Today's Post: Some stuff and Marry Christmas

Hello everyone and Merry X-mas, whoe whoe whoe and what not.

I've tuned in today after having noticed two things on the Blizz post tracker, that I believe were interesting to discuss and mention. One of them being the following announcement made by Community Manager Keganbe:

Thank you for helping us test our very first Ranked Play season! This season is intended to conclude on January 2nd, so be sure to wrap up your climb up the ladder before that date. Once the season is over, everyone’s ranking will be reset back to Rank 25, and Test Season 2 will begin!

During the course of this first test season we’ve gotten some very valuable feedback and data from you regarding the new Ranked Play system. We greatly appreciate your efforts in helping us test this updated Play mode, and we look forward to seeing your future feedback in Test Season 2. In the future, once the Test Seasons have concluded, we look forward to adding our Ranked Play rewards: Alternate card backs and Golden Heroes. We can’t move on without your help! 

Be sure to continue reporting bugs on our Bug Report forum here, and give us your feedback on Ranked Play mode on our general discussion forum here. 

Thank you for helping us test Ranked Play mode!

Edited by Aratil on 12/20/2013 4:59 PM PST (I wonder what it was that Aratil edited on another mod's post :p)

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/10974517629#1

Not much to comment here yet, but I'm sure I'm going to come up with something soon :D All in all I was just discussing the other day with a m8, that they should and somehow need to create more incentive for ranked play too. I just hope the incentive wont revolve around spending more cash. So ... 

The second thing I found to be relevant to my interest as I took the time to read through it's pages and posts, was the feedback a certain "stop nerfing everything" post got from Blizzard and even more so, from of a few members of the community. To be honest, I haven't seen this happen before, in any Blizz game to this day, where more than one or two guise are in tune to the same "radical" idea I've proposed and noticed time and time again, and basically something I've been bitching about for years now. More recently in posts such as this one: A plea to Blizzard and some of it's community.

The post that squeezed an answer from Blizz wasn't some noble well written complaint or the eloquent voicing of one's opinions and thoughts. No, it was called "Blizzard instead of nerfing everything maybe buff?" and it got both an answer from a community mod manager as well as several other interesting feedback bits that I for one rarely (if ever) read on the Blizzard forums when it came to nerfs. The usual modus operandi revolved around a hate and vomit festival where the nerfed "benefactors" of a given "overpowered something" were going against the larger "QQing/bitching by default" player base. And this was the place where unknowingly we were chosen to bare witness to a magical moment. The birth of something truly special that I can only imagine would look like this once it came of age:

That is, the birth of a new kind of "gamer", a type that only came into being along with the internet and through the power of community forums. You see, eons ago, children would only have the option to smash their consoles to bits if they were unable to go against the extraordinary challenges imposed by a given game they played, or maybe go outside and play, or (and this may sound a bit extreme but bare with me here), LEARN how to overcome a certain obstacle and move on! I saw it happen with my own eyes!

Anyhow, this new breed of forum-child-"gamers" (there was a time when declaring that you are a "gamer" was the equivalent of saying you are a professional wanker, or a professional TV watcher and the fact that you spend your free time playing games wasn't believed to be an actual achievement in life), stood out from the rest due to the accidental invention of a standard formula to be defined by, that can be widely applied to explain such cases.

For the sake of example we will use the most common known scenario that can easily be explained and summed up in the following form:

"Bob plays X", "X is OP", "Bob gets raped by Y cuz he's nub" = "Y is OP, NURF!"

x - may stand for paladin (for the sake of example)

y - may stand for rogue (for the sake of example)

And Bob is a very well known fan of many many games and is no stranger to other communities outside the Blizzard "family". You may have met or come across Bob in games such as GW2, PoE, LoL, CoD and many more.

