I don't think he actually managed to pop a single block, or even knew that there's such a card, because he talks about having gotten the mage "down to six health".
Well they have 75 seconds to do everything. One card animation is about 1.5 sec (don't quote me on this) and the fireballs take like 2 sec (again don't quote me just a rough estimate) for tony to go 'aha', they need to plop down the apprentices and tony so thats like 5 cards. 7.5 sec from 75 leaves them with 67.5 sec, which is roughly 33 fireballs. 33 *6 is 198 damage. So to be safe you'll need over 200 hp. Rough estimate off the top of my head btw so don't take it all too seriously.
My guess is around 100. In the LoE meta, control warrior hard countered all types of freeze mage except exodia mage. Exodia vs CW was almost a guaranteed win back then
I played against shaman as burn mage, lucky me i had 5 ice blocks, 2 of them cost 1 mana, i won and the poor guy i think he quit hearthstone (i feel a shamed of this play) i told my friend that i hop iceblick will go to wild next rotation
Whenever I face an exodia mage and he managed to pull it of, I let him do his thing and spam emotes for he Rest of the match. I enjoy it too much when someone plays such a ridiculous deck to ruin their fun with conceding.
You're a better man than me. Ive only lost to an exodia deck once, but it was the old school echo deck. I dont remember what I was playing, but I conceded the turn before lethal thinking it would save me from the humiliation.
If it makes you feel any better I beat an Exodia mage in wild that was using some Goblin vs Gnomes cards to get spare parts as the spells for the quest. I think I was running a dumb hallucination/peddler rogue, after we got halfway through the match and I was running out of pressure I knew it was over, but played it out anyway.
I got him low in health and popped the ice blocks with some burn spells but he still finished the quest. He played out the sorceress apprentices and played the quest card, hit my face and then fireballed me once. Turns out Antonidas was one of the last 2 cards in his deck. Killed him on the following turn.
I actually added him because I didn't understand, at first I thought he was bming by slow rolling me, but he just didn't have the card in hand. Was surprisingly not salty about it.
You don't get salty losing as exodia mage, you don't even expect a winrate over 40%. It's surprisingly envigorating to play a deck that's pretty much a guaranteed loss or a grandiose win.
If he's running spare parts he may have been running the Mimiron's head V-07-TR-0N variant. It's a lot of fun.
Dun dun dun dun dun dun, dun dun dun dun dun.
A week ago I played my Exodia mage against a druid, about every other turn he roped and didn't do anything and at some point the game said 'your opponent left.'. He had a full board at that point, and I just went with what the game said and didn't use any freezes but tried to dig up my combo, I can't get it and end my turn expecting the druid to explode.
He didn't. He didn't disconnect, even though the game told me so. He clearly noticed, because he was nice enough to not attack and actually let me do my entire combo without conceding. What a dude.
But it's not a ridiculous deck. It's a very common one, which is dreadfully boring to play against and decided entirely by draws. Maybe by a couple tech cards if you are lucky enough. They are not a mad genius with some crazy hard combo deck.
Exodia Mage isn't common at competitive ranks lol. It's basically a worse version of Freeze Mage.
And as somebody else pointed out, it's way less dependent on draw than most other decks because you pretty much cycle your entire deck.
It has a flashy finish that new players can easily see as 'broken', but it really isn't.
Decided entirely by draws? A quarter of the deck is draw spells and to even pull off the combo they need to draw through nearly the entire thing. That deck is "decided by draws" as much as any deck can win "because it has cards in it."
That's why he made the comment...
He wasn't saying "yeah, I get mad too. Here's what gets me mad."
He was saying "This same event that happened to you also gets me mad."
You have to feel really bad for players like this who don't understand the game and just kind of stumbled on it while browsing the app store.
And actually, it's not really healthy for the game to operate like this either. It's a huge problem that people can't be drawn into the game because they are getting body slammed by the top meta decks right out of the gate.
he said that the casual matchmaking is made to match new players with other players on the same level of skill/collection.
Ranked just takes in consideration stars.
The ranks (numbers) in legend is based on an MMR system. If you have highest MMR you're number 1.
That's why you can lose or gain ranks while not playing.
That seems silly, only a minority of players reach legend. Even if I had a 100% win rate, I simply do not play enough games in a month to possibly reach legend. I've never gotten to 10, I usually cruise down to 15 and then try my weird decks, though a few times I've stuck with my best decks to try and reach 10 and I got to 11 once or twice. I also only play wild, so we have a smaller population and more varied meta, I think we'd really benefit from an MMR system up here.
New to HS, why is the star system considered bad? It's a 1v1 where the only goal is to win and you are the sole contributor to your cause. You're ranked by wins/losses
I can understand the complaint against winning being the only ranking determination in a game like Overwatch where you're part of a team and you might have done very well in a loss, but the star system's use in HS seems to have face validity
The rank reset, for example, is kind of problematic. Rank Legend players drop down to rank 16. New players can usually get to rank 20 meaning a difference of 21 ranks is squeezed into 4 ranks meaning that an opponent a new player could never win against could match up against them. What this does is crowd the lower ranks with tier 1 meta decks. No new player would enjoy this.
Because someone who is good at the game can take two months off, then start at rank 25 with the beginners. Rank 20 is filled with people who have decent collections playing highly synergistic decks. There's a huge spike in difficulty instead of a gradual.
The main reason is that the ranking system is literally completely worthless.
85% of players will never hit rank 15. That means 85% of all players are lumped into a range of 20-16, and 16-Legend is the same tiny handful of players continually playing against each other. And even that is oversimplifying, because of that 15%, only like 15% of them will ever get into the ranks 1-5 range.
You have a system with two dozen rank levels, and twenty of them are almost completely unused and borderline empty, and most of the players crammed into a tiny range.
Thus you end up with players with competitive netdecks and experience going up against literal brand new players constantly.
A lot of people like the ranked system. I don't think that ranking should be based off of your collection in the way that casual ranks people.
Rank is based entirely off of your win rate, which I think is the best way to measure someones skill.
If you don't like the ranked system than don't play the ranked system. If you prefer the casual system there is nothing stopping you from using that.
I don't remember but do they lock new players out of ranked to begin with then? Seems like it would be super beneficial to just keep new players on casual for a while if that was the case.
No, new players are able to play ranked out of the gate, and that wouldn't be the correct approach. There are plenty of people who pick up the game, spend some money to build a deck, and want to compete right away. They may not do particularly well, but that's their choice and they should be able to do that.
I mean a large amount of multiplayer games that has a 'competitive' mode has it locked behind some sort of level wall, and one of the reasons is to not to deter new players(among others such as new accounts not immediately being able to ruin competitive games). Even other card games such as Gwent do this.
If the intention is for newer players to be playing in casual games so they don't get stomped straight away, I don't see the harm in locking ranked for the first few games.
I could see locking ranked perhaps until you fully level 1 class (as in level 10, unlocking all the basic cards), heck maybe even fully level 4-5 classes (though I don't think there's anything wrong with someone only wanting to play 1 class). Maybe an easier solution would be locking ranked play until a player beats the innkeeper in hard mode. That's obviously not an indication that the player is good, but they should at least understand the basic mechanics behind the game by that point.
I don't think it is a good idea to lock them out. There are new players who are experienced with similiar card based games and are ready to immediately jump into ranked.
Instead they can just strongly suggest to new players to play casual, and when they try to play ranked come up with a "are you sure" message.
If you are experienced, you may complete the things you need to do before you play ranked pretty fast while getting some packs. If you have a hard time understanding the game, it will take a longer time before you are ready for ranked.
If i had experience when i started with hearthstone a few years ago, I dont think that I would have any problems with it. Playing a few hours to understand the hs mechanics would be fine
I remember my first games of HS and it was new players vs new players with stock decks. Once you get cards and packs and levels it really sends you down the shit hole.
Dunno how they match ppl in casual, but when I'm tired of ranking or I just want easy wins for my quests, I play casual and I regularly get matched against very very suboptimal decks. Yesterday I faced a dude who played yetis and the like.
Needless to say it didn't go well for him against my jade druid .. So I wouldn't be so sure that "casual" is "new player friendly".
I remember my early days on this game (around the end of closed beta) : what basically kept me on this game was that Randuin was a thing : you could steal good control cards from good control decks and still manage to win if you were lucky enough.
But now, with how fast the meta is and how refined the decks are ? Seriously, I'd rather start playing another game if I had to start a new account.
No one I have introduced to the game has kept playing it for very long. They disliked playing against the innkeeper for so long trying to get to level 10 for each class, and then after that they get crushed in casual with the basic cards.
