That is a crazy nerf to Thaddius but it looks quite warranted when you look at the card's winrate stats on HSReplay.
Diamond through Legend tells us the card had a bit of a rise in January but ultimately wasn't that big of a deal and it's fizzled out.
But when we look at Bronze through Gold, it tells a different story. Players are having a rough time with the card and even though both the top and bottom of the ladder see Thaddius at a popularity score of 1.38% and 2% respectively, so a small number of decks, the card is clearly a winrate outlier in lower-end play so if not many are playing it, nerfing it sounds like it will only improve those weird one-off games where he's just such a powerhouse and can't be dealt with.
Honestly that's just kinda a thing for all consoles and didn't feel like it needed to be pointed out but you very well might be right about it being worth mentioning. I'll have to figure out how I want to approach it. Thanks for the feedback!
Yeah it's doing incredibly well. 855,706 on steam is the current peak and they just stated there are now 3 million copies sold in 40 hours. So nutty but I love it!
Destiny 2 [...] there is important lore in the removed content that is now completely inaccessible to new players.
Yup, and they removed ways to get items that are still useful in the game. Luckily, there is an alternative way to obtain exotics from the past, but it requires a potentially larger time sink than had the content remained in the game. It's possible they've adjusted it since 2021 though when I was last looking into obtaining stuff I was missing, so maybe it isn't as bad.
Note that for apps on Apple's mobile store, it is forbidden to download executable code, probably as a measure to avoid code bypassing review.
Yup, that's the exact reason! And it's a reason why some bugs can't be fixed via small hearthstone-provided updates. Blizzard has done a good job over the years though improving what they can and can't hotfix into the client, so that's a plus.
the market for live service games as a whole becomes worse, because players have no time left to play multiple games.
Yeah =(
The problem is that investors expect not just profits, but growing profits, which is not sustainable. This is a wider problem and I think it will take a lot of time and probably a few collapses before people will learn to be satisfied with just steady profits instead of expecting exponential growth in every market.
We're in for an incredibly rude awakening when this becomes a universal truth. Steady profits are so healthy, as is single digit growth, but of course, greed takes over on the side of everyone and is the reason we can't have nice things. If you aren't making returns that are beating the market, you're effectively losing money. Magic fairy money at that.
Classic could also make a decent Twist for a month. I'm surprised they haven't done that yet.
This would have been such an easy thing for them to do for the "off season" that is happening right now for January before they bring in some new goodies for February. They could have done Classic + Naxx and it would have been a great way to kick off the year.
My guess is that they already have a plan to drop Mercenaries from the client and are just waiting a while to announce it
Removing paid content like that from players, especially in a card game, would be a huge slap in the face. If they offered refunds to BattleNet balance or just an equivalent in other Hearthstone stuff, I could see them being able to do it with less friction, but they have to take a loss in order to do it. I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
Destiny 2 infamously removed content from the game because of "hard drive space" with no optional way to get it back. If Blizzard wanted to take the smarter approach here, and make some new tech, maybe they could make Mercenaries an optional download (it's a lot of data, images, code) which would slim down the mobile install of the game.
One reason I don't see them doing that though is the people who will ask the same for Battlegrounds, but Battlegrounds being an active mode needs to be baseline for the ease of access, and because there's that 1% chance someone who doesn't care about it goes and plays it once because it was easy to do so and they end up spending money on it.
In a way though, I'd like to be wrong about that. Mercenaries has so much stuff in the client, it would certainly make all our datamining processes quicker without it there. But I'd rather it stay because I know people that still like to play it and I think that's awesome.
Live service games in general are having a hard time: a combination of the market being saturated, player preferences changing and rising costs.
Oh yeah, I feel bad for the new model of games. It used to be that you'd launch a game, provide some support for it, and then it was done and you were either a great game or a bad game. But now everything from AAA needs multiplayer, needs a battle pass, needs microtransctions (even in single player games), and it just all feels so predatory. It forces everyone to stick to regular content releases which in some cases can lead to lower quality updates in games (honestly a lot of early PUBG felt lower quality and updating for the sake of updating).
Then you add in how players change overtime? Oof.
It reminds me of the time when every few months another "WoW killer" was announced and few lived beyond the initial hype.
I am so thrilled to have never sunk time into another MMO during the early "WoW killer" days. Played all the betas, always went back to the real crack dealer and it looks like I wasn't wrong for doing so. It's not even that all those games were bad, some of them had great stuff in them, but they all ended up lacking content at the end of the day.
