Sad times. Although E3 fell off pretty hard in its last few years, it's still sad to see it go. Summer Game Fest isn't perfect, but at least it feels a bit more organized instead of everyone making their announcements all at the same time on a show floor.
I remember first hearing about E3 in Nintendo Power, Nintendo's magazine, many moons ago. It became a dream to go to E3 but when later in life I was given the chance, the show just didn't feel interesting enough anymore.
The intention was to bring Oozefest back this year but when the time was open to do so, there was only about a week left of October and I felt it wasn't enough time to do anything (site events should be at least 2 weeks long).
I know how much people enjoyed our site events (I do too!) so I'm glad to hear that love is still there. ❄️
Realistically, we can't be a Hearthstone-only site. Even look at the biggest Hearthstone sites online, they aren't getting the traffic they once did and by extension they are not doing great. Larger companies are keeping them around because it's worth having the property in your portfolio, and not because it's necessarily very profitable. Look at our old home - I'm not saying we've done a super good job recently, but they've been quite a bit late to some reveals, they also can go many days at a time without posting anything particularly interesting. They don't have anyone properly paying attention to that site.
Yes, our primary folks visiting and interacting are still Hearthstone, but we are seeing more traction as time goes on and as we try new things for the "games" side of the site. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is Out of Games. The end vision is to continue supporting Hearthstone for many years to come and to have more than that too.
One of the most difficult things to do is to get people to sign up for your website. "Why do I need another account". This problem ultimately needs to be solved and we need to find good reasons for people to join our community and good places to promote the fact they can sign up - a lot of sites these days seem to not have registration systems and instead exist just to farm pageviews with crappy seo content - fun! Leveraging our community-focused side of the site to bring more people in is going to be a big thing going forward.
but it doesn't look like it works out so far
I don't disagree with you. I'm not particularly happy about it and it can certainly be a demotivator at times, but on the flip side it increases the drive to try new stuff. We're trying to push more content through social media, and new ways to engage with people, which has been working more this month and I've been happy to see some of that result in more site traffic.
Written media is on a decline, and it really pisses me off. It's difficult to hold people's attention because it isn't a 15 second TikTok clip with robovoice. Video is currently the king of content online and through those platforms, so not your own platform, you can build an audience. But, does that translate well to your own site? Not really.
On the social media side, man. There's your video social (YouTube, TikTok, Facebook/Instagram Reels) and your traditional link social (Twitter, Facebook) and Twitter is feeling like it is less and less worth it with them changing their algorithm to make discovery harder. Facebook, if you aren't paying them money, they aren't sending you viewers anymore. Then the video stuff, if you focus on video, now we're no longer focusing on our written side of the site.
Where else can you promote your website? Reddit... and Discords. Sharing your content on Discord servers though is varied and may not be allowed in a lot of places. Reddit is similar with every subreddit having a different rule set. Promoting your own content outside of organic google traffic is just harder than it once was. We also have a team that doesn't like promoting their own great content on sites like reddit, which you kinda need everyone to promote their own content instead of one person promoting all the content, just due to the way those places work, which could be some nice additional traffic.
actual visitor stats
I don't think we've ever really showcased our traffic stats? We've done a few infographics at the end of the year to showcase the community, but other than that, traffic stats haven't been public - though please do correct me if I'm wrong. Sites generally don't make that information available to the public as competition can more easily see what works and let's them copycat more easily.
We showcase view metrics on user-created content because people like to see how well their content is doing compared to everyone else, and it serves as a good metric, outside of votes, for people to sort content by to find good stuff.
add revenue stats
Similarly to traffic stats, this is private information. The vast majority of our site staff don't have access to this information and instead, they get to see a more general view of our ups and downs in traffic. One could certainly put some pieces together to figure out a rough guess of what the site makes, and maybe someone on staff has but hasn't said anything about it, but yeah, that's something we're likely to keep private.