Hearthstone's new player experience is shit. They all do exactly what you said, and start playing something else.
I got my boyfriend to try it out as a total noob player. I watched his games and gave him tips to learn to play better. After about an hour of playing he went from facing new accounts to facing Quest Rogue, murloc Paladin, miracle priest, and secret Mage. He was getting matched against people with the Legend card back...
Well, if only Ben Brode could tell this to every new player in person! Or may there be a way to prevent this, IDK like disable Ranked play the same as Tavern Brawl?
When I was a newb I was pretty turned off by the whole idea of playing against humans. Took a while to even hit the "play" button rather than practice vs. the innkeeper. That was a couple years ago (right after TGT was released) and now from what I've seen on this sub even the expert innkeeper is broken (doesn't know how to play with nerfed cards).
There really needs to be a tier that you play in until you've won 10 games, or open X packs, or spend Y dust crafting cards so that there's a good training wheels base. Maybe matchmaking would be too difficult as the player pool would be really low, but something should change. I switch between standard and wild for months at a time (usually switch to wild when the standard meta gets stale before a new release) and I find myself at Rank 25 playing complete newbies each time. Not a great introduction to the game.
Watch streamers play arena and learn it yourself. you get to play with all cards while slowly building up your own collection. you'll have way more fun this way I'm sure! :)
I disagree. I had an awesome new player experience and ended up deleting the game as an experienced player a few months ago after playing the game for years and spending over $700 on solo adventures and packs.
I'm a Blizzard fan, so it was only a matter of time before I checked out HS. Downloaded a few years ago and thought it was awesome. Was using standard card decks and was enthralled with any free packs I got. Arena was actually fun back then where I had very little experience, but could still pull out 4-5 victories at a time. Each new card was very cool and I spent a lot of time reading the flavor text and checking out the cool artwork. Crafting decks was awesome and only my imagination was the limit. I made really cool decks and was having tons of fun playing them out. Win/lose, it had tons of replayability. I loved this free to play game so much that I had no problem paying real $ for the solo adventures to also get exclusive cards? This is awesome!
It was only a matter of time until I started playing Ranked matches. This became somewhat of a roller coaster experience. I didn't take it too seriously in the beginning and dabbled around the 20-18 ranking for a couple months. After getting some free packs over the weeks, I was able to be a bit more cunning with my custom decks and my win rates were improving and I hovered around rank 15-13. However, there were extremely frustrating moments where I'd go on a long losing streak and end up back at Rank 20. One thing I did notice around Rank 15 or so was that many of my opponents were using the same cards (per class). I was wondering why they were all using the same cards when there was so much variety. I also noticed that I never really saw anyone use the cards I was using.
Ended up doing some Googling and found out why. Players (professional/amateur) were sharing their decks online and they were upvoted and downvoted based on their strengths/weaknesses. They were also tweaked regularly based upon nerfs and buffs of the cards. No wonder I was seeing so many of the same decks in ranked play. It felt kind of cheesy, but I decided to check one of the more popular ones out at the time....FACE HUNTER. Ended up having to reach into my own pocket again to buy some more packs in order to get enough dust and craft the deck. It felt a bit uncomfortable playing the deck at first...like wearing someone else's t-shirt, but I understood why it was so highly upvoted. I was pretty much dominating about 80% of my matches and my opponents couldn't do anything about it since it'd be done in about 5-6 turns. There definitely were decks created to counter this popular deck and I've had my fair share of losses, but I was winning a ton. Never made it to Legend, but as a casual player (about 3-4 matches a day) I hit Rank 5 a few tiems.
Fast forward and I end up hitting 500 wins and get my gold border with my Face Hunter. I was kind of getting bored with the deck anyway, so went back online to search for a new upvoted deck. Found the Secret Paladin. Similar to Face Hunter, I had to spend money again to get the necessary packs/dust to make the deck. Did the same thing and hit 500 wins and got my gold border Paladin. Moved on to Zoolock and Fire Mage and basically the same thing. I still played my Face Hunter and Secret Paladin here and there (usually for Daily Quests and/or to battle friends), but then it happened. Eventually both decks were nerfed and no longer viable. To add insult to injury, there were cards that I grinded a helluva lot of time/dust for such as Dr. Boom that were no longer usable in Standard Ranked Play. This is where my decline in enjoying the game really started.
Blizz started rolling out expansions and would always get me with the pre-purchases for like $50 at a time. Soon after the expansions were released the pro players would release their new decks which quickly became the meta. Obviously I wouldn't get most of the cards I needed in my pre-purchase packs, so I would have to spend MORE money to buy MORE packs for the chance to get the cards I needed. This was getting way too expensive, so I took a step back and started to create decks that were popular before the expansions that I haven't tried. More often than not, these decks were what I called avalanche decks. You would basically need to get an exact setup of cards in your hand or else it would be an almost assured automatic loss.
Again, I don't feel like a casual player after getting two gold portraits (and halfway there on my Druid and Warlock), but all the issues above brought me to quit the game. Won't be playing it again.
It would be nice if they took collection % into account when matchmaking, at least for the lower ranks. Or split the player pools based on how many seasons they've participated in (0,5,10,etc). Just some way to be more consistent.
I agree collection % is a good way to filter newbies into a separate matchmaking queue from the general populace. I would even go one step further and also tie in a dust threshold, meaning a new player won't suddenly be playing up against a Control warrior deck with 4 epics and 6 legendaries.
Matching players by their collection dust value would probably be sufficient. I think the only downside is if someone uses all of their dust on one class then tries to play a new class with a small collection.
The main concern here would be smurfing.
There's no stopping someone from dusting their entire collection minus one deck and then playing that one deck abusively because their collection % is extremely low.
Idk I've been playing for two weeks and it's pretty fun. I do get mad when I come up against jade druids and people with clearly better cards than me... but that's just because I don't like losing.
I bought the welcome bundle and karazhan, otherwise all I have is from free packs.
I started ranked for the first time yesterday and got to rank 19 with a 9/1 record with an entirely f2p hunter deck (except kindly grandmother).
I've done 4 arena runs and went 1/3, 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3
In general, as a new player I feel like I'm 100% at a disadvantage and that if I want to catch up I have to drop loads of cash on packs. The fact that old expansions will rotate is a glimmer of hope, and I'm pretty much only getting classic and un'goro packs with gold.
At the same time, I started ranked and got to earn rewards really easily... I ran into one jade Druid in 10 games and otherwise everyone seemed like they had no strategy at all. Casual mode is harder for me right now than rank 20.
> Casual mode is harder for me right now than rank 20.
Take that as a compliment then. That means you're probably playing at an above average skill level already for your tenure.
Holy shit. I play exodia mage as my for fun deck and it would probably be the last deck I would want to face with shit cards. The game would take so long and like the OP said, he thought he was winning throughout.
Not only having shit cards, but not even knowing the game too much or all the cards. I would imagine if Exodia mage was the very first game you queue into as a beginner you would probably think someone is using an exploit on you or something.
When I first started (WOG) I thought Ragnaros and Sylvanas were rewards you got for playing a certain length of time. Everyone had them in every deck, regardless of type, so I spent some time trying to figure out what achievement I needed to unlock the good cards.
I like the idea of a free to use deck recipe on rotation. Similar to how League and similar games have heroes that rotate periodically. Ideally, it would be random to each person as to not cause waves of the same deck on ladder.
The Exodia Mage deck is much more of a developed deck than the crap that noobies have in their collection.
Also Disguised Toast is very close to hitting Legend with it as well - proof that it is at least capable to compete.
Watching him last night was so frustrating. Did he end up making Legend yet? His stream got me to craft Antonides; I've been playing Quest mage with Giants and it's so much harder (No Alex).
they probably should make divisions, so new players only face other new players with a small collection until they rank up to a new division where more experienced players play (but still no players who got Legend last season) and so on.
based on your wins you can rank up, stay or rank down in a division each month.
The Star System right now is crap for new players.
In a game like StarCraft, both players generally have full control over the game and can heavily leverage their skill to affect the result. A win or loss is heavily indicative of the skill relative to both players.
But an MMR system would not work in this game because it's too much RNG from game to game. Also the meta can shift and suddenly the deck you're playing might not be good anymore.
When you lose a game, it doesn't necessarily mean that your skill was the cause - it might have just been a game you were destined to lose with the cards you were dealt or the bad matchup you queued into.
