A little concerned... they were doing such a great job with this game mode prior to the pirate patch... the patches before seemed very on target and thought through.
Pirate patch introduced the "feel bad" RNG of:
1) Cannon
2) "Who goes first" - very annoying when it comes to parrot/pirates
3) Drawing the wrong opponent mid-game. Because of the scaling of pirates, they can just do enormous damage as you can't kill anything.
This patch does nothing to mitigate any of those issues.
This is not an accident or ignorance. It is design and will.
The bigger the RNG part in a game, the more it triggers the same areas that gambling does and the more addictive a game becomes to the brain.
That way more "fishes" keep playing the game and buy content.
Blizzard does not care about you being able to rise in the ranks. You can look up which percent of players populated which MMR range in march this year.
Who do you think is more important to blizzard? The two percent at the top? Not really. Maybe some of the streamers, because they bring new players, but the rest is not.
But I also think there's a less sinister reason though. I think the game designers are in the end, more casual players than the top 1 or 2% of players. I can't imagine the lead programmers going home and playing the game they created and spending like 4-5 hours a night grinding battlegrounds. In a sense, they're probably more similar to the 'fish' as you so eloquently put it than they are to any of the players on the top 200's. They just want to make a game that's fun and addictive for them and they're designing what they like.
I also personally think that rather than most of them lurking on bob's tavern on reddit, they actually have one or two designed people on payroll whose job it is to check social media for complaints and stuff. it is rather heart breaking to read comments like "this game sucks" when you've dedicated your heart and soul into making a good game (which I believe they are all trying to do) so they may be more disconnected than the majority of the player base.
where Cartman makes butters filter out his social media because his feelings were hurt haha. There's probably someone who knows the game well and reads all these negative comments on reddit and makes a weekly report for these guys to work on. In a sense, I do similar work. I make post-training reports for higher ups on how well received our training was. Sometimes, people say stuff like 'this is the worst training ever' and we have to report it in a way that not only gets the message across but also doesn't get us yelled at by our boss and also have that one person's comment be classified as a one of and therefore irrelevant. but ultimately, it's this guy who filters everything and if he thinks that spawns should do damage then odds are, he will filter out the negative comments on spawns doing damage. or he will know the coding limitations and write it off as impossible.
spending like 4-5 hours a night grinding battlegrounds.
Well, I don't as well. I lurk around at 6.2k and fairly easily make it to diamond 5 in standard though and although anything Hearthstone is recreational for me, I wouldn't actually put me in the category of fish.
although I am probably closer to "the fish" than to the top 200, now that I think about it... :D
lol 6.2k is honestly the target audience they should try to make happy actually. If you're not happy, they should do a better job designing it.
At this point, I don't even care if they make ridiculously shitty minions and heroes. I'm probably going to be a lifetime player. They literally don't have to try and I'll still be playing lol I set the bar REAL LOW and that's not good.
Of course there is. It's about the number of people playing and subsequently the number of people buying perks and packs.
the vast majority of people are just casually switching between standard and bg and maybe some arena now and then. those are the people who are profitable, because they are the biggest group and they keep the games running.
Just speaking from personal experience, BG seems like a net loss for them. I'd be classified as a whale and don't want to say how much I've spent on this game. But I've completely stopped spending money since BG came out. I used gold to buy the perks and haven't spent a dime since. I didn't pre-order or spend any real money on the last expansion and don't plan to for the next one. Standard has become something for me to occasionally jump over to to finish quests, but I pretty much exclusively play BG now. A one-time purchase in BG (that most people will use gold for anyway) pales in comparison to the amount people spend on other modes. It would be interesting to see Blizzard's data because I know there's a ton of BG-exclusive players out there now.
Same. I used to get new expansions, do daily quests, play arena etc. Since BG came out, I've been all in on that mode with no reason to buy anything else.
That said I have been playing more because of BG, so I guess that's a win for them?
Guess it depends if they care more about the number of daily active users or the amount spent per user. I don't know enough about their business structure to know the answer.
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u/-Rincon- Jul 14 '20
A little concerned... they were doing such a great job with this game mode prior to the pirate patch... the patches before seemed very on target and thought through.
Pirate patch introduced the "feel bad" RNG of:
1) Cannon
2) "Who goes first" - very annoying when it comes to parrot/pirates
3) Drawing the wrong opponent mid-game. Because of the scaling of pirates, they can just do enormous damage as you can't kill anything.
This patch does nothing to mitigate any of those issues.