Ugh. Usually when people complain about Tavern Brawl, I say it’s meant it be a fun casual mode. It appeals mainly to players who don’t give their opinions on online forums, and that’s ok. Not everything has to be for me.
But then a mode like this comes along. How are those casual players supposed to play this week?
If you’re calculating the value of this deal, I recommend that you don’t think about the cost of individual packs or Legendaries. Instead, think about what you need to have fun with the game.
If you accept that a pack of 5 cards is worth $1.25, or a Legendary is worth $10, then guess what? Blizzard will keep offering you deals better than that, and you’ll sink hundreds of dollars into the game. The reality is that cards don’t have a static value to YOU. Your first 60 packs are vital to get all the Commons and Rares. Your next 60 are important to get a few more Epics and Legendaries, along with the dust to craft more. The 60 after that are nice, but have diminishing returns because you’ll have already drawn or crafted the most important cards for you. The ones after that are even less important.
So what do you want from the game? Is it enough packs to play a few competitive decks per expansion? Most competitive decks per expansion? A complete set? Also some cosmetics? Ok, now that you’ve decided that, what is it worth to you? Divide that over 4 months and decide if that’s a fair “subscription” price for the enjoyment Hearthstone will give you.
When I first started playing, the $50 pre-orders gave me the cards I needed from the current set (when added to my gold, of course), and the occasional other deal helped me stretch my resources to catch up on the older sets I hadn’t gotten. Then as my collection fleshed out, I only wanted the pre-order deal. Just as I was thinking that I should pay a little less, the new rewards track came out. Now I get all the cards AND cosmetics I could want from buying that pass and sometimes the mini-set. Some of the other deals are tempting, but I pass on them because I don’t need to dump more cards into my collection. It would just be wasted money.
You may decide you want more (or less) than me. Your decision may involve the occasional mid-expansion deal like this. That’s fine. I just encourage you to decide on a budget and a goal ahead of time so you don’t get tricked into buying more “good deals” than you actually want.
Are people asking Dean about the charges Blizzard is facing? I assume they are, and I’m sure that he’s in an awkward position and has to watch what he says, but I’d really like to hear more from him on it.
Two weeks ago, when the news had just broke, he gave a very honest-sounding reaction about it at his AMA. I appreciated it, and the reactions like that helped me believe that Blizzard as a company is redeemable. But there has been nothing new over the last two AMAs. Even if there can’t be big announcements about it every week, the silence does feel awkward.
I appreciate that they’ve put the amount of gold that they feel is right on the track. If they made more rewards give gold, they’d make up for it by reducing other rewards. Everyone can have opinions about whether the track is generous enough, but I think the real question is whether the non-gold rewards could be more fun.
It seems like the free golden cards were a good experiment that failed. I don’t care too much about golden cards, but to the extent that I do, they’re fun partly because my collection of golden cards will be different than yours. It makes our collections feel a little more personal even though most of us have at least 90% of the same cards. Given that, it’s not very fun to get a golden card that EVERY other semi-serious player will also earn. Why bother?
Also, the golden epics create some harmful incentives and feel-bad moments. I know that I’ll earn two Elwynn Boars once I’ve been playing for 3-4 weeks. If I open one in a pack before then, that will be a duplicate epic I’ll just have to dust. I actually stopped opening card packs early to avoid this risk. I’m holding off on more until I reach level 75, and not experimenting as much with the new set in the meantime. That’s not what the designers intended.
I think the right solution would be to introduce tokens that let you upgrade cards of a certain rarity to golden. Then you can apply them to the ones in your collection that you want. It’s fun, it keeps the golden cards personal and “special”, and there’s no way that opening the wrong card in a pack can make that system feel like a loss.
If you draw the nuts and your opponent applies basically no pressure to you, then you can finish this quest on turn 5 or 6 and close out the game on 7. But in addition to playing the Quest, the 9 cards for the quest, AND Dawngrasp, it means you’ve played one or two copies of Incanter's Flow. Without that cost reduction, your post-quest game is strong but nothing special.
More typically, I can expect to win a Quest Mage game around turn 8-10, and sometimes I’ll have bad luck and be unable to do that. If you think of this as aggro, then you haven’t been playing Hearthstone for the last few years. This is the slowest post-launch meta I can remember.
My prediction is that this card will remain strong, but it will not be OP once the meta solidifies. This deck has the advantage of being related to an existing popular deck, so the theroycrafters honed in on a near-optimal build quickly. Also, you have to make a lot of inefficient plays to cast the right spells quickly, and as I mentioned above, my opponents haven’t been applying much pressure to me. Once I start facing other good decks, I expect to struggle a lot with the mid-game.