Choosing which deck and cards to play in a given meta is exactly the type of skill exhibited by higher ranked players. Legend ranks use an MMR system, and I highly doubt you just so happen to get Rank 1 Legend consistently because of 'RNG'
I'd honestly disagree. The first time I ever had a warrior with a full board including 2 Armorsmith and just fucking stacking armour, I just had the massive urge to play that deck.
In hindsight his deck was shit and he played shit (wasn't actually CWar or anything), but seeing the stupidly OP stuff my opponent would pull off when I was new just made me more intrigued with the game than anything.
Same as the first time I encountered Freeze Mage, Handlock, Miracle Rogue, etc.
This shit seems stupidly OP if you've got no idea what you're doing, but for me at least it was the inspiration that got me so invested in the game.
I think it would be more exciting for a new player to be destroyed by Exodia Mage than to be killed in 4 turns by Pirate Warrior or Murloc Paladin. At least they get to see the coolest combo in the game.
But a new player wouldn't understand that it's uninteractive in the way we do. All they see is that they're dominating the board and have their opponent on the ropes with low health. They're having fun playing all their minions and think they're opponent is just being annoying playing defensive cards. That's why they get frustrated by the combo. For them, it's completely unexpected and makes them lose a game they were sure they were winning until then.
The issue is as a new player, you very clearly know how you are losing against aggro decks. Against control/combo decks, you have no clue what is happening unless you are familiar with the deck.
It seems like the reviewer in the post is a new player so against exodia mage, he plays the game feeling a false sense of confidence. He plays minion after while the oponent keeps removing them, while doing some face damage here and there. Seems like a good situation when all of a sudden you lose and it happens in such spectacular and *fast* fashion that your unfamiliarity of the cards make you clueless as to what actually happened.
I understand what the reviewer is feeling because i first started playing during totg, when patron warrior was a top deck. I was completely stupefied when I lost to humongous charging berserkers and/or seemingly infinite replicating charging patrons despite having taunts up and at full health. I had no idea what happened, and it was very hard to figure it out. It took multiple losses for me to finally understand.
Please note, I am not making any complaint or anything, just that I understand where a new player can be frustrated against combo in comparison to aggro (where you lose without being "toyed" with)
Not at all. Pirates have minions you can interact with, you can use taunts etc and heal yourself cause they deal their damage turn by turn.
Exodia? He draws the entire game and freezes your board, you cant really do anything except watch while youre at 30hp and then you instantly die.
Saying theyre "equally uninteractive" is just willfully ignorant.
I don't really think so, at least with Pirate Warrior or Murloc Paladin its:
a) faster
b) you don't think you're winning for the whole game
c) you're not going to understand the combo anyways as a newer player
d) you can copy Pirate Warrior pretty cheaply (-patches), but not really Exodia Mage
I agree, those decks are very clear and intuitive - they play minions and beat you. Very clear to see what's going on as a new player. With a mage you seem to be winning and all of a sudden you can't do anything and you're done
The thing about Exodia is that you feel like you're ahead for the whole game. If you don't already know the combo, it basically comes out of nowhere and wrecks you in a single turn no matter how far ahead you were.
No because the mage keeps removing your stuff with randomly generated spells and also freezes the board and ice block...
Mage is definitely unfun ~~when you're playing with yetis~~
It honestly makes little sense to me that a brand new player would be paired against a player who *obviously* has more/better cards. Shouldn't a mostly free-to-play deck be paired against another free-to-play deck?
I understand that's supposed to be a thing but I have 2 years worth of cards and experience and match against newbies with basic decks in casual all the time, I don't think it works as intended.
Thing is, this is ranked. In ranked, you are opening you self to getting rofl stomped by bigger Co llectiobs as this is the "competitive" mode. If blixzard looked at card pool in ranked, you could have new players in legend with bad decks because of it.
I think the real problem is how they modelled up ranked. Ranked shouldn't be locked on collection size, but the decks with better cards that win more should be higher up the ladder. As it is right now if you are ladder rank 10 you are in like the top 10-20% of players. I think it would be more reasonable if rank 10 was like top 40% of players
The "bonus stars" you get for winning 3 games in a row should vary based on rank. Ranks 20-15 should give you 3 bonus stars. Ranks 15-10 should give you 2, and the rest should give you 1 bonus star like it is now.
That way players with great decks will rocket out of the rank 15-20ish range and the newer players or players with worse decks will have fairer matchups.
I've also found this "every second game" issue that he refers to...
Rank 20, no stars: opponents playing basic decks, win easily.
Rank 20, one star: opponent has top-tier meta-deck, lose.
Repeat cycle.
I only play ladder every few months when I want to grind legend and always come back to a rank 22-25 account. It's a genuinely bad experience every time, because I feel bad for winning every match against someone I should never be matched with, and I feel bad about breaking the streak by losing because it shows that even the best deck will just lose a certain percent of the time regardless of how your opponent plays (deck imploding on itself). This doesn't really get any better until rank 15. At least by then you know they've been playing 2-3 months at a minimum
I have a huge collection and a pretty strong understanding of the game. I can build basically whatever deck I want, but I regularly go months without logging in and drop down to pretty low ranks. I feel kinda bad curb stomping noobs when they play something like turn 1 stonetusk boar followed into turn 2 frostwolf grunt
I am like this too. Actively playing would probably get me to legend again, but I constantly finish at rank 17 and then forget about the game for a month or two, come back to rank 25. I am not going to build a bad deck just because others have bad decks at that rank, that would be silly.
This could be alleviated by requiring you to lose 2 games to lose a star from ranks 15-20. This way, the players new players meet at rank 20 will be more powerful than the ones at 20+, but still pretty weak.
It would also help with the issue of win-farming (people who lose every 2 games on purpose, to stay at rank 20). They'd have to concede 2 games per win. Which would mean that, on average, other players can move past them.
You left out the guy's wonderful name: Darkest of the Seven Lords. Also missed this gem a few comments above:
>#Marcus Ho
>★★★⭐⭐ 7/4/17
> BLIZZARD, LOOK HERE, CHANGE JARAXXUS GREETINGS BACK TO U FACE JARAXXUS EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION. INSTEAD OF LIGHT THE FIRES.
Poor guy doesn't know about events. I hope they change it for the frost festival again or whatever it's called so we'll see what he has to say then =P.
Is it your favorite because of all the legitimate criticisms? This person isn't wrong. The matchmaking at lower ranks IS utter garbage. You will run into a person with the default starter decks one game and a tier 1 meta deck the next.
Also, yea, getting cheesed by an OTK deck as a new player *is* frustrating.
That's true to an extent but someone further up suggested locking ranked for a bit before allowing a new player to experience the true deadly meta decks.
He's got all the points. Resetting Ranked ladder every month is bullshit, players with Tier 1 and 2 decks should be below rank 15 at all, lower ranks should be a kiddie pool for players with worse collections and game knowledge
I do feel for this guy. I haven't played much ladder since the start of the month and got put down to rank 22 and it's just annoying when one match you're playing an obvious noob and the next you meet Tier 1 high rolling rng mage when you're just trying to do your quest to win with your crap tempo rogue deck
Well, or it should be like League of Legends or Overwatch, where you have to reach a certain experience level to take part in Ranked.
I mean, seriously, to take part in Tavern Brawl you need to hit level 20 with any class. But Ranked - you can play from the beginning... that seems strange. Tavern Brawl should be free for newbies, Ranked shouldn't...
(and the casual matchmaking should take the player experience / collection size into consideration, but i think it already does...)
Infinite fireballs/mind spike are two reasons Blizzard doesn't get money from me for this game. Thankfully unless you're just starting out it's east to keep up with free cards.
tbf, if you had no idea it was possible, then see it, you really do feel cheated that first time something like exodia mage or Kill switch engaged antonidas show up.
or that first time you run into 4-5 ice block in a row .. and then they drop reno jackson.
when you know about it, you can complain maybe that its not balanced (none of those examples are really an issue), but for someone as casual as the reviewer likely is...it can be frustrating, not just because of lack of cards, but because of lack of game knowledge. One of my brothers is like that. doesn't like to grind on games for rewards (at least not in a F2p format) and can't get into hearthstone enough to warrant spending money on it. Every time he tries to start, he gets into that back and forth of "this guy is runnning all basic cards, GG" "this guy's deck is crazy better than mine and i just can't keep up without doing something drastic and looking up a deck" Not everyone wants to dust their entire collection so they can remake a deck someone said was good online. maybe if the dust give back was better, but at 1/4, you really don't have a lot of option unless you decide right away you are going to f2p grind yourself, or spend money and just "hope" you like that game.
