And this is why the majority of the time I preface datamined info with "this may change etc." It is so important to cover your ass when you're going to be the source of something important and you know people are going to mangle it.
But, there are times, such as the XP with the rewards track, when I didn't bother with a disclaimer at the content of it itself because it was easily verifiable as true in the game. I do think some more care could have been taken to address that there were going to be other sources of experience, because it is quite clear people forgot about that, but I don't think in this case it would have calmed any of the rage.
I do love that I still get comments about Celeste. I especially love it when they are in the realm of "that was a bunch of bs". It shows even a proper disclaimer doesn't go very far with people and the general understanding that should exist of "stuff can be in a game client for a long time without a release" clearly doesn't.
I love datamining though and giving everyone insight into what's going on with the game that they aren't telling us about.
I know some people don't mean a literal Hearthstone 2, and they certainly mean well when talking about it, but the way I see it, we're already past HS 2.
The base of Hearthstone was a very simple game. We had standard, we had the forge, and we had a couple of card sets. Each time new features have been added to the game, it kept going farther away from the base. At this point, we must at least be on HS 4.
A new client is not needed and would be the largest waste of engineering time, time that could be better spent adding new features. Unity is an excellent platform to develop on and Blizzard has improved their tooling a ton over the years for it. If there are bugs, they need to fix the bugs, not create more by developing a new client. Performance problems? They are continuing to optimize the game which is great to see, though maybe not quite quickly enough for everyone's taste.
It would be a poor choice to scrap the interface. They do need to update parts of it (like the main screen only having 4 buttons to access all the content in the game, but for the most part, we're really lucky to have what we have since the HS team is generally good at UI/UX.
This expansion and the goodies that came with it was definitely a step into a new era of Hearthstone and I like it.
The achievements UI is bad. There is no sugarcoating it at all, they didn't do a good job. I should not have to click on them to earn my points. It is super silly that the points don't display on my friendslist, and it is a bit weird that there are zero rewards tied to any individual achievement.
I know Blizzard will argue that experience is a reward that gets you to the real rewards, but the experience on those DMF achievements is only going to last until the next expansion comes out. Where are the classic pack rewards for some of the more basic achievements for new players?
I agree that I may be too optimistic at times, but the way I see it, Blizzard backed themselves into a corner on this one.
If they truly were to not at least match gold rates from the old system after constantly saying they were going to, they are going to have an even worse time on their hands. They were unbelievably dumb for not giving us the full picture out the gate, especially when they had to of known we'd have the XP rates datamined day 1 since it was all client-side.
I think Duels is in an okay spot. I understand I may be in the minority with that and it is an excellent discussion topic, but the way I see it is as follows:
Not every mode in the game needs to have the same accessibility (mainly describing F2P)
Being a constructed-driven mode, it makes sense that a certain set of cards is going to have influence over it
Now, what I think is bullshit with Duels is the heroic mode. I see both sides of the argument with the mode but its just makes me feel off that we're still locked based on our collections. Its like the ultimate win-more mode requiring a solidly sized collection and then money on top of it to enter. The gamble is cool, I like that just like I like it in Brawliseum, but I don't like that it is inaccessible to newer players. I don't have any sympathy for older players who dusted their wild collections years ago because I always felt that was a silly thing to do when you never knew what the future would hold or if you may have wanted to hop onto the wild train (its why I never touched my wild cards to get dust), but it does suck that new players are penalized that heavily.
The dust economy in Hearthstone is definitely shit though. With most legendaries feeling mandatory to have, and even if that isn't statistically true, it still feels like it is which isn't great. Nothing feels worse than not getting that one legendary you wanted to play with and needing to disenchant four others to make up for it. I'm surprised we haven't seen more out there considering Runeterra has changed the landscape on what F2P means for a card game. I know it isn't anywhere near as large as HS, but I see more and more posts in the Runeterra community of people leaving Hearthstone for it due to the accessibility. We've been begging Blizzard for more cosmetics, make the game more about cosmetics, monetize it by providing cosmetics with good value and not just by adding more legendaries into the game.
Achievements I'm fine with. Achievements do not matter at all in the grand scheme of things, especially not the first round of them. I expected very little out of the achievement system because I know their goal was going to be to use key patches to add more "normal" achievements as a way to get people to hop back into Hearthstone. A lot of games do achievements differently but from my experience with WoW, I would never expect to get every achievement in a game anyway, especially considering the game is an active service and not something single player you get through and never again. Having achievements with different levels of accessibility is important to pave way for long-term goals and to allow for there to be variance in the number of achievements all the players are unlocking.
