Episode 266: Relaxing by the Hearthstone

[Rob Zacny]

An all-star panel of Julian Murdoch, David V. Heron, and Troy "Well Played!" Goodfellow get together to talk about Hearthstone. Blizzard's CCG seems to be the darling of the gaming community, but David has his reservations. 

 

Listen here.

[malphigian]

I was excited to see this episode, but upon listening I'm disappointed. 

 

I do love a good critique and hearthstone is ripe for them, but I didn't think most of the hits here made a lot of sense.

 

David sounded like someone with a ton of magic experience and only a casual familiarity with Hearthstone.    The dismissive and hyperbolic comparisons to Hearts and the reductionist understanding of hearthstone decks were a little galling.   Hearthstone is not the most complicated card game I've ever played, but the idea that hearthstone deck play is a series of obvious optimal choices with no decision making is just ridiculous.   This is aside from the things that were just plain wrong (e.g."everyone uses yetis"  -- looking at competitive decks, you won't see yetis even in the majority of them. Or  "every mage runs 2 pyroblasts" current top 2 competitive mage decks: aggro runs with no pyro at all, and freeze runs with 1 and it's hardly the linchpin of the deck).   

 

It was a frustrating discussion because I agree with the many of the underlying criticisms.  The sacrifices made for easier multiplayer interaction like lack of enemy turn interaction, for example.    But you guys also missed many of the real problems, take for instance the dominant competitive deck right now, the Miracle Rogue, which bears a distressing resemblance to playing against someone engaging in a game of solitaire. 

 

I think maybe only Troy knows what a miracle rogue is? And he barely talked.  There was no discussion of the current meta, how it's developed.    I feel like you guys must know someone who is a high level hearthstone player and/or has a familiarity with the game's pro scene.  Having someone more knowledgable would have really helped the episode a lot -- clarifying David's problems with the game and getting into the kind of deeper strategic discussion I usually expect from TMA.

 

Also, as an aside, Hearthstone was in fact made by a small team in blizzard (team 5), there's a interesting story to it strategically for a large company like Blizzard.  There was a great talk at GDC this year by one of the members this year.  They haven't published any figures, but Hearthstone has been trotted out by Activision in shareholders meetings as a big success.   I think it's a safe bet that it is perceived as a hit by Blizzard, and is not being designed as some kind of tie in app to the slowly dying beast that is WoW.

[Arathain]

I enjoyed the discussion. I really like Hearthstone, because it fills a very nice niche in my life. I only really have time for gaming of any sort in short bursts, so to have a game that is polished, tactically satisfying and competitive that I can play in fifteen minutes is a real blessing. Actually, I feel like I get more out of it than I might if I had more time- since I like to play mostly Arena, as long as I pick my Arena class to complete a quest or two I can basically sustain myself in Arena runs nearly indefinitely, barring the odd dip into Constructed if I get a card I want to experiment with. 

 

My initial reaction was to scoff a tad at your lack of in-depth knowledge, but I found that your perspectives were insightful and interesting. It's nice to hear experienced strategy gamers give essentially a casual perspective.

 

I think you underestimate the legs the game has, as well as its strategic depth over the long term. While the game can sometimes seem to play out in an obvious way based on your hand, the huge distinction in achievement between the highest level players and the merely good ones suggest a level of decision making not apparent to most. A few of the really good streamers have taken fresh accounts to Legend rank without spending any money, meaning they are doing so without many of the cards considered the best.

 

That said, net-decking is a big deal, and the meta generally focuses around a handful of decks at any given time, just like the Magic tournaments you described. These do shift slowly over time as counter-decks are discovered, and refinements bring older decks back into play. That this happens even with a small card pool bodes well for future card releases. The first expansion is coming within a month or two, and the new cards are mostly themed around Deathrattles. The new cards look like they offer new possibilities for sure. 

[BobbyBesar]

David sounded like someone with a ton of magic experience and only a casual familiarity with Hearthstone.    The dismissive and hyperbolic comparisons to Hearts and the reductionist understanding of hearthstone decks were a little galling.   Hearthstone is not the most complicated card game I've ever played, but the idea that hearthstone deck play is a series of obvious optimal choices with no decision making is just ridiculous.   This is aside from the things that were just plain wrong (e.g."everyone uses yetis"  -- looking at competitive decks, you won't see yetis even in the majority of them. Or  "every mage runs 2 pyroblasts" current top 2 competitive mage decks: aggro runs with no pyro at all, and freeze runs with 1 and it's hardly the linchpin of the deck).   