What I will say, is the site is a money hole and I haven't been full time on it for a couple of years because I've been working full-time. I wish it wasn't the case because it has clearly had a large impact on the site, but running the site without ads for a good portion of the early days pulled us into a bad position for sustainability and we've been playing catch-up since. I haven't said anything about it in public because the last thing I wanted to do was cause alarm bells to ring and people leave the site because it didn't look like I was a big part of it anymore. Nope, I still am, just not the 10-12 hours a day I used to be. I could have also made some smarter decisions with our infrastructure costs, which are now greatly reduced vs our early days. Covid also fucked us pretty hard for a variety of reasons and I lost a ton of money from that. Oh joy!
discord
Discord, honestly, has never been a big priority for me. Discord is chaos, and if anything, takes away from the site itself. Insightful conversations on Discord are lost immediately because people won't be able to reliably find them in the future. I'm quite against Discord for that reason, so much good information is being locked behind joining Discord servers.
staff members
It's difficult to find quality additions for our team. I want people that will treat it seriously and have the time to help us push great content every single day and have multiple hours they can dedicated to the cause. I love our folks that don't have that kind of time anymore too because we get some genuinely good stuff from it and without a healthy mix of the two, I don't think you end up with as good of a product. The biggest issue though is people want to get paid and if your traffic isn't great, there's not a huge sell to working on the site when everything is revenue sharing based.
We don't have an unlimited budget because we're independant. I've had several offers throughout the years to buy the site which could have injected large amounts of capital into it, but then I lose control of it and I don't know how new ownership would feel in a year from then or even a month. Out of Games will always be independant, it just means the growth is slower.
plans for the site
Earlier in the year I talked about us being close to shipping a site update. We were! We were quite close to pushing it but changes kept creeping in and deadlines were missed and then heavy news cycles took away attention (and irl responsibilities too) and so that update never got pushed. Since then, a lot has changed with our big site update and I've got a few bits that still need to be styled before we can push it out.
I'll talk a little bit about expectations.
The forums as they are currently known are getting destroyed - however I use that word incorrectly because all the content is being preserved. I love the forums, I love forums in general; I love being able to chronologically look at the way people are having a conversation. Forums don't work for our site anymore. Every game will, going forward, have it's own "forum" and each of those "forums" will have the ability to tag topics so that they can be filtered. You want to look at Card Discussion? Click on the topic tag for it!
One big problem our forums have always had is having all the content spaced out into so many different sections. There may have been conversations happening in half a dozen different forums this hour, but going to each of those forums, they effectively look dead. People don't want to be a part of a discussion place that looks dead.
Portals. I mean, Realms. Games exist as a Realm on the site. Much like how today you can go to our Hearthstone Portal, there will instead be a Hearthstone Realm which will put our curated content at the forefront and the community's content alongside it.
Maybe we don't need to cover a thing about Hearthstone Esports because someone has made a really good thread for it and people are already talking about it there. Why split the discussion if we don't need to?
We're also going to start diving more into tools. Things like our Hearthstone Deckbuilder can give us opportunities to be more than a site that is focused purely on content. Tools help create content, yet, but tools let everyone share their favourite things or let us give people ways to calculate important information in games they love. Tools should be the biggest part of our pie, it leads community, which is in front of good curated content.
In addition to tools, activities like our word searches are going to be right up there too. Giving folks more fun stuff to do outside of the games they play in quick bursts can be a great way to encourage signups. Nothing concrete to announce right now, but we should be seeing our prototype of our next Hearthstone tool very, very soon. One of our new staff members is quite passionate about it and I've built a tool to make the experience even better. Stay tuned!
I also want to make it easy for people to ignore the content they don't want to see. Having a personalized feed - even if that means it's only for Hearthstone stuff, is important and is something the site update delivers on. The homepage itself doesn't change, but everyone will have access to a new page on the site that will showcase filtered information that would otherwise be on the homepage. I'd eventually like to add more customization to it, such as being able to embed our Hearthstone deck widget onto it, but that will have to be down the line and be a greater discussion with the community of what they'd like to see pluggable there when the time comes.
