So, there we have it guise.
Today Aratil has announced a sort of a draft to several upcoming changes in Hearthstone:
"As we move further into the closed beta, we’re continuing to closely monitor card balance as more and more Hearthstone games are played. We also want to ensure that cards acquired in Hearthstone are done fairly through our various game modes.
The amount of gold gained by winning games in Play mode per day will be capped at 100 in the upcoming patch. This cap does not affect gold gained through Quests, Arena, or Achievements. There will 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.
In regards to card balance, there are a few cards we’ve noticed that have sprung up that warrant some tuning, and we’ll be making these changes in the next patch. Our goal is to change as few cards as possible over the course of time, but we felt the need to address these six cards in particular. The cards are: Shattered Sun Cleric, Flame Imp and Argent Commander. These cards will be adjusted along with the other cards we mentioned at BlizzCon: Mind Control, Starving Buzzard and Unleash the Hounds.
Shattered Sun Cleric is now a 3/2 (was a 3/3)
Argent Commander is now a 4/2 (was a 4/3)
These cards are quite good for their cost, and they currently feel to be slightly above the curve in power compared to cards of a similar cost and type. Players end up choosing these cards for their deck much more often than other cards at the same mana cost. We want to increase the variety of cards being played at 3 and 6 mana.
Flame Imp’s Battlecry now deals 3 damage (up from 2)
Warlocks have a very strong early game, and this small change to Flame Imp should help a small amount. There are other cards that help the Warlock maintain early board advantage, and we’re keeping a close eye on those as time goes on.
Mind Control’s mana cost is now 10 (up from 8)
Mind Control has some pretty accurate flavor text … perhaps a little too accurate. Raising the mana cost will allow players to have a couple more turns to play with their big minions.
Starving Buzzard is now a 2/1 (was a 2/2)
At some ranks, Hunter was a bit strong versus Druids, Mages and Rogues. This change to Starving Buzzard will help even the playing field against those classes in particular.
Unleash the Hounds has been reworked and now reads: “(4) For each enemy minion, summon a 1/1 Hound with Charge”.
The old version of Unleash the Hounds was allowing for Hunters to win in a single turn, starting with no minions on the board. The new version adds some fun, new card combos to Hunters and helps with their ability to AoE.
We hope these changes will increase your versatility and creativity in making card choices for your decks, and helps to make Hearthstone a more fun game for all to enjoy."
As usual, the actual effectiveness or how well thought these changes are, is up to ferocious "debate" (some motivations being grounded in logic and reasoning while others seem to be simple outbursts of misplaced revenge from past experiences).
However, as I kept reading comments, pondering upon the changes and my honestly limited experience with Hearthstone (
being invite into the closed beta on the 4th of December, after having thought to myself a day before that personally I don't even know people that have EVER been admitted into a closed beta session, lewl), I noticed something that I kept feeling and saying and noticing over and over again with my not-so-limited experience with Blizzard (over 10 years as I've basically started with Warcraft 2&3, DotA back when it was considered some sort of TD game, Diablo 1&2,
The Lost Vikings, several years of WoW, etc. etc.).
Not so many years ago, somewhere in between WoW expansions, I started to feel "a disturbance in the force" (bare with me). After a bit more time I realized that Blizzard was slowly sliding towards the dark side and slide it did. It began with small things: a buck here, a compromise there, a full "overhaul"/"tweaking" of the dev teams where (and I quote), "
fun was taken out of making videogames" ...
Bob Lizard -> B.Lizard -> Blizzard. It was always there for us to see!
A reptilian! Do not doubt your sanity.
... and suddenly I found myself to be in love and sort of struggling over a person I didn't recognize anymore. It sounded almost the same, it looked the same but I knew deep inside something was not right, something had died, something changed. Well, change is only natural you might say and I won't disagree however, our own perception, value and understanding of said change is a different matter.
Cutting to the chase, I could start (or maybe sum everything up) with the case at hand, that being the present closed beta approach to balancing a virtual TCG. To me this is as typical of a Blizzard approach as it gets. You see, going back to World of Warcraft made me remember yet another thing I had noticed and spoke of in an older blog I used to frequent, that is Blizzard needs to listen less and do more!
If at first it felt good to believe that all the waves upon waves of hatred and frustration regurgitated on the forums by 80% of the community seemed to shape up into a general "hum" of the hive that eventually lead to certain changes in the game, it wasn't too soon that the core community and it's leaders (and by core I don't mean hardcore: boasting that you have massive amounts of time to play/invest in playing a game makes you anything but interesting or hardcore), the ppl doing the crazy vids, the ppl making the insane builds, the awesome events on the server, big guilds and GMs and so on, felt the coming of the dreaded LK (Lamenting Kids).
