Blizzard communications are pretty funny on this one.
I don't think the devs realized these cards weren't supposed to be released today. Celestalon and Cora are both retweeting the cards and the artist for Cariel Roame (name now confirmed) even tweeted out the full art and name of the card.
Blizzard is just moronic when it comes to card reveals. There's never a reason to do three at once. It's not like it adds excitement, if anything, it removes it IMO. Totally different when they do a bunch of reveals together that have synergy though, that one I'd give them credit for because that's really cool. This was not really the case though in this time slot.
Being able to look at a card and think about it alone is nice. Knowing there is another one arriving in just another hour is great, it can keep the excitement going on all day. Three cards followed by a large gap and then what will almost surely be 2 cards since that's the Instagram way of doing it - not incredibly exciting. We could have had the whole morning filled with hourly reveals, a 2-hour break (not 4), and then the Instagram reveals.
But what do I know, I don't get paid to think about scheduling card reveals, just like they don't get paid to think. Giving a YouTube channel a card reveal when all they post about is Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm. Really need to get those 5 remaining Heroes players over onto Hearthstone! It reeks of nepotism.
It took them 3-4 days to get all the reveals up on the calendar. This isn't very uncommon to have happen but it's so silly. The whole community freaks out because "there's only 12 reveals?!?" and such a simple thing could be avoided if they just... were more prepared. I guess that's what everything boils down to, it just feels like card reveals are a "fuck it, wing it" thing =/. I know that isn't the case and they do have a strategy around it, but I don't think anyone can play the "Covid made our communications bad" card anymore.
Also, the expansion should have dropped on the 23rd, not the 30th. Not sure what they screwed up there!
I also don't know why they refuse to acknowledge their failure with Mercenaries. They didn't push it out during the last part of the Year of the Phoenix yet are sweeping it under the rug that the mode ended up delayed. They really need a proper communications team. I miss old Blizzard.
Video is a significant portion of revenue for the site, we can't get rid of it. I know it's shitty but at the end of the day, it has allowed us to grow more and I'll be honest, I'm a fan of that.
Out of Cards premium is available to disable ads across the entire site. It's also the best way to support the site! https://outof.cards/premium
Without premium, you can minimize the video and the anchor ad that sits at the bottom of the screen though! Both have an "X" available on top of them that will turn it off for that page load.
Seriously though, if you can't run basic web infrastructure, maybe you shouldn't be getting card reveals.
This site fucks everything up every single card reveal period. It's late to post or the site is so unreachable it doesn't matter if you have a direct link to the image even because it won't load. Caching is not difficult. You can run a WordPress blog on a $5 a month VPS with some pretty crazy traffic if you have the slightest clue at what you're doing. I went to their site yesterday out of curiosity and it was still a massively lagged-out horror and at the time I doubt many people from Thailand were visiting it since it was the middle of the night there.
A waste of time for everyone hitting refresh for these card reveals. Even more of a pain in the ass because content folks that try to sleep between reveals get screwed over even harder.
Blizzard, this is your fault. You can definitely find a different person from Thailand to reveal cards. Give someone else the exposure.
Yeah, I kinda wanted to smack my monitor when that was written because it just seemed tone-deaf.
Now we can play Classic for a few days and then come back to it a week in when some class is destroying the meta in Standard and we're waiting on that early balance patch.
Damn, totally forgot about Firebloom! I can't say I used Xaril much but I do remember doing the card reveal for it (back when Blizzard gave me cards to reveal) and how stealth through fadeleaf in rogues was really nice flavor to have. I always love when they dive into the Warcraft universe in ways one might not expect!
I definitely agree with the speculation. We've also already seen fadeleaf in the game through Xaril, Poisoned Mind and his Fadeleaf Toxin which soft-confirms the Stealth card imo.
We'll have the guide updated as soon as we can get proper confirmations. I hope people see this comment in the meantime!
We'll have the option available when account management gets an overhaul. All cosmetics need proper preview options so you can see not only what they look like but also how they will appear on your profile. =)
Life was so much easier when we just had forum titles to deal with, lol.
We’ve heard your feedback: higher levels of the reward track just take too much XP to reach. We originally included event reward XP when calculating our intended cadence of rewards. We’ve rethought this and recognize that the rewards track should stand on its own and not require event XP bonuses, making rewards predictable and consistent across an expansion. We will still have in-game events, of course, but they will remain consistent with our existing approach to event rewards instead of rewarding bonus XP for the rewards track.