So, no, Out of Cards is not coming back and being 100% in on Hearthstone will never happen. We will have people that dedicate themselves to Hearthstone, and if you want to subscribe to an Out of Cards experience, you would be able to subscribe to the card games you like to see that personalized feed for them, but we are very much going in the overall direction of supporting games as a whole.
And with that, supporting games as a whole with a consistent approach to community. I cannot stand how insane reddit's moderators are. They rule with an iron fist on the stupidest of topics and most importantly, every single damn subreddit has different rules which can make it difficult to be a part of.
One set of rules, site-wide. No NSFW content, no spamming, no hateful people, just quality discussion.
I miss Out of Cards too and it was a brand that I was fully in love with. I wanted Out of Games and Out of Cards to live side-by-side but our reality was that the niche site just doesn't work as well because of the limitations. It also split our staff with some folks only on Out of Games which meant there were even less eyes on Out of Cards. Had Out of Cards been a larger site, I think we could have pulled it off better. One big, happy community is better for all of us though, so let's focus on making that happen.
Yeah there's too much cleanup happening for this to be someone just having fun. Hopefully the eventual Steam release (and maybe even console??!?) leads to a boost in players and they go and start development again. It certainly wouldn't need a huge team, but a dozen folks could keep the game going with solid support for years to come.
Not much has changed over the past couple of years. When I last played... in I don't know exactly when it was definitely better than its original launch (much more to do, many more characters, improved UI, etc.) so I'm going to assume other than the fact there aren't too many people playing which may impact queue times, the game is solid.
Free to play, I'm assuming Steam release will also be F2P should it happen. I should probably bust out my old datamining tools for the game and see if there are any references to Steam - assuming they still work.
I'd love to start creating some content around the game should time permit. We've definitely gotta have something happening to it soon.
I hope we can continue to support collections for many years to come. They are so vital to finding decks to play with at a glance, we've almost certainly lost some traffic due to broken collections and I hope we can rebuild everyone's trust going forward.
The other compendiums are broken due to mini-sets and we need to really fix that problem, but I confirmed in the database that these are the top 3 of all time.
Incredibly, Kayn had 338 5-star votes and Kronx had 496 which makes them both some of the most voted on cards too.
Runeterra has a lot of other issues right now, especially since our overall site data is out of date and there is a bunch of cards incorrectly flagged that need to be fixed.
Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 were, imo, justly given bad reviews.
D4 on launch was not a great game, season 1 still had lots of issues, and season 2? ehhhh. They are taking the game in the right direction though so given enough time, they should get to where they need to be for years to come.
OW2 was a horrible decision, monetization nightmare, and an insult to people playing OW1. My only hope for it at this point is with Blizzard and Activision being separated, we end up in a scenario where Blizzard can make OW2 more friendly. Tough call though since they clearly have some players playing it and it might be enough to support development and profits.
Monetization models for games as a service are just so weird
Yeah. It's kinda messed up how many games would be so good as $x purchases with cosmetic in-game purchases instead of this nonsense. I ran into that a lot with Clash Royale and is why I ultimately stopped playing it.
Rumble has such solid gameplay, and a bit of a grind is totally fine, just yeah "I just wish they'd make players jump through one fewer hoop with this upgrade system".
Yeah, after the initial "throw gold at them" it grinds to a halt.
I agree with dungeons being too long of a rotation. It super sucks if you can't do anything your first week in the game due to bad luck. I just so happened to join when it was Alliance focused and I picked Jaina as my first hero so I wasn't even aware that the dungeons weren't being uniquely tailored.
The talent system as a whole is unfortunately designed. I was able to achieve common on several minis unlocking possibilities of talents through a few weeks of play. With rare being so difficult to get though (and then epic) if you buy your first talent as the "wrong talent" then you're locking yourself out of talents with that mini for a long time.
