Power level was definitely part of the problem, but because they were powerful, they saw a lot of play and therefore the other problems questlines had were much more noticeable. Nobody was calling for Bloodreaver Gul'dan to be nerfed when he came out, despite it being one of the best hero cards of the set; the calls for a nerf only started once Warlock got strong cards in a later set that brought it back into the meta. Today, nobody is calling for Orion, Mansion Manager to be nerfed despite it being an absolutely infuriating card to play against.
I think the biggest issue was that questlines (and regular quests and hero cards before them) made many games feel the same. As I wrote in another reply above, I think that's mostly due to the rewards and in particular the completion rewards, not the questline mechanic itself.
Regular quests had the problem that they were very hard to balance: you had to play with effectively one card less, which is a big drawback, but at the end there was a reward that would give you a huge advantage for the rest of the game. So there was a very narrow window between the quest being too hard to complete and the quest being oppressive.
Questlines solved part of that with their intermediate rewards, but they kept the big and permanent rewards for completion, so as a result they were just as oppressive as quests when they worked, but they also worked much more often. I think the solution is not to go back to regular quests, but to go further away from them, by having less impactful final rewards.
If you look at excavate, the final reward is powerful, but not a win condition in itself, except for the Snake before it got nerfed. Also the excavate reward is used up, instead of providing a permanent boost for the rest of the game. Looking at the original quests, The Last Kaleidosaur never became a problem, even as it became easier to complete over time in Wild, because the reward is a one-time thing that doesn't instantly win the game.
Non-permanent rewards are not the only option though: the original set of hero cards had the same problem as quests where the permanent reward in the form of a new hero power would dominate the game and make many games feel the same. Recent hero cards have shifted some of the power from the hero power to the battlecry and as a result have been much better received.
I noticed there are no Demon Hunter decks in the list. I've had unexpected success with Big Demon DH; small sample size but I've beaten several of the meta decks in this article. According to HSReplay the matchup against Druid is pretty bad, but if you're not facing a lot of Druids it could be an option.
It's a weird deck: it is relatively slow and its power comes from cheating out big minions, but the way it wins is by dealing face damage over multiple turns without requiring your big board to stick.
I'll switch to e-mail style quoting as well, as the formatted quotes are a pain to edit.
> I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
I think in this case "maintenance pressure" doesn't mean it's too hard, just that it eats up developer hours, which cost money. If so, both your and their explanation are different ways to describe the same problem. Apparently Duels wasn't being played enough to make it worth investing those hours there instead of elsewhere in the game.
Destiny 2 infamously removed content from the game because of "hard drive space" with no optional way to get it back.
Removing content is never popular with players, both from a personal perspective and from a preservation perspective. Despite that, it happens very regularly. I think they'll just wait until players get detached enough from their Mercenaries collection that they won't be as upset when it goes poof.
At least with Mercenaries, the lore impact is low, as most of the lore building was done with the Book of Heroes mini-adventures, which can remain in the game even if the Mercenaries mode disappears. From what I understand of the Destiny 2 situation (never played it, but I watch SkillUp's videos sometimes), there is important lore in the removed content that is now completely inaccessible to new players.
If Blizzard wanted to take the smarter approach here, and make some new tech, maybe they could make Mercenaries an optional download (it's a lot of data, images, code) which would slim down the mobile install of the game.
An optional download would be a great solution, but I don't expect them to implement this unless they get the feature almost for free because they already have the infrastructure. Hearthstone has some live content download support, but it still requires frequent client upgrades, so the system probably has some limitations.
Note that for apps on Apple's mobile store, it is forbidden to download executable code, probably as a measure to avoid code bypassing review. Therefore they could only make the data an optional download. As data is generally much larger than code, that wouldn't impact the goal of having a smaller download/install footprint all that much though.
I am so thrilled to have never sunk time into another MMO during the early "WoW killer" days. Played all the betas, always went back to the real crack dealer and it looks like I wasn't wrong for doing so. It's not even that all those games were bad, some of them had great stuff in them, but they all ended up lacking content at the end of the day.