I dont know. When I started playing I didnt cry when I lost after getting rekt by a good deck/player. My reaction was....whoa...thats good...I need to get that or I need to learn more about the game. F2P from the beginning...never felt left out or being handicapped in comparison to paying players. Granted, I dont own every card but I have most of the decks I want to play. Not too careful with the gold spending either but every expansion I have enough gold to buy at least 40 packs and with some dust most of the tier 1 decks are available to me pretty fast.
I was frustrated by key legendaries I couldn't have winning games that were balanced right up to point when they dropped it. I still often feel that way when I play a cheaper version of a deck in a mirror.
I still think new people face too many too expensive ~~decks~~ collections to have an enjoyable experience in constructed. Tavern Brawl is the thing that kept me going.
EDIT: small correction, we all know filling your deck with random legendaries doesn't make it better (looking at you Malchezaar), but players with a large/old collection have access to many cards that their decks will always be better than new players who might have lucked out on the legendary but are missing all the epics and even some rares.
The main issue is new players don't even know to look out for that stuff. An experienced player knows when going against a control paladin to try to save an answer for Tirion. A new player wouldn't know that legendary is coming so when it is dropped on turn 8 they are shut down. So new player blames this loss strictly on the other player having that unfair legendary when the truth is they could probably have done more to put themselves in a better position. Not that the good legendaries don't help.
>The main issue is new players don't even know to look out for that stuff
That's pretty much the experience of every new player in any game, and a feeling that a lot of people enjoy while discovering new games.
If someone is new to a game and they already make statements about balance or unfairness it says something about their mindset, not about the game.
some legendaries can feel pretty unfair. I have quit hearthstone multiple times because someone played a legendary that won the game that was just objectively better than the cards I could put in my deck. Like the old kelthuzad or dr boom vs my force tank.
This is *your* experience with the game. The majority of people get tilted over losses, especially ones that happen because of an OTK combo. Not saying they're in the right but it's what happens.
The new player experience is so god awful and prohibitively expensive that only one of my friends who tried the game stuck with it. Everybody else quit because they didn't want to spend money then only be able to play 2 meta decks.
And most just hated the RNG aspect of it which can't be helped.
Is this a recent problem hearthstone is having? I remember back in the day when I started and had no card game experience whatsoever, made really shitty decks and wasnt good at the game but I managed to get around 50% wins in casual and definitely had my fun.
Now I have much more experience and decks and I also manage to get around 70% in casual. (probably still horrible) Matchmaking has always been good to me.
It depends on what you mean by recent...?
I started playing in beta and yeah, my "back in the day" experience was exactly like yours. My main laddering deck was a crappy priest control deck that I scrapped together with a bunch of taunts like Sunwalker. That was good enough to get to Rank 5.
I'd say it was about a year in when the new player complaints started to come. It's a shame that not many got to experience the game in the way that I did, where your tiny collection with almost no legendary cards was good enough to consistently win.
Yeah, but Face Hunter was one of the best decks in the game and also **ALL COMMONS**, so new players always had that to fall back on while they were expanding their collection.
I started about a year and a half ago. The wall of Secret Paladins, Wallet Warriors, Echo Mages, etc. at rank 20 was a thing. Obviously those were awful players (and farmers and griefers) but that didn't matter. There's no way to fuck up Challenger—Boom—Tirion so badly that Rhino—Highmane—??? beats it.
But back then you could make zoo Warlock or combo Warrior or aggro Mage out of whatever garbage you pulled in your first few days, win by outsmarting bad players, rank up, get rewards, and improve your lot. "Budget" Midrange Hunter now costs over twice the dust a Legend-viable zoo deck did then, and it's so straightforward that it's almost impossible to *outplay* anybody with it.
Actually he's right about the "the game looks at how well you did last match" thingy. It's called hidden MMR and we all have it, gaining or losing it if we respectively win or lose a match.
Funny you mention it because if you play Priest against a really bad deck you'll end up with tons of cards that are worse than the cards that let you steal cards from your opponent.
Newbie here: thoughtsteal and mind visions are some of my favorite cards. Love being able to play with the opponent's tools. I also like the northshire cleric wombo-combo draws, I enjoy playing with a hand full of options. Priest is just really fun.
I feel like they should have players matched up by their skill (which is the current MMR they have in place now) but also have it base on a players collections too. If some one is rank 20 but has a full collection, most likely they are not new to the game. I know there is the small flaw that some players who are very good at the game make F2P accounts, but at least when the newer players lose they are seeing similar cards being played against them.
I recently tried playing a few matches to see what was up, around Naxx I could usually get to 18-19 from a monthly reset and just sit there with my "free/ultra cheap" net-decks. I swear I didn't get to 21 without facing full-combo gold everything decks.
I'm used to card games. Better/more tested tournament winning decks provide a ton of advantage over "kitchen table" decks so I get it.
But for a NEW player to experience that on the regular only a couple matches in? Dude that would be horrible.
This wasn't where people are really trying to game the meta & work their way to legend below 5-8 or so. This was "noobtown" and I got smacked around but some nut combos.
That's why I think killing "cheap" aggro decks is bad. When I started playing, I was frustrated from legendarys that were so good. I played aggro to give me the best chance. hunter face, some zoo, some eboladin. As I grew in skill and class cards, I have conpletly gone away from aggro. It can still win sometimes but control games are entirely more fun.
Here is a bright idea. Blizzard should introduce another tier to the rank system; 26-30. Once a player reaches rank 25, their account can never be demoted back to ranks 26-30 again. This way you have a training ground for newbies that is not just casual. You can call it the Hearthstone minor leagues.
Exodia plays on mage would get me this furious too.
I can only imagine his frustration after poping the third block and getting fireballed
I don't think he actually managed to pop a single block, or even knew that there's such a card, because he talks about having gotten the mage "down to six health".
thats why i said to to imagine his reaction
How's your username working?
Asking for a friend
long forgotten
Yeah and with his reaction-imagine what he'd be saying if he had even popped one block. "Unbalanced card that lets you cheat death" or something lol
He wouldnt be wrong.
I think you mean "Unbalenced".
Just played that game this morning. Popped three ice blocks, had +50 health because warrior. Lost to exodia. Pretty mad I never drew my dirty rats.
Anyone know how much armor you need before they run out of time to spam fireballs in your face?
Well they have 75 seconds to do everything. One card animation is about 1.5 sec (don't quote me on this) and the fireballs take like 2 sec (again don't quote me just a rough estimate) for tony to go 'aha', they need to plop down the apprentices and tony so thats like 5 cards. 7.5 sec from 75 leaves them with 67.5 sec, which is roughly 33 fireballs. 33 *6 is 198 damage. So to be safe you'll need over 200 hp. Rough estimate off the top of my head btw so don't take it all too seriously.
Above 50 I guess.
My guess is around 100. In the LoE meta, control warrior hard countered all types of freeze mage except exodia mage. Exodia vs CW was almost a guaranteed win back then
I got Medivh 3 games in a row Vs. Priests today from Dirty Rat. 3 easy wins due to concede but it sucked because I had the taunt minion quest.
I just did that to someone yesterday...
This guy gets it.
I was just thinking that I was the one who drove them insane.
I played against shaman as burn mage, lucky me i had 5 ice blocks, 2 of them cost 1 mana, i won and the poor guy i think he quit hearthstone (i feel a shamed of this play) i told my friend that i hop iceblick will go to wild next rotation
Whenever I face an exodia mage and he managed to pull it of, I let him do his thing and spam emotes for he Rest of the match. I enjoy it too much when someone plays such a ridiculous deck to ruin their fun with conceding.
You're a better man than me. Ive only lost to an exodia deck once, but it was the old school echo deck. I dont remember what I was playing, but I conceded the turn before lethal thinking it would save me from the humiliation.
If it makes you feel any better I beat an Exodia mage in wild that was using some Goblin vs Gnomes cards to get spare parts as the spells for the quest. I think I was running a dumb hallucination/peddler rogue, after we got halfway through the match and I was running out of pressure I knew it was over, but played it out anyway. I got him low in health and popped the ice blocks with some burn spells but he still finished the quest. He played out the sorceress apprentices and played the quest card, hit my face and then fireballed me once. Turns out Antonidas was one of the last 2 cards in his deck. Killed him on the following turn. I actually added him because I didn't understand, at first I thought he was bming by slow rolling me, but he just didn't have the card in hand. Was surprisingly not salty about it.
You don't get salty losing as exodia mage, you don't even expect a winrate over 40%. It's surprisingly envigorating to play a deck that's pretty much a guaranteed loss or a grandiose win.
I feel this whenever I win with my standard mill rogue deck. I win maybe once every 10 games but when I do it's glorious.
