I think some announcement had said “next week” in a way and at a time that was vague enough that it could have been this Wednesday or it could be next Wednesday.
This hearthpwn post says the 26th or the 2nd are likely candidates.
It was going to be the brawl this week, they changed their mind to re-evaluate after it got almost universal negative reactions.
What makes you think that? The initial announcement never said when it was going to be, as far as I know.
So I’ve been playing a bit of Clash Royale lately… and this got me back into Hearthstone.
Frankly, I love the gameplay of Clash Royale. It has the drawbacks of deck-based games and the metagaming thereof, but there’s so much more space for counterplay that I feel like it’s not THAT bad.
The problem, though, is that this thing is so pay to win. Like, unapologetically pay to win. You think Hearthstone has powercreep? This game is like if EVERY card had power creep, and no only was there powercreep, it’s infinitely powercreep - it’s as if someone who has more money than you could keep giving their cards +1/+1 buffs until you had an 13/13 Argent Squire. And then you win only until someone else gets a 14/14 Argent Squire.
Shit’s ridiculous!
And yet I feel tempted to play it, because man the gameplay is so good, and the game length and intensity is just perfect, but… damn. This game.
So I’m intentionally playing Hearthstone to get away from Clash Royale and trying to F2P my way through ONIK. And maybe buy some packs from the new expansion if a deck catches my fancy, or just craft them - I have amassed quite the collection over the years after all. But Hearthstone is just so good to me in comparison that I feel like I have to support it.
ugh.
Some random guy on reddit was able to calculate it. Blizzard is a lot smarter than that.
Honestly, I’m kinda surprised people are clamouring for Hearthstone tournaments, because the game is fundamentally unsuited for competitive play. If you look at almost any competitive game, you’ll find that the top tournaments are often won by the top players. You’re pretty much never going to see a Street Fighter world championship where Infiltration enters and isn’t somewhere in the top 8 bracket. Rogue and Envyus are going to feature in a lot of Overwatch grand finals. The games are consistent, and the more skilled player/team will typically win.
This is not the case in Hearthstone. It just isn’t. If you’re qualifying “best players in the world” by “who wins tournaments”, there’s no way in hell you’re getting the top players, because the game is random to a degree which forbids it. I looked into that whole “choose your champion” thing and I think I recognized like… one name. Even Magic: The Gathering, which has a lot of random elements, still sees some people winning multiple pro tours, and you can typically expect the best players to rise to the top. The game is simultaneously fairly basic and extremely random. You can be the best player in the world, and if your Piloted Shredder drops a novice apprentice and your opponents’ Piloted Shredder drops Millhouse Manastorm, chances are good you just aren’t going to win that game.
Blizzard’s community is better at math and smarter than blizzard all the time. The example that comes to mind was years ago when they were doing a massive talent rework for an expansion of WoW, one of the rogue’s top tier combat talents, the thing that was supposed to be talent tree defining, actually lowered the class’ damage output because Blizzard didn’t understand how their own combat roll system worked. Their community spotted it right away.
In Heroes of the Storm, new heroes are almost always significantly overtuned or undertuned, and the community can tell them that ahead of time, but they refuse to listen ad keep making the same mistakes.
That sort of stuff happens all the time - Blizzard has a history of making very basic math errors / poor design that the community catches immediately.
Yeah, what Beef said. They’re still tweaking the original cards in ways that were cried for by players all the way back to beta.
And I really don’t think the 29% rake fits their style of greed; I think it is simple incompetence.
That’s… disturbing.
To expand on the Heroes of the Storm thing, Blizzard runs public test realms. Meaning that the new version of the game with all the changes (including the new hero) are available for the public to play for two weeks before they release the patch. They do that so there are no surprise broken things when the patch actually releases live. It’s a really good idea. And thousands of people volunteer to go to that PTR and test it out for them to help them ensure it’s working.
What a great resource for balancing new heroes, right? Volunteers will come play the hero in a real live game environment to see how they actually work, and give feedback. Blizzard can see if their planned designs actually work as intended.
… Except for some mysterious reason, Blizzard has declared their stated policy is not to use the PTR to test for balance, only to test that there are no bugs. So they can release new heroes to the test realm, see that there is both their own data and player feedback saying that the new hero is massively underpowered or overpowered, and the player feedback will specifically say why… and then they deliberately discard this data and release the hero in its pre-PTR state anyway. This leads to about 75% of the heroes they release being significantly underpowered or overpowered at launch.
Not that many companies have the resources to do this, to run these dedicated alternate servers and a big community that wants to give them feedback… but Blizzard has it… and deliberately squanders it. It’s baffling.
What… even the hell. That’s not just disturbing, that’s scary. It’s good to see that the Overwatch team has their heads less firmly in their asses.
Overwatch has the luxury of having all the characters free, though. Paid cards and paid heroes are something else.
Personally, I’m not sure that PTR gives enough data to tell if a hero is under or over tuned myself. It is a rather small sample size in a rather artificial meta.
The new quests are a fun idea, but they seem to come up too much. I’ve had nothing but the new ones for 5 days now, and none of the older simpler ones. Sometimes I don’t want to build a new deck just to play 30 murlocs or whatever.
I’ve just made quick decks with no thinking to play in Casual for the new quests; need to play Divine Shield … just pick all the Divine Shield cards and fill the rest at random, etc.
I’ve run into others obviously doing the same thing … a couple times we’ve both gone down to 1 health and just stopped attacking so we could put more cards on the board.
For the 30 card quests, two or three games is all it takes if your deck is full of the required cards.
That’s when you play confuse murloc priest! 
Tried today’s Tavern Brawl. The guy I played first threw out a Dreadsteed, and I had nothing to deal with it. Put on the Taunt Side, it just keeps coming back, so I could never break through. Is there a way around it, or should I just add a silence to my deck.
hex/poly/mc/sylvanas/mc tech/shadow priest/concede
Dreadsteed on charge side + knife juggler wins you the game if you don’t rope yourself
or Mogor the Ogre
Yeah, and here I am without any dreadsteeds. Think I’ll have to make an anti-dreadsteed deck - probably priest of some sort. Maybe silence priest.
Won my first game with silence priest.
My opponent did not have dreadsteeds.
this was a waste of time
Is anyone else concerned much less about winning with the new quests? Normally, I try ot have good, solid decks in every class to try and win even if I’m playing for quests, but now I just slap together whatever crap gets the quest done and winning doesn’t even matter. I just finished play 30 murlocs and play 10 divine shields without winning a game, or even trying to, just throwing them out to finish the quest as quickly as possible. Am I alone?