The same still applies to modern live service games: even the ones that are good at launch struggle to provide enough content to retain players. To wean players off a game they're already invested in, the new game has to provide a much better experience than the old game; there is a huge barrier to entry.
And that's my problem with battle passes. I know I'm not the target audience for a lot of games, I don't have the time like I used to, but damn do I hate how battle passes feel so essential to the experience. I like having some cool stuff and games and it seems like the coolest always comes from the passes and they just take such a massive time commitment to finish. If I had a dollar for every battle pass I haven't finished, I'd be able to buy a few more battle passes.
Players spend more money in games that they spend more time in, so it makes business sense for companies to try and make players spend as much time as possible in their live service game. The battle pass is a way to buy player loyalty that the player is paying for; it's no wonder companies like them. But by optimizing the monetization of each individual game in this way, the market for live service games as a whole becomes worse, because players have no time left to play multiple games.
Isn't it insane how you can fire a dozen people, screw over the game hard enough to require cuts, but when you look at the overall picture if they cost the company 1.5 million a year and the game profits 50 million (totally making up numbers here) that higher ups see that as a positive savings?
The problem is that investors expect not just profits, but growing profits, which is not sustainable. This is a wider problem and I think it will take a lot of time and probably a few collapses before people will learn to be satisfied with just steady profits instead of expecting exponential growth in every market.
Investment in game studios was one of the worst things to happen to the industry.
Yes and no. Without investments, good AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't be possible either.
It would be a huge loss to the community to have a positive force like Regis being completely gone from the game.
Regis is fantastic when he's having fun. But when he's not having fun, that also shows in his work and I just feel sorry for the guy, as he's such a likable character. So I hope that he's able to find fun in Hearthstone in the future, but doesn't stick with the game when he cannot.
The loss of Classic was tragic, though they should have accelerated the timeline of era releases instead of never touching it. Classic makes a good Tavern Brawl though, and works way better as a "this shows up as a 1 week thing" occasionally instead of being permanently available.
Classic could also make a decent Twist for a month. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet.
Mercenaries was another huge loss, the mode had a lot of potential but failed to deliver in so many ways. Mercenaries would be removed from the client too if it wasn't for the simple fact they actually sold players content for the mode.
Mercenaries is in kind of the opposite situation as Duels: because it shares almost nothing with other modes, it takes up a lot of space in download and installation, but it also doesn't require much maintenance because no changes to shared resources can break it.
My guess is that they already have a plan to drop Mercenaries from the client and are just waiting a while to announce it, to soften the blow to people who put a lot of time and/or money into it.
What happened to Hearthstone being this platform for so many different ways to play with the game? (...)
We used to get some great viewership on Duels content. The mode was clearly doing well at different points, but maybe it just wasn't doing good enough for Activision.
Live service games in general are having a hard time: a combination of the market being saturated, player preferences changing and rising costs. It reminds me of the time when every few months another "WoW killer" was announced and few lived beyond the initial hype. There is only so much space for games that require a lot of time investment; the fact that one game is successful doesn't mean that a similar game will bring similar success.
What I think happened is that they fired a number of developers last year to cut costs and now they have to make cuts in the stuff they can deliver because they're short-staffed.
Steam's algorithms seem to work fine at filtering out the garbage, but they're not good at discovering hidden gems. As a player, I still have plenty of good games left that I haven't played yet, so it doesn't affect me all that much. I can imagine it's horrible for developers though.
I get most of my game recommendations from YouTube these days. There are several channels that review indie games and if something looks fun, I put it on my wishlist.
I had a few words that were completely embedded in other words: "Sled" in "DogSled" and "Snow" in "SnowAngel", "Snowmen", "SnowFort". While technically you can just highlight both the embedded and the longer word in the same space to find both, it does feel a bit weird.
Quietly leaving would be a disservice to the people who still expect updates to be posted. It's better to tell them what other platforms are available.
I think Alex Jones' return is likely not the sole reason, rather the straw that broke the camel's back. (edit: the "I regret not pulling the plug sooner" quote confirms this)
You also need an advantage after both decks are destroyed. I had a game versus a Chaos Mage for example where they got a lot of value from portals and random spells they had left in hand. Repeatedly shuffling minions and lifesteal really help you stay in the game the longest.