At the same time another great current in psychology started to be encouraged and embraced overseas, where despite thousands of years of evolution and basically spitting in the face of healthy competition and skill formation, everyone SHOULD be a winner! So why spend time climbing the ladder and why look towards yourself when getting beaten over and over and over by the same dude/dudes/feral druid, when you can go and whine on the forums that said entities are OP (stands for "Obese Pacifiers")?
Thus the great L2P - OP divide was born and it often made me imagine how hilarious this would be to apply IRL, where in one hypothetical case you would be pulling on the referee's T-shirt while screaming at him that you too deserve a gold medal cuz well, "you came in last and you got there by chance"!!!
And you could pretty much feel this trend manifest itself. WoW is a great example for this since it is an enormous machine that functioned for several years, thus giving us the chance to analyze it's evolution both on a horizontal and at a vertical scale. Let me also clarify that I stopped playing WoW in Cata and that I don't plan to go back. It has lost it's magic to me, I have grown apart from it, it is all following a natural course, where timing and other subjective matters get mixed up to create an experience. However, I also believe World of Warcraft was an amazing game/experience/time, that deserves the utmost respect (both from an artistic point of view as well as from a technical standing, due to the several problems it had to solve and overcome) and I personally will forever look back on it with a mixed feeling of love, melancholy and loss. That was the old me, the old WoW and back to our subject, the old Blizz.
Going back to the community, when TBC came out it was pure madness! Everyone was playing it, the game's popularity was growing, it's subscribers grew in numbers and it was voted on of the best expansions of all times. TBC was all about grinding, about climbing a ladder, gear transition, learning the ropes but even more so, it was about learning to play! Every crowd control skill mattered. Pulling packs wasn't all about aoe taunts, aggro transfers and spam healing. People that had done Shattered Halls HC or even Karazhan and other raids surely remember how every skill had it's place and everyone seemed to have to do their part decently in order to get things done. I remember those "omg, it resisted trap!" -> wipe times but I also remember the feeling of accomplishment that came along with completion (a.k.a. great success).
In this setup epics weren't something you could come across that easily, good gear meant you were in a guild or were somehow running raids with a guild, it took time, even PvP worked differently. Rushing was something you would do mostly to boast and that would happen after you actually got to know your class, your mates and the game in general... at least in most of the times.
On the other hand, this meant that a certain player base was never going to do those end game things everyone was talking about ... like killing Illidan, owning a Warglaive to AFK for hours in Shattrath or even raids such as MH or TK. Those took time, a group and skill. And if you didn't move from fire (or did move in fire on that one rare occasion...) more than a few times, it would most likely mean you wouldn't be making the team.
There are probably a lot more things we could discuss, but the previously described state of the game laid the basis for the new approach WoW took during it's next expansion: Wrath of the Lich King (where the actual, bigger War 3 story ended more or less). WotLK came as an answer to the prayers of the needy and that growing (?) player base who wanted things done faster and epix for everybody with minimum effort (even tho' the color was actually the thing that mattered not the actual stats). It was like ... some sort of purple magic!
This of course pissed others off for reasons ranging from elitist assholery to the somewhat truthful argument that gear is something you need to work for and it should be a reward for the time spent or your skill! Not some sort of charity giveaway.
I on the other hand didn't really bother with this part cuz you know, "a noob in epix is still a noob", and this went almost the same for PvP too. BUT, I did notice a significant change in the way individuals and groups worked, what was required in order to succeed and many other things. WoW had moved into the realm of AOE-speed runs. Big dmg, aoe-heal, aoe-taunt, aoe-dmg, aoe-aoe and while
at first (Naxx WotLK times) it seemed to be a good addition to single target dps boredom, towards the end, the entire game seemed to move into that direction to the extent that the best CC one could have in his group was more heal and more aoe. Thus, having no balance between CCing in order to avoid death, single target burn downs and mindless aoe and aggro redirecting. And this went on for some time... enough time that certain people either heard about the "good 'ol days" or felt that they missed
(emotionally or literally) them
(when in fact they most likely missed their childhood, high-school years or the drunk times from college). So the general "humm" intensified and Blizzard vibrated to the will
(cash $$) of the many and ...