I still think they should leave in the later rewards while still giving out gold in addition to them. Giving people a handful of older expansion packs DOES NOT HURT AT ALL. We're talking an average of 100 dust per pack so with 5 packs you can make... an epic card.
Hearthstone as a whole though has improved so much over the past 2 years though which gives me a lot of hope for the overall lifespan of the game. Around the time when Second Dinner was formed, when I wished Yong and Brode a farewell from the community, I was actively looking to disengage as well because I wasn't feeling it anymore. I'm glad I ended up staying because things did a 180 and we started getting solid improvements.
There will always be something bad, but I think Hearthstone does a good enough job now with the good things that we have some room for mistakes, especially if we know it'll be fixed as is the case with the rewards track. They're only human, minus that devil Kotick, so the best thing we can do as a community is say we won't stand for nonsense and stop playing if it ends up becoming a shit show.
That's also why Out of Cards isn't just a site focused on Hearthstone (though admittedly lately we've been lacking in the other titles). I refuse to rely on one single company, especially one that has been making some interesting choices lately across most of their titles, as a source of primary income. If Hearthstone flopped tomorrow, it would be very easy to move on right now, not so much if we were only Hearthstone focused. Diversification ftw!
It is so disappointing when a company with the usual good UI makes these blunders.
Seriously though, why is Tavern Brawl so front and center? I know they don't want to abandon the box because its "Hearthstone", but it's time to take it out into the backyard and put it into a grave.
Or, have two modes (MTG Arena sorta does this). Have a simplified UI for when you're new and then swap to advanced later on. Not that MTG Arena should be used as an interface king, because it is so far from it, but at least I can find most of the modes there in a single menu with... WORDS!
I wasn't aware of issues with the adventure ones which is a shame because we could have gone full crazy and done some adventure spotlights before the expansion!
Oh well, just as good content down the line. There are definitely plenty of players who never completed old ones and with Duels and Achievements, they are worth going back to.
That's a huge oversight that needs correction. I forget what you used to be able to do to see if you won the round before it was over, but I know they patched it out for the same reason. Hopefully that is on their radar.
They did address this, I know we posted it somewhere...
Apparently, they only stored whether or not you hit legend, not from what ladders. Kinda lame since you'd think all that data would just be kept forever for statistical purposes but nope, storage apparently not worth it =
This part is okay because it opens up the gold to more players (Battlegrounds mainly since they didn't have tons of dailies) but yeah, the rewards pass needs to be more than just gold, packs, and heroes if you paid money
I hate bringing more negativity into a negative situation because negativity only feeds into more of it and we really, REALLY don't need more of that shit in gaming, but it all needed to be said here too.
Just select "Duels" before selecting a class, or, when you're in the regular builder, you can change the game format filter to Duels to unlock the additional functionality.
This is on top of the update on patch day which brought the new treasures and hero powers into the builder.
If people are spamming the same thing, they'll have their comments wiped and cosmetics removed after the crawl ends so they have zero chance of obtaining them again.
If you come across someone being dumb, private messages are always open =)
Card games by nature are expensive and if anything, Blizzard has helped move it in the other direction. Prior to the Year of the Phoenix starting, we received a huge update that gave us duplicate protection for all rarities.
Now, I know this doesn't help with the legendary problem, where players want more legendary cards than they get because they are arguably the most important cards in the game, but at a baseline, Hearthstone did get cheaper to play.
But, back the battle pass. The math is definitely not working for a chunk of the players as it stands right now which has been disappointing. My biggest issue though with the whole problem is that we don't have the full picture yet. Yes, Blizzard fucked up and should have provided us with the full picture and it would have been great if they were to actually provide us with a preview of this before it went live. Of course, they did not because they can't write a blog post to save their own lives, but when they do, they do so to bump some unfortunate soul's card reveal.
Blizzard needs to announce either an immediate boost to the base level of experience or they need to tell us what we can expect from legendary quests. Are we going to have quests appear that give us 20k experience? If so, completing a handful of those is going to net you some huge swings in progression as we get deeper into the pass and it would be in line with receiving a few packs from a legendary quest.