Maybe there are some good options in Druid or Rogue too; there are a lot of cards in Wild.
Same here... I kinda want one, but I can't think of many situations in which I would actually use it. I work from home most days, so not many commutes. And I put my PC in the nicest spot in the house because I spend so many hours behind it.
I will probably switch to Steam. The only Blizzard games I play are Hearthstone and StarCraft 2 and it's been a few years since I last launched SC2. I now have the BattleNet client running for just one game, while I also have Steam running because most of my other games are there.
Maintaining the BattleNet client does cost money, so if they can phase it out without losing too many players, I think they will.
Now that I think about it, like Light's Justice, the upgraded hero power was also worse in this particular deck compared to other decks. You couldn't really use it until after quest completion, because 2 mana is better spent playing two 1-drops. Even if you found Tour Guide, it was often a losing gamble to use the discount on turn 4 instead of waiting one turn for the reward's buff to kick in.
In general, hero powers are useful to fill gaps in your mana curve, but you don't have gaps in the early game with a deck full of 1-drops, while in the late game you have huge gaps and one use the hero power per turn is not enough to fill them.
I've also spent a lot of time trying to make the Paladin questline work. I think the main problem is simply the amount of 1-mana cards you need to play to complete it. If you put your deck full of 1-mana cards, you can complete it on turn 4 relatively often, but still not super reliably. And then you're stuck with top-decking 1-mana cards for the remainder of the game, so you better hope that your hero power is enough to close out the game.
As you mentioned, Light's Justice wasn't terribly useful as a reward: often I would just go face with it, to use up all the charges in case I would be offered a better weapon from Blessed Goods later. I don't think Light's Justice is bad in general, but it is the wrong tool for this deck: it helps you trade up, but if you're playing all 1-drops, you can't afford to make a lot of trades, as you have to be pushing face damage to close out the game before your deck's power falls off.
Another approach was to put more dude (Silver Hand Recruit) synergy cards in the deck, but even a few would dramatically reduce the chance of completing the quest on turn 5 and on later turns the impact of both the 7/7 body and the quest reward is no longer enough to carry the game.
I've seen some people play the questline in Wild in a Dude Paladin deck that finishes the quest later in the game. I guess that with enough synergy cards, the upgraded hero power becomes powerful enough to justify weakening your opening hand. In Standard, that critical mass of synergy cards was never there.
One thing that could have helped is more cards that generate cards like Blessed Goods, which always offers a 1-mana option because Paladin secrets cost 1 mana, but can also produce more expensive cards in a top-deck situation. Another option would be to simply reduce the number of cards needed to advance one or more of the steps. As the quest reward can't be played before turn 5 anyway (*), I think easier completion wouldn't have made it overly powerful.
(*) Turn 1 is the questline itself, so you have 5 mana to spend on turn 2 and 3. Even if every one of the three steps would take 2 instead of 3 cards to be played, you couldn't coin out the reward on turn 4.
By the way, while the deck is widely considered to be unplayable, the win rate I got was actually not that far below 50%: I didn't measure it exactly, but I got decent progress on the "win 5 matches" weekly quest. However, when it won, it was usually very close, while when it lost, it was by a mile. So the deck felt worse to play than what the winrate would suggest.
A deck variation that might be worth mentioning is the inclusion of Lady Prestor, which takes advantage of the fact that many dragons have good battlecries. Still, I think overall she didn't make the deck better, but it did add some more variety.
Mostly playing Talos Principle 2 at the moment. I'm about halfway the regular content now. It is more story-heavy compared to the first game, but the puzzles are still good (including new mechanics) and I like that there is more stuff to do outside the puzzle arenas (staying vague here to avoid spoilers). There is a sizable demo that gives a good impression of what the game is like: the start of the story, some old mechanics (for new players or those that need a reminder) and some new mechanics.
Baldur's Gate 3 with friends, but only once a week, so that will take a long time.