Now don't get me wrong, of course there are plenty of cases where nerfs are actually addressing a problem hands on. When they are the proper course of action and are actually aimed at fixing a very particular problem and doing a great job in this respect. This however doesn't count towards the birth of Bob. No matter what a developer/company does, there will always be a Bob. Maybe even you were a Bob sometimes and didn't even know it! Hell, I myself may have been a Bob several times, even despite all the time I usually take before actually thinking some particular mechanic or bunch of mechanics in a game may have mistakenly caused a bit of a shortcut towards achieving your goal: the misfortune of another.

However, if we are to pursue our theoretical approach further, we may notice the existence or emergence of yet another case, that is in this same category but at the same time different in many ways. That is, what some people in posts such as THIS ONE, call knee-jerk nerfs, and where community managers declare amongst other universal truths, things such as:

Nerfing (and buffing) cards are both things that require delicate balance. We've stated that we don't want to be making constant changes to cards, and it takes time to see what changes may be necessary to cards over an extended period of time. We would rather make the correct change to a card once than make multiple changes to a card as a knee-jerk reaction.

While the 1st statement is entirely true, I cannot come to terms with the last part of this phrase and while in some cases it is the proper and natural course of action as stated before, there are other cases in which it simply tells us how little someone knows, or cares in respect to the actual quality and mechanics of a game. Or even worse, it tells us of the actual motives that stand behind a product. Of course the primary objective of everything human sadly revolves around money and it is also the primary objective of a corporation, company, firm, etc. but then again, there's a difference between say making drugs to combat disease or making disease in order to produce drugs. It is, in the end a matter of personal choice.

This course of action, where aiming for one particular problem is usually the best case scenario. When one can say for sure that focusing change on a single target will produce the desired overall result, or when that particular change actually solves the problem. However, the problem from my point of view comes from those cases where it is done simply out of convenience. Of course it is easier to act upon one particular thing rather than going through the entire machine and replacing and tuning it's components accordingly. But there are times when "fixing" one thing and not caring or taking time to view the bigger picture, only leads to the malfunction or wearing out other parts in the "machine" or engine or whatever floats your goat again.

And somewhat in tune with this idea, I've read several posts, ranging from people lashing out at the blue poster to others voicing out their own subjective feelings towards different aspects of the game. Such as this guy:

Your entire PR essay is simply countered by the state of Hunters in this game. You are the ones who have direct access to data that shows Hunters are non-existent in higher (not highest, HIGHER) ranked play. They are unplayable in current meta, hell, they are unplayable in any meta in this state.

Your balance was to completely change Unleash card, not balance it/tweak it, completely change. Even if you knew Hunters have just ONE viable deck that was fully dependable on that card - you completely changed it and didn't do any other tweaks to the class. Now that wasn't enough, wasn't it? You had to nerf another crucial part of the Hunter's gameplay, all needed Buzzard change. Amazing balance insight!

You don't need careful thinking and time to see something is terribly wrong with Hunters and yet you are doing nothing to make that class better.

I would be ashamed if I were here to defend current balancing of Hearthstone with such an explosive evidence that shows something is wrong with how you handle balance in this game.

Maybe your balancing team knows for some really good Hunter decks, do they care to enlighten us how we should play this class and not get DESTROYED by everyone and everything? Please!

or

I agree with the logic of the OP. Its the nature of card games that theres always going to be a "best" strategy. Nerfing that is only going to create another "best" option. And then that will get nerfed. Rinse and repeat. Eventually everything will get nerfed into the ground to the point where nothing does anything. There needs to be buffing to balance the nerfing.

As for other mechanics this other guy enlightens us and tells us that:

They will not be adding new keywords (as in battlecry,deathrattle etc) until the first expansion, the adventures which are mini expansions will add new cards but presumably just new takes on the existing mechanics.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwQaBHPeoGQ (Valuetown interview with Eric Dodds from blizzard)

And this wraps up my butthurt for Christmas and I wish you all a great day, a Merry Christmas, festivus, or whatever you guys are going for and piles of things you don't really need ... or perhaps actual stuff you do need!