I doubt we'll see the Battle.net launcher go away. There are millions of people conditioned to using it already, and people that use it avoid platform fees in other places when selling games or in-game content.
I do wonder if Call of Duty will eventually be leaving Battle.net though in favor of the Xbox app. It seems like Activision and Blizzard are being allowed to be separate entities again under Microsoft, so there's no real reason to keeping CoD on Battle.net. Maybe they push it there into a corner so they can get some sales still should people not want to go to Xbox or Steam, but no longer a main focus in the app.
I do hope Microsoft borrows BNet client engineers though to improve the Xbox app. So much potential but it just doesn't feel right. I don't know if the bnet team will have a good solution, but they've certainly done some great client work over the years.
I just hope their online is improved and people won't be able to cheat the system like has been the case for GTA5. The online can genuinely be quite fun, but then someone joins the server and teleports everyone somewhere or they just kill you over and over again with cheats. Invincibility when fighting is also bullshit.
Probably no change to that though, so bring on the money drops I suppose. At least that was the only positive thing to come out of a primarily client-side peer-to-peer architecture.
GTA as a series has some pretty messed up themes overall that aren't very "2023" so it'll be interesting to see what direction Rockstar goes. I hope they stick to their roots and give people some crazy stuff to play because honestly, real life is a hell of a lot closer to the picture GTA 5 paints than the magical fairy kingdom that people on social media seem to believe exists and "how dare rockstar do x y and z".
Sad times. Although E3 fell off pretty hard in its last few years, it's still sad to see it go. Summer Game Fest isn't perfect, but at least it feels a bit more organized instead of everyone making their announcements all at the same time on a show floor.
I remember first hearing about E3 in Nintendo Power, Nintendo's magazine, many moons ago. It became a dream to go to E3 but when later in life I was given the chance, the show just didn't feel interesting enough anymore.
You're right, the link itself isn't very useful! I've written a fresh guide to let folks know how they can get these connected, here you go!
https://outof.games/hearthstone/guides/343-how-to-sync-your-hearthstone-collection-to-out-of-games-with-firestone/
I've also updated our link on the collection page to go to the guide instead of the website directly.
Please let me know if you have any further questions.
The intention was to bring Oozefest back this year but when the time was open to do so, there was only about a week left of October and I felt it wasn't enough time to do anything (site events should be at least 2 weeks long).
I know how much people enjoyed our site events (I do too!) so I'm glad to hear that love is still there. ❄️
Now that you say that, I can definitely read it the way you intended.
You'd be surprised at how many people want to know the nitty gritty, and I get it, no one really shares that information and we're all curious beings.
I took look forward to the future and bringing back our holiday site event.
Realistically, we can't be a Hearthstone-only site. Even look at the biggest Hearthstone sites online, they aren't getting the traffic they once did and by extension they are not doing great. Larger companies are keeping them around because it's worth having the property in your portfolio, and not because it's necessarily very profitable. Look at our old home - I'm not saying we've done a super good job recently, but they've been quite a bit late to some reveals, they also can go many days at a time without posting anything particularly interesting. They don't have anyone properly paying attention to that site.
Yes, our primary folks visiting and interacting are still Hearthstone, but we are seeing more traction as time goes on and as we try new things for the "games" side of the site. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither is Out of Games. The end vision is to continue supporting Hearthstone for many years to come and to have more than that too.
One of the most difficult things to do is to get people to sign up for your website. "Why do I need another account". This problem ultimately needs to be solved and we need to find good reasons for people to join our community and good places to promote the fact they can sign up - a lot of sites these days seem to not have registration systems and instead exist just to farm pageviews with crappy seo content - fun! Leveraging our community-focused side of the site to bring more people in is going to be a big thing going forward.
I don't disagree with you. I'm not particularly happy about it and it can certainly be a demotivator at times, but on the flip side it increases the drive to try new stuff. We're trying to push more content through social media, and new ways to engage with people, which has been working more this month and I've been happy to see some of that result in more site traffic.
