I like to see how the intellectually dishonest, abusive,
Blizzard apologist set lives, so this week I was hanging around the Hearthstone
General forum when I saw a post from Daxxarri titled Fair Play is at the Heart of Hearthstone. My first thought was that Daxxarri had played
a completely different game than I played since Hearthstone went public Alpha
in March.
Then a different part of me
remembered that Blizzard had a bunch of job requisitions opened for Hearthstone
design and balance. Even though all
those reqs had a requirement of 75 bazillion hours experience in 1 v. 1,
netdeck v. netdeck, coin flip fake sports, there was always hope that someone
in Irvine woke up and realized that CCGs are more than just 1 v. 1 games
against strangers and netdecking Hearthstone Ranked as a full-time job. So, with cautious optimism, I opened the post
expecting to see multiple paragraphs about missing CCG variants being added to
Friendly play, a statement about strict adherence to the Card Balance
Philosophy, and statements about fixes to the base set commensurate with the
Card Balance Philosophy. The post we got
was three sentences. I’m going to
deconstruct it sentence by sentence, and in some cases, word by word.
Daxxarri’s words will be in italics:
A fun, fair, and
competitive environment is at the very heart of the Hearthstone experience.
No it isn’t, but let’s look into why:
A fun environment is
at the very heart of the Hearthstone experience.
Impossible given Hearthstone is missing every casual, fun CCG
variant in favor of trying to jam every player into the Ranked hole on the Fisher-Price Workbench, regardless of how ill-fitting they are for Ranked play.
A fair environment is at the very heart of the
Hearthstone experience.
Leeroy Jenkins combos, the Power 6, Zoo, and Naxx slightly
shifting degenerate deck archetypes all say otherwise, but I suppose one could
self-deceive that perpetually netdecking the FotM (Flavor of the Metagame) against strangers who are also perpetually netdecking the FotM is
“fair”.
A competitive
environment is at the very heart of the Hearthstone experience.
Here’s the lone nugget of reality in the first sentence.
Blizzard, in fact, created a system where the entire point is to scratch and
claw your way to either Rank 20, Legend Rank, or Top 16 of Legend Rank. Everything else is worthless, so if I can
come up with a way to do that while doing anything more productive or more fun,
then it would be to my benefit to do so.
This is a reminder
that we take fair play very seriously…
If this were true, the base set design would have been fixed
months ago, but it hasn’t, so no, Daxx, your design team can’t be bothered to
care about fair play.
…and that making use
of third party programs that automate gameplay (also known as ‘bots’ or
‘botting’) is a violation of our Terms of Use. Accounts that are found to be
making use of ‘bots’ are subject to penalties, up to and including permanent
suspension.
Oh, this is just toothless, PR, CYA, nonsense so Blizzard
can say with a straight face that they are doing something about botting to
quell forum complaints. Banning accounts
is irrelevant in a F2P game. If weenie rush wasn’t a dominant deck archetype,
botting would be much harder. If
Hearthstone had depth, botting would be much harder. If Hearthstone was
interactive, botting would be much harder.
If there were real casual alternatives for players to play their friends
instead of feeling forced to play Ranked all the time against strangers,
botting would be less prevalent.
So if I’m understanding fully: The feature set, core game design, core set
design, willful ignorance of cards and combos that violate the Card Balance
Philosophy, and an expansion that did almost nothing to the metagame are all
fully and solely the responsibility of Blizzard; players have subsequently
rejected some or all of these things and employed a way around having to
subject themselves to Hearthstone’s myriad shortcomings. Blizzard’s response to that rejection is not
to fix their game, but to dump the responsibility for “fair play” solely on the
shoulders of the players?
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