I'll end the post with a random dirty Christmas joke:

A plea to Blizzard and some of it's community

Hello everyone. 

For today I've decided to prepare a boring old "speech" aimed to address a few of my "fears". I have created the exact same topic on the official US HS forums, HERE. However from the looks of it and to my own dismay (even though it is pretty much something to be expected, most people don't really "care" so to speak; they only voice their own problems when and if it starts to squeeze them by the balls), it is not attracting too much interest nor is it generating discussions.

As some of you may have noticed by now (since I've been seeing some people from Germany, the US, Serbia and other coming back to read/view my ramblings on a daily basis ), I am a casual HS player, I often watch streams and vids from "popular" streamers, I've been a Blizzard costumers for years now (started with Warcraft 2) and I currently write on this noob blog called The Darkshire (a small town in Duskwood back in the good ol' days :p) Hearthstone Club.

What I am about to address is not meant to offend (even tho experience tells me that is never entirely possible). It is simply something I dread and something that should be brought up and discussed since it focuses something we do as a hobby, something we invest time in and as such, it should be of interest to us all.

Reading through some of the topics and posts, after today's patch and after viewing Kripp's new vid, I simply felt the need to lay out my thoughts in regard to where I feel the game might be headed (as well as through the lens of past experiences and examples). I believe there is a very important issue that needs to be voiced and discussed. Personally I find it to be a crucial part of any game that is looking for fun and variety. Even more so, a game that uses a class system.

That "thing" basically revolves around the idea of changing stuff around enough to make every class basically feel the same. Stripping a class of it's specific mechanics, what made it be unique, what made it different and fun to play. This is not about the recent nerfs really, it's just something I believe has happened to other games I loved and I'd hate to see it happen here too.

In this respect, I would ask you all to be moderate and thoughtful with what you wish for. At the same time, I sincerely hope Blizzard won't take the easy way out, and will in fact try to tone classes down around themselves, taking the time to think it through in order to avoid ending up with the same mechanics on every class, only with different names (just like...some other game I know and used to play :p).

In any case, this is something I believe concerns us all and lastly this is what I personally think.

P.S. For the sake of clarity, I will underline (there we go :D) the fact that this has nothing to do with a particular nerf (I hate nerfs no matter what since I believe they create a never ending circle of hate and further nerfs)! It is merely directed at game balance in the detriment of making a certain tactic, mechanic, setup, deck, class and so on, feel just the same as others (e.g. damage, heal, taunt, full stop).

And here's Force on the same issue:

Blizzard! Y U no more listen to children! Y U learn PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE! Check my 1st post on this blog for an extended story about this. I've been saying this for years, in WoW, in D3 and now here. Please wake up!

Link to forum thread: http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/10973847345#1

Thank you for reading. Have a beautiful time!

Hearthstone Patch News: Mages in for a slight "nerf" and arenas getting fixed

Blizzard is on the verge of implementing a new patch for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. The update was announced not so long ago by community manager Zhydaris and it is aimed to address two issues: Arenas and ... Mages. (You know I just die for nerfs in games)

It doesn't come as a surprise that yet another class gets it's cards fiddled around with, especially when it comes to Mages. That story my friends is as old as Blizzard ... as a matter of fact the Mage uses Blizzard as a spell and not the other way around! :p

Mages were generally built into a rather versatile class, successfully fulfilling the role of nukers and crowd controllers, using several tools in order to increase mobility, survivability and baking strudels. The overall combining of these traits have more than often caused Mages to be frowned upon and to cause frustration when going against them but were generally considered a great asset to have in your team. Avoiding going into more specific discussions and transitions that the Blizzard Mage concept went through, it seems in Hearthstone they've been met with the same strong reaction from their opponents. Nerfs are rarely good and such balances may cause these changes to backfire in the long run as they lead to a never ending circle of QQs.

