Magic: The Combattening - Hearthstone

[Paelos]

My biggest issue with the game as it stands is that they made classes. That's probably the worst flaw since the cards locked to those classes can be ridiculously overpowered in a pvp setting.

That and there's no real reason to spend money on the game in my mind.

[Paelos]

Why people can't accept sometimes that they like bad games and that's OK? When you happen to dance to a shitty tune (if you do) you still know it's bad. When you giggle at a shitty comedy you still know it's shitty, and it's OK that you enjoy it, you have your reasons, but that doesn't change the fact that you can see why it is shitty, obvious, badly acted, overly reliant on unwitty references, tropes or other bad old jokes. It is all fine, but why can't people ever admit they like a bad game, and it always has to turn into factions when it comes to games? Why everyone is always so defensive about their tastes in games?

Bad games, like bad songs or bad comics or bad shows, are NOT strictly the ones that don't make money or the ones that YOU are not playing. This is the very basic concept of "pop" culture. We all buy into it at times.

I don't really care if it's bad or not. I'm playing it because it's an easy time-waster.

Analyzing this watered down version of a TCG is a waste of time. I don't think it's a masterpiece, but I do have fun playing it, and I still think PvE is a place this game would shine far beyond the shitty PvP class-based stuff they started with.

[schild]

Just shut up. Enjoy the game. Post about the game if you want to. But stop saying the game must be a good game. Its not a good game. Stupid games that aren't very good are just fine sometimes.

I think what a lot of you card vets are purposefully ignoring is that a lot of us don't necessarily want something with all the doodads and bells and whistles of Hex or Magic.  This is stripped down, basic, and fast.  The only time I have for gaming any more is in 5-10 minute chunks, and for that, this game scratches that itch admirably.  If you want to go all TCG neck beardy that's your prerogative.  Doesn't make Hearthstone a bad game, though.

No no, we all get that. We just think even with it being stripped down it didn't have to be so goddamn shitty. I really can't stress how poorly designed even a lot of the "good" cards are.

This thing will go down as the Titanic of TCGs. Probably make as much money as any of them (besides Magic). Probably be more popular than all the rest put together. Polished as much as is possible. But really, it's a piece of shit that only people with an overactive vagina will ever watch again.

[schild]

Random game against a nobody, unprovoked busts that out. True that, homes.

[jakonovski]

Ha, had a couple games that really emphasise Hearthstone. Both at rank 19, first was against a Shaman. I got a slowish start. He lucked out a few good totems, played a pile of rares and then buffed his stuff beyond the range of any of my Warrior's mass removal. I know of one Warrior card that could've done anything, Brawl, and it's an Epic.

Second game, same rank, a Rogue with nothing. It was the same thing as before except in reverse, only I didn't even have to draw anything special.

The matchmaking means nothing when your deck is not a factor.

edit: that said, the third game, against a Mage, came down to the wire. The only reason I won was because the opponent didn't stay out of Mortal Strike range even though he had a choice. But then again even that was lucky for me, as I only have one copy.

[dusematic]

Schild probably posts in Nintendo forums how Mario Kart is a terrible game for numbskulls, and only True Smart Guys play Asetto Corsa.

[schild]

That's neither clever nor insulting. I don't even know what that is, other than poor form.

Edit: I had to look up what Asetto Corsa was. I get what you were saying now. Very good, another completely incorrect comparison. If you keep typing, maybe you'll stumble upon a good one on accident. Go for volume, not accuracy.

[Tannhauser]

Ha, had a couple games that really emphasise Hearthstone. Both at rank 19, first was against a Shaman. I got a slowish start. He lucked out a few good totems, played a pile of rares and then buffed his stuff beyond the range of any of my Warrior's mass removal. I know of one Warrior card that could've done anything, Brawl, and it's an Epic.

Second game, same rank, a Rogue with nothing. It was the same thing as before except in reverse, only I didn't even have to draw anything special.

The matchmaking means nothing when your deck is not a factor.

edit: that said, the third game, against a Mage, came down to the wire. The only reason I won was because the opponent didn't stay out of Mortal Strike range even though he had a choice. But then again even that was lucky for me, as I only have one copy.

Haven't tried Warrior ranked yet, been wondering.  My druid deck went 10-0 up thru the rankings, but then I hit a wall and lost about five games in a row with it!  It had no epics, just three blues.  But that's OK, it really started me thinking competitively and being very critical of my deck design.  Turns out about half of my cards were just shite picks.  Even running a mage net deck straight from Trump's website doesn't guarantee a win, you need to think about and react to the gameboard.  Especially since you can attack minions as well instead of always going for the other player.