Written media is on a decline, and it really pisses me off. It's difficult to hold people's attention because it isn't a 15 second TikTok clip with robovoice. Video is currently the king of content online and through those platforms, so not your own platform, you can build an audience. But, does that translate well to your own site? Not really.
On the social media side, man. There's your video social (YouTube, TikTok, Facebook/Instagram Reels) and your traditional link social (Twitter, Facebook) and Twitter is feeling like it is less and less worth it with them changing their algorithm to make discovery harder. Facebook, if you aren't paying them money, they aren't sending you viewers anymore. Then the video stuff, if you focus on video, now we're no longer focusing on our written side of the site.
Where else can you promote your website? Reddit... and Discords. Sharing your content on Discord servers though is varied and may not be allowed in a lot of places. Reddit is similar with every subreddit having a different rule set. Promoting your own content outside of organic google traffic is just harder than it once was. We also have a team that doesn't like promoting their own great content on sites like reddit, which you kinda need everyone to promote their own content instead of one person promoting all the content, just due to the way those places work, which could be some nice additional traffic.
I don't think we've ever really showcased our traffic stats? We've done a few infographics at the end of the year to showcase the community, but other than that, traffic stats haven't been public - though please do correct me if I'm wrong. Sites generally don't make that information available to the public as competition can more easily see what works and let's them copycat more easily.
We showcase view metrics on user-created content because people like to see how well their content is doing compared to everyone else, and it serves as a good metric, outside of votes, for people to sort content by to find good stuff.
Similarly to traffic stats, this is private information. The vast majority of our site staff don't have access to this information and instead, they get to see a more general view of our ups and downs in traffic. One could certainly put some pieces together to figure out a rough guess of what the site makes, and maybe someone on staff has but hasn't said anything about it, but yeah, that's something we're likely to keep private.
What I will say, is the site is a money hole and I haven't been full time on it for a couple of years because I've been working full-time. I wish it wasn't the case because it has clearly had a large impact on the site, but running the site without ads for a good portion of the early days pulled us into a bad position for sustainability and we've been playing catch-up since. I haven't said anything about it in public because the last thing I wanted to do was cause alarm bells to ring and people leave the site because it didn't look like I was a big part of it anymore. Nope, I still am, just not the 10-12 hours a day I used to be. I could have also made some smarter decisions with our infrastructure costs, which are now greatly reduced vs our early days. Covid also fucked us pretty hard for a variety of reasons and I lost a ton of money from that. Oh joy!
Discord, honestly, has never been a big priority for me. Discord is chaos, and if anything, takes away from the site itself. Insightful conversations on Discord are lost immediately because people won't be able to reliably find them in the future. I'm quite against Discord for that reason, so much good information is being locked behind joining Discord servers.
It's difficult to find quality additions for our team. I want people that will treat it seriously and have the time to help us push great content every single day and have multiple hours they can dedicated to the cause. I love our folks that don't have that kind of time anymore too because we get some genuinely good stuff from it and without a healthy mix of the two, I don't think you end up with as good of a product. The biggest issue though is people want to get paid and if your traffic isn't great, there's not a huge sell to working on the site when everything is revenue sharing based.
We don't have an unlimited budget because we're independant. I've had several offers throughout the years to buy the site which could have injected large amounts of capital into it, but then I lose control of it and I don't know how new ownership would feel in a year from then or even a month. Out of Games will always be independant, it just means the growth is slower.
Earlier in the year I talked about us being close to shipping a site update. We were! We were quite close to pushing it but changes kept creeping in and deadlines were missed and then heavy news cycles took away attention (and irl responsibilities too) and so that update never got pushed. Since then, a lot has changed with our big site update and I've got a few bits that still need to be styled before we can push it out.
I'll talk a little bit about expectations.