I've been reading up on some forums, and I felt the need to say this because nobody seems to understand: data is expensive. You can't just "save all the data in a bunch of data centres" because that costs too much. A 1 terabyte hard drive already runs upwards of $140, and you also have to pay for security and bandwidth and a whole bunch of stuff. If people could save their data everywhere, then they would.
EDIT: Should probably point out that I don't work in IT. My knowledge comes from my friends that do.
Relatively speaking, data storage isn't that expensive, neither is bandwidth, compute sure as hell is though.
It is cheaper, in the long run, to run your own drives and hardware RAID in a couple of different places if we're just talking about files, but you're better off using an object store like Amazon's AWS S3. They worry about all the stuff that can go wrong and your data is built with the loss of two data centers in mind. (The odds of 3 data centers losing the same files in three places at the same time? I'll take that risk). Even with that in mind though, anything critical you are storing on S3 you should also mirror somewhere else. It could be an on-premises NAS or Google / Azure clouds - never trust a single service.
If you need a database though, that's when things can get pricy. Depending on the workloads you're dealing with, you're going to need comparable hardware in your second location if you want to do a real-time replica (which ensures little to no data loss when the primary fails). You'll also need to do backups (at least daily) to dump into storage but storage itself is cheap so that's not a big deal.
If your business relies on its data, it is in your best interest to make sure you can recover when a failure happens. Failures are ALWAYS a when and not if situation. You can be as proactive as you want but even that is not enough to give you a 100% guarantee that you are safe. If a business can't afford the cost to make regular backups of their essential data, I don't think they're doing a very good job as a business.
The only thing that Out of Cards doesn't have is the ability to instantly switch the site onto a fresh set of hardware. There would be some downtime involved since our compute isn't distributed. I don't consider it essential at this point, though it would be nice, because we're talking about a relatively small amount of downtime. I'd prefer us to have zero, but that's a spot I'm willing to penny-pinch on for now.
Nah, looks like its just the basic ones according to the official site.
Update: Cora and Celestalon have deleted their retweets.
Blizzard communications are pretty funny on this one.
I don't think the devs realized these cards weren't supposed to be released today. Celestalon and Cora are both retweeting the cards and the artist for Cariel Roame (name now confirmed) even tweeted out the full art and name of the card.
https://twitter.com/sulamoon/status/1372239180445712397
Nice art, but big oops!
I'll buy them, I'll play them, and I'll enjoy them since I didn't play Diamond and Pearl originally, but...
Where's my damn Let's Go Johto?
They do! We'll have images up in a few
Blizzard is just moronic when it comes to card reveals. There's never a reason to do three at once. It's not like it adds excitement, if anything, it removes it IMO. Totally different when they do a bunch of reveals together that have synergy though, that one I'd give them credit for because that's really cool. This was not really the case though in this time slot.
Being able to look at a card and think about it alone is nice. Knowing there is another one arriving in just another hour is great, it can keep the excitement going on all day. Three cards followed by a large gap and then what will almost surely be 2 cards since that's the Instagram way of doing it - not incredibly exciting. We could have had the whole morning filled with hourly reveals, a 2-hour break (not 4), and then the Instagram reveals.
But what do I know, I don't get paid to think about scheduling card reveals, just like they don't get paid to think. Giving a YouTube channel a card reveal when all they post about is Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm. Really need to get those 5 remaining Heroes players over onto Hearthstone! It reeks of nepotism.
It took them 3-4 days to get all the reveals up on the calendar. This isn't very uncommon to have happen but it's so silly. The whole community freaks out because "there's only 12 reveals?!?" and such a simple thing could be avoided if they just... were more prepared. I guess that's what everything boils down to, it just feels like card reveals are a "fuck it, wing it" thing =/. I know that isn't the case and they do have a strategy around it, but I don't think anyone can play the "Covid made our communications bad" card anymore.
Also, the expansion should have dropped on the 23rd, not the 30th. Not sure what they screwed up there!
I also don't know why they refuse to acknowledge their failure with Mercenaries. They didn't push it out during the last part of the Year of the Phoenix yet are sweeping it under the rug that the mode ended up delayed. They really need a proper communications team. I miss old Blizzard.
Video is a significant portion of revenue for the site, we can't get rid of it. I know it's shitty but at the end of the day, it has allowed us to grow more and I'll be honest, I'm a fan of that.
Out of Cards premium is available to disable ads across the entire site. It's also the best way to support the site!
https://outof.cards/premium
Without premium, you can minimize the video and the anchor ad that sits at the bottom of the screen though! Both have an "X" available on top of them that will turn it off for that page load.