[HaemishM]

The matchmaking means nothing when your deck is not a factor.

This. While there are certainly a lot of things wrong with the game (distilled combat, no blocking phase and lack of interrupts), the matchmaking is what takes the game from too simplistic in its design to just badly designed period. The gap in power between a deck filled with epics and legendaries and one that isn't, even with the randomness of the draws is just too great NOT to take it into account when matchmaking. Rather than a slow difficulty curve as your deck gets kitted out better when you win, it's a constant whiplash of facing outmatched decks and being the deck that's outmatched. One-offs are fine that way (though annoying) but in systems with rankings and progression, it's just inexcusable. It also kills any real hope of being a good eSport/competitive scene.

[Rendakor]

This. While there are certainly a lot of things wrong with the game (distilled combat, no blocking phase and lack of interrupts), the matchmaking is what takes the game from too simplistic in its design to just badly designed period. The gap in power between a deck filled with epics and legendaries and one that isn't, even with the randomness of the draws is just too great NOT to take it into account when matchmaking. Rather than a slow difficulty curve as your deck gets kitted out better when you win, it's a constant whiplash of facing outmatched decks and being the deck that's outmatched. One-offs are fine that way (though annoying) but in systems with rankings and progression, it's just inexcusable. It also kills any real hope of being a good eSport/competitive scene.

To me, the issue here is not awful matchmaking but lack of trading. When you're playing a CCG at the competitive level, you're doing so with full playsets of everything. Getting to that point in HS takes either a very long time or a lot of cash, because you're limited to buying packs or crafting (trading at a big loss).

[jakonovski]

Arenas are pretty dumb. Drew no epics or legendaries, ran against 5 decks that all had multiple epics. Was only able to win a couple because the opponents were clueless. But in terms of sheer card power, I had no chance. Because limited a la Blizzard means random cards. The utter lack of ccg knowledge exhibited by the developers is fascinating in this game.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Thing is, HS isn't really a card game when it comes down to it.  There is no solid state either digitally physically, stats can be changed or balanced, no trading and no real value to individual pieces.  You can collect sure but you can also collect pokemon.  I mean, it's fun to play and all when I have a little time at work but if you changed the graphics from rectangles to little figurines you would just call it a turn based combat game.

[Margalis]

Arenas are pretty dumb. Drew no epics or legendaries, ran against 5 decks that all had multiple epics. Was only able to win a couple because the opponents were clueless. But in terms of sheer card power, I had no chance. Because limited a la Blizzard means random cards. The utter lack of ccg knowledge exhibited by the developers is fascinating in this game.

It's not lack of knowledge it's different design goals.

Their draft is non-interactive by design. It means you don't have to wait on other people while drafting or for matchmaking. (During the draft portion at least)

Again, this would be terrible design for a physical game. For an online game? I can see why they did it. I don't particularly like it, but I understand the choice that was made. It's not great game design but it's good product design.

[jakonovski]

They could've made an effort to balance the draft pool. Instead it's now all about getting the epics and legendaries. It wouldn't be so bad if spot removal of big creatures wasn't so hard to come by, especially in relation to how easy it is to remove smaller dudes.

[Paelos]

I don't think it's that hard for them to do arena where you get 1 legendary, 2 epics, 5 rares, and the rest are common draws. In fact, I know it's easy because it would standardize the decks to a degree. Yes, you'd get some people who gets screwed by getting a "bad" legendary, but the rest of your deck should easily make up for that.

[Johny Cee]

They could've made an effort to balance the draft pool. Instead it's now all about getting the epics and legendaries. It wouldn't be so bad if spot removal of big creatures wasn't so hard to come by, especially in relation to how easy it is to remove smaller dudes.

The distribution of epics/legendaries isn't as backbreaking as the RNG occasionally screwing you over on basic necessary class-specific cards.  Like the Mage with no Flamestike/Polymorph, or the Warrior with no weapons, or the squirt gun that shoots jelly. 

Epics/legendaries are usually higher casting cost.  Limited formats generally favor aggressive strategies, and the weak taunt system means that aggressive strategies are even more favored.  It kind of sounds like you aren't weighing early game as highly as you should in Arena.  In other words, legendaries don't matter if you already have your opponent on the ropes.

[Paelos]

Games are basically over by Turn 3-4. That seems to be my experience.

[jakonovski]

The distribution of epics/legendaries isn't as backbreaking as the RNG occasionally screwing you over on basic necessary class-specific cards.  Like the Mage with no Flamestike/Polymorph, or the Warrior with no weapons, or the squirt gun that shoots jelly.  