The forums as they are currently known are getting destroyed - however I use that word incorrectly because all the content is being preserved. I love the forums, I love forums in general; I love being able to chronologically look at the way people are having a conversation. Forums don't work for our site anymore. Every game will, going forward, have it's own "forum" and each of those "forums" will have the ability to tag topics so that they can be filtered. You want to look at Card Discussion? Click on the topic tag for it!
One big problem our forums have always had is having all the content spaced out into so many different sections. There may have been conversations happening in half a dozen different forums this hour, but going to each of those forums, they effectively look dead. People don't want to be a part of a discussion place that looks dead.
Portals. I mean, Realms. Games exist as a Realm on the site. Much like how today you can go to our Hearthstone Portal, there will instead be a Hearthstone Realm which will put our curated content at the forefront and the community's content alongside it.
Maybe we don't need to cover a thing about Hearthstone Esports because someone has made a really good thread for it and people are already talking about it there. Why split the discussion if we don't need to?
We're also going to start diving more into tools. Things like our Hearthstone Deckbuilder can give us opportunities to be more than a site that is focused purely on content. Tools help create content, yet, but tools let everyone share their favourite things or let us give people ways to calculate important information in games they love. Tools should be the biggest part of our pie, it leads community, which is in front of good curated content.
In addition to tools, activities like our word searches are going to be right up there too. Giving folks more fun stuff to do outside of the games they play in quick bursts can be a great way to encourage signups. Nothing concrete to announce right now, but we should be seeing our prototype of our next Hearthstone tool very, very soon. One of our new staff members is quite passionate about it and I've built a tool to make the experience even better. Stay tuned!
I also want to make it easy for people to ignore the content they don't want to see. Having a personalized feed - even if that means it's only for Hearthstone stuff, is important and is something the site update delivers on. The homepage itself doesn't change, but everyone will have access to a new page on the site that will showcase filtered information that would otherwise be on the homepage. I'd eventually like to add more customization to it, such as being able to embed our Hearthstone deck widget onto it, but that will have to be down the line and be a greater discussion with the community of what they'd like to see pluggable there when the time comes.
So, no, Out of Cards is not coming back and being 100% in on Hearthstone will never happen. We will have people that dedicate themselves to Hearthstone, and if you want to subscribe to an Out of Cards experience, you would be able to subscribe to the card games you like to see that personalized feed for them, but we are very much going in the overall direction of supporting games as a whole.
And with that, supporting games as a whole with a consistent approach to community. I cannot stand how insane reddit's moderators are. They rule with an iron fist on the stupidest of topics and most importantly, every single damn subreddit has different rules which can make it difficult to be a part of.
One set of rules, site-wide. No NSFW content, no spamming, no hateful people, just quality discussion.
I miss Out of Cards too and it was a brand that I was fully in love with. I wanted Out of Games and Out of Cards to live side-by-side but our reality was that the niche site just doesn't work as well because of the limitations. It also split our staff with some folks only on Out of Games which meant there were even less eyes on Out of Cards. Had Out of Cards been a larger site, I think we could have pulled it off better. One big, happy community is better for all of us though, so let's focus on making that happen.
Yeah there's too much cleanup happening for this to be someone just having fun. Hopefully the eventual Steam release (and maybe even console??!?) leads to a boost in players and they go and start development again. It certainly wouldn't need a huge team, but a dozen folks could keep the game going with solid support for years to come.
Not much has changed over the past couple of years. When I last played... in I don't know exactly when it was definitely better than its original launch (much more to do, many more characters, improved UI, etc.) so I'm going to assume other than the fact there aren't too many people playing which may impact queue times, the game is solid.
Free to play, I'm assuming Steam release will also be F2P should it happen. I should probably bust out my old datamining tools for the game and see if there are any references to Steam - assuming they still work.
I'd love to start creating some content around the game should time permit. We've definitely gotta have something happening to it soon.
Moved to the correct forum.
I looked into the block reason and have taken steps to fix it.
Currently we don't have a way to display that. We should probably do a data dump for it to show everyone the full ranking list though. Noted!