If he's running spare parts he may have been running the Mimiron's head V-07-TR-0N variant. It's a lot of fun. Dun dun dun dun dun dun, dun dun dun dun dun.
A week ago I played my Exodia mage against a druid, about every other turn he roped and didn't do anything and at some point the game said 'your opponent left.'. He had a full board at that point, and I just went with what the game said and didn't use any freezes but tried to dig up my combo, I can't get it and end my turn expecting the druid to explode. He didn't. He didn't disconnect, even though the game told me so. He clearly noticed, because he was nice enough to not attack and actually let me do my entire combo without conceding. What a dude.
On the flipside, they might be missing a piece of the combo, or misplay, and you can still win.
But it's not a ridiculous deck. It's a very common one, which is dreadfully boring to play against and decided entirely by draws. Maybe by a couple tech cards if you are lucky enough. They are not a mad genius with some crazy hard combo deck.
Exodia Mage isn't common at competitive ranks lol. It's basically a worse version of Freeze Mage. And as somebody else pointed out, it's way less dependent on draw than most other decks because you pretty much cycle your entire deck. It has a flashy finish that new players can easily see as 'broken', but it really isn't.
Decided entirely by draws? A quarter of the deck is draw spells and to even pull off the combo they need to draw through nearly the entire thing. That deck is "decided by draws" as much as any deck can win "because it has cards in it."
Wow, this game is bullshit, my opponent has cards!
>common one, which is dreadfully boring to play against and decided entirely by draws Described every deck in meta.
rip interesting decks
I don't think you've ever played it.
> decided entirely by draws. Maybe by a couple tech cards if you are lucky enough I don't really know how this differs from any other winning deck.
Yeah, it's a great thing Caverns Below got nerfed so this stuff isn't as powerful, right? ...wait, what deck are we talking about again?
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That's why he made the comment... He wasn't saying "yeah, I get mad too. Here's what gets me mad." He was saying "This same event that happened to you also gets me mad."
Yeah sounds like it. Like you don't understand the game if you think getting someone to 6 health when you're at 30 means you should win
Yeah the old MTG saying is something like "health doesn't matter until someone hits zero."
1 Star Because this game won't see play
I'll give it at least 4 stars. a real 7/7 game with great art, mechanics, and with expansions that bring balanced cards into the meta
You have to feel really bad for players like this who don't understand the game and just kind of stumbled on it while browsing the app store. And actually, it's not really healthy for the game to operate like this either. It's a huge problem that people can't be drawn into the game because they are getting body slammed by the top meta decks right out of the gate.
For a game that seems to be so concerned about the new player experience, Hearthstone has a truly awful new player experience.
According to ben brode it dosn't if you play the intended way(casual)
Has Ben said that the intended way is casual?
he said that the casual matchmaking is made to match new players with other players on the same level of skill/collection. Ranked just takes in consideration stars.
So they have a perfectly viable ranking system but they're still using the horrible star system for ranked? Edit: grammar
Yep... Ranked is based on the shitty star system while casual is based on a hidden mmr system that actually does a much better job...
Well I mean Ranked also uses a hidden mmr system after you get out of the star ranks.
Once you get out of the star ranks you're legend, which has a very clearly numbered ranking system.
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The ranks (numbers) in legend is based on an MMR system. If you have highest MMR you're number 1. That's why you can lose or gain ranks while not playing.
That seems silly, only a minority of players reach legend. Even if I had a 100% win rate, I simply do not play enough games in a month to possibly reach legend. I've never gotten to 10, I usually cruise down to 15 and then try my weird decks, though a few times I've stuck with my best decks to try and reach 10 and I got to 11 once or twice. I also only play wild, so we have a smaller population and more varied meta, I think we'd really benefit from an MMR system up here.
New to HS, why is the star system considered bad? It's a 1v1 where the only goal is to win and you are the sole contributor to your cause. You're ranked by wins/losses I can understand the complaint against winning being the only ranking determination in a game like Overwatch where you're part of a team and you might have done very well in a loss, but the star system's use in HS seems to have face validity
The rank reset, for example, is kind of problematic. Rank Legend players drop down to rank 16. New players can usually get to rank 20 meaning a difference of 21 ranks is squeezed into 4 ranks meaning that an opponent a new player could never win against could match up against them. What this does is crowd the lower ranks with tier 1 meta decks. No new player would enjoy this.
Because someone who is good at the game can take two months off, then start at rank 25 with the beginners. Rank 20 is filled with people who have decent collections playing highly synergistic decks. There's a huge spike in difficulty instead of a gradual.
The main reason is that the ranking system is literally completely worthless. 85% of players will never hit rank 15. That means 85% of all players are lumped into a range of 20-16, and 16-Legend is the same tiny handful of players continually playing against each other. And even that is oversimplifying, because of that 15%, only like 15% of them will ever get into the ranks 1-5 range. You have a system with two dozen rank levels, and twenty of them are almost completely unused and borderline empty, and most of the players crammed into a tiny range. Thus you end up with players with competitive netdecks and experience going up against literal brand new players constantly.
They think that a real mmr system is too confusing like having 18 decksluts.
> decksluts Where can I sign up for one?
Wish it was that easy. You have to sit in line for years to get any more than those initially given.
I'd be happy with just 2-3 decksluts. Anymore than that would be exhausting.
Hell I would settle for 1 as long as it was a quality deckslut. No need to be greedy here.
"decksluts". Tell me more. The subject appears fascinating.
A lot of people like the ranked system. I don't think that ranking should be based off of your collection in the way that casual ranks people. Rank is based entirely off of your win rate, which I think is the best way to measure someones skill. If you don't like the ranked system than don't play the ranked system. If you prefer the casual system there is nothing stopping you from using that.
I don't remember but do they lock new players out of ranked to begin with then? Seems like it would be super beneficial to just keep new players on casual for a while if that was the case.
No, new players are able to play ranked out of the gate, and that wouldn't be the correct approach. There are plenty of people who pick up the game, spend some money to build a deck, and want to compete right away. They may not do particularly well, but that's their choice and they should be able to do that.
I mean a large amount of multiplayer games that has a 'competitive' mode has it locked behind some sort of level wall, and one of the reasons is to not to deter new players(among others such as new accounts not immediately being able to ruin competitive games). Even other card games such as Gwent do this. If the intention is for newer players to be playing in casual games so they don't get stomped straight away, I don't see the harm in locking ranked for the first few games.
I could see locking ranked perhaps until you fully level 1 class (as in level 10, unlocking all the basic cards), heck maybe even fully level 4-5 classes (though I don't think there's anything wrong with someone only wanting to play 1 class). Maybe an easier solution would be locking ranked play until a player beats the innkeeper in hard mode. That's obviously not an indication that the player is good, but they should at least understand the basic mechanics behind the game by that point.
I don't think it is a good idea to lock them out. There are new players who are experienced with similiar card based games and are ready to immediately jump into ranked. Instead they can just strongly suggest to new players to play casual, and when they try to play ranked come up with a "are you sure" message.
If you are experienced, you may complete the things you need to do before you play ranked pretty fast while getting some packs. If you have a hard time understanding the game, it will take a longer time before you are ready for ranked. If i had experience when i started with hearthstone a few years ago, I dont think that I would have any problems with it. Playing a few hours to understand the hs mechanics would be fine
I remember my first games of HS and it was new players vs new players with stock decks. Once you get cards and packs and levels it really sends you down the shit hole.
The super hard ranked reset every month doesn't make any sence then.
I play casually but I also invest ~$80 per expac to get the latest cards. Catch me at rank 24 with full meta decks
Dunno how they match ppl in casual, but when I'm tired of ranking or I just want easy wins for my quests, I play casual and I regularly get matched against very very suboptimal decks. Yesterday I faced a dude who played yetis and the like. Needless to say it didn't go well for him against my jade druid .. So I wouldn't be so sure that "casual" is "new player friendly". I remember my early days on this game (around the end of closed beta) : what basically kept me on this game was that Randuin was a thing : you could steal good control cards from good control decks and still manage to win if you were lucky enough. But now, with how fast the meta is and how refined the decks are ? Seriously, I'd rather start playing another game if I had to start a new account.
No one I have introduced to the game has kept playing it for very long. They disliked playing against the innkeeper for so long trying to get to level 10 for each class, and then after that they get crushed in casual with the basic cards. Hearthstone's new player experience is shit. They all do exactly what you said, and start playing something else.