There is only so much space for games that require a lot of time investment;
And that's my problem with battle passes. I know I'm not the target audience for a lot of games, I don't have the time like I used to, but damn do I hate how battle passes feel so essential to the experience. I like having some cool stuff and games and it seems like the coolest always comes from the passes and they just take such a massive time commitment to finish. If I had a dollar for every battle pass I haven't finished, I'd be able to buy a few more battle passes.
What I think happened is that they fired a number of developers last year to cut costs and now they have to make cuts in the stuff they can deliver because they're short-staffed.
Isn't it insane how you can fire a dozen people, screw over the game hard enough to require cuts, but when you look at the overall picture if they cost the company 1.5 million a year and the game profits 50 million (totally making up numbers here) that higher ups see that as a positive savings? Everything always comes down to penny pinching in AAA because of the investors. Investment in game studios was one of the worst things to happen to the industry. Investment as a whole has ruined a lot of businesses and the quality of service they deliver to customers, I remember when you could get someone who actually spoke English on the physical phone with Amazon, but that's a topic for another time.
Oh yeah, I could definitively say and almost be willing to commit to shoe eating if it does happen, that solo adventures are gone for good.
Blizzard always talked about how much work they took and how they have no replay value. Dungeon Run was a solution to that, and Duels was a way to improve upon Dungeon Run. RIP
Which is a damn shame. World of Warcraft has had a similar problem where every expansion the old expansion's stuff is all completely irrelevant which leads to the time in development being too high for the use of it all. With Dragonflight they changed that mantra and instead are creating systems that will be used for years to come which has put so much good into the game.
I think Hearthstone should revisit what a solo adventure is. Why do we need them to be completely voice acted? Why do we need special effects for key moments with a lore character? I can say without a doubt that players would be happy, maybe not all, and probably not Zeddy (<3), with just getting some new AI to play against that featured other characters. Then if you do want to put in the effort of voicelines and animations, sell the damn heroes as playable heroes! Hero Skins must still sell well for there to be so many options, so double up and use solo adventures as a way to showcase cool new hero skins (alongside fun ai to fight). We don't need an adventure to progress some unique Hearthstone story. Go take World of Warcraft's Zul'Aman and create a deck for each of the bosses - you probably already have rights to use the existing art for them. Done.
This is an awesome way to end the epic games holiday giveaway. I never got an opportunity to play Guardians of the Galaxy but I know a lot of folks really enjoyed it so it's now been added to the backlog!
It would be a huge loss to the community to have a positive force like Regis being completely gone from the game.
I hope Blizzard can figure something out. Dungeon Run PvP was a very cool mode and I genuinely had fun playing with it over the years. If they did something with it as a Twist format for a month (special heroes + hero powers), or if they do experiment more with Arena, I think that's time well spent and it consolidates the player base more which means better queues across the field.
What happened to Hearthstone being this platform for so many different ways to play with the game? The loss of Classic was tragic, though they should have accelerated the timeline of era releases instead of never touching it. Classic makes a good Tavern Brawl though, and works way better as a "this shows up as a 1 week thing" occasionally instead of being permanently available. Mercenaries was another huge loss, the mode had a lot of potential but failed to deliver in so many ways. Mercenaries would be removed from the client too if it wasn't for the simple fact they actually sold players content for the mode.
I wonder if Duels never received content for sale because they too weren't sure about the long-term viability of the mode. It's been quite some time since Blizzard has pushed a relevant update to it, so it's not like the writing hasn't been on the wall for a while now.
We used to get some great viewership on Duels content. The mode was clearly doing well at different points, but maybe it just wasn't doing good enough for Activision.
Last night I rang in the new year with buddies playing Raft. It was a game we had all talked about playing several times over the years and bit the Steam sale bullet. Tons of fun, I'm glad we waited though because a common complaint was the game "didn't have enough content". Now? Certainly seems like it did so early access was seemingly a success.
I also started a co-op Far Cry 6 playthrough with a friend. Neither of us have played the game and I never played a game in the Far Cry series and so far, it's been fun. I'm assuming we'll progress a few hours each week so done by the end of the month if schedules work out - fingers crossed.
This month, I'd love to play a bit of WoW, some F1 2023, I've got to continue ARK as well. I'd like to jump into Path of Exile again too, but I just get disappointed because I don't have the time to commit to it.
This is a great overview, Thonson! Thanks for the great community contribution.
It'll be interesting to see if this is able to capture new players whenever Hearthstone ends up on Steam. I can only imagine they're getting feedback now on it being live before flipping that switch next year. New experience does look good!