And yeah, honestly, the premium pass should have been included in the mega bundle. In fact, a big change that I'd like to see, and I was even considering doing an article for it because I think it makes for an excellent discussion point, is I'd love to see them move the cosmetic Hero that comes with the mega bundle into the premium rewards track.
We now know that they are willing to bring expansion pre-order bonuses back to the shop and they have mentioned wanting to do this with heroes. I have my doubts that the most important item to boost pre-orders is the addition of a cosmetic hero so if they just dumped that into the pass, it provides two ways of obtaining it. The more expensive way, buying a ton of packs and getting the pass alongside it, and the cheaper way of just buying the pass.
They definitely have some work to do with their communication. It really hurts to see because I've always heard we're improving, things are going to be better, we're excited to interact more. Then it falls flat multiple times during a year. Blizzard doesn't really seem to value their community team as much anymore and instead focus their efforts on streamers. I get it, they have huge, live audiences with a measurable impact which is perfect for the execs that just love to talk those live numbers.
I'm sure many of you remember when we'd get bundles of packs to giveaway (as did other community sites) or cards to reveal and now that isn't a thing anymore for the non-streamers. It isn't that big of a deal since the traffic for a dedicated card reveal doesn't really matter much (it just ends up as an image across twitter, fb, reddit so you get no clicks) but it was one hell of a nice gesture. Sure, I loved the Scholomance Robe and Shoes that they gave me, and the stuff that came in the Warglaive box (that was super awesome), but that isn't something we get to share as a community. The card dump is wasted potential after the final stream is over - not everyone needs to get exciting cards, had them out in batches of 3 or 4 and let people create some cool content around them.
Ultimately, yes, they have a lot to work through with the new rewards track. I think it's a good start though and we're going in the right direction with it provided they open up and give us the full picture so we can continue to do the math on it.
And this is why the majority of the time I preface datamined info with "this may change etc." It is so important to cover your ass when you're going to be the source of something important and you know people are going to mangle it.
But, there are times, such as the XP with the rewards track, when I didn't bother with a disclaimer at the content of it itself because it was easily verifiable as true in the game. I do think some more care could have been taken to address that there were going to be other sources of experience, because it is quite clear people forgot about that, but I don't think in this case it would have calmed any of the rage.
I do love that I still get comments about Celeste. I especially love it when they are in the realm of "that was a bunch of bs". It shows even a proper disclaimer doesn't go very far with people and the general understanding that should exist of "stuff can be in a game client for a long time without a release" clearly doesn't.
I love datamining though and giving everyone insight into what's going on with the game that they aren't telling us about.
I don't like the idea of a Hearthstone 2.
I know some people don't mean a literal Hearthstone 2, and they certainly mean well when talking about it, but the way I see it, we're already past HS 2.
The base of Hearthstone was a very simple game. We had standard, we had the forge, and we had a couple of card sets. Each time new features have been added to the game, it kept going farther away from the base. At this point, we must at least be on HS 4.
A new client is not needed and would be the largest waste of engineering time, time that could be better spent adding new features. Unity is an excellent platform to develop on and Blizzard has improved their tooling a ton over the years for it. If there are bugs, they need to fix the bugs, not create more by developing a new client. Performance problems? They are continuing to optimize the game which is great to see, though maybe not quite quickly enough for everyone's taste.
It would be a poor choice to scrap the interface. They do need to update parts of it (like the main screen only having 4 buttons to access all the content in the game, but for the most part, we're really lucky to have what we have since the HS team is generally good at UI/UX.
This expansion and the goodies that came with it was definitely a step into a new era of Hearthstone and I like it.
Honestly, it could be better. We're still really small so the effort that is put into a lot of the articles isn't really worthwhile.
I love that you love what we're doing though <3
The achievements UI is bad. There is no sugarcoating it at all, they didn't do a good job. I should not have to click on them to earn my points. It is super silly that the points don't display on my friendslist, and it is a bit weird that there are zero rewards tied to any individual achievement.
I know Blizzard will argue that experience is a reward that gets you to the real rewards, but the experience on those DMF achievements is only going to last until the next expansion comes out. Where are the classic pack rewards for some of the more basic achievements for new players?
I agree that I may be too optimistic at times, but the way I see it, Blizzard backed themselves into a corner on this one.
If they truly were to not at least match gold rates from the old system after constantly saying they were going to, they are going to have an even worse time on their hands. They were unbelievably dumb for not giving us the full picture out the gate, especially when they had to of known we'd have the XP rates datamined day 1 since it was all client-side.