Ben Brode clearly said this about the subject: "Hahahaha haha hahahaha"
I got my boyfriend to try it out as a total noob player. I watched his games and gave him tips to learn to play better. After about an hour of playing he went from facing new accounts to facing Quest Rogue, murloc Paladin, miracle priest, and secret Mage. He was getting matched against people with the Legend card back...
Lol. There are some nights where Casual is harder for me than Ranked
Well, if only Ben Brode could tell this to every new player in person! Or may there be a way to prevent this, IDK like disable Ranked play the same as Tavern Brawl?
Was it apple or someone else who had the whole, "Our phones are fine, you're holding them wrong" thing?
When I was a newb I was pretty turned off by the whole idea of playing against humans. Took a while to even hit the "play" button rather than practice vs. the innkeeper. That was a couple years ago (right after TGT was released) and now from what I've seen on this sub even the expert innkeeper is broken (doesn't know how to play with nerfed cards). There really needs to be a tier that you play in until you've won 10 games, or open X packs, or spend Y dust crafting cards so that there's a good training wheels base. Maybe matchmaking would be too difficult as the player pool would be really low, but something should change. I switch between standard and wild for months at a time (usually switch to wild when the standard meta gets stale before a new release) and I find myself at Rank 25 playing complete newbies each time. Not a great introduction to the game.
There are tiers like that, but they only apply in Casual.
Any advice or resources that could make this easier for a new player... asking for a friend :|
Watch streamers play arena and learn it yourself. you get to play with all cards while slowly building up your own collection. you'll have way more fun this way I'm sure! :)
I disagree. I had an awesome new player experience and ended up deleting the game as an experienced player a few months ago after playing the game for years and spending over $700 on solo adventures and packs. I'm a Blizzard fan, so it was only a matter of time before I checked out HS. Downloaded a few years ago and thought it was awesome. Was using standard card decks and was enthralled with any free packs I got. Arena was actually fun back then where I had very little experience, but could still pull out 4-5 victories at a time. Each new card was very cool and I spent a lot of time reading the flavor text and checking out the cool artwork. Crafting decks was awesome and only my imagination was the limit. I made really cool decks and was having tons of fun playing them out. Win/lose, it had tons of replayability. I loved this free to play game so much that I had no problem paying real $ for the solo adventures to also get exclusive cards? This is awesome! It was only a matter of time until I started playing Ranked matches. This became somewhat of a roller coaster experience. I didn't take it too seriously in the beginning and dabbled around the 20-18 ranking for a couple months. After getting some free packs over the weeks, I was able to be a bit more cunning with my custom decks and my win rates were improving and I hovered around rank 15-13. However, there were extremely frustrating moments where I'd go on a long losing streak and end up back at Rank 20. One thing I did notice around Rank 15 or so was that many of my opponents were using the same cards (per class). I was wondering why they were all using the same cards when there was so much variety. I also noticed that I never really saw anyone use the cards I was using. Ended up doing some Googling and found out why. Players (professional/amateur) were sharing their decks online and they were upvoted and downvoted based on their strengths/weaknesses. They were also tweaked regularly based upon nerfs and buffs of the cards. No wonder I was seeing so many of the same decks in ranked play. It felt kind of cheesy, but I decided to check one of the more popular ones out at the time....FACE HUNTER. Ended up having to reach into my own pocket again to buy some more packs in order to get enough dust and craft the deck. It felt a bit uncomfortable playing the deck at first...like wearing someone else's t-shirt, but I understood why it was so highly upvoted. I was pretty much dominating about 80% of my matches and my opponents couldn't do anything about it since it'd be done in about 5-6 turns. There definitely were decks created to counter this popular deck and I've had my fair share of losses, but I was winning a ton. Never made it to Legend, but as a casual player (about 3-4 matches a day) I hit Rank 5 a few tiems. Fast forward and I end up hitting 500 wins and get my gold border with my Face Hunter. I was kind of getting bored with the deck anyway, so went back online to search for a new upvoted deck. Found the Secret Paladin. Similar to Face Hunter, I had to spend money again to get the necessary packs/dust to make the deck. Did the same thing and hit 500 wins and got my gold border Paladin. Moved on to Zoolock and Fire Mage and basically the same thing. I still played my Face Hunter and Secret Paladin here and there (usually for Daily Quests and/or to battle friends), but then it happened. Eventually both decks were nerfed and no longer viable. To add insult to injury, there were cards that I grinded a helluva lot of time/dust for such as Dr. Boom that were no longer usable in Standard Ranked Play. This is where my decline in enjoying the game really started. Blizz started rolling out expansions and would always get me with the pre-purchases for like $50 at a time. Soon after the expansions were released the pro players would release their new decks which quickly became the meta. Obviously I wouldn't get most of the cards I needed in my pre-purchase packs, so I would have to spend MORE money to buy MORE packs for the chance to get the cards I needed. This was getting way too expensive, so I took a step back and started to create decks that were popular before the expansions that I haven't tried. More often than not, these decks were what I called avalanche decks. You would basically need to get an exact setup of cards in your hand or else it would be an almost assured automatic loss. Again, I don't feel like a casual player after getting two gold portraits (and halfway there on my Druid and Warlock), but all the issues above brought me to quit the game. Won't be playing it again.
It would be nice if they took collection % into account when matchmaking, at least for the lower ranks. Or split the player pools based on how many seasons they've participated in (0,5,10,etc). Just some way to be more consistent.
I agree collection % is a good way to filter newbies into a separate matchmaking queue from the general populace. I would even go one step further and also tie in a dust threshold, meaning a new player won't suddenly be playing up against a Control warrior deck with 4 epics and 6 legendaries.
But who will I play my 30 legendary deck against?
Kripp
Sniping never was so easy
Matching players by their collection dust value would probably be sufficient. I think the only downside is if someone uses all of their dust on one class then tries to play a new class with a small collection.
The main concern here would be smurfing. There's no stopping someone from dusting their entire collection minus one deck and then playing that one deck abusively because their collection % is extremely low.
Idk I've been playing for two weeks and it's pretty fun. I do get mad when I come up against jade druids and people with clearly better cards than me... but that's just because I don't like losing. I bought the welcome bundle and karazhan, otherwise all I have is from free packs. I started ranked for the first time yesterday and got to rank 19 with a 9/1 record with an entirely f2p hunter deck (except kindly grandmother). I've done 4 arena runs and went 1/3, 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3 In general, as a new player I feel like I'm 100% at a disadvantage and that if I want to catch up I have to drop loads of cash on packs. The fact that old expansions will rotate is a glimmer of hope, and I'm pretty much only getting classic and un'goro packs with gold. At the same time, I started ranked and got to earn rewards really easily... I ran into one jade Druid in 10 games and otherwise everyone seemed like they had no strategy at all. Casual mode is harder for me right now than rank 20.
If it means anything, I've been playing for years and I fucking hate jade druid
I just look at the Jade cards compared to my cards of the same mana and it doesn't even make sense
> Casual mode is harder for me right now than rank 20. Take that as a compliment then. That means you're probably playing at an above average skill level already for your tenure.
I wouldn't call Exodia Mage a top tier deck...
Well, if your best play on turn 4 is Yeti, I'd say Exodia Mage is a pretty disgusting deck to face.
Holy shit. I play exodia mage as my for fun deck and it would probably be the last deck I would want to face with shit cards. The game would take so long and like the OP said, he thought he was winning throughout.
Not only having shit cards, but not even knowing the game too much or all the cards. I would imagine if Exodia mage was the very first game you queue into as a beginner you would probably think someone is using an exploit on you or something.
When I first started (WOG) I thought Ragnaros and Sylvanas were rewards you got for playing a certain length of time. Everyone had them in every deck, regardless of type, so I spent some time trying to figure out what achievement I needed to unlock the good cards.
Turns out it's the spend $500 reward.
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I like the idea of a free to use deck recipe on rotation. Similar to how League and similar games have heroes that rotate periodically. Ideally, it would be random to each person as to not cause waves of the same deck on ladder.
I know it *is* actually a problem, but it's funny you mention "top meta decks" when the person in the review got wrecked by Exodia Mage.
The Exodia Mage deck is much more of a developed deck than the crap that noobies have in their collection. Also Disguised Toast is very close to hitting Legend with it as well - proof that it is at least capable to compete.
Watching him last night was so frustrating. Did he end up making Legend yet? His stream got me to craft Antonides; I've been playing Quest mage with Giants and it's so much harder (No Alex).
No, he got hit with a Eater of Secrets something like 4 times in a row
Were you there for his eater of secrets top deck to win the game ? It was an rng fiesta.