I still need to finish Afterimage. It's a good metroidvania, but larger than I expected and now I only have difficult areas left that I'm just going to fail at if I'm too tired, so progress is slow.
And Hearthstone of course; got to keep up with those quests to get gold for the new expansion.
By the way, now that this is Out of Games rather than Out of Cards, this subforum has become on-topic, so maybe a bit of reorganization would be good.
Even though Twist wasn't a big hit, I've never had to wait in queue for too long, so there must still be a decent amount of people playing it.
Creating a Twist season shouldn't be that much more work than creating a Tavern Brawl. But we rarely see new Tavern Brawls anymore either. Are they so severely understaffed that they just can't find the time?
Power level was definitely part of the problem, but because they were powerful, they saw a lot of play and therefore the other problems questlines had were much more noticeable. Nobody was calling for Bloodreaver Gul'dan to be nerfed when he came out, despite it being one of the best hero cards of the set; the calls for a nerf only started once Warlock got strong cards in a later set that brought it back into the meta. Today, nobody is calling for Orion, Mansion Manager to be nerfed despite it being an absolutely infuriating card to play against.
I think the biggest issue was that questlines (and regular quests and hero cards before them) made many games feel the same. As I wrote in another reply above, I think that's mostly due to the rewards and in particular the completion rewards, not the questline mechanic itself.
Regular quests had the problem that they were very hard to balance: you had to play with effectively one card less, which is a big drawback, but at the end there was a reward that would give you a huge advantage for the rest of the game. So there was a very narrow window between the quest being too hard to complete and the quest being oppressive.
Questlines solved part of that with their intermediate rewards, but they kept the big and permanent rewards for completion, so as a result they were just as oppressive as quests when they worked, but they also worked much more often. I think the solution is not to go back to regular quests, but to go further away from them, by having less impactful final rewards.
If you look at excavate, the final reward is powerful, but not a win condition in itself, except for the Snake before it got nerfed. Also the excavate reward is used up, instead of providing a permanent boost for the rest of the game. Looking at the original quests, The Last Kaleidosaur never became a problem, even as it became easier to complete over time in Wild, because the reward is a one-time thing that doesn't instantly win the game.
Non-permanent rewards are not the only option though: the original set of hero cards had the same problem as quests where the permanent reward in the form of a new hero power would dominate the game and make many games feel the same. Recent hero cards have shifted some of the power from the hero power to the battlecry and as a result have been much better received.
I noticed there are no Demon Hunter decks in the list. I've had unexpected success with Big Demon DH; small sample size but I've beaten several of the meta decks in this article. According to HSReplay the matchup against Druid is pretty bad, but if you're not facing a lot of Druids it could be an option.
It's a weird deck: it is relatively slow and its power comes from cheating out big minions, but the way it wins is by dealing face damage over multiple turns without requiring your big board to stick.
I'll switch to e-mail style quoting as well, as the formatted quotes are a pain to edit.
> I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
I think in this case "maintenance pressure" doesn't mean it's too hard, just that it eats up developer hours, which cost money. If so, both your and their explanation are different ways to describe the same problem. Apparently Duels wasn't being played enough to make it worth investing those hours there instead of elsewhere in the game.
Removing content is never popular with players, both from a personal perspective and from a preservation perspective. Despite that, it happens very regularly. I think they'll just wait until players get detached enough from their Mercenaries collection that they won't be as upset when it goes poof.
At least with Mercenaries, the lore impact is low, as most of the lore building was done with the Book of Heroes mini-adventures, which can remain in the game even if the Mercenaries mode disappears. From what I understand of the Destiny 2 situation (never played it, but I watch SkillUp's videos sometimes), there is important lore in the removed content that is now completely inaccessible to new players.
An optional download would be a great solution, but I don't expect them to implement this unless they get the feature almost for free because they already have the infrastructure. Hearthstone has some live content download support, but it still requires frequent client upgrades, so the system probably has some limitations.
Note that for apps on Apple's mobile store, it is forbidden to download executable code, probably as a measure to avoid code bypassing review. Therefore they could only make the data an optional download. As data is generally much larger than code, that wouldn't impact the goal of having a smaller download/install footprint all that much though.
