Haha, yeah, some of those pros get predictions so horrible wrong that it is incredibly amusing.
I like to give people an idea of what thoughts go into stuff behind the scenes when possible (usually when people bring it up) so I'm glad I was able to let you in on that.
Thanks for contributing and being a part of everything here. Never stop!
I don't disagree with you. There are definitely negatives when we incentivize discussing these cards and even rating them. I believe the potential benefits outweigh the negatives though.
To start, with votes. We get enough "legitimate" votes that I don't believe we're going to skew this in the wrong direction. Yes, there will always be some bad apples who go through and vote the same 1 star or 5 stars on every single card, but it shouldn't hurt things for our compendium because there are way more people voting properly. We also have the option of removing votes before compendium ships if anyone seems to be manipulating things. I haven't had to pull that trigger yet and don't think it'll happen.
Now, discussion. This is the one that has the best chance of going downhill. There are a few things I want to bring up though.
It gets more people to participate long-term
I actually had just brought this up on our site support channel on Discord. I've noticed that when we do these sorts of things, so people will sign up for an account or actually login for a change and start having meaningful discussion on the cards. This brings people into our community in a contributing role which is awesome! Some of these people do stick around and participate in other forums of discussion on the site too which gives us more activity, creating some nice positive ripples.
It can be hard to jump into a community, intimidating even. Giving people an easy way to jump into things is very important and something I think we could do better. Hearthstone is old, and a lot of us have known each other for some amount of time longer than Out of Cards has existed, so that can be tough to break into.
These are only initial reviews
A lot of what people are saying about these cards is going to be hilariously incorrect once the expansion comes out. One could argue it isn't even worth having the threads available since no one is going to be able to have a proper discussion anyway. This is especially true if one considers that the card threads that are created earlier in the reveal cycle have nowhere near a complete picture of what Scholomance looks like. Should we consider that to be a lower quality discussion because pieces of the puzzle were missing? Some might argue it is.
Lazy people don't usually participate
Looking back at the past couple of these, some people end up rating a handful of cards or with some "low quality" discussion on, again, only a handful of cards. It takes a LOT of effort to rate and discuss every card that gets revealed and it's clear even when we did card pack giveaways for participation, so it isn't always worth it.
Also, what one person may consider "low quality" or "unqualified" isn't necessarily the case and can be a bit of a crummy way of looking at it (I'm guilty here at times). Not everyone is able to correctly articulate all their thoughts, some people just want to say something is cool without giving it a full review, and others may simply want to ask questions that as newer players they don't understand but veterans it is first nature. Being more inclusive to all these types of people makes us a better, stronger community. We should try and keep things positive if possible and encourage participation.
With all that said though, if there are people just spamming nonsense, such as copy-pasting the same thing to every thread, I have zero issues with wiping their posts out. You can report posts you truly believe do not belong there and we can make a call on it. To those reading this comment, reporting should only be reserved as a last resort for spam and not just something you may consider "low quality".
Quick recap on the stages of design (I should really flesh this out as guide material since it is interesting)
Initial Design starts everything off. They name the cards, decide on their art, and give them their identities along with initial stats. This process takes 4 months.
Final design takes over after the initial design team gives the set a pass. They also spend 4 months on the set. The set is finished around 2 months before it gets released, though they do sometimes still make some changes closer to the set launch if they have balance concerns.
This means multiple sets are in production at the same time, with the core concepts of each one coming even before initial design. (Let's make a dark themed, old gods set!)
The December set which should release the first week of that month will have wrapped up final design at the start of October. That does give Gallon a month and a bit of time on the team during that process, but I'm willing to wager most of the time will be getting setup at Blizzard and learning about all their processes. The first set I'd expect to see any of his balance work / contributions on is April 2021. 3 sets if we count Scholomance not being released yet. Since I believe the entire team gets together to discuss themes for new sets, I don't believe he'd have any say in that until sets coming out in 2022 or possibly the last set of 2021.
Glad you enjoy both it and the recently updated card search!
The card search was a long time coming. I'm thankful we can wrap that new tech that was built for it onto other parts of the site now because database forms have not been the best around these parts :sweat:
Yeah, I hated that it was difficult to find those last ones without wasting a lot of precious time. I want to figure out something clean to get the cards you're missing on this page too so you don't need to check the expansion guide
You've asked for this for a couple of expansions now and I'm glad to present we have a functional version of what I've decided to name the "Tavern Crawl".
Everything here is on-site cosmetics, no digital giveaways for Hearthstone packs this time around. COVID has been a pain in the ass with ad revenue only starting to recover since it being junk all year, so doing a paid giveaway wasn't in the cards this time.
Good luck!
PS. This is all going to go away when the expansion launches with no more credit being obtainable. You've got a little less than a week until then, so get to it. I'll add a countdown in to make it clear when it expires.
If there is a specific golden legendary you want to craft, you should do it first because of how legendary protection works. Legendary protection prevents you from opening up a duplicate legendary card until you've opened all legendaries for that particular set.
When I initially looked at Blizzard data for the dual-class cards when reveals started, it showed they had flagged them as a "primary class" and then as the multiclasses. I wrongly assumed it was going to stay this way so our data import from the client today flagged all the dual-class cards as neutral!
This is fixed. The achievement was flagged incorrectly as not being active.
Looking into this.
The location where you need to comment for credit is found on the "Discuss this Card" buttons under each card in the Scholomance guide.
Yeah, perfect timing since stuff was gonna rotate anyway. Looking forward to what I can do with them when rotation hits!
Haha, yeah, some of those pros get predictions so horrible wrong that it is incredibly amusing.
