Typical I’ve already got all of these.īlizzard has very little idea what kind of game they actually want Hearthstone to be. There’s no point in playing on any further, because there’s no chance of overcoming the odds. I often find myself resigning on turn 4 or 5 of a game if I know I’ve entered an unwinnable scenario where my opponent has just played every card in perfect order. If you play against the wrong deck, and they have the answers to every one of your cards, losing is almost an inevitable conclusion. This leads to many games devolving into a rock-paper-scissors formula. This means that almost every minion or spell can be stopped immediately if you’ve chosen the right cards, and have had the luck to draw them. Many cards in Hearthstone have direct counters with other cards, a yin to a yang as it were. Similarly, choosing which minions to play is sometimes comparatively unimportant compared to having the right minion to counter your opponent. If you get a bad hand with lots of high cost minions and spells, you have to spend several turns doing nothing, while your opponent might be building up unstoppable tempo. Many games in Hearthstone will be decided from the very beginning what cards you manage to get in your opening hand. Random chance is perhaps the biggest and most controversial aspect of Hearthstone it well outranks player skill in terms of the deciding factor for many matches. Never have a board of 1 health minions when your opponent has Swipe. As the new expansion has just come out, this issue is somewhat temporarily ameliorated, but it will become a problem again when the metagame (how the game is actually played by everyone) becomes more concrete. This is mind-numbingly tedious and not at all fun. In order to ascend the ladder, you MUST play one of the popular decks, and you must play match after match after match against a small pool of other similar decks. This means an awful lot of time spent playing Hearthstone, and if you find yourself on a losing streak or match up against the wrong opponents, you could find a lot of your hard work comes undone.įurthermore, the ladder is dominated by just a few very popular decks, which have been tweaked and perfected to such a degree that any experiments outside of these decks is near doomed to failure. In order to ascend, you must achieve a net positive win rate, and with many of the best decks only achieving win rates of around 55%, this means you will on average lose 9 games to every 20 you play. These improve the ladder somewhat but do not fix the fundamental problem, which is that moving all the way up to Legend rank is a monumental time sink. Blizzard has recently introduced rank “ceilings” which you can’t fall below if you reach them, which are every 5 levels rank 15, 10 and 5. Below level 20 you cannot lose rank, only gain it, but above 20, losing games means losing stars and eventually dropping ranks. All players start at rank 25 and then move up the ranks for each game they win. Hearthstone’s ranked matches are based on a ranking system from 1 to 25 which is colloquially called the ladder. In this piece, I want to look at some of the issues Hearthstone is still facing, and if anything will be done to fix them. Hearthstone is a great game that is on several levels fundamentally broken. The more of the game I have played, the more I realise that this frustration isn’t by mistake it is baked into the design of the game itself. As time has gone on, my frustration has gradually increased. I’ve enjoyed Hearthstone in small doses, and have had great fun with it on many occasions, but I’ve always found several aspects of the game frustrating that have made me never want to play for extended periods. I consider myself an average Hearthstone player in many respects. I’ve played Hearthstone semi-regularly throughout this time, playing enough games to get me to Rank 20 each month, but never investing the time, energy or cold-hard cash required to get all the way to the top. Since March 2014 when the game originally released, it has been regularly supported with the launch of new cards sets and occasional single-player adventures. As 2017 marches through August and into September, Hearthstone has just experienced the launch of its sixth expansion in three years.
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