...Cata was born. A return to the roots, a review and replay of your nublet places (along with the total face-rape of Azeroth, where the zones that were beautiful were made ugly along with the memories of those last of the older players, while the ugly zones were left unharmed and stayed as dead as ever). Barrens and Barrens chat, no more free epics but blue gear! (WTF?! :O), CCing and many many more. At least that's what I thought... and some of it was just that, some of it was good but as usual, some of it only acted as a reminder to how things changed forever.
And so, Deathwing came and washed away most of the places I held dear. Overall there was more of course: no more summoning stones, no more summoning stone PvP, no more great lift and alliance coming to boost alts and do RFC/RFK, Ashenvale, Stonetalon (I do agree it was boring but atleast the damn map made SENSE!!!), Barrens, Booty Bay, STV (omg STV used to be awesome), Thousand Needles (from interesting and unique to a giant sink plugged with a dead whale), even Tanaris or Desolace (yes, there was this zone called Desolace that was worth visiting - especially as a rogue - cuz it was here that you could raise your lock picking skill level and not just cuz Archeology told you to go dig there) and many more were forever changed, torn apart and "enhanced" through what was supposed to be the natural transition of a dynamic world and a change imposed by the game's storyline ...right?
On the other hand, it came to contrast with the fact that WoW used to have TONS of amazingly beautiful places due to amazing artwork/art directing and careful setup of details (e.g. herbs that grew only in certain places such as hill areas, close to trees, water, near water, on mountains, in caves etc.), landscape and the overall feeling it projected on the player. It may sound a bit too much, but it was in fact more than a game, Blizz sold an experience.
And along these lines, I remember to this day an encounter with a much higher level rogue from the opposing faction, back in Desolace waters. I was in the process of leveling my 1st toon
(..a rogue...-.-). He tolerated me snooping about his fast paced lock picking leveling routine, until he decided I crossed the line and killed me most likely only by targeting me. I corpse ran my ass off, lurked around the shadows underwater with an eye on my breath meter.
"Ppl used to call me Killer"
I saw him go for one more chest before having to surface and I knew he didn't have much "air" left
[the water being quite deep and back then we didn't have Korean type health pools]. I waited for him to start the "cast" and SAPPED him while praying I don't miss
(I couldn't see his level) and that it will be enough to make my revenge plan happen. I struggled to land another CC and used all the tools I had at my disposal just to keep him from insta-pwning me. Of course he killed me again but as I was "sinking to the bottom of the ocean" I saw him desperately swimming upwards, to grab his precious air, watching him slowly lose enough hp to go kaput and DIE! ha-xaxaxaxa ... and everything went black.
Ooooh... the stories we all have ^^... anywayz, all that was soon replaced with a bunch of crap thrown about and around, in order to cover for a shallow or in the best case, rushed design and storyline (yes, like Diablo3 :D). Thus things like Azshara were forced upon us to visit but the zone itself was still as dead as ever before, even more unattractive and well, now it felt out of context and worse than it used to be. And that was the case for me with most of the "changes" at a design level: a strange cataclysm of mixed feelings.
Anyhow, another thing that underlines and expresses best how things were different from before, happened this one time I queued an alt to a dungeon using the LFG system (that's another topic). It was back in Deepholm, an intermediate dungeon introduced with the expansion. [P.S. I should mention the fact that soon after Cata launch even the veterans had a bit of a time readjusting to doing things "slower" while the greater majority went for the "this is too haaaard, mommy I want to win too" option]. We had a mage in the group, the tank pulls, I start dps, I silence some casts while some add was running around wreaking havoc on the lightly geared and prepared (by mother nature) group. Eventually we wipe, on the 1st pack in a rather easy dungeon and as I kept looking at what he was doing during the fight, I asked him why he didn't interrupt or for the love of Jay Wilson, cast a damn polymorph,?! To which he replied: "I CBA to use polymorph".
And this is just one case! I've seen ppl that thought fear was shit on warlock in PvP, priests not having some key skills in their bar, etc. and these were all at max/almost max level, with decently geared characters!
Then everything else came in and I quit: pandas, nerfs, the overly balancing of classes eventually lead to all the classes having the same skills but with different names: e.g. heals, stealth, blink, dots and so on. Heals on: hunter, warrior, druid, shaman, pally, priest, rogue, warlock, dk and even mage. Stealth went from druid, nightelves and rogues to hunters and mages, basically we could say that classes were pretty much stripped of a unique play style and the unique feeling you got out of playing that specific class by way of it's specific skillset. Yes it was also fun to have leaps, pulls, shadowsteps, disengages, blinks and so on with more classes, yes balancing some key issues were much easier this way, but at the same time we were playing almost the same classes with minor changes and different animations.