I think Duels is in an okay spot. I understand I may be in the minority with that and it is an excellent discussion topic, but the way I see it is as follows:
Now, what I think is bullshit with Duels is the heroic mode. I see both sides of the argument with the mode but its just makes me feel off that we're still locked based on our collections. Its like the ultimate win-more mode requiring a solidly sized collection and then money on top of it to enter. The gamble is cool, I like that just like I like it in Brawliseum, but I don't like that it is inaccessible to newer players. I don't have any sympathy for older players who dusted their wild collections years ago because I always felt that was a silly thing to do when you never knew what the future would hold or if you may have wanted to hop onto the wild train (its why I never touched my wild cards to get dust), but it does suck that new players are penalized that heavily.
The dust economy in Hearthstone is definitely shit though. With most legendaries feeling mandatory to have, and even if that isn't statistically true, it still feels like it is which isn't great. Nothing feels worse than not getting that one legendary you wanted to play with and needing to disenchant four others to make up for it. I'm surprised we haven't seen more out there considering Runeterra has changed the landscape on what F2P means for a card game. I know it isn't anywhere near as large as HS, but I see more and more posts in the Runeterra community of people leaving Hearthstone for it due to the accessibility. We've been begging Blizzard for more cosmetics, make the game more about cosmetics, monetize it by providing cosmetics with good value and not just by adding more legendaries into the game.
Achievements I'm fine with. Achievements do not matter at all in the grand scheme of things, especially not the first round of them. I expected very little out of the achievement system because I know their goal was going to be to use key patches to add more "normal" achievements as a way to get people to hop back into Hearthstone. A lot of games do achievements differently but from my experience with WoW, I would never expect to get every achievement in a game anyway, especially considering the game is an active service and not something single player you get through and never again. Having achievements with different levels of accessibility is important to pave way for long-term goals and to allow for there to be variance in the number of achievements all the players are unlocking.
I still think they should leave in the later rewards while still giving out gold in addition to them. Giving people a handful of older expansion packs DOES NOT HURT AT ALL. We're talking an average of 100 dust per pack so with 5 packs you can make... an epic card.
Hearthstone as a whole though has improved so much over the past 2 years though which gives me a lot of hope for the overall lifespan of the game. Around the time when Second Dinner was formed, when I wished Yong and Brode a farewell from the community, I was actively looking to disengage as well because I wasn't feeling it anymore. I'm glad I ended up staying because things did a 180 and we started getting solid improvements.
There will always be something bad, but I think Hearthstone does a good enough job now with the good things that we have some room for mistakes, especially if we know it'll be fixed as is the case with the rewards track. They're only human, minus that devil Kotick, so the best thing we can do as a community is say we won't stand for nonsense and stop playing if it ends up becoming a shit show.
That's also why Out of Cards isn't just a site focused on Hearthstone (though admittedly lately we've been lacking in the other titles). I refuse to rely on one single company, especially one that has been making some interesting choices lately across most of their titles, as a source of primary income. If Hearthstone flopped tomorrow, it would be very easy to move on right now, not so much if we were only Hearthstone focused. Diversification ftw!
Yup, yup, and yup.
It is so disappointing when a company with the usual good UI makes these blunders.
Seriously though, why is Tavern Brawl so front and center? I know they don't want to abandon the box because its "Hearthstone", but it's time to take it out into the backyard and put it into a grave.
Or, have two modes (MTG Arena sorta does this). Have a simplified UI for when you're new and then swap to advanced later on. Not that MTG Arena should be used as an interface king, because it is so far from it, but at least I can find most of the modes there in a single menu with... WORDS!
Here's everything you need to know about the currencies (or not need to know since its China exclusive)
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/587-new-hearthstone-currencies-possibly-coming-arcane-orbs-runestones
Agreed. Stupid design choice.
They also should have included a description of what you did when you get the popup saying it was earned.
You would be correct but I goofed. Shoulda said CET!
You're most welcome :)
I wasn't aware of issues with the adventure ones which is a shame because we could have gone full crazy and done some adventure spotlights before the expansion!
Oh well, just as good content down the line. There are definitely plenty of players who never completed old ones and with Duels and Achievements, they are worth going back to.
That's a huge oversight that needs correction. I forget what you used to be able to do to see if you won the round before it was over, but I know they patched it out for the same reason. Hopefully that is on their radar.