I’ve seen a few comments implying that this is the end of it or that other people will avoid responsibility because Brack took the blame. That’s not true at all. It doesn’t end the court case or the calls for reconciliation from employees.
The truth is that the CEO is partly responsible for this - they need to be aware of the corporate culture, especially if it’s so bad that HR is widely considered to be ineffective. It’s hard to believe that he didn’t have an active hand in this, but if he really knew nothing about it, that means he’s too incompetent to run a company.
Firing him isn’t the final step. It’s a necessary first step, and one that’s so obvious that they’ll do it even before the case finishes.
One point I want to make: A lot of people are still unsure if Blizzard really did anything wrong, since no court has ruled on this yet. Some of these people are saying that this is a cynical move by Blizzard and because we don’t know if Brack was at fault for anything.
But here’s the truth: Even though it IS a calculated move by a corporation who’s looking at their bottom line, it’s also a move by a corporation who KNOWS A LOT ABOUT THE EVIDENCE THAT WILL COME OUT. This firing is an admission of at least some guilt, and a proactive attempt to win leniency with the judge and the public. If Blizzard believed that these claims were entirely unfounded, they would make that case in court, and there would be no reason to act guilty now.
Are you unsure whether Blizzard did anything wrong? They have to be careful right now about what they say and how they say it, but what they just did is a public announcement that at least some of the allegations are true.
And if even a portion of these things are true, then Blizzard definitely deserves to be taken to court and many people (including Brack) definitely deserve to lose their jobs.
Here's my entry. I have a special love for cheap Token Druid decks, because that was the source of my first major climb up the ladder when I was still new and didn't have many legendaries. Hopefully this option is available for other new players in the upcoming meta!
I’ve never been a Warlock player, but once Quest Hunter gets nerfed I’m going to have to try this just so I can make a deck named “Anetheron bites the dust”.
Edit: I just learned that WilmerHale, the outside firm they’re contracting with, is known for helping companies fight unionization. That certainly puts a disturbing spin on this issue.
My original comment:
Thank you. Those are very good points. I had interpreted this all as a good sign - yes, I’m cynical about anything a large corporation does, but this is the rare situation where morality, laws, and profit motive line up pretty well. I saw this as the first step in a process that I could expect to go well. But you’re right - it can definitely be read as the CEO staking out a position that doesn’t go as far as it should.
I will make two points about what you said:
1) Just because a group of employees made demands, the company doesn’t have to agree immediately. It’s ok for them to stake out different public positions, and then work towards a compromise. And though I like every one of the demands made by the employee group, you generally ask for more than you expect to get. It’s not necessarily a travesty if Blizzard gives in to most but not all of the demands.
2) As others have pointed out in this thread, the reference to changing characters and in-game items is probably because some things in WoW are directly named after abusers. That’s a good change. I don’t think that this is an excuse to censor artwork or anything. I just don’t see that being a successful PR gambit.
I’m very curious about how well the alternate bartenders will sell. Most cosmetics in games like this are things your opponent will see as well, but bartenders are for your eyes only. Will people still want to pay for them?
justice does not work like that. "Innocent until proven guilty"
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a very important principle. If the State of California announced that they were going to skip the trial and just imprison some Blizzard executives or fine the company millions of dollars, that would be a horrible miscarriage of justice. I’m very glad that the government is held to a strict standard of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, even if it means some criminals go free.
But that doesn’t mean every citizen should hold themselves to that standard. You’re allowed to break up with someone because you THINK they’re cheating on you. You can decide not to be friends with someone because you HEARD they’re a jerk. And if you hear that there’s evidence that a company is hurting people, you can decide how to react. The world outside the courtroom is more nuanced and complex than the one in the courtroom, and you simply can’t avoid making judgement calls that might help or hurt the wrong person.
It really is your choice. Personally, I expect to keep playing Hearthstone unless I hear that these problems were all throughout Team 5 as well. And I’ll feel guiltier about the part of my payment that props up credit card companies than the part that goes to Blizzard. But I totally understand why some people are choosing to cut back on the game, or even to express anger about the allegations before eventually playing again. If the chaos right now means that the reveal season is interrupted, then that’s not a miscarriage of justice. It’s a case of people doing their best in an imperfect world.
To our knowledge, no one from the Hearthstone team has been implicated. I don’t believe that the published information is clear about identifying everyone, and it’s hard to believe that there is NO cultural bleed between teams, so who knows what the truth is.