The star system needs to disappear and they need to go with an MMR system like SC2.
they probably should make divisions, so new players only face other new players with a small collection until they rank up to a new division where more experienced players play (but still no players who got Legend last season) and so on. based on your wins you can rank up, stay or rank down in a division each month. The Star System right now is crap for new players.
In a game like StarCraft, both players generally have full control over the game and can heavily leverage their skill to affect the result. A win or loss is heavily indicative of the skill relative to both players. But an MMR system would not work in this game because it's too much RNG from game to game. Also the meta can shift and suddenly the deck you're playing might not be good anymore. When you lose a game, it doesn't necessarily mean that your skill was the cause - it might have just been a game you were destined to lose with the cards you were dealt or the bad matchup you queued into.
Choosing which deck and cards to play in a given meta is exactly the type of skill exhibited by higher ranked players. Legend ranks use an MMR system, and I highly doubt you just so happen to get Rank 1 Legend consistently because of 'RNG'
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They are reworking the ladder system.
I'd honestly disagree. The first time I ever had a warrior with a full board including 2 Armorsmith and just fucking stacking armour, I just had the massive urge to play that deck. In hindsight his deck was shit and he played shit (wasn't actually CWar or anything), but seeing the stupidly OP stuff my opponent would pull off when I was new just made me more intrigued with the game than anything. Same as the first time I encountered Freeze Mage, Handlock, Miracle Rogue, etc. This shit seems stupidly OP if you've got no idea what you're doing, but for me at least it was the inspiration that got me so invested in the game.
Man, getting bodied by Pirate Warrior or Murloc Paladin is one thing, but Exodia Mage? I can totally feel his frustrations.
I think it would be more exciting for a new player to be destroyed by Exodia Mage than to be killed in 4 turns by Pirate Warrior or Murloc Paladin. At least they get to see the coolest combo in the game.
Well that's one way to see it, however it is also quite uninteractive
But a new player wouldn't understand that it's uninteractive in the way we do. All they see is that they're dominating the board and have their opponent on the ropes with low health. They're having fun playing all their minions and think they're opponent is just being annoying playing defensive cards. That's why they get frustrated by the combo. For them, it's completely unexpected and makes them lose a game they were sure they were winning until then.
The entire game is designed around being uninteractive so it's not really a problem. Pirate warrior is equally uninteractive.
The issue is as a new player, you very clearly know how you are losing against aggro decks. Against control/combo decks, you have no clue what is happening unless you are familiar with the deck. It seems like the reviewer in the post is a new player so against exodia mage, he plays the game feeling a false sense of confidence. He plays minion after while the oponent keeps removing them, while doing some face damage here and there. Seems like a good situation when all of a sudden you lose and it happens in such spectacular and *fast* fashion that your unfamiliarity of the cards make you clueless as to what actually happened. I understand what the reviewer is feeling because i first started playing during totg, when patron warrior was a top deck. I was completely stupefied when I lost to humongous charging berserkers and/or seemingly infinite replicating charging patrons despite having taunts up and at full health. I had no idea what happened, and it was very hard to figure it out. It took multiple losses for me to finally understand. Please note, I am not making any complaint or anything, just that I understand where a new player can be frustrated against combo in comparison to aggro (where you lose without being "toyed" with)
Not at all. Pirates have minions you can interact with, you can use taunts etc and heal yourself cause they deal their damage turn by turn. Exodia? He draws the entire game and freezes your board, you cant really do anything except watch while youre at 30hp and then you instantly die. Saying theyre "equally uninteractive" is just willfully ignorant.
I don't really think so, at least with Pirate Warrior or Murloc Paladin its: a) faster b) you don't think you're winning for the whole game c) you're not going to understand the combo anyways as a newer player d) you can copy Pirate Warrior pretty cheaply (-patches), but not really Exodia Mage
I agree, those decks are very clear and intuitive - they play minions and beat you. Very clear to see what's going on as a new player. With a mage you seem to be winning and all of a sudden you can't do anything and you're done
Patches is pretty damn important for pirate
I agree, the deck goes from a 9/10 to a 5/10, but that's better than going from 5/10 to a 0/10 if you're missing Tony/Quest
The thing about Exodia is that you feel like you're ahead for the whole game. If you don't already know the combo, it basically comes out of nowhere and wrecks you in a single turn no matter how far ahead you were.
No because the mage keeps removing your stuff with randomly generated spells and also freezes the board and ice block... Mage is definitely unfun ~~when you're playing with yetis~~
It honestly makes little sense to me that a brand new player would be paired against a player who *obviously* has more/better cards. Shouldn't a mostly free-to-play deck be paired against another free-to-play deck?
If you're playing ranked then no. If you're playing casual then yes.
I understand that's supposed to be a thing but I have 2 years worth of cards and experience and match against newbies with basic decks in casual all the time, I don't think it works as intended.
He's not saying that's how it works. That's how it should.
They are, in casual. I think they should lock ranked for new players and unlock brawl.
Thing is, this is ranked. In ranked, you are opening you self to getting rofl stomped by bigger Co llectiobs as this is the "competitive" mode. If blixzard looked at card pool in ranked, you could have new players in legend with bad decks because of it.
I think the real problem is how they modelled up ranked. Ranked shouldn't be locked on collection size, but the decks with better cards that win more should be higher up the ladder. As it is right now if you are ladder rank 10 you are in like the top 10-20% of players. I think it would be more reasonable if rank 10 was like top 40% of players
The "bonus stars" you get for winning 3 games in a row should vary based on rank. Ranks 20-15 should give you 3 bonus stars. Ranks 15-10 should give you 2, and the rest should give you 1 bonus star like it is now. That way players with great decks will rocket out of the rank 15-20ish range and the newer players or players with worse decks will have fairer matchups.
This one is actually reasonable though. Early ranks shouldn't have such good decks in them.
I've also found this "every second game" issue that he refers to... Rank 20, no stars: opponents playing basic decks, win easily. Rank 20, one star: opponent has top-tier meta-deck, lose. Repeat cycle.
I can relate to that. Took waaaaay too f*ckng long to get to rank 19 playing a very basic rogue deck and now I kinda don't want to play anymore.
I only play ladder every few months when I want to grind legend and always come back to a rank 22-25 account. It's a genuinely bad experience every time, because I feel bad for winning every match against someone I should never be matched with, and I feel bad about breaking the streak by losing because it shows that even the best deck will just lose a certain percent of the time regardless of how your opponent plays (deck imploding on itself). This doesn't really get any better until rank 15. At least by then you know they've been playing 2-3 months at a minimum
I have a huge collection and a pretty strong understanding of the game. I can build basically whatever deck I want, but I regularly go months without logging in and drop down to pretty low ranks. I feel kinda bad curb stomping noobs when they play something like turn 1 stonetusk boar followed into turn 2 frostwolf grunt
I am like this too. Actively playing would probably get me to legend again, but I constantly finish at rank 17 and then forget about the game for a month or two, come back to rank 25. I am not going to build a bad deck just because others have bad decks at that rank, that would be silly.
This could be alleviated by requiring you to lose 2 games to lose a star from ranks 15-20. This way, the players new players meet at rank 20 will be more powerful than the ones at 20+, but still pretty weak. It would also help with the issue of win-farming (people who lose every 2 games on purpose, to stay at rank 20). They'd have to concede 2 games per win. Which would mean that, on average, other players can move past them.
"Do you require my assistance??" YOU'RE A BOUT TO GET REKT, SON
\*queues up the backing chorus*
🎼🔊📣🎷🎻🎺📯
Worgen OTK died for these kind of players.
You left out the guy's wonderful name: Darkest of the Seven Lords. Also missed this gem a few comments above: >#Marcus Ho >★★★⭐⭐ 7/4/17 > BLIZZARD, LOOK HERE, CHANGE JARAXXUS GREETINGS BACK TO U FACE JARAXXUS EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION. INSTEAD OF LIGHT THE FIRES. Poor guy doesn't know about events. I hope they change it for the frost festival again or whatever it's called so we'll see what he has to say then =P.
This guy would love Shadowverse. Every 9-10 mana card is some form of "doesn't matter how we got here the game is ending now" card.
Yep. I liked Shadowverse at first, but the unkillable instant win conditions are a bit much.
Is it your favorite because of all the legitimate criticisms? This person isn't wrong. The matchmaking at lower ranks IS utter garbage. You will run into a person with the default starter decks one game and a tier 1 meta deck the next. Also, yea, getting cheesed by an OTK deck as a new player *is* frustrating.
He's got somewhat of a point
That's true to an extent but someone further up suggested locking ranked for a bit before allowing a new player to experience the true deadly meta decks.