Thank you very much for the support, goober!
I hope we can continue to support collections for many years to come. They are so vital to finding decks to play with at a glance, we've almost certainly lost some traffic due to broken collections and I hope we can rebuild everyone's trust going forward.
Kayn Sunfuryhad a 94
https://outof.games/hearthstone/expansions/ashes-of-outland/community-compendium
Kronx Dragonhoof was 92
The other compendiums are broken due to mini-sets and we need to really fix that problem, but I confirmed in the database that these are the top 3 of all time.
Incredibly, Kayn had 338 5-star votes and Kronx had 496 which makes them both some of the most voted on cards too.
Thanks for the feedback I just deployed the following fixes:
There is still an issue with the game mode dropdown that need to be investigated but its on the radar.
RIP fixing
Hearthstone collections should be fixed.
Runeterra has a lot of other issues right now, especially since our overall site data is out of date and there is a bunch of cards incorrectly flagged that need to be fixed.
Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 were, imo, justly given bad reviews.
D4 on launch was not a great game, season 1 still had lots of issues, and season 2? ehhhh. They are taking the game in the right direction though so given enough time, they should get to where they need to be for years to come.
OW2 was a horrible decision, monetization nightmare, and an insult to people playing OW1. My only hope for it at this point is with Blizzard and Activision being separated, we end up in a scenario where Blizzard can make OW2 more friendly. Tough call though since they clearly have some players playing it and it might be enough to support development and profits.
Yeah. It's kinda messed up how many games would be so good as $x purchases with cosmetic in-game purchases instead of this nonsense. I ran into that a lot with Clash Royale and is why I ultimately stopped playing it.
Rumble has such solid gameplay, and a bit of a grind is totally fine, just yeah "I just wish they'd make players jump through one fewer hoop with this upgrade system".
Yeah, after the initial "throw gold at them" it grinds to a halt.
I agree with dungeons being too long of a rotation. It super sucks if you can't do anything your first week in the game due to bad luck. I just so happened to join when it was Alliance focused and I picked Jaina as my first hero so I wasn't even aware that the dungeons weren't being uniquely tailored.
The talent system as a whole is unfortunately designed. I was able to achieve common on several minis unlocking possibilities of talents through a few weeks of play. With rare being so difficult to get though (and then epic) if you buy your first talent as the "wrong talent" then you're locking yourself out of talents with that mini for a long time.
I doubt we'll see the Battle.net launcher go away. There are millions of people conditioned to using it already, and people that use it avoid platform fees in other places when selling games or in-game content.
I do wonder if Call of Duty will eventually be leaving Battle.net though in favor of the Xbox app. It seems like Activision and Blizzard are being allowed to be separate entities again under Microsoft, so there's no real reason to keeping CoD on Battle.net. Maybe they push it there into a corner so they can get some sales still should people not want to go to Xbox or Steam, but no longer a main focus in the app.
I do hope Microsoft borrows BNet client engineers though to improve the Xbox app. So much potential but it just doesn't feel right. I don't know if the bnet team will have a good solution, but they've certainly done some great client work over the years.
I just hope their online is improved and people won't be able to cheat the system like has been the case for GTA5. The online can genuinely be quite fun, but then someone joins the server and teleports everyone somewhere or they just kill you over and over again with cheats. Invincibility when fighting is also bullshit.
Probably no change to that though, so bring on the money drops I suppose. At least that was the only positive thing to come out of a primarily client-side peer-to-peer architecture.
GTA as a series has some pretty messed up themes overall that aren't very "2023" so it'll be interesting to see what direction Rockstar goes. I hope they stick to their roots and give people some crazy stuff to play because honestly, real life is a hell of a lot closer to the picture GTA 5 paints than the magical fairy kingdom that people on social media seem to believe exists and "how dare rockstar do x y and z".
The update should be going live Fridayish, in time for updates to be made to collections prior to the launch of the expansion.