our homepage deck widget, community members could set wild as their preferred choice to see decks; Wild was the entire reason we let people set their own default sort.
I say none of this to "try and get you to stay" or whatever, I'm just not letting this go unanswered because you said I don't care about the format. Also, if people really want to use "cause me to leave the site" as a threat, it isn't a particularly great one to ever use against someone so I recommend not doing so in the future.
The new cards aren't flagged yet with the internal Hearthstone id numbers. Data imports for patches take time and since Blizzard, unfortunately, released the new cards on the same day that they patched, our deck strings don't work immediately.
I've been preaching cosmetic sales for way too long. I hope it's Legends of Runeterra that has put this pressure on Blizzard to perform better in this space.
Now we just need a random hero option for out decks :D
Yup! Sometimes lore stuff doesn't get launched immediately on the main page because it is more "filler" style content (and its been a damn busy month so far). The goal is that everything is eventually promoted there though so it doesn't get missed.
Also, if you love the lore posts and want to see when they are published, we'll have a follow feature coming on the site soon (we'll have a front-page post when it goes live) so you can follow Goliath to get notifications when new lore guides are published (and any other content he ends up writing).
I can't be bothered to look it up but if memory serves correct, I believe Ben Brode back in the day had said they really don't want to show you losses ever for exactly that reason. If it was him that said it, I hope its the one thing the team keeps from his vision.
I love win loss ratio, and I can easily track that with Hearthstone Deck Tracker so I don't need it in-game, but it definitely would not be good for most players for exactly the reason you described. Positive statistics, and fun ones like how many Murlocs you've played or how many times you killed someone in a single turn, are way better to see. Though one could certainly argue how positive or healthy OTK is, it is a fact of life for card games =D
If it got more players playing, it would likely be a huge win for the mode and would help with possible problems skill-based matchmaking would bring.
Personally, I think they should go the route of "Heroic" Arena and regular, with no rewards for the normal offering like they do for Duels. It can be a very intimidating mode so that alone doesn't make me want to possibly waste gold on it, especially if all I'm gonna get back out of it is a card back that isn't really worth anything to me at this point. It also would mean they didn't have to give out tickets when they want to do special Arena events like dual-class arena for Halloween since they can just run that in the free mode as well. Turn the heroic arena into something more like heroic brawl with more kickass rewards with a higher cost to enter and leave that at the wins-losses matchmaking.
If they were to do more monetization through cosmetics, making Arena free seems like a way better way to earn money. Then again, I don't have access to the data they do so I could be completely wrong on this.
Like someone said last night on The Angry Chicken's 400th episode, I'd rather just draft Magic the Gathering anyway because its better than what Arena is.
This has nothing to do with ads. If I wanted to push more ads, we would have made individual articles for each card reveal and then done separate articles for each class and their spoilers. (In-article ads are certainly nice, but they are nothing compared to what we have in the header that everyone sees on a page load). Hell, we woulda gotten better SEO if we divided stuff up better too!
The reason for this format was primarily because space for content is going to be very tight over the next couple of days so by including our thoughts now, it lets us save that space for other articles that are planned. It's also a nice little test to see what people think about it. If it's popular, we'll maybe attempt to do the same thing during an actual reveal season. We have so many more staff members now that it makes doing real-time reviews easier.
We will be doing a full recap of the mini set a little later today which will have the cards in a more normal gallery format organized by class which will feel less chaotic.
I'm surprised that I'm even faster than the OoC front page. The mini-set has just been announced officially on YouTube: Introducing the Darkmoon Races Mini-Set!
It usually takes us an extra few minutes after announcements drop to write out our social posts, make our post image, format the article :P
Some serious hypefest going on today though helllll yeah!
It's the default site event that is active during a non-event period. Yes, it's not really supposed to be there, however, we also don't link very prominently to the page and the page itself isn't a pretty listing yet so I'm not too worried about it displaying. It may actually have a use going forward to explain some stuff.
Yup, it has allowed certain groups of people to connect that otherwise would not be able to in day-to-day life since it is such a small portion of the population. Now, this has also been a positive because there are some great social causes out there that have benefited greatly from this power, propelling knowledge into the greater public, but it's when this is used for evil that it becomes a problem.
Shit, the majority of my friend group is digital and I would never have known they were out there had it not have been for the internet. Such a great tool for meeting people that are close to you in niche interests!
Is it too hard to have a laugh these days? I didn't realize that one part of the community was strictly off-limits.
Similar jokes have been made at the expense of standard players as well, which greatly outnumber every other type of player in Hearthstone. People are passionate about the modes they like and I respect that, but at the end of the day, Hearthstone is meant to be fun and if we can't laugh together about how the community reacts to stuff, I really don't know what else to say.
This is the problem with the internet in general these days. People take stuff too seriously, are too polarized with their opinions, and it's too risky to say anything at all anymore. Well, that's one thing I'm not okay with and it's why we actually write opinion-based content on Out of Cards (you'll see writers give opinions fairly frequently whereas when we ran HearthPwn, that was a big no because how dare we possibly upset someone). Shit, comedians can't even say anything anymore because there is always a group of people that will get upset and cancel culture goes hard after them.