However, we may say that currently Mage decks built around ice spells are a bit overpowered. The fact that it was possible for players to easily control the opponent's minions via the Mage class and spells such as Cone of Cold, Blizzard and Frost Nova, has led to an overwhelming amount of QQ and made this class stand out from the rest (as an easier and much faster to burn down your opponent class), thus increasing both it's popularity and the frustration it causes. More Mages, more QQ, path of least resistance - see this post for my take on nerfs, changes in gaming and Blizz games!

Meanwhile, here's a video of a control Mage deck in action:

According to several Blizzard posts such as this one, they are always monitoring game balance issues and in this case it all revolves around fine tuning cards and the synergy between them. Accordingly, they've decided it was time to address some of the cards that helped make it all happen:

[...] we’re not planning on too many additional patches between now and open beta, so we’ve also decided to take this opportunity to make a couple of changes to some Mage cards that utilize the Freeze mechanic. 

We’ve been keeping an eye on Freeze mechanics for the past few months, and we’ve decided to make some changes to certain cards that utilize Freeze in this patch: Cone of Cold, Blizzard and Frost Nova. These cards are all having their mana costs increased by one. We understand that the Freeze mechanic can be frustrating to play against, and we’re trying to minimize the amount of frustrating mechanics in Hearthstone while at the same time making the control-themed Mage a viable play option. These changes should allow the opponent some additional time to be aggressive with their minions and well as slow the overall pacing of the control-based Mage play style while still keeping Freeze playable in many different types of decks. 

As with all Expert card changes, Cone of Cold and Blizzard will both be disenchantable for their full value for two weeks starting from the day of the patch.

While dramatic changes in a card game such as Hearthstone can be pretty frustrating since earning or crafting new cards without spending real money isn't always a walk in the park, I think there is another very important aspect to keep in mind. Yes, Mage might have been out of line when compared to the other classes, yes a class can sometimes be frustrating to play against and Mage was so overly used it caused the opposing player to feel a sudden need to vomit (that's how I sometimes feel towards the Priest class, being an obnoxious class to play with as well as against it).

Teamwork gets it done lawl!

Yet stripping the Mage of it's most frustrating mechanics, such as control and spell nukes, will only make it stop feeling like a caster and a Mage. And this goes for all classes, their specific mechanics and cards that make them stand out from one another.

Be careful what you wish for people or we'll end up with having 9 classes (10 with DK and 11 with monk if ever) that are basically the same to play with and will rely on the same old boring, monotonous play-styles, hidden behind different spell names that essentially have the same effects (just like in WoW :p).

Rejoice! The evil spirit has been banished and Hearthstone flows freely once again

Well, even tho this is kind of old news at the time of this post, around 11 hrs ago (03:00 GMT) the servers were declared alive and the critical issues (even though to this time unknown and unspoken of) seem to have been overcome through hard work, draconian bosses, "you didn't read the fine print" contracts, as well as sacrificing a black rooster in the early hours of morning.

Despite this announcement, the all mighty forum was still reporting trouble here and there, but all in all things started to slide back into normal parameters... at least for most of the beta player base. I can't help but wonder if we'll ever find out what caused the Great Battlenet Blackout of 2013.

6 hours later Lurdlespor was closing the main thread and the topic as a generalized concern. I bet the team handling this has seen better days :-s. Cheers to y'all, thank you and pls post a pic with the guy who got drunk on Saturday and went all "fuck you servers! you're drunk! go home!". 

That makes almost 2 full days since the main thread found HERE was opened. 

P.S. Selling I survived the Great Battlenet Blackout T-shirts.

24+ Hrs of Downtime in Hearthstone and Battlenet issues!

As a general introduction, I must say that I'm proud of you all beta testers out there... We beta tested THE FUCK out of Hearthstone and Battlenet.