What little we’ve seen so far from the HS team does seem reassuring. The major figures are making strong statements that say the right things. That may seem like the bare minimum, but it’s hard to speak out when your company is facing legal action. Either their management is allowing them to make these statements, or they care too much about the issue to be silenced. Also, putting off the card reveals was done in solidarity with community figures and signaled that the community should feel free to speak out on this without repercussion.
Those actions could be a cynical public relations act, sure. But compared to the pissy, immature statement that Blizzard corporate put out, it does seem like this team understands the issue and at least knows how to conduct themselves.
(Seriously, can you believe that statement? I had trouble believing a multi-billion dollar company could have a culture as toxic as California described, until I saw Blizzard’s response. We may not have seen proof of the allegations yet, but we’ve already been shown that the people running Blizzard truly are dumb and entitled.)
In short, right now I’m giving Hearthstone the benefit of the doubt. I’ll definitely be listening for any stories that come out now, and I’ll be willing to believe them if I do start hearing more bad stories.
I think Dean would make a couple other points is this weren’t a rushed Twitter Q&A:
1) Hunter’s power level is fairly consistent. It always has at least a playable deck, but rarely has the very highest WR. If you’re going to fix something, start with a class that swings wildly between Dumpster Tier and God Tier.
2) Hunter probably has more fans than any other class. Especially at lower levels of play (and even medium), you’ll find a lot of people who are happy to main Hunter even if it’s not currently meta. As discussed elsewhere in this article, you don’t usually want to take away something that some players LOVE and replace it with something that other players will like.
The counter argument to all this is that Hunter is too consistent and boring. The easiest prediction to make about the Stormwind meta is that we’ll see a Face Hunter similar to the Barrens Face Hunter. But I don’t think that outweighs the benefits I listed above. Besides, this isn’t like Hero Cards that are so game-changing that the team has to take breaks in between new ones. Having an aggro option is just a fact of life in most CCGs. The Hunters we know are here to stay.
Thank you. I appreciated the detail and the links :) I did assume that the last Duels ratings reset was considered a new season, so I’m glad to know that something bigger is coming.
I barely play Duels now, but I think it’s 90% of the way to being a great system, so I really hope they keep working on it.
Give players double XP (or triple, even) for playing that class on any mode. Keep the ladder rankings unchanged.
Ugh. Usually when people complain about Tavern Brawl, I say it’s meant it be a fun casual mode. It appeals mainly to players who don’t give their opinions on online forums, and that’s ok. Not everything has to be for me.
But then a mode like this comes along. How are those casual players supposed to play this week?
Thanks. That’s a great guide! Much better than the Blizzard blog post I linked below.
The best resource I know of is the old blog post when Blizzard announced the special commands: https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/20056284
I agree that we need a better one, especially if new items like “refund” are being added.
If you’re calculating the value of this deal, I recommend that you don’t think about the cost of individual packs or Legendaries. Instead, think about what you need to have fun with the game.
If you accept that a pack of 5 cards is worth $1.25, or a Legendary is worth $10, then guess what? Blizzard will keep offering you deals better than that, and you’ll sink hundreds of dollars into the game. The reality is that cards don’t have a static value to YOU. Your first 60 packs are vital to get all the Commons and Rares. Your next 60 are important to get a few more Epics and Legendaries, along with the dust to craft more. The 60 after that are nice, but have diminishing returns because you’ll have already drawn or crafted the most important cards for you. The ones after that are even less important.
So what do you want from the game? Is it enough packs to play a few competitive decks per expansion? Most competitive decks per expansion? A complete set? Also some cosmetics? Ok, now that you’ve decided that, what is it worth to you? Divide that over 4 months and decide if that’s a fair “subscription” price for the enjoyment Hearthstone will give you.
When I first started playing, the $50 pre-orders gave me the cards I needed from the current set (when added to my gold, of course), and the occasional other deal helped me stretch my resources to catch up on the older sets I hadn’t gotten. Then as my collection fleshed out, I only wanted the pre-order deal. Just as I was thinking that I should pay a little less, the new rewards track came out. Now I get all the cards AND cosmetics I could want from buying that pass and sometimes the mini-set. Some of the other deals are tempting, but I pass on them because I don’t need to dump more cards into my collection. It would just be wasted money.
You may decide you want more (or less) than me. Your decision may involve the occasional mid-expansion deal like this. That’s fine. I just encourage you to decide on a budget and a goal ahead of time so you don’t get tricked into buying more “good deals” than you actually want.
Are people asking Dean about the charges Blizzard is facing? I assume they are, and I’m sure that he’s in an awkward position and has to watch what he says, but I’d really like to hear more from him on it.