The same still applies to modern live service games: even the ones that are good at launch struggle to provide enough content to retain players. To wean players off a game they're already invested in, the new game has to provide a much better experience than the old game; there is a huge barrier to entry.
Players spend more money in games that they spend more time in, so it makes business sense for companies to try and make players spend as much time as possible in their live service game. The battle pass is a way to buy player loyalty that the player is paying for; it's no wonder companies like them. But by optimizing the monetization of each individual game in this way, the market for live service games as a whole becomes worse, because players have no time left to play multiple games.
The problem is that investors expect not just profits, but growing profits, which is not sustainable. This is a wider problem and I think it will take a lot of time and probably a few collapses before people will learn to be satisfied with just steady profits instead of expecting exponential growth in every market.
Yes and no. Without investments, good AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't be possible either.
Regis is fantastic when he's having fun. But when he's not having fun, that also shows in his work and I just feel sorry for the guy, as he's such a likable character. So I hope that he's able to find fun in Hearthstone in the future, but doesn't stick with the game when he cannot.
Classic could also make a decent Twist for a month. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet.
Mercenaries is in kind of the opposite situation as Duels: because it shares almost nothing with other modes, it takes up a lot of space in download and installation, but it also doesn't require much maintenance because no changes to shared resources can break it.
My guess is that they already have a plan to drop Mercenaries from the client and are just waiting a while to announce it, to soften the blow to people who put a lot of time and/or money into it.
Live service games in general are having a hard time: a combination of the market being saturated, player preferences changing and rising costs. It reminds me of the time when every few months another "WoW killer" was announced and few lived beyond the initial hype. There is only so much space for games that require a lot of time investment; the fact that one game is successful doesn't mean that a similar game will bring similar success.
What I think happened is that they fired a number of developers last year to cut costs and now they have to make cuts in the stuff they can deliver because they're short-staffed.
Steam's algorithms seem to work fine at filtering out the garbage, but they're not good at discovering hidden gems. As a player, I still have plenty of good games left that I haven't played yet, so it doesn't affect me all that much. I can imagine it's horrible for developers though.
I get most of my game recommendations from YouTube these days. There are several channels that review indie games and if something looks fun, I put it on my wishlist.
I had a few words that were completely embedded in other words: "Sled" in "DogSled" and "Snow" in "SnowAngel", "Snowmen", "SnowFort". While technically you can just highlight both the embedded and the longer word in the same space to find both, it does feel a bit weird.
Anyway, nice to see the word search return.
Quietly leaving would be a disservice to the people who still expect updates to be posted. It's better to tell them what other platforms are available.
I think Alex Jones' return is likely not the sole reason, rather the straw that broke the camel's back. (edit: the "I regret not pulling the plug sooner" quote confirms this)
The video looks cool, but remembering the launch of No Man's Sky, let's not pre-order this one.
I'm not sure this is for me anyway: I like multiplayer with a small group of friends, but I'm generally not into MMO, which I expect this to be.
An excellent way to use Fanottem.
You also need an advantage after both decks are destroyed. I had a game versus a Chaos Mage for example where they got a lot of value from portals and random spells they had left in hand. Repeatedly shuffling minions and lifesteal really help you stay in the game the longest.
Maybe there are some good options in Druid or Rogue too; there are a lot of cards in Wild.
Since Steamcleaner is a Mech, Frequency Oscillator and Timeline Accelerator are ways to play the Steamcleaner one or two turns early.
I had completely forgotten about that. :)
I'll have to try it tomorrow.
As the portals are added after the game has begun, Steamcleaner works.
Same here... I kinda want one, but I can't think of many situations in which I would actually use it. I work from home most days, so not many commutes. And I put my PC in the nicest spot in the house because I spend so many hours behind it.
You mean acquire? That would be difficult, because Gabe Newell himself owns over half the shares.
I will probably switch to Steam. The only Blizzard games I play are Hearthstone and StarCraft 2 and it's been a few years since I last launched SC2. I now have the BattleNet client running for just one game, while I also have Steam running because most of my other games are there.