While I must admit that given the fact that most of the US is hunky dory on this matter, we back here in the EU are (as most of the player base in beta admits)... doing other things rather than playing with those decks we helped test with real money.

Now this wouldn't really be such a problem, (I mean who the hell LIVES on Hearthstone?! ...except maybe that one guy that admitted he is "experiencing withdrawal symptoms and that he needed a hit before going to sleep") if in fact we had some decent information on this issue! Meanwhile, back in the real world time moves slow and we are getting half-assed automated responses such as:

Notice the time frame and the lack of anything useful in both posts

There is actually not one article in the news section about what's going on at this time, with the several issues that surfaced yesterday and got even worse today. It's been more than 24 hrs of downtime since the last time Bnet and Hearthstone worked for me (and for what I've read, for most of the users in EU regions).

Having stumbled upon this problem only yesterday (Sunday, Dec. 15th) I thought to myself that it will only take a while to get it fixed! Most likely by tomorrow morning (worst case scenario I told myself... ) we'll get everything back in order. However, as time passed I noticed some ppl are actually doing just fine! So I started to think: Hey, what if this issue is somehow on my end, they did something or... fuck knows, and I can "fix" it by... Google-ing and lurking the forums! I had indeed seen quite a few posts in this regard but not enough to make me believe it's a general thing or that it doesn't have to be solved on the end user side. 

Even atm (edit: this has now completely vanished) there's still something nagging the behind of my brain that maybe if  I tried to change my password (as some poor bastards were asked to do by the Blizz teams), or re-install the game and whatnot it might all go back to normal. Why? Cuz at a first glance on the EU forum and not to mention the US forum, you notice that even though this seems to be quite a BIG thing going down as we speak, there are very few threads regarding what is vaguely called a "disruption" and an "issue". Hell, I don't even know if I'm supposed to wait, make a ticket or try fixin' stuff that ain't really broken on my end! I understand patience and beta, but the lack of info these guys give out on the website (follow us on twitter? ..common :-L) I feel is just disrespectful towards their player base. It hasn't been 3 hrs, it hasn't been 6, it's been more than 24 hrs affecting more than Hearthstone and Battlenet. As a matter of fact I for one don't even remember if there was such a heavy blackout in their entire service history!

This of course (and the striking realization of how little some or most of us do with our spare time... and perhaps lives...? and youth ...? :-s and ...) has gotten some others to re-post vids like the one here, which at this time seems to fit quite well in the general scene:

A few threads to keep an eye on regarding this issue can be found here:

http://eu.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/8966267040?page=1

Or more generally here:
http://eu.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/8881489/

Looking forward to what happens next!

Update:

We also have a more pronounced response on the US forums made in the form of an official admin locked sticky thread. I quote:

We are currently experiencing issues where players are unable to login, or in some cases start, Hearthstone in the European region.

Players may experience freezes when connecting, followed by an error, be unable to click 'play' on the desktop app, receive messages that their region is unavailable or 'closed', or be unable to connect to the desktop app at all.

We are currently providing updates in the following thread:
http://eu.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/8966267040

As well as via our twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/BlizzardCSEU_EN

We do not currently have an estimated time for a resolution of this issue, however we will update this sticky too when we have definitive info about when this will be resolved.

Link: http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/10896370060

I think I like Lurdlespor for being around 24/7 and spamming us with some blue posts. On the other hand I must emphasize "we are currently", where currently means over 24 hrs ago and according to other issues that escalated to the current point where B-net is dead and Hearthstone play button was unavailable, it's been over 40 hrs in total.

Sadly, Lurdlespor has very little to do with the way Blizzard handles their stuff and what they let him give out to the public. Thus, I find it a bit discordant to evaluate him when in fact I evaluate my feelings towards what someone at Blizz decide for him to announce.
I like Lurdlespor and I like the guys fixing the games I like. However, I don't like where Blizzard has been headed in the past few years but that might be just me.