They did address this, I know we posted it somewhere...
Apparently, they only stored whether or not you hit legend, not from what ladders. Kinda lame since you'd think all that data would just be kept forever for statistical purposes but nope, storage apparently not worth it =
This part is okay because it opens up the gold to more players (Battlegrounds mainly since they didn't have tons of dailies) but yeah, the rewards pass needs to be more than just gold, packs, and heroes if you paid money
I hate bringing more negativity into a negative situation because negativity only feeds into more of it and we really, REALLY don't need more of that shit in gaming, but it all needed to be said here too.
Hey all! Just updated our deckbuilder so that it supports the new expansion's cards.
This isn't live in Hearthstone until tomorrow, but I figured we could at least get the theorycraft game started.
You can access the duels deckbuilder within the regular deckbuilder ->
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/deckbuilder/
Just select "Duels" before selecting a class, or, when you're in the regular builder, you can change the game format filter to Duels to unlock the additional functionality.
This is on top of the update on patch day which brought the new treasures and hero powers into the builder.
We're just training everyone to learn the cards =)
Hasn't really been a problem in the past tbh.
If people are spamming the same thing, they'll have their comments wiped and cosmetics removed after the crawl ends so they have zero chance of obtaining them again.
If you come across someone being dumb, private messages are always open =)
Compendium will arrive tomorrow morning, a few hours before the expansion launches.
I'm going to say something unpopular.
I don't think Hearthstone is too expensive.
Card games by nature are expensive and if anything, Blizzard has helped move it in the other direction. Prior to the Year of the Phoenix starting, we received a huge update that gave us duplicate protection for all rarities.
Now, I know this doesn't help with the legendary problem, where players want more legendary cards than they get because they are arguably the most important cards in the game, but at a baseline, Hearthstone did get cheaper to play.
But, back the battle pass. The math is definitely not working for a chunk of the players as it stands right now which has been disappointing. My biggest issue though with the whole problem is that we don't have the full picture yet. Yes, Blizzard fucked up and should have provided us with the full picture and it would have been great if they were to actually provide us with a preview of this before it went live. Of course, they did not because they can't write a blog post to save their own lives, but when they do, they do so to bump some unfortunate soul's card reveal.
Blizzard needs to announce either an immediate boost to the base level of experience or they need to tell us what we can expect from legendary quests. Are we going to have quests appear that give us 20k experience? If so, completing a handful of those is going to net you some huge swings in progression as we get deeper into the pass and it would be in line with receiving a few packs from a legendary quest.
And yeah, honestly, the premium pass should have been included in the mega bundle. In fact, a big change that I'd like to see, and I was even considering doing an article for it because I think it makes for an excellent discussion point, is I'd love to see them move the cosmetic Hero that comes with the mega bundle into the premium rewards track.
We now know that they are willing to bring expansion pre-order bonuses back to the shop and they have mentioned wanting to do this with heroes. I have my doubts that the most important item to boost pre-orders is the addition of a cosmetic hero so if they just dumped that into the pass, it provides two ways of obtaining it. The more expensive way, buying a ton of packs and getting the pass alongside it, and the cheaper way of just buying the pass.
They definitely have some work to do with their communication. It really hurts to see because I've always heard we're improving, things are going to be better, we're excited to interact more. Then it falls flat multiple times during a year. Blizzard doesn't really seem to value their community team as much anymore and instead focus their efforts on streamers. I get it, they have huge, live audiences with a measurable impact which is perfect for the execs that just love to talk those live numbers.
I'm sure many of you remember when we'd get bundles of packs to giveaway (as did other community sites) or cards to reveal and now that isn't a thing anymore for the non-streamers. It isn't that big of a deal since the traffic for a dedicated card reveal doesn't really matter much (it just ends up as an image across twitter, fb, reddit so you get no clicks) but it was one hell of a nice gesture. Sure, I loved the Scholomance Robe and Shoes that they gave me, and the stuff that came in the Warglaive box (that was super awesome), but that isn't something we get to share as a community. The card dump is wasted potential after the final stream is over - not everyone needs to get exciting cards, had them out in batches of 3 or 4 and let people create some cool content around them.
Ultimately, yes, they have a lot to work through with the new rewards track. I think it's a good start though and we're going in the right direction with it provided they open up and give us the full picture so we can continue to do the math on it.
Ramble out.
Guilty