Two weeks ago, when the news had just broke, he gave a very honest-sounding reaction about it at his AMA. I appreciated it, and the reactions like that helped me believe that Blizzard as a company is redeemable. But there has been nothing new over the last two AMAs. Even if there can’t be big announcements about it every week, the silence does feel awkward.
I appreciate that they’ve put the amount of gold that they feel is right on the track. If they made more rewards give gold, they’d make up for it by reducing other rewards. Everyone can have opinions about whether the track is generous enough, but I think the real question is whether the non-gold rewards could be more fun.
It seems like the free golden cards were a good experiment that failed. I don’t care too much about golden cards, but to the extent that I do, they’re fun partly because my collection of golden cards will be different than yours. It makes our collections feel a little more personal even though most of us have at least 90% of the same cards. Given that, it’s not very fun to get a golden card that EVERY other semi-serious player will also earn. Why bother?
Also, the golden epics create some harmful incentives and feel-bad moments. I know that I’ll earn two Elwynn Boars once I’ve been playing for 3-4 weeks. If I open one in a pack before then, that will be a duplicate epic I’ll just have to dust. I actually stopped opening card packs early to avoid this risk. I’m holding off on more until I reach level 75, and not experimenting as much with the new set in the meantime. That’s not what the designers intended.
I think the right solution would be to introduce tokens that let you upgrade cards of a certain rarity to golden. Then you can apply them to the ones in your collection that you want. It’s fun, it keeps the golden cards personal and “special”, and there’s no way that opening the wrong card in a pack can make that system feel like a loss.
If you draw the nuts and your opponent applies basically no pressure to you, then you can finish this quest on turn 5 or 6 and close out the game on 7. But in addition to playing the Quest, the 9 cards for the quest, AND Dawngrasp, it means you’ve played one or two copies of Incanter's Flow. Without that cost reduction, your post-quest game is strong but nothing special.
More typically, I can expect to win a Quest Mage game around turn 8-10, and sometimes I’ll have bad luck and be unable to do that. If you think of this as aggro, then you haven’t been playing Hearthstone for the last few years. This is the slowest post-launch meta I can remember.
My prediction is that this card will remain strong, but it will not be OP once the meta solidifies. This deck has the advantage of being related to an existing popular deck, so the theroycrafters honed in on a near-optimal build quickly. Also, you have to make a lot of inefficient plays to cast the right spells quickly, and as I mentioned above, my opponents haven’t been applying much pressure to me. Once I start facing other good decks, I expect to struggle a lot with the mid-game.
I’ve seen a few comments implying that this is the end of it or that other people will avoid responsibility because Brack took the blame. That’s not true at all. It doesn’t end the court case or the calls for reconciliation from employees.
The truth is that the CEO is partly responsible for this - they need to be aware of the corporate culture, especially if it’s so bad that HR is widely considered to be ineffective. It’s hard to believe that he didn’t have an active hand in this, but if he really knew nothing about it, that means he’s too incompetent to run a company.
Firing him isn’t the final step. It’s a necessary first step, and one that’s so obvious that they’ll do it even before the case finishes.
One point I want to make: A lot of people are still unsure if Blizzard really did anything wrong, since no court has ruled on this yet. Some of these people are saying that this is a cynical move by Blizzard and because we don’t know if Brack was at fault for anything.
But here’s the truth: Even though it IS a calculated move by a corporation who’s looking at their bottom line, it’s also a move by a corporation who KNOWS A LOT ABOUT THE EVIDENCE THAT WILL COME OUT. This firing is an admission of at least some guilt, and a proactive attempt to win leniency with the judge and the public. If Blizzard believed that these claims were entirely unfounded, they would make that case in court, and there would be no reason to act guilty now.
Are you unsure whether Blizzard did anything wrong? They have to be careful right now about what they say and how they say it, but what they just did is a public announcement that at least some of the allegations are true.
And if even a portion of these things are true, then Blizzard definitely deserves to be taken to court and many people (including Brack) definitely deserve to lose their jobs.
Here's my entry. I have a special love for cheap Token Druid decks, because that was the source of my first major climb up the ladder when I was still new and didn't have many legendaries. Hopefully this option is available for other new players in the upcoming meta!
This is the question I’ve been wanting answered for months now. Thank you Slysssa for asking it!
It was one of Dean’s tersest answers this week. He really doesn’t seem interested in talking about Mercenaries.
I’ve never been a Warlock player, but once Quest Hunter gets nerfed I’m going to have to try this just so I can make a deck named “Anetheron bites the dust”.
Edit: I just learned that WilmerHale, the outside firm they’re contracting with, is known for helping companies fight unionization. That certainly puts a disturbing spin on this issue.