Epics/legendaries are usually higher casting cost.  Limited formats generally favor aggressive strategies, and the weak taunt system means that aggressive strategies are even more favored.  It kind of sounds like you aren't weighing early game as highly as you should in Arena.  In other words, legendaries don't matter if you already have your opponent on the ropes.

I feel I am, but it's not like effective early drops come up in consistent numbers either. Plus you need support cards to buff them and/or remove threats, a bunch of weenies get plain murdered by mid range creatures.

[naum]

I know I'm way late to the party, but I just gave this a go. I haven't played human opponents yet, just went through the practice decks, and defeated all the classes. Hopefully, if I get some time tonight or this weekend, will give the online play v. other humans a trial next.

I had wanted to play this but hitherto, reading all the descriptions of gameplay and cards, it just seemed so flat, uninspiring, unexciting, etc., compared to MtG.

It definitely is a subpar game, compared to MtG, but at least Blizzard crafted a decent UX experience (Is this really so hard to do, WotC?).

I'll probably bore of this quickly, as I suspect my willingness to fork over money to play will stay at zero or close to zero. I don't even know if it takes a lot of money investment to have fun with this, or even if you do, will the experience be rewarding enough? How much money have others here dumped into this?

[Paelos]

I have two decks that I've collected cards for that work, my druid and mage decks. The rest of them are basically shit or I haven't figured out how to compose the deck.

[jakonovski]

I haven't paid for anything, I have five decks of mostly starter cards (Warrior, Warlock, Priest, Mage, Druid). You can get a decently playable deck just by getting to level 10, which can be done against the computer pretty fast. That part is boring however. Then you can start doing dailies and win games. I suggest going to ranked straight away, nothing to lose by playing there. I'm currently rank 16 with very little in the way of rare/epic/legendary cards.

One thing I did was to use arenas to level my low level summoners. Cuts down on the pointless boredom. Also never buy packs, go to arena. It's designed to mostly pay itself back, as you're guaranteed a pack and the more you win, the more gold you get.

[eldaec]

Wait, this game is a tcg with dailies?

What kind of mind even thinks of that?

[jakonovski]

A f2p p2w mind. 

It's hilarious though, the dailies too are wildly imbalanced. Some, like the one where you have to play 30 critters of manacost 2 or lower, can take ages unless you make a gimp deck that does nothing else. Or then you can have two wins as class X, which can be over in a few minutes.

[eldaec]

My mind, blown it is.

[Tannhauser]

My mind, blown it is.

Unlike Hex, you can get free packs if you complete quests.  If you played every day for a month you'd earn about 15-20 packs. This number is only an estimate.  You then 'disenchant' any extra copies over two and use that 'dust' to select and craft the cards you want.  Theoretically you could eventually get the entire set for free.  The big downside is that you can't trade, only buy or craft.

I've spent just shy of $100 and have a very good collection but certainly not all of them.  I'm hesitant to spend money on Hex because I'm not sure it's going to be around in six months. 

[trias_e]

Poker is a bad analogy in many ways. A single hand of poker is very short, after which state resets. It also has psychology, betting patterns, etc. If you have to compare to poker the best comparison is probably to a single-elim head's-up tournament.

I am personally not of fan of games that amount to bare optimization problems. If you have a card that does 8 damage distributed randomly yes, it is more complicated in some ways, but in an optimization-problem busy-work sort of way - deriving the EV means going through the permutations, which to me is not interesting or satisfying.

What's more interesting to me than "how will these 8 points of damage be distributed" is "if every enemy takes 2 points of damage how can I play the rest of my cards to take advantage of that, and is my deck constructed such that doing 2 points of damage to every enemy right now gives me the best chance to win?" The interesting part is in how the individual well-understood pieces interact.

Just because there's randomness to a card doesn't mean that you have a 'bare optimization problem'.   It just means you have to look at probabilistic outcomes instead of deterministic ones.  No matter what, the 'interesting' part that you listed above is always an essential part of the process.  The question is not 'How will these 8 points of damage be distributed', but rather 'Given the potential outcomes of how the damage will be distributed, how can I play the rest of my cards to take advantage of that, and is my deck construed such that...etc'.   You have to do the same analysis:  You just have to do it for multiple possible scenarios. 

Secondly, the 'optimization' problem is too difficult for cards with many different potential results.  No one sits there and calculates EV.  Possible events are grouped into categories, then the categories are planned for.  Being good at it is much more of an art than a science (for human beings, at least).