Maintaining the BattleNet client does cost money, so if they can phase it out without losing too many players, I think they will.
Now that I think about it, like Light's Justice, the upgraded hero power was also worse in this particular deck compared to other decks. You couldn't really use it until after quest completion, because 2 mana is better spent playing two 1-drops. Even if you found Tour Guide, it was often a losing gamble to use the discount on turn 4 instead of waiting one turn for the reward's buff to kick in.
In general, hero powers are useful to fill gaps in your mana curve, but you don't have gaps in the early game with a deck full of 1-drops, while in the late game you have huge gaps and one use the hero power per turn is not enough to fill them.
I've also spent a lot of time trying to make the Paladin questline work. I think the main problem is simply the amount of 1-mana cards you need to play to complete it. If you put your deck full of 1-mana cards, you can complete it on turn 4 relatively often, but still not super reliably. And then you're stuck with top-decking 1-mana cards for the remainder of the game, so you better hope that your hero power is enough to close out the game.
As you mentioned, Light's Justice wasn't terribly useful as a reward: often I would just go face with it, to use up all the charges in case I would be offered a better weapon from Blessed Goods later. I don't think Light's Justice is bad in general, but it is the wrong tool for this deck: it helps you trade up, but if you're playing all 1-drops, you can't afford to make a lot of trades, as you have to be pushing face damage to close out the game before your deck's power falls off.
Another approach was to put more dude (Silver Hand Recruit) synergy cards in the deck, but even a few would dramatically reduce the chance of completing the quest on turn 5 and on later turns the impact of both the 7/7 body and the quest reward is no longer enough to carry the game.
I've seen some people play the questline in Wild in a Dude Paladin deck that finishes the quest later in the game. I guess that with enough synergy cards, the upgraded hero power becomes powerful enough to justify weakening your opening hand. In Standard, that critical mass of synergy cards was never there.
One thing that could have helped is more cards that generate cards like Blessed Goods, which always offers a 1-mana option because Paladin secrets cost 1 mana, but can also produce more expensive cards in a top-deck situation. Another option would be to simply reduce the number of cards needed to advance one or more of the steps. As the quest reward can't be played before turn 5 anyway (*), I think easier completion wouldn't have made it overly powerful.
(*) Turn 1 is the questline itself, so you have 5 mana to spend on turn 2 and 3. Even if every one of the three steps would take 2 instead of 3 cards to be played, you couldn't coin out the reward on turn 4.
By the way, while the deck is widely considered to be unplayable, the win rate I got was actually not that far below 50%: I didn't measure it exactly, but I got decent progress on the "win 5 matches" weekly quest. However, when it won, it was usually very close, while when it lost, it was by a mile. So the deck felt worse to play than what the winrate would suggest.
A deck variation that might be worth mentioning is the inclusion of Lady Prestor, which takes advantage of the fact that many dragons have good battlecries. Still, I think overall she didn't make the deck better, but it did add some more variety.
Mostly playing Talos Principle 2 at the moment. I'm about halfway the regular content now. It is more story-heavy compared to the first game, but the puzzles are still good (including new mechanics) and I like that there is more stuff to do outside the puzzle arenas (staying vague here to avoid spoilers). There is a sizable demo that gives a good impression of what the game is like: the start of the story, some old mechanics (for new players or those that need a reminder) and some new mechanics.
Baldur's Gate 3 with friends, but only once a week, so that will take a long time.
I still need to finish Afterimage. It's a good metroidvania, but larger than I expected and now I only have difficult areas left that I'm just going to fail at if I'm too tired, so progress is slow.
And Hearthstone of course; got to keep up with those quests to get gold for the new expansion.
By the way, now that this is Out of Games rather than Out of Cards, this subforum has become on-topic, so maybe a bit of reorganization would be good.
Even though Twist wasn't a big hit, I've never had to wait in queue for too long, so there must still be a decent amount of people playing it.
Creating a Twist season shouldn't be that much more work than creating a Tavern Brawl. But we rarely see new Tavern Brawls anymore either. Are they so severely understaffed that they just can't find the time?