I think it's absurd that Blizzard won't make changes to cards that are clearly overpowered and hurting the game. But, Dean Ayala also said in his recent Q&A that maybe they need to gather more opinions of wild players to see if they're wrong. I can tell you, based on the years of talk about wild that I've been a witness to, Blizzard is wrong.
And although I may not play the format, because it is absolutely too much of a hassle to get into, I don't hate wild. If I had that much disdain for it we wouldn't spend time every week working on content for it on the site and I certainly wouldn't have put the time in to make sure that in our homepage deck widget, community members could set wild as their preferred choice to see decks; Wild was the entire reason we let people set their own default sort.
I say none of this to "try and get you to stay" or whatever, I'm just not letting this go unanswered because you said I don't care about the format. Also, if people really want to use "cause me to leave the site" as a threat, it isn't a particularly great one to ever use against someone so I recommend not doing so in the future.
Fixed the issue, sorry about that. Going to redo everyone's candy cane transaction and give you all the correct pin.
I won't be removing snowballs from anyone so if you didn't buy the snowball pin, grats.
Agreed, it could resolve with a more useful message =)
This was fixed around 30 minutes after I had previously replied, sorry for not responding again!
The new cards aren't flagged yet with the internal Hearthstone id numbers. Data imports for patches take time and since Blizzard, unfortunately, released the new cards on the same day that they patched, our deck strings don't work immediately.
This will be fixed shortly.
It's easy. I see Dynasty Warriors, I upvote.
Thanks for catching that! His release order, like Illidan, didn't change. My mistake for not including him in the list.
Going to be working on full hero preview videos soon!
I've been preaching cosmetic sales for way too long. I hope it's Legends of Runeterra that has put this pressure on Blizzard to perform better in this space.
Now we just need a random hero option for out decks :D
Yup! Sometimes lore stuff doesn't get launched immediately on the main page because it is more "filler" style content (and its been a damn busy month so far). The goal is that everything is eventually promoted there though so it doesn't get missed.
Also, if you love the lore posts and want to see when they are published, we'll have a follow feature coming on the site soon (we'll have a front-page post when it goes live) so you can follow Goliath to get notifications when new lore guides are published (and any other content he ends up writing).
I can't be bothered to look it up but if memory serves correct, I believe Ben Brode back in the day had said they really don't want to show you losses ever for exactly that reason. If it was him that said it, I hope its the one thing the team keeps from his vision.
I love win loss ratio, and I can easily track that with Hearthstone Deck Tracker so I don't need it in-game, but it definitely would not be good for most players for exactly the reason you described. Positive statistics, and fun ones like how many Murlocs you've played or how many times you killed someone in a single turn, are way better to see. Though one could certainly argue how positive or healthy OTK is, it is a fact of life for card games =D
If it got more players playing, it would likely be a huge win for the mode and would help with possible problems skill-based matchmaking would bring.
Personally, I think they should go the route of "Heroic" Arena and regular, with no rewards for the normal offering like they do for Duels. It can be a very intimidating mode so that alone doesn't make me want to possibly waste gold on it, especially if all I'm gonna get back out of it is a card back that isn't really worth anything to me at this point. It also would mean they didn't have to give out tickets when they want to do special Arena events like dual-class arena for Halloween since they can just run that in the free mode as well. Turn the heroic arena into something more like heroic brawl with more kickass rewards with a higher cost to enter and leave that at the wins-losses matchmaking.
If they were to do more monetization through cosmetics, making Arena free seems like a way better way to earn money. Then again, I don't have access to the data they do so I could be completely wrong on this.
Like someone said last night on The Angry Chicken's 400th episode, I'd rather just draft Magic the Gathering anyway because its better than what Arena is.
I'm sorry you feel that way, FortyDust =(
This has nothing to do with ads. If I wanted to push more ads, we would have made individual articles for each card reveal and then done separate articles for each class and their spoilers. (In-article ads are certainly nice, but they are nothing compared to what we have in the header that everyone sees on a page load). Hell, we woulda gotten better SEO if we divided stuff up better too!
The reason for this format was primarily because space for content is going to be very tight over the next couple of days so by including our thoughts now, it lets us save that space for other articles that are planned. It's also a nice little test to see what people think about it. If it's popular, we'll maybe attempt to do the same thing during an actual reveal season. We have so many more staff members now that it makes doing real-time reviews easier.
We will be doing a full recap of the mini set a little later today which will have the cards in a more normal gallery format organized by class which will feel less chaotic.
Confirmed
It usually takes us an extra few minutes after announcements drop to write out our social posts, make our post image, format the article :P
Some serious hypefest going on today though helllll yeah!
It really should be!
66, you get full playable copies.
I suspect you may be biased... hmmmmm
It's funny this got brought up again because it's coming out late tonight or tomorrow. Been a weekend project of mine.
Update: Few other things have come up preventing deploying this. Some work on notifications-related stuff.
Observant =)
It's the default site event that is active during a non-event period. Yes, it's not really supposed to be there, however, we also don't link very prominently to the page and the page itself isn't a pretty listing yet so I'm not too worried about it displaying. It may actually have a use going forward to explain some stuff.