![]() ![]() But then, a lot of the time, he argues that the game’s player-base does a good job of ensuring that this action is unnecessary. As soon as you nerf one deck another one will emerge.”Ĭhayes won’t be drawn on what cards may be nerfed in the future because although he does say cryptically there are “one ore two” the team is looking at. ![]() The reality is, there will always be a ‘most powerful deck’ in Hearthstone. The reason for this is that we want the community to push the metagame forward rather than us coming in with a heavy hand and changing cards. “In the last year we’ve been very deliberate and very tentative about nerfing things more than we had to. “Nerfs are something we take very seriously,” Chayes continues. Warsong Commander was ultimately limiting the places where Hearthstone could go, so the team made the decision to nerf it in order to revitalise Hearthstone’s metagame – the strategic element that involves attempting to understand and anticipate an opponent’s deck. “The biggest problem with Grim Patron, which ultimately led to the change is that we received a lot of feedback from players – which we agreed with – that it wasn’t very fun to play against and, specifically, to lose against,” he says.Īccording to Chayes, the reports of player dissatisfaction presented a wider problem for Hearthstone because it meant the game was falling into a degenerative state. “We don’t want to nerf cards anymore than we absolutely have to.”Īs Chayes tells it, the decision to tweak Warsong Commander wasn’t taken lightly and came as much from the community. “One of our goals is to make sure that our players know that we’re valuing their investment in the game, whether that be time investment or monetary investment through purchasing cards.” “ taking creations, like a new deck type, that came out of the community and making it no longer viable,” he says. Then it makes sense to come in and make a change.”Ĭhayes points out, however, that the Hearthstone team is very careful about when to do it, and which cards they nerf, as they don’t want to appear heavy handed. “Then, wouldn’t you know, we ship the expansion or we ship the adventure, and the community has a lot more experience and lot more people trying things than we do and discovers new things that we’d never even thought of. “This is the way it works: we do a lot of testing internally to the point where we feel like the game’s in a pretty good place ,” says Chayes. There will always be exploits the team didn’t catch – and that millions of dedicated fans will quickly work together to uncover. His argument is that, as Blizzard is committed to adding ever more cards to the game’s already sizeable catalogue, further nerfing is inevitable because player skill levels quickly surpass those of the developers. But, as Chayes tells it, Hearthstone is a different beast to most games. So Chayes’ admission that nerfing is an integral part of Hearthstone could be read as tossing a hand grenade at the game’s 30-million-plus community. There have even been instances where players have responded to developers nerfing their game with threats on social media. Players are a passionate and, at times, volatile bunch – when a developer tinkers with a game to remove an advantage they’ve enjoyed, factions within the user base can respond with outright hostility. ![]() While many agreed that the game was more balanced as a result, nerfing always prompts a backlash from the community. As complaints grew, Blizzard finally decided to act, reducing the power of the Warsong Commander card in a patch in October. Although widely used among pro players, it was inarguably over-powered especially as when combined with another card, the Frothing Berserker, it could offer a one turn kill. The result of combining these cards was an instant army of immensely destructive capabilities, often wiping out an opponent’s force in one turn. This popular selection included the Grim Patron, a card capable of replicating itself if it survived damage, and the Warsong Commander, which allowed some cards to strike immediately when summoned. This was definitely the case this year for Blizzard, with a deck known as Grim Patron Warrior. In collectible card games, nerfing generally occurs when players have found an exploit that gives them an unfair edge over competitors that makes the whole experience less fun for everyone. In an increasingly competitive scene, where Hearthstone players must build their own combinations of cards to do turn-based battle against other participants, it is vital that no possible formation becomes dominant. “I’m very confident there will be more nerfs in Hearthstone’s future,” admits production director Jason Chayes during an interview with the Guardian at the recent Blizzcon event. It turns out that while nerfing cards is often considered a failure of design among the makers of physical collectible card games, it may be a feature of Hearthstone. ![]()
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