That is a crazy nerf to Thaddius but it looks quite warranted when you look at the card's winrate stats on HSReplay.
Diamond through Legend tells us the card had a bit of a rise in January but ultimately wasn't that big of a deal and it's fizzled out.
But when we look at Bronze through Gold, it tells a different story. Players are having a rough time with the card and even though both the top and bottom of the ladder see Thaddius at a popularity score of 1.38% and 2% respectively, so a small number of decks, the card is clearly a winrate outlier in lower-end play so if not many are playing it, nerfing it sounds like it will only improve those weird one-off games where he's just such a powerhouse and can't be dealt with.
Neat!
Honestly that's just kinda a thing for all consoles and didn't feel like it needed to be pointed out but you very well might be right about it being worth mentioning. I'll have to figure out how I want to approach it. Thanks for the feedback!
If you run into any issues, you can mention them here. Feedback is also appreciated.
Still slots open!
Yeah it's doing incredibly well. 855,706 on steam is the current peak and they just stated there are now 3 million copies sold in 40 hours. So nutty but I love it!
https://twitter.com/Palworld_EN/status/1748871267439247623
Every. Single. Time.
FWIW Kotick left Activision Blizzard.
That doesn't invalidate anything you've said, just wanted to clear that up for anyone that missed the message.
My favourite comment :D
Yup, and they removed ways to get items that are still useful in the game. Luckily, there is an alternative way to obtain exotics from the past, but it requires a potentially larger time sink than had the content remained in the game. It's possible they've adjusted it since 2021 though when I was last looking into obtaining stuff I was missing, so maybe it isn't as bad.
Yup, that's the exact reason! And it's a reason why some bugs can't be fixed via small hearthstone-provided updates. Blizzard has done a good job over the years though improving what they can and can't hotfix into the client, so that's a plus.
Yeah =(
We're in for an incredibly rude awakening when this becomes a universal truth. Steady profits are so healthy, as is single digit growth, but of course, greed takes over on the side of everyone and is the reason we can't have nice things. If you aren't making returns that are beating the market, you're effectively losing money. Magic fairy money at that.
Yeah I'm replying
Yeah!
Just a test
I love it, lots of quotes! Let's dive in.
This would have been such an easy thing for them to do for the "off season" that is happening right now for January before they bring in some new goodies for February. They could have done Classic + Naxx and it would have been a great way to kick off the year.
Removing paid content like that from players, especially in a card game, would be a huge slap in the face. If they offered refunds to BattleNet balance or just an equivalent in other Hearthstone stuff, I could see them being able to do it with less friction, but they have to take a loss in order to do it. I can't see this being anything but a monetary-driven decision. They might claim that it's difficult to support balance in the mode when they are always creating so many new cards, and they have on Twitter, that can't be the only driving force behind why it was okay to remove.
Destiny 2 infamously removed content from the game because of "hard drive space" with no optional way to get it back. If Blizzard wanted to take the smarter approach here, and make some new tech, maybe they could make Mercenaries an optional download (it's a lot of data, images, code) which would slim down the mobile install of the game.
One reason I don't see them doing that though is the people who will ask the same for Battlegrounds, but Battlegrounds being an active mode needs to be baseline for the ease of access, and because there's that 1% chance someone who doesn't care about it goes and plays it once because it was easy to do so and they end up spending money on it.
In a way though, I'd like to be wrong about that. Mercenaries has so much stuff in the client, it would certainly make all our datamining processes quicker without it there. But I'd rather it stay because I know people that still like to play it and I think that's awesome.
Oh yeah, I feel bad for the new model of games. It used to be that you'd launch a game, provide some support for it, and then it was done and you were either a great game or a bad game. But now everything from AAA needs multiplayer, needs a battle pass, needs microtransctions (even in single player games), and it just all feels so predatory. It forces everyone to stick to regular content releases which in some cases can lead to lower quality updates in games (honestly a lot of early PUBG felt lower quality and updating for the sake of updating).
Then you add in how players change overtime? Oof.
I am so thrilled to have never sunk time into another MMO during the early "WoW killer" days. Played all the betas, always went back to the real crack dealer and it looks like I wasn't wrong for doing so. It's not even that all those games were bad, some of them had great stuff in them, but they all ended up lacking content at the end of the day.