Sorry to those with smaller screens!
This has Taunt, I fucked the translation up. God fucking damn it I hate Blizzard and their shit reveals.
I'd love to reveal pack filler tbh. Write an essay on it for fun =D
Seriously though, if you can't run basic web infrastructure, maybe you shouldn't be getting card reveals.
This site fucks everything up every single card reveal period. It's late to post or the site is so unreachable it doesn't matter if you have a direct link to the image even because it won't load. Caching is not difficult. You can run a WordPress blog on a $5 a month VPS with some pretty crazy traffic if you have the slightest clue at what you're doing. I went to their site yesterday out of curiosity and it was still a massively lagged-out horror and at the time I doubt many people from Thailand were visiting it since it was the middle of the night there.
A waste of time for everyone hitting refresh for these card reveals. Even more of a pain in the ass because content folks that try to sleep between reveals get screwed over even harder.
Blizzard, this is your fault. You can definitely find a different person from Thailand to reveal cards. Give someone else the exposure.
I'm not salty, you're salty.
Dean said on Twitter that he was wrong!
https://twitter.com/IksarHS/status/1372073844882685955
Unfortunate situation but hey, at least everything makes sense now!
Yeah, I kinda wanted to smack my monitor when that was written because it just seemed tone-deaf.
Now we can play Classic for a few days and then come back to it a week in when some class is destroying the meta in Standard and we're waiting on that early balance patch.
Damn, totally forgot about Firebloom! I can't say I used Xaril much but I do remember doing the card reveal for it (back when Blizzard gave me cards to reveal) and how stealth through fadeleaf in rogues was really nice flavor to have. I always love when they dive into the Warcraft universe in ways one might not expect!
I definitely agree with the speculation. We've also already seen fadeleaf in the game through Xaril, Poisoned Mind and his Fadeleaf Toxin which soft-confirms the Stealth card imo.
We'll have the guide updated as soon as we can get proper confirmations. I hope people see this comment in the meantime!
Fixed the typo!
We'll have the option available when account management gets an overhaul. All cosmetics need proper preview options so you can see not only what they look like but also how they will appear on your profile. =)
Life was so much easier when we just had forum titles to deal with, lol.
To piggyback on this comment to provide a sour, this was a part of their big announcement 3 months ago
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/2302-blizzard-responds-to-the-hearthstone-rewards-track-less-xp-required-gold-bonus-next-week-more-xp-gains
I'm pretty certain I don't teach math and I've been celebrating Pi Day for as long as I can remember.
A great reason to have some delicious Apple Pie for dessert and maybe have a Pizza =D
Happy Pi Day all!
Relatively speaking, data storage isn't that expensive, neither is bandwidth, compute sure as hell is though.
It is cheaper, in the long run, to run your own drives and hardware RAID in a couple of different places if we're just talking about files, but you're better off using an object store like Amazon's AWS S3. They worry about all the stuff that can go wrong and your data is built with the loss of two data centers in mind. (The odds of 3 data centers losing the same files in three places at the same time? I'll take that risk). Even with that in mind though, anything critical you are storing on S3 you should also mirror somewhere else. It could be an on-premises NAS or Google / Azure clouds - never trust a single service.
If you need a database though, that's when things can get pricy. Depending on the workloads you're dealing with, you're going to need comparable hardware in your second location if you want to do a real-time replica (which ensures little to no data loss when the primary fails). You'll also need to do backups (at least daily) to dump into storage but storage itself is cheap so that's not a big deal.
If your business relies on its data, it is in your best interest to make sure you can recover when a failure happens. Failures are ALWAYS a when and not if situation. You can be as proactive as you want but even that is not enough to give you a 100% guarantee that you are safe. If a business can't afford the cost to make regular backups of their essential data, I don't think they're doing a very good job as a business.
The only thing that Out of Cards doesn't have is the ability to instantly switch the site onto a fresh set of hardware. There would be some downtime involved since our compute isn't distributed. I don't consider it essential at this point, though it would be nice, because we're talking about a relatively small amount of downtime. I'd prefer us to have zero, but that's a spot I'm willing to penny-pinch on for now.
In an ideal setup, Out of Cards would be distributed in a few locations and we'd run Chaos Monkey.
https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
I've always wanted to run infrastructure with that running.
Are you visiting this page?
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/expansions/forged-in-the-barrens
That is the exact page you need to be on for it and it seems to have just credited me for it np.