[I just scrolled up and this turned out to be about the biggest TL;DR and offtopic post in recorded history]
If you'd like to read more about such "jibber jabber", here's a link to a much more professional article from an actual professional, speaking about gaming and gaming decisions made by the wrong people: Cracked.com - 5 Reasons the Video Game Industry Is About to Crash. I didn't write it and I think it really explains part of what I've been feeling for the past few years from an end-user perspective.
TL;DR a.k.a "I can't read for too long cuz I get hungry and die" or "I CBA with your crap opinions":
Coming back to Blizz and Hearthstone we the players and Blizz at the same time should understand that this isn't WoW nor is it D3. It's a card game (we don't trade so no T to that CG :p). A competitive, multiplayer card game, with plenty of the changes based on player feedback.
Of course, some of the posts are valid points of view and actual issues, while a greater majority simply reflect the players own experience with a given set of cards and AGAINST a specific other set of cards. However this is not the point of this story, the point I want to make is that Blizz actually needs to listen less and make their games more. It might even be healthier to consider a revolutionary approach and go about buffing other classes...
...every once in a while to counter certain cases of bad judgement, decisions or mistakes, rather than making a lousy, cheap or rash changes and then sticking to those decisions for months on end as usual (I plan on writing about this in a future post with actual data gathered from patchnotes).
What really seems absurd, is how resilient the Blizzardpeople are in the face of what must be one of the basic rules of the damn universe when it comes to balancing things out in their games: path of least resistance. When you nerf two, let's say three classes, another one will emerge! It's the next best thing! You nerf that and people switch to what they perceive to give the most bang for their buck and so on until...? [Until you get communism and "everyone is equal"]. Blizz seems to have been ignoring this simple fact for the past 5 years I think. Yes, nerfing three cards is MUCH faster and easier than risking and taking the time to solve and even things out the proper way. Not to mention this is an online, virtual CG! What if it was an actual hard-copy TCG, you just stop allowing the 8 mana version of MC and print the 10 mana versions and give them out for free?
We really need to stop mixing the games we play and their genres guise. We are basically hurting ourselves. Impulsive advocating for nerfs mean giving birth to an infinite loop of backlashing horsecock that will eventually come around and smack you over those frustrated little fingers.
As for another thing I really really wanted to bring up and point my finger at was the part where The amount of gold gained by winning games in Play mode per day will be capped at 100 in the upcoming patch [...] is intended to combat certain methods of gold acquisition that violate our Terms of Service [those being "make more money" or you get fired]. 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.
... -.- Really? Does your data show the player base is THAT gullible and slow? :| ... what am I saying, ofc it is:
"How so? If there are people that bot or whatever it is that they do to continuously farm gold, this would be a good way to stop them. 30+ wins a day is a lot, especially considering its not meant to be a major game you spend most of your time on. I really doubt even the current streamers will continue playing it for hours a day once the hype has died out (not to mention they mostly play arena anyway)."
What does this guy even mean? Is he with me, or against me here? Well, whatever the case we need to argue that:
- 30 wins / day for the average Joe (me) IS HUGE!
- Secondly, I do dare anyone to explain how one could code an efficient bot to exploit this game and particularly on getting 100g (that you can't sell, trade, gift, just as everything else in hearthstone besides the time you put in and lose forever) from 30 WINS, in a game that is based on turn based dynamic decisions against REAL TIME opponents, choosing the proper set of cards from your hand to respond to theirs;
- 100g from 30 wins (provided you manage to do that) + the average 40g daily quest = 140g (10g short of an arena pass :p)
- Stop being naive. Game quality < revenue. However it's really YOU (us) > game quality > revenue. No you = no $ = no revenue. Ask for your money's worth people.
And this basically underlines the essence of the changes Blizz went through from my personal point of view. Blizzard is still riding off the wave other people made with games that basically set entire trends and were benchmarks for a given genre. They were legends and made the company get to where it is now.
That's why we should have every right to feel pissed when reading things like "
certain comments" that throw shit towards the very persons that made some jobs exist in the first place, by creating the 1st game out of later became a great franchise. The paradigm has shifted from
good products that bring good revenue, to
building things around the money (cuz some of us know you are doing that Blizz ...).
Good games brought you fame and fortune, not the RMAH or the fine tuning of price ranges between Hearthstone pack bundles. Don't expect people to pay more for HS than your WoW monthly subscription or else you'll end up ruining
yet another perfectly good game.
