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)
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)
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:
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