Tbh, at this point my angst in finding out what happened is almost if not just as great as playing the actual game. Given the scale of this issue and the silence behind it, I suspect anything in between aliens, an attack on the server locations from the Diablo franchise fans, Kotick selling the servers for being counter-productive and not telling anyone, Jay Wilson being upset that someone made a better game than he did and going all shift-delete on stuff and the list of possible suspects could go on forever.

As we wait, I invite everyone to go to the Hearthstone website and check the top right corner arrow out... Who knows... it just might get unscrewed and fall off.

I double dare you ...

New dedicated page -> Hearthattack

Hello Guild! :))

Today I've decided to stress the capabilities of the blog and conjure up another page that will be dedicated exclusively to viewer submitted and own footage of amazing, funny, angry, lucky, skilled, omfg, wtf, smash keyboard with forehead, faceroll and so on bits of Hearthstone Gameplay. I decided to post in this section so I could let you all know it may be worth checking out another page around here. Anywayz, here's the copy of the 1st post in the Hearth-attack section:

Hearthstone Gameplay - Crafty Winz ep.1 (Winning with no cards left)

For this so called 1st episode I played a mage deck and got queued against a drood, both of us being a rather low rank however.

After an interesting and overall lengthy match I ended up with no more cards left in my hand while my opponent refused to out out more of his. I knew I was supposed to have another fireball in my deck but I wasn't 100% sure. I was at the mercy of my draw and I didn't manage to keep any +spelldmg creatures on the table. Thus we ended up where the video starts. I had only one card left to pull and I still had to burn through his turn based armor stack and another 7 hp left. Fireball is 6 dmg :-s. Things didn't look very good. Before casting Fireball, I had to decide whether to look weak and maybe use it on the next turns provided he thinks I got nothing left. OR, freak him out leaving him with 1 HP and force him to play some of the cards he had left. I was hoping a creature would be played and I'd manage to copy it. 

As a backup plan, I figured that unless he had some really big dmg coming my way I had it covered due to being able to outlast him having superior HP and win by fatigue.

Anyways, let's see how it went. Enjoy.

Remember. If you enjoy reading this blog do let me know, recommend it to your friends and why not, if you feel generous you can even donate for the planned Christmas Pack Frenzy!

Cheers.

10. DEC. 2013 Hearthstone Patch Notes: new rank system and more.

Hearthstone™ Closed Beta Patch Notes - 1.0.0.4217 - Become a Legend! patch was announced the other day: "Our latest Hearthstone patch is here! We’ve included a lot of great features and bug fixes in this update, including the ability to abandon one Quest per day, animations for all of our Golden cards, and the addition of the epic rocker Elite Tauren Chieftain! That’s not all—we’ve also added a completely new Ranked Play system, where you can work your way through the ranks to become a Hearthstone Legend. Check out the details on the new Ranked Play system below, along with the full patch notes."

Along with a few other things like adding print screens to your desktop using the dedicated keyboard button (that wasn't a thing you could do on the previous day) or the changes announced before in regard to cards such as Unleash the hounds, Mind Control, Shattered Sun Cleric, Starving Buzzard, Flame Imp Argent Commander, we also had a remake of the older medals ranking system and their interface buttons. Unranked mode is now called Casual and it looks like this:

"All players first stepping foot into the revamped Ranked Play mode will start at Rank 25: Angry Chicken. In Ranked Play, you’ll be pitted against opponents equal to or as close to your rank as possible. You and your opponent’s ranks will be visible to each other as you battle. Every time you find yourself victorious against your opponent, you’ll gain a star above your medal. Collect enough stars, and you’ll eventually find yourself attaining the next rank—Rank 24: Leper Gnome. There are 25 different ranks to attain, starting at Angry Chicken and going up to Rank 1: Innkeeper."