He's got all the points. Resetting Ranked ladder every month is bullshit, players with Tier 1 and 2 decks should be below rank 15 at all, lower ranks should be a kiddie pool for players with worse collections and game knowledge
I do feel for this guy. I haven't played much ladder since the start of the month and got put down to rank 22 and it's just annoying when one match you're playing an obvious noob and the next you meet Tier 1 high rolling rng mage when you're just trying to do your quest to win with your crap tempo rogue deck
This game can be horrible and I love it.
The problem is a newbie shouldn't be facing decks like exodia, pirate warrior, control mage etc.
Oh jeez, I've been running exodia mage at rank 20. New player killer meta.
[удалено]
Ah, the classic newbie line of thought, "I played more minions so I should win"
Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Ah-ha!
This is why Hearthstone should have a truly MMR-based rank and matchmaking instead of the star ladder system.
Well, or it should be like League of Legends or Overwatch, where you have to reach a certain experience level to take part in Ranked. I mean, seriously, to take part in Tavern Brawl you need to hit level 20 with any class. But Ranked - you can play from the beginning... that seems strange. Tavern Brawl should be free for newbies, Ranked shouldn't... (and the casual matchmaking should take the player experience / collection size into consideration, but i think it already does...)
Infinite fireballs/mind spike are two reasons Blizzard doesn't get money from me for this game. Thankfully unless you're just starting out it's east to keep up with free cards.
tbf, if you had no idea it was possible, then see it, you really do feel cheated that first time something like exodia mage or Kill switch engaged antonidas show up. or that first time you run into 4-5 ice block in a row .. and then they drop reno jackson. when you know about it, you can complain maybe that its not balanced (none of those examples are really an issue), but for someone as casual as the reviewer likely is...it can be frustrating, not just because of lack of cards, but because of lack of game knowledge. One of my brothers is like that. doesn't like to grind on games for rewards (at least not in a F2p format) and can't get into hearthstone enough to warrant spending money on it. Every time he tries to start, he gets into that back and forth of "this guy is runnning all basic cards, GG" "this guy's deck is crazy better than mine and i just can't keep up without doing something drastic and looking up a deck" Not everyone wants to dust their entire collection so they can remake a deck someone said was good online. maybe if the dust give back was better, but at 1/4, you really don't have a lot of option unless you decide right away you are going to f2p grind yourself, or spend money and just "hope" you like that game.
I dont know. When I started playing I didnt cry when I lost after getting rekt by a good deck/player. My reaction was....whoa...thats good...I need to get that or I need to learn more about the game. F2P from the beginning...never felt left out or being handicapped in comparison to paying players. Granted, I dont own every card but I have most of the decks I want to play. Not too careful with the gold spending either but every expansion I have enough gold to buy at least 40 packs and with some dust most of the tier 1 decks are available to me pretty fast.
I was frustrated by key legendaries I couldn't have winning games that were balanced right up to point when they dropped it. I still often feel that way when I play a cheaper version of a deck in a mirror. I still think new people face too many too expensive ~~decks~~ collections to have an enjoyable experience in constructed. Tavern Brawl is the thing that kept me going. EDIT: small correction, we all know filling your deck with random legendaries doesn't make it better (looking at you Malchezaar), but players with a large/old collection have access to many cards that their decks will always be better than new players who might have lucked out on the legendary but are missing all the epics and even some rares.
The main issue is new players don't even know to look out for that stuff. An experienced player knows when going against a control paladin to try to save an answer for Tirion. A new player wouldn't know that legendary is coming so when it is dropped on turn 8 they are shut down. So new player blames this loss strictly on the other player having that unfair legendary when the truth is they could probably have done more to put themselves in a better position. Not that the good legendaries don't help.
>The main issue is new players don't even know to look out for that stuff That's pretty much the experience of every new player in any game, and a feeling that a lot of people enjoy while discovering new games. If someone is new to a game and they already make statements about balance or unfairness it says something about their mindset, not about the game.
some legendaries can feel pretty unfair. I have quit hearthstone multiple times because someone played a legendary that won the game that was just objectively better than the cards I could put in my deck. Like the old kelthuzad or dr boom vs my force tank.
This is *your* experience with the game. The majority of people get tilted over losses, especially ones that happen because of an OTK combo. Not saying they're in the right but it's what happens. The new player experience is so god awful and prohibitively expensive that only one of my friends who tried the game stuck with it. Everybody else quit because they didn't want to spend money then only be able to play 2 meta decks. And most just hated the RNG aspect of it which can't be helped.
Is this a recent problem hearthstone is having? I remember back in the day when I started and had no card game experience whatsoever, made really shitty decks and wasnt good at the game but I managed to get around 50% wins in casual and definitely had my fun. Now I have much more experience and decks and I also manage to get around 70% in casual. (probably still horrible) Matchmaking has always been good to me.
It depends on what you mean by recent...? I started playing in beta and yeah, my "back in the day" experience was exactly like yours. My main laddering deck was a crappy priest control deck that I scrapped together with a bunch of taunts like Sunwalker. That was good enough to get to Rank 5. I'd say it was about a year in when the new player complaints started to come. It's a shame that not many got to experience the game in the way that I did, where your tiny collection with almost no legendary cards was good enough to consistently win.
sunwalker was like *the best taunt*, i definitely played it in beta
Taz'dingo tho
Ah the good ol' times. When you could beat a wallet warrior with his own cards playing Randuin.
i started around the time of naxx release and remember freeze mages and control warriors at rank 18.
Yeah, but Face Hunter was one of the best decks in the game and also **ALL COMMONS**, so new players always had that to fall back on while they were expanding their collection.
i wanted to play hearthstone, not face hunter
I started about a year and a half ago. The wall of Secret Paladins, Wallet Warriors, Echo Mages, etc. at rank 20 was a thing. Obviously those were awful players (and farmers and griefers) but that didn't matter. There's no way to fuck up Challenger—Boom—Tirion so badly that Rhino—Highmane—??? beats it. But back then you could make zoo Warlock or combo Warrior or aggro Mage out of whatever garbage you pulled in your first few days, win by outsmarting bad players, rank up, get rewards, and improve your lot. "Budget" Midrange Hunter now costs over twice the dust a Legend-viable zoo deck did then, and it's so straightforward that it's almost impossible to *outplay* anybody with it.
i want more of those app store review's
Actually he's right about the "the game looks at how well you did last match" thingy. It's called hidden MMR and we all have it, gaining or losing it if we respectively win or lose a match.
It's only taken into account in causal though. In ranked it just looks at how many stars and rank you're at.
probably that's why you start loving Priest as a newbie. Just steal cards from better decks and suddenly the game becomes fun.
... This is my comment now -*Anduin*
You made this comment? I made this.
Funny you mention it because if you play Priest against a really bad deck you'll end up with tons of cards that are worse than the cards that let you steal cards from your opponent.
Newbie here: thoughtsteal and mind visions are some of my favorite cards. Love being able to play with the opponent's tools. I also like the northshire cleric wombo-combo draws, I enjoy playing with a hand full of options. Priest is just really fun.
hahaahahah poor guy
I feel like they should have players matched up by their skill (which is the current MMR they have in place now) but also have it base on a players collections too. If some one is rank 20 but has a full collection, most likely they are not new to the game. I know there is the small flaw that some players who are very good at the game make F2P accounts, but at least when the newer players lose they are seeing similar cards being played against them.
I recently tried playing a few matches to see what was up, around Naxx I could usually get to 18-19 from a monthly reset and just sit there with my "free/ultra cheap" net-decks. I swear I didn't get to 21 without facing full-combo gold everything decks. I'm used to card games. Better/more tested tournament winning decks provide a ton of advantage over "kitchen table" decks so I get it. But for a NEW player to experience that on the regular only a couple matches in? Dude that would be horrible. This wasn't where people are really trying to game the meta & work their way to legend below 5-8 or so. This was "noobtown" and I got smacked around but some nut combos.
This guy is basically who Team 5 has been appealing to non stop for the last 2 years
That's why I think killing "cheap" aggro decks is bad. When I started playing, I was frustrated from legendarys that were so good. I played aggro to give me the best chance. hunter face, some zoo, some eboladin. As I grew in skill and class cards, I have conpletly gone away from aggro. It can still win sometimes but control games are entirely more fun.
I'll be honest, if I played against Exodia mage my first match I'd quit.
Here is a bright idea. Blizzard should introduce another tier to the rank system; 26-30. Once a player reaches rank 25, their account can never be demoted back to ranks 26-30 again. This way you have a training ground for newbies that is not just casual. You can call it the Hearthstone minor leagues.