Developers start listening

This message is only for developers.
I have some questions:
Is there going to be a real match up in arenas were players have the opportunity to play around the opponent? Consider the game as a chess game …both players should have even opportunities right? Were both players have to actually THINK before acting…I dont see the reason why there has to be a warlock’s season or pally’s season .You start getting the point right?
This is a business for you all developers but it’s unpleasant for many players to play theirs favourite game so a massive part of players are disappointed about this (money)game.
Even if i have a favourite hero mine is rogue f.e. you make me play something really different than what i like…
2nd question:
Do you developers even play the game???
Do you run tests between all different kind of decks before releasing them?
I bet my bank account that you dont even know how the game actually run you dont know the possibilities of each deck and you cannot bring Ballance to a game of cards.
Since i was young i used to play card games ,yes luck is always part of it but both players have equal chances to win.
I can dis for ever with you guys but i feel that there is pointless to do this since you dont listen players you listen to the god of money only.and since i pay for cards most of the expansions i ASK for Equal chances between heroes and players.Its just a freaking game of cards why you make it this crappy all the time??
Start playing different heroes start playing what you create to check that something isn’t going right.

I’d just like to say that you’ve put way more than just 2 questions before you got to the question that you labeled as the second one. But I’ll try to tackle all the ones that stand out to me. Please excuse me for the wall of text.

This game can’t really be compared to chess. The mechanics are far too different and there is inherent randomness due to the card game nature. But alright, let’s think about it in the way you intended.

Yes, in theory both players have even opportunities. However, because each player has the ability to customize their deck and the random card draws you get each turn, there is gonna be differences that can cause the evenness to tilt towards another player’s side, either through the player’s own action or through the game’s RNG. The majority of it is going to happen because of the player’s deck tinkering.

But what would it look like if we got to the point where both players have completely even opportunities?
Both of them would have the exact same deck, same heroes, exact same starting hands and the exact same draws. Discover effects would be the exact same for both players. The random card effects would each do the same thing. Only thing that might look different is some individual cards being Golden/Diamond and some hero portraits being different.

Sounds boring, right?

Judging by the way you phrased this, it makes it seem like you think this is by design. Like Blizzard has some sort of schedule for this kind of stuff where some classes are intentionally made better than others for certain periods/expansions.
I don’t see it that way. I see it as card designers creating cards around a theme while keeping in mind the balance of the cards and archetypes as much as possible, and the meta gamers simply taking what works best and rolling with it.

As for how the meta gamers determine this kind of stuff?
Theory-crafting, for one. Pros are constantly looking for new ways to improve their game and decks are constantly evolving. Some new cards might have been designed to help boost the player’s ability to counter certain decks. Counters to top decks rise up, top decks adapt or fall back to not being top decks, new top deck arises, ad infinitum.

From what I imagine, quite a lot!

In a word? Yes.
Then why is there inbalance in the game, I hear you asking? Why are some decks OP and some not?
The answer: They can never test enough.
The internal testing division at Blizzard is most likely (I cannot say for certain, I can only make an educated guess) quite big, sure, but they are only human. Things are bound to end up in a state where some decks perform better overall than others. After all, what is a testing team of, say, 50 individuals against 10,000s of regular players, some of whom might be even more capable than the testing team?

In the end they do try to make things as balanced as possible before and after the fact. Otherwise we wouldn’t get any balance changes after a set releases. But they can’t anticipate everything. And you can only change cards so much before they become deemed useless not just for the deck that might have brought it to the limelight, but also for all the other decks that might have used it.
And who knows? Maybe when the next set or miniset releases, Rogue might become real good and have just the kind of top deck you’d like to play…

As for me, I’ll just play whatever I feel like. They’re bad decks, sure, but sometimes I’ll grab a win. And I’ll enjoy playing them, no matter who or what I face.

They 100% could have anticipated that the game would be trash after removing fatigue from warlock and mage, 2 of the fastest drawing classes in the game. Just this 1 thing, messing with a core mechanic and failing miserably is a pretty good indication that pretty much 0 testing went into releasing this abysmal excuse of an expansion.

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Phew i write quite much but you did a great job as well!!
When i create something i must know everything happens with my product before releasing it.
When “they run tests” but every patch release some decks are roffling and some others are just bottom doesn’t make me sure if they actually do the necessary tests.
Yes i would prefer to have even opportunities with my opponent and yes i don’t wanna switch between heroes because he/she really crushes the ladders.
I really understand or trying to understand as hard as i can but the experience of the game tent to make me say the opposite.
Yes blizzard are huge company and yes we are more than them but as a huge company dont make the things up and down . Don’t sell me things that are going to change in a bad way.that mean that your tests as a company are bad and then they have to nerf / change new cards.
Make the game free and let it be as it is.(its a p2w game and you can understand this when you go to create a legendary mob 1600 dust but when you destroy that legendary you get 400) that’s 1/4 of what you “paid”.

One thing you have to remember, however, is that…as a card game, Hearthstone is very very big now in terms of the pool of cards in it, and there are a huge amount of potential interactions, particularly in Wild…so much so that’s it’s physically impossible to test every single interaction before release, and people underestimate just how inventive the hearthstone playerbase on the whole is.

There will be extensive testing done, in as much as they can do in a game that gets updated with new cards every 4 months, but they can’t cover every potential interaction of every card in the game and still keep to the expansion release expectation that has been set. The will cover as many potentially game breaking possibilities as they can, but with so many inventive players out there someone will always come up with something the devs haven’t even thought of. They do, however, take notice of game breaking mechanics, keep an eye on them and work on potential fixes should they be needed, as we have seen many times. But this also takes time. They have to weigh up potential solutions, how they will affect the card, the build…even the class as a whole and decide the best way to move forward on a mechanic change the stops it being game breaking, but doesn’t kill it completely and allows it to still be viable in a fair way, otherwise you risk discouraging inventive players from looking for clever ways to play due to them just getting immediately shut down.

They also have to ensure that any changes they make don’t cause other unintended problems as it takes a a lot of work and a long time to create and fine tune a games coding to work as intended with as few bugs as possible. When you start trying to change that coding it can have all kinds of unintended consequences if you aren’t careful, so planning changes has to be done carefully in the coding too and it needs time to be written, quality checked, tested and released which is why changes that need to be made can’t just happen over night

The whole thing is a fine balancing act. Think of it like a house of cards, and the problems you talk about are a single card in the middle that’s slowly degrading. If you don’t remove it, the whole thing is eventually going to come down, but if you’re rash and just start pulling things out, it’s going to collapse as well.

As for the dusting cost, I agree a little that the return for dusting a card is too low, particularly legendaries, but they can’t make dusting equal to the cost of the card otherwise people will dust and create and dust and create until they get exactly the cards they want, which defeats the whole point of random pack opening and takes away that’s it’s meant to simulate a real life game where you’d go to a shop, physically buy a pack and get a random selection inside. Instead, you might as well just let people buy dust so they can just make whatever cards they want and then its just a different game entirely. But, as I said, I also thing dust compensation is a bit low. I’d maybe increase it to 1/2 a cards cost at the most, but no more

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