So it already sounds a bit more interesting even tho the previous medals didn't look half bad themselves. In the previous play mode players could duel other players to increase their medal ranking by clicking on the medal in the top corner, which switched from "Unranked" Play, to "Medal Earning" Play, while relying on the Battle.net matchmaking to pair them up against worthy opponents.

Novice

Journeyman

Copper

Silver

Gold

Platinum

Diamond

Master

Gran' Mastah

On the other hand the new setup does give a bit more context and brings the whole thing into tune with the overall theme. But wait! There's more! And here's where it gets a lot more interesting [and sort of answers what I was asking myself the other day while testing out some decks in normal play in regard to the games overall reward system and goals to play and grind for besides well... just the game]:

"As you progress through the ranks, you’ll continue to be matched with opponents of equal or close-to-equal rank. If you hit a win streak, you may notice you collect more stars per win. However, once you progress up to Rank 20, a loss will cause you to lose stars, so play carefully! Win streaks will also end starting at Rank 5 through Rank 1, so every match will really count at those high ranks."

Omfg?! Woot? And wait! There's more!

"Once you become a Rank 1: Innkeeper with five stars to your name, another win will push you into a special rank: Legend. Legend rank will be represented by a Legendary orange mana crystal with a number in the middle of it. That number tells you exactly where you rank against other players in your region. If your Legend rank shows the number 300, you’re the 300th best Hearthstone player in your region.

Legend Ranks and Matchmaking Rating

You’ll continue to be matched against opponents of equal or close-to-equal skill in Legend rank using a hidden Matchmaking Rating (MMR). Matchmaking Rating follows a couple of simple general rules:

• MMR is gained with wins and lost with losses.
• The amount of MMR gained or lost is dependent on the MMR of your opponent.

Legend rankings in your region will only be displayed for the top 10,000 Legend players, so battle on if your Legendary mana crystal doesn’t show a number. Keep racking up those wins, and you may become the #1-ranked Hearthstone Legend!

And So Begins Test Season 1

With all that said, this patch marks the start of our first test season of Ranked Play mode. Since we’re in closed beta, we expect some things to break along the way, and we hope you’ll post your feedback and findings on the forums and contribute to various discussions revolving around the updates we made to this mode.

Every month of Ranked Play is called a “season,” and Ranked Play rankings are intended to reset at the end of every season. However, since this test season is starting a bit later in the month than a season normally would, it may act a little strangely. Casual Play will not reset on a monthly basis like Ranked Play does—Casual Play will continue to match you with other players of similar skill. We’ll keep an eye on things as time goes on and make changes as necessary.

During this first test season, Ranked Play rewards (alternate card backs and Golden Heroes) will not be available. We want to make sure the rewards for Ranked Play are available to anyone who wants to attain them—with your help, we can get Hearthstone out of closed beta and let the game loose to everyone!"

Other awesome things worth mentioning are as follows:

General

• You are now able to abandon one quest per day. When you abandon a quest, you’ll receive a new, random quest in its place.
• New Feature: Recently played Opponent – Your friends list now displays the last person you played against, provided they were not a Real ID or BattleTag friend. If you had a particularly great match against someone, you can now friend them for future play!
• New Feature: Players Near Me - You can now opt-in to seeing other Hearthstone players on your local network in your friends list.
• Parental controls can now disable in-game Shop purchases. (You are fucked kids!)
• You now have the option to keep the sound playing while the game is running in the background.
• The amount of gold gained by winning games in Play mode per day is now capped at 100. This cap does not affect gold gained through Quests, Arena, or Achievements. There will now be an indication within the game when this gold cap is reached. This cap is intended to combat certain methods of gold acquisition that violate our Terms of Service. The spirit of fair play is extremely important to us, and we will continue to monitor gold acquisition activity closely to ensure a fun and enjoyable game environment for everyone.