My original comment:
Thank you. Those are very good points. I had interpreted this all as a good sign - yes, I’m cynical about anything a large corporation does, but this is the rare situation where morality, laws, and profit motive line up pretty well. I saw this as the first step in a process that I could expect to go well. But you’re right - it can definitely be read as the CEO staking out a position that doesn’t go as far as it should.
I will make two points about what you said:
1) Just because a group of employees made demands, the company doesn’t have to agree immediately. It’s ok for them to stake out different public positions, and then work towards a compromise. And though I like every one of the demands made by the employee group, you generally ask for more than you expect to get. It’s not necessarily a travesty if Blizzard gives in to most but not all of the demands.
2) As others have pointed out in this thread, the reference to changing characters and in-game items is probably because some things in WoW are directly named after abusers. That’s a good change. I don’t think that this is an excuse to censor artwork or anything. I just don’t see that being a successful PR gambit.
I’m very curious about how well the alternate bartenders will sell. Most cosmetics in games like this are things your opponent will see as well, but bartenders are for your eyes only. Will people still want to pay for them?
Yes, and I’m more excited about this than I am about the whole newsdump from Hearthstone.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is a very important principle. If the State of California announced that they were going to skip the trial and just imprison some Blizzard executives or fine the company millions of dollars, that would be a horrible miscarriage of justice. I’m very glad that the government is held to a strict standard of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, even if it means some criminals go free.
But that doesn’t mean every citizen should hold themselves to that standard. You’re allowed to break up with someone because you THINK they’re cheating on you. You can decide not to be friends with someone because you HEARD they’re a jerk. And if you hear that there’s evidence that a company is hurting people, you can decide how to react. The world outside the courtroom is more nuanced and complex than the one in the courtroom, and you simply can’t avoid making judgement calls that might help or hurt the wrong person.
It really is your choice. Personally, I expect to keep playing Hearthstone unless I hear that these problems were all throughout Team 5 as well. And I’ll feel guiltier about the part of my payment that props up credit card companies than the part that goes to Blizzard. But I totally understand why some people are choosing to cut back on the game, or even to express anger about the allegations before eventually playing again. If the chaos right now means that the reveal season is interrupted, then that’s not a miscarriage of justice. It’s a case of people doing their best in an imperfect world.
To our knowledge, no one from the Hearthstone team has been implicated. I don’t believe that the published information is clear about identifying everyone, and it’s hard to believe that there is NO cultural bleed between teams, so who knows what the truth is.
What little we’ve seen so far from the HS team does seem reassuring. The major figures are making strong statements that say the right things. That may seem like the bare minimum, but it’s hard to speak out when your company is facing legal action. Either their management is allowing them to make these statements, or they care too much about the issue to be silenced. Also, putting off the card reveals was done in solidarity with community figures and signaled that the community should feel free to speak out on this without repercussion.
Those actions could be a cynical public relations act, sure. But compared to the pissy, immature statement that Blizzard corporate put out, it does seem like this team understands the issue and at least knows how to conduct themselves.
(Seriously, can you believe that statement? I had trouble believing a multi-billion dollar company could have a culture as toxic as California described, until I saw Blizzard’s response. We may not have seen proof of the allegations yet, but we’ve already been shown that the people running Blizzard truly are dumb and entitled.)
In short, right now I’m giving Hearthstone the benefit of the doubt. I’ll definitely be listening for any stories that come out now, and I’ll be willing to believe them if I do start hearing more bad stories.
I think Dean would make a couple other points is this weren’t a rushed Twitter Q&A:
1) Hunter’s power level is fairly consistent. It always has at least a playable deck, but rarely has the very highest WR. If you’re going to fix something, start with a class that swings wildly between Dumpster Tier and God Tier.
2) Hunter probably has more fans than any other class. Especially at lower levels of play (and even medium), you’ll find a lot of people who are happy to main Hunter even if it’s not currently meta. As discussed elsewhere in this article, you don’t usually want to take away something that some players LOVE and replace it with something that other players will like.
The counter argument to all this is that Hunter is too consistent and boring. The easiest prediction to make about the Stormwind meta is that we’ll see a Face Hunter similar to the Barrens Face Hunter. But I don’t think that outweighs the benefits I listed above. Besides, this isn’t like Hero Cards that are so game-changing that the team has to take breaks in between new ones. Having an aggro option is just a fact of life in most CCGs. The Hunters we know are here to stay.
Thank you. I appreciated the detail and the links :) I did assume that the last Duels ratings reset was considered a new season, so I’m glad to know that something bigger is coming.
I barely play Duels now, but I think it’s 90% of the way to being a great system, so I really hope they keep working on it.