Now, I'm not going to tell you that you Should like this sort of card.  Obviously there's psychology at play:  It sucks when your random card gives you a shitty result.   But your portrayal of the scenario as 'bare optimization' isn't fair.  Randomness cards add another dimension to decision making, but they do so at a cost (higher variance, less reliability).  This is why I hate cards that are basically 'flip a coin':  They don't add much difficulty to the decision making and greatly increase variance (and these are generally the kind that are argued against in those magic articles).  I like cards that have lots of small random effects, because both variance is reduced and skill in decision making is increased.  Note that these kind of cards only really work in a computer game like Hearthstone, they are just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with on a physical board.

One thing that gets me is that, fundamentally, drawing cards at random results in the same type of decision making based on randomness that I'm talking above.  When determining the best play in any given turn, one has to think about the probability of what you will draw.  There will be many situations where you can get 'fucked' because 9/10 of your deck called for one play, but 1/10 of your deck called for another (and you draw part of the 1/10).  You can play perfectly and get punished for it:  That's just the nature of card games.  I think we are just 'used to' the randomness of cards, so it's easier for people to accept it as part of the game.

I would like to add that, while I do enjoy the game, I agree with much of the criticism here:  Stupid matchmaking system based on the stupid rank system, no legitimate draft (although I do enjoy arena, there should be the option for a real draft if you want it),  some terribly designed cards (although mostly not the ones with random elements with a few exceptions, but rather shit like Leeroy Jenkins and Harrison Jones), and a really poor start to the game for new players.

[Margalis]

Just because there's randomness to a card doesn't mean that you have a 'bare optimization problem'.   

One thing about these sorts of added complexities is that they often end up making the game less complex in the end. It's pretty common for games to have elaborate systems that seem to have a million variables and possibilities but there's actually one or two dominant strategies. It's like playing Tekken with King - you have like 20 different chain throws and nobody uses any of them because T-Bone is better than them all. It's often harder to balance systems where there are a lot of individual parts and where the parts are themselves all complicated, vs a system where the interaction between parts is the focus but each part is well-understood.

One thing that gets me is that, fundamentally, drawing cards at random results in the same type of decision making based on randomness that I'm talking above.  When determining the best play in any given turn, one has to think about the probability of what you will draw. 

This is true, but typically in these games you try to construct a deck that maximizes your chances of drawing what you need.

I get what you are saying in theory. Let's say I play this card that does randomly distributed 8 points of damage. I have to think about "ok, what if this kills the creature I wanted it to kill, what am I going to draw next. What if it does some damage to all creatures but kills none of them? Then what are my chances of drawing X and Y?" And in theory you can construct your deck such that if either outcome occurs you can draw something that helps, or construct it so that it does really well in most circumstances but fails in one that you just write off. Maybe you do some elaborate math and figure out that if you put this card together in your deck with a card that does 1 point of damage to everything then the usefulness of both cards increases dramatically.

But in practice this sort of stuff often collapses under it's own weight - it's hard to evaluate and hard to design around, and often ends up leading to degenerate strategies.

[jakonovski]

Today I tried my Druid deck with one non-common, a singular Starfall. Matched up against a Paladin, he casually removed everything I had, then slapped down Tirion and Ragnaros. It's funny, I don't think I can even begin to deal with Tirion as a Druid without getting more packs for silence creatures.

[Morat20]

Arena with a mage. Like EVERY Arena run I win the first two, then get face rolled for two or three. Their matchmaking is really atrocious.

So I run into a freaking Paladin. I am not kidding, this fucker plays FIVE humility cards on me (Changes attack to 1) over the course of the game. Five cards. A sixth of his damn deck was humility.

I died, too. Had him at 1 fucking point and I died. How? He had that fucking "Change the health of all minions to one" card and zipped through my defense on the last turn.

Seriously, five copies of humility. Their RNG is fucked.

[jakonovski]

My last arena offered me 4 Mirror Entities, but I only chose two. No Polymorphs or Fireballs anywhere. Luckily it was still a good deck.

edit: just went 7-3 and then 1-3. It's like this game's been actively designed to not only remove skill, but to also introduce wild swings of luck.

[dusematic]

Arena with a mage. Like EVERY Arena run I win the first two, then get face rolled for two or three. Their matchmaking is really atrocious.

In Arena, every time you win, you then face people who have the same wins.  So at two wins, you're facing other people with two wins.  That's why you always lose then.  Because you're a baddie.

[Tannhauser]

I've been assured by TOP players here that the reason they can't win arenas is that the game is too random.  Can't be their skills which are, in fact, leet.

[Rendakor]

Just because the game is incredibly random doesn't mean you can't make bad plays, so bad players will still lose often. It means you can make good plays and sometimes still lose, which is fucking stupid.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Top player win rates are atrocious for people who can be considered the best in the world at this game.

[Jeff Kelly]

Top players at HS have an average win rate of 60 percent in ranked play

If randomness wasn't an issue it should be higher