Ranking

• The Ranked play system has been completely redone
• There are now month long seasons that reset at the end of each month
• There are new ranks and minion portraits for all levels of play
• You earn a star for each win and lose one for each loss and your stars determine your rank
• Players who get to top rank of legend and are in the top 10,000 players have their exact region-wide ranking displayed
• There will be rewards for playing ranked mode in the future, but they were not implemented with this patch, and will be added at a future date.

Arena

• The number of matches you can win in Arena has increased to 12 (up from 9).
• Arena rewards have been restructured.

Zerith the community manager ^^, said the following about this:

"With the Arena reward restructuring, we pretty much just took the rewards that you would normally get in Arena mode and... WE DOUBLED IT!!! (oh wait...no, that was another game, where's that Jay when you actually need him?:|) ...put them into fewer boxes. So, for example, instead of opening five boxes and getting a pack and four boxes full of 5 Arcane Dust each if you didn't have a great Arena run, you'd get a Pack and a box full of 20 Dust. 

The rewards should also now clearly be better the higher up in wins that you obtain. So there shouldn't be a reason to quit out at 8 wins, as an example, and it should drive you to strive for the 12 wins and the best Arena loot possible.  We're not trying to hide anything - our intent is quite the opposite. Win more, get more." 
[yes, they had to SPECIFY that they aren't trying to screw us and that they have the best intentions at heart here]

The main idea behind this is to create a bigger incentive to play arenas, whether for gold or for real moneyz and I believe a good job was done in this respect: we now seem to need more overall wins, to make the same amount of gold that made it possible to queue for several arenas based on previous winnings. Even if the rewards seem larger (due to adding 3 more harder-to-get-to levels), the general aim must have been to lower the chances of a larger portion of the player base to access this "arena loop" and to lower the overall chance to get an actual profit. You still need around 7 wins in order to secure a profit or even to obtain a balance before getting booted from the arena. Of course the high end rewards seem to be really impressive, but you must account for the fact that in order to reach that high you will need to try your luck *cough* skill and aim for a much tighter streak. Thus, the chances to be out of the competition rises both at a general level (since more ppl will fail to go that high) and at a player level since you will have much more chances to score a loss before reaching your target (1:4 ratio versus the previous 1:3). This could also translate into fewer people running arenas as often as before (at least using gold to pay the entry fee that is :p).

Here's a Reddit link for "compiled" arena rewards or the stuff on the official forums right HERE in regard to our precious LEWT! Thanks to Achilles we have a general (yet uncertain) view of rewards and in his own words the conclusions are as follows:

- you still need 7 wins to guarantee you 150G (another free Arena entry)
- seems like 8 wins and 9 wins now yield you less gold than before, I remember I could retire at 8 wins and can get around 220G to 285G, looks like blizzard wants to emphasize on card collection (give out more cards / golden etc).
- the gold you get from getting 10/11/12 wins varies widely (above shows with 12 wins it ranges from 180G to 505G)
- the new rewards allows skilled players + good RNG to get more gold than before, though it is harder to sustain infinite arena for some? we'll have to see.
Edited by Achilles on 12/11/2013 10:02 AM PST

Gameplay, General

• All Golden cards are now animated. [Goodie!]
• The visual effects of some cards have been improved. [see below]

• Ysera now summons her Dream cards directly from the Emerald Dream!
• King Krush now makes a dinosauric appearance when played!
• Al’Akir the Windlord now rides into battle on the tempest itself!

UI

• The chat UI has received additional improvements.
• Your player rank (icon and number) is now visible in the friends list, the versus screen and your BattleTag in-game.
• The PrintScreen key now takes a screenshot of your game and saves it to your desktop.
• Custom art has been added to headers for each class in the collection manager.
• The toggle between Casual and Ranked Play modes is now more explicit.
• The art has been updated for the box and pack opening screens.

For the full official coverage visit THIS LINK.

If you would enjoy seeing more stuff by me or crave for more elaborate material, let me know and maybe even consider making a small donation for Christmas Packs Frenzy event.

May your draw be lucky and your hand stronk!