I like to give people an idea of what thoughts go into stuff behind the scenes when possible (usually when people bring it up) so I'm glad I was able to let you in on that.
Thanks for contributing and being a part of everything here. Never stop!
I don't disagree with you. There are definitely negatives when we incentivize discussing these cards and even rating them. I believe the potential benefits outweigh the negatives though.
To start, with votes. We get enough "legitimate" votes that I don't believe we're going to skew this in the wrong direction. Yes, there will always be some bad apples who go through and vote the same 1 star or 5 stars on every single card, but it shouldn't hurt things for our compendium because there are way more people voting properly. We also have the option of removing votes before compendium ships if anyone seems to be manipulating things. I haven't had to pull that trigger yet and don't think it'll happen.
Now, discussion. This is the one that has the best chance of going downhill. There are a few things I want to bring up though.
It gets more people to participate long-term
I actually had just brought this up on our site support channel on Discord. I've noticed that when we do these sorts of things, so people will sign up for an account or actually login for a change and start having meaningful discussion on the cards. This brings people into our community in a contributing role which is awesome! Some of these people do stick around and participate in other forums of discussion on the site too which gives us more activity, creating some nice positive ripples.
It can be hard to jump into a community, intimidating even. Giving people an easy way to jump into things is very important and something I think we could do better. Hearthstone is old, and a lot of us have known each other for some amount of time longer than Out of Cards has existed, so that can be tough to break into.
These are only initial reviews
A lot of what people are saying about these cards is going to be hilariously incorrect once the expansion comes out. One could argue it isn't even worth having the threads available since no one is going to be able to have a proper discussion anyway. This is especially true if one considers that the card threads that are created earlier in the reveal cycle have nowhere near a complete picture of what Scholomance looks like. Should we consider that to be a lower quality discussion because pieces of the puzzle were missing? Some might argue it is.
Lazy people don't usually participate
Looking back at the past couple of these, some people end up rating a handful of cards or with some "low quality" discussion on, again, only a handful of cards. It takes a LOT of effort to rate and discuss every card that gets revealed and it's clear even when we did card pack giveaways for participation, so it isn't always worth it.
Also, what one person may consider "low quality" or "unqualified" isn't necessarily the case and can be a bit of a crummy way of looking at it (I'm guilty here at times). Not everyone is able to correctly articulate all their thoughts, some people just want to say something is cool without giving it a full review, and others may simply want to ask questions that as newer players they don't understand but veterans it is first nature. Being more inclusive to all these types of people makes us a better, stronger community. We should try and keep things positive if possible and encourage participation.
With all that said though, if there are people just spamming nonsense, such as copy-pasting the same thing to every thread, I have zero issues with wiping their posts out. You can report posts you truly believe do not belong there and we can make a call on it. To those reading this comment, reporting should only be reserved as a last resort for spam and not just something you may consider "low quality".
Quick recap on the stages of design (I should really flesh this out as guide material since it is interesting)
Initial Design starts everything off. They name the cards, decide on their art, and give them their identities along with initial stats. This process takes 4 months.
Final design takes over after the initial design team gives the set a pass. They also spend 4 months on the set. The set is finished around 2 months before it gets released, though they do sometimes still make some changes closer to the set launch if they have balance concerns.
This means multiple sets are in production at the same time, with the core concepts of each one coming even before initial design. (Let's make a dark themed, old gods set!)
The December set which should release the first week of that month will have wrapped up final design at the start of October. That does give Gallon a month and a bit of time on the team during that process, but I'm willing to wager most of the time will be getting setup at Blizzard and learning about all their processes. The first set I'd expect to see any of his balance work / contributions on is April 2021. 3 sets if we count Scholomance not being released yet. Since I believe the entire team gets together to discuss themes for new sets, I don't believe he'd have any say in that until sets coming out in 2022 or possibly the last set of 2021.
Most excellent!
Glad you enjoy both it and the recently updated card search!
The card search was a long time coming. I'm thankful we can wrap that new tech that was built for it onto other parts of the site now because database forms have not been the best around these parts :sweat:
Only open your packs. No online allowed =(
Yeah, I hated that it was difficult to find those last ones without wasting a lot of precious time. I want to figure out something clean to get the cards you're missing on this page too so you don't need to check the expansion guide
Hey all,
You've asked for this for a couple of expansions now and I'm glad to present we have a functional version of what I've decided to name the "Tavern Crawl".
Everything here is on-site cosmetics, no digital giveaways for Hearthstone packs this time around. COVID has been a pain in the ass with ad revenue only starting to recover since it being junk all year, so doing a paid giveaway wasn't in the cards this time.
Good luck!
PS. This is all going to go away when the expansion launches with no more credit being obtainable. You've got a little less than a week until then, so get to it. I'll add a countdown in to make it clear when it expires.
There are ways to do it, but it's a complicated setup.
If there is a specific golden legendary you want to craft, you should do it first because of how legendary protection works. Legendary protection prevents you from opening up a duplicate legendary card until you've opened all legendaries for that particular set.
Good reminder, I've made a note that you can't craft cards.
The whole reasoning behind it is so everyone that attends is on an even playing field of RN... at least that's my assumption.
Deploy is out with fixes for this in the deckbuilder, card listing, expansion guide, and decklists.
If anyone notices anything funky anywhere else, please let me know!
Hey all,
Going to get something out as soon to fix this.
When I initially looked at Blizzard data for the dual-class cards when reveals started, it showed they had flagged them as a "primary class" and then as the multiclasses. I wrongly assumed it was going to stay this way so our data import from the client today flagged all the dual-class cards as neutral!
This will be a fun update.
Hacker!
Hahaha! That's both awesome and sad =(
At least your backup plan is working well!
FeelsBadMan