And that's my problem with battle passes. I know I'm not the target audience for a lot of games, I don't have the time like I used to, but damn do I hate how battle passes feel so essential to the experience. I like having some cool stuff and games and it seems like the coolest always comes from the passes and they just take such a massive time commitment to finish. If I had a dollar for every battle pass I haven't finished, I'd be able to buy a few more battle passes.
Isn't it insane how you can fire a dozen people, screw over the game hard enough to require cuts, but when you look at the overall picture if they cost the company 1.5 million a year and the game profits 50 million (totally making up numbers here) that higher ups see that as a positive savings? Everything always comes down to penny pinching in AAA because of the investors. Investment in game studios was one of the worst things to happen to the industry. Investment as a whole has ruined a lot of businesses and the quality of service they deliver to customers, I remember when you could get someone who actually spoke English on the physical phone with Amazon, but that's a topic for another time.
Thanks for the reply!
Oh yeah, I could definitively say and almost be willing to commit to shoe eating if it does happen, that solo adventures are gone for good.
Blizzard always talked about how much work they took and how they have no replay value. Dungeon Run was a solution to that, and Duels was a way to improve upon Dungeon Run. RIP
Which is a damn shame. World of Warcraft has had a similar problem where every expansion the old expansion's stuff is all completely irrelevant which leads to the time in development being too high for the use of it all. With Dragonflight they changed that mantra and instead are creating systems that will be used for years to come which has put so much good into the game.
I think Hearthstone should revisit what a solo adventure is. Why do we need them to be completely voice acted? Why do we need special effects for key moments with a lore character? I can say without a doubt that players would be happy, maybe not all, and probably not Zeddy (<3), with just getting some new AI to play against that featured other characters. Then if you do want to put in the effort of voicelines and animations, sell the damn heroes as playable heroes! Hero Skins must still sell well for there to be so many options, so double up and use solo adventures as a way to showcase cool new hero skins (alongside fun ai to fight). We don't need an adventure to progress some unique Hearthstone story. Go take World of Warcraft's Zul'Aman and create a deck for each of the bosses - you probably already have rights to use the existing art for them. Done.
That's awesome! Have you had any unfortunate deaths yet?
This is an awesome way to end the epic games holiday giveaway. I never got an opportunity to play Guardians of the Galaxy but I know a lot of folks really enjoyed it so it's now been added to the backlog!
It would be a huge loss to the community to have a positive force like Regis being completely gone from the game.
I hope Blizzard can figure something out. Dungeon Run PvP was a very cool mode and I genuinely had fun playing with it over the years. If they did something with it as a Twist format for a month (special heroes + hero powers), or if they do experiment more with Arena, I think that's time well spent and it consolidates the player base more which means better queues across the field.
What happened to Hearthstone being this platform for so many different ways to play with the game? The loss of Classic was tragic, though they should have accelerated the timeline of era releases instead of never touching it. Classic makes a good Tavern Brawl though, and works way better as a "this shows up as a 1 week thing" occasionally instead of being permanently available. Mercenaries was another huge loss, the mode had a lot of potential but failed to deliver in so many ways. Mercenaries would be removed from the client too if it wasn't for the simple fact they actually sold players content for the mode.
I wonder if Duels never received content for sale because they too weren't sure about the long-term viability of the mode. It's been quite some time since Blizzard has pushed a relevant update to it, so it's not like the writing hasn't been on the wall for a while now.
We used to get some great viewership on Duels content. The mode was clearly doing well at different points, but maybe it just wasn't doing good enough for Activision.
RIP
I appreciate the lore!
Yeah, it's easy to earn some snow by just navigating the site and you get 10 each day for visiting the Snowpocalypse page.
Happy New Year!
Last night I rang in the new year with buddies playing Raft. It was a game we had all talked about playing several times over the years and bit the Steam sale bullet. Tons of fun, I'm glad we waited though because a common complaint was the game "didn't have enough content". Now? Certainly seems like it did so early access was seemingly a success.
I also started a co-op Far Cry 6 playthrough with a friend. Neither of us have played the game and I never played a game in the Far Cry series and so far, it's been fun. I'm assuming we'll progress a few hours each week so done by the end of the month if schedules work out - fingers crossed.
This month, I'd love to play a bit of WoW, some F1 2023, I've got to continue ARK as well. I'd like to jump into Path of Exile again too, but I just get disappointed because I don't have the time to commit to it.
This is a great overview, Thonson! Thanks for the great community contribution.
It'll be interesting to see if this is able to capture new players whenever Hearthstone ends up on Steam. I can only imagine they're getting feedback now on it being live before flipping that switch next year. New experience does look good!