this will take me a while
The article is going ham on their card designers near the end which is pretty offensive to a designer because the author doesn't know anything about card design either
I don't know anything about web designing (in how the visual part is created) and I can completely judge if a design is shit, what you are saying here is that everyone should shut up unless they know card design, which is already a very dubious claim, I can see if something is good or bad, specially when talking numbers, no need to have a masters degree in design to know if something looks good or bad.
and what their article does in essence is confirming the bias that already exists in the community but not covering the other aspects of the issue, inherently presenting that yeah what you feel is bad because bad card design!
please read the second paragraph of the article:
So, what's wrong? Obviously, there are issues close to the community's heart that have been neglected, the primary one being the lack of new features to freshen up the game. We're not here to discuss that. We're here because despite looking healthy on the surface, the meta does have a glaring problem that cannot be fully grasped by deck win rates and play rates alone.
they already said there are multiple issues that could be impacting the game, but they were address an specific one that they think is important give the analysis they make.
In the end the author is putting all the blame on card designers which is unfair and dismisses why their approach to these cards have legitimate thinking behind them, promoting countless replies from fools on reddit directly attacking the developers because it presents the designers as idiots. "Look how these cards obviously promoting RPS! and RPS is bad you hate it don't you! these last four sets are all like that!" That's this article. Just because it's written in nice language doesn't mean it good, it straight up calling them you don't know how to make the game, learn from this ...ok.... They are trying to change the feeling of the game and this is what they've done instead of playing it safe and that's why they made these cards, not everything goes according to plan but it's much better that they try high risk cards and fix them later while the author is encouraging them to play it safe and against more extreme concepts. Card games are all about doing strong and absurd things, that's when the player feels empowered not by trading minions on curve. There shouldn't be anything they can't touch, they should try whatever they feel like it's going to be fun. You can't run a card game for long if only releasing boring safe "reasonable" cards.
I might sound a bit bad here, but it's not like they are giving us this for free, it's not like those cards were made by thin air, inside team 5 those card designers have been doing a single job, pumping cards into the game to sell us, don't make the mistake of thinking they are out of good will there, it's also their job to answer when things like this happen, they don't grant the answers reddit could give them and I would never condone them, but going for the approach of "poor developers, they are so miserable" is not the right approach, specially when the article has never thrown them into a pit of lava, the most they said was this:
We urge the Hearthstone team to learn from this polarizing experience and tone down the elements that enable it. Infinite value, infinite life and infinite damage are dangerous. Mechanics that nullify the importance of card advantage or life as a resource often become degenerate, polarizing and lacking counterplay. It started with Jade Idol and escalated with Death Knights and Baku. Players simply hate it, and when brute force counterplay is introduced in response to it (Skulking Geist), it creates an experience that is just as frustrating and polarizing.
The analysis is specifically about how a main core of the design of a deck is affecting the polarization of matchups, it's pretty clear that baku and genn are very important in the decks they are made, take baku from odd paladin and you can't play that deck anymore. This is part of how they design these cards, these mechanics.
This is a well thought out conclusion, all their analysis came to the conclusion that there is a flaw in how some of these cards are designed, and it is interesting that kibler, an exdesigner, have been saying the same thing about these constant infinite value effects. I've seen way more inflammatory articles designed to bait people's perception, but this is clearly not one of them, they made an analysis, they took data and showed it clearly, reddit can answer however they want but that's not VS, that's like blaming the wrong side.
team5 was criticized for a long time for keeping the game very simple. they added much more complicated interactions, some of it led to extremes but that's fine. They should not be discouraged for trying. Nobody thought 2 years ago they would ever add and support combo decks like they do now and the Leeroy meme was the constant spam.
and that's very good, but also they have purposely taken out more skillful mechanics before, a famous example was the red mana from kazakus and the kabal tribe. Still, that's not the point, the point is that team 5 is making some mistakes that they should be looking into, specially as an issue that, as this article has helped to explain, have been in the works for quite sometime now, since ungoro the polarization has been increasing, they can do better.
Donais? he dismissed everything, no problem at all. That's honestly infuriating. Of course the meta needs polarization, that's a given, but not this unhealthy amount they have been breeding for some time.