 

I'm certainly not an expert on Hearthstone, but I found the comparison to a trick taking game fairly apt, although I probably would have used Bridge instead of Hearts, since there's some added complexity there (i'm not familiar with Euchre or Whist, so I don't know where they sit in the complexity scale). There's a huge amount of skill, but that's largely about vicariously guessing what you think your opponent has, and tweaking your order of play to accommodate that (of course, bridge has the teamwork aspect as well, so it isn't a perfect analogy) But the point is, based on what you think your opponent is going to do (revealed by their bidding in Bridge, or their class and first few turns in Hearthstone), you have a set plan, and then you deviate from that plan based on what they actually do. It's not that there's no skill involved in the play phase, it's that the overall sequence of the game is fairly predictable. This is partially due to the fixed growth resource model, but also due to the smaller possibility space due to the small card set.

 

Also, I think this is pretty dependent on the skill level and also the class. At lower ranks, you see a fairly limited set of cards and deck types, so it's more predictable, while at the very upper end, the meta means that you have a pretty good idea of what you're going to see. The game is probably most interesting in the juicy middle where you're seeing a range of different types of decks and experimentation. Similarly, I think arena suffers from this less (although not entirely) because there's such a significant random element to it that vicarious thinking about the deck structure is less effective, although you still have some general class guidelines that you can tend towards.

[Reyturner]

Great episode! I've only dabbled in Hearthstone and decided to bow out until the Android version drops. Glad to see my initial impressions were validated; that Arena is the best way to play and that the constructed scene falls prey to the same issues all competitive constructive play suffers. Still, I look forward to playing it on my couch. 

[Michael]

I think that one of the reasons that I am enjoying Hearthstone so much is that I'm purposefully avoiding the meta. There's only so much room in my brainmeats for planning, researching, reading, competitive talk, stream-watching, and metagaming. Right now, Dota2 fills up all of that. Sometimes I wonder if I even enjoy it, but that's a discussion for another day. 

 

I don't play WoW, but I did play a bunch of Magic back in the day. I haven't really picked up a CCG since, though I really enjoyed Spectromancer. I wish that game had caught on more than it did.

 

With Hearthstone, I sit down and play a game. If I win, hooray! If I lose, oh well. I'll tweak my deck (I love deckbuilding), earn some new cards, and put it away for a while. I can even play a game or two while feeding my daughter a bottle. It's a neat, compact package that gives me some satisfying game time. It's getting harder and harder for me to find the requisite 45 minutes to an hour of completely uninterruptible gaming time to play Dota2, but Hearthstone is satisfying and always around.

 

Also, though I've grown a thick skin playing Dota2, I can't stress enough how awesome the limited communication is in Hearthstone. I really enjoy that aspect of it.

[Arathain]

Yes! The decision to remove any sort of chat is so, so important to making the game as fun as it is. As the podcast mentions part of the pleasure is the relaxed mental level it operates at. I never have to worry about some moron screaming bigoted gibberish in chat, because it can't happen. I've had some quite pleasant exchanges with folk via the e-motes.

[Codicier]

I was excited to see this episode, but upon listening I'm disappointed. 

 

I do love a good critique and hearthstone is ripe for them, but I didn't think most of the hits here made a lot of sense.

 

t was a frustrating discussion because I agree with the many of the underlying criticisms.  The sacrifices made for easier multiplayer interaction like lack of enemy turn interaction, for example.    But you guys also missed many of the real problems, take for instance the dominant competitive deck right now, the Miracle Rogue, which bears a distressing resemblance to playing against someone engaging in a game of solitaire. 

 

Also, as an aside, Hearthstone was in fact made by a small team in blizzard (team 5), there's a interesting story to it strategically for a large company like Blizzard.  There was a great talk at GDC this year by one of the members this year.  They haven't published any figures, but Hearthstone has been trotted out by Activision in shareholders meetings as a big success.   I think it's a safe bet that it is perceived as a hit by Blizzard, and is not being designed as some kind of tie in app to the slowly dying beast that is WoW.

 

 

I enjoyed the discussion. I really like Hearthstone, because it fills a very nice niche in my life. I only really have time for gaming of any sort in short bursts, so to have a game that is polished, tactically satisfying and competitive that I can play in fifteen minutes is a real blessing. Actually, I feel like I get more out of it than I might if I had more time- since I like to play mostly Arena, as long as I pick my Arena class to complete a quest or two I can basically sustain myself in Arena runs nearly indefinitely, barring the odd dip into Constructed if I get a card I want to experiment with. 

 

My initial reaction was to scoff a tad at your lack of in-depth knowledge, but I found that your perspectives were insightful and interesting. It's nice to hear experienced strategy gamers give essentially a casual perspective.

 

I think you underestimate the legs the game has, as well as its strategic depth over the long term. While the game can sometimes seem to play out in an obvious way based on your hand, the huge distinction in achievement between the highest level players and the merely good ones suggest a level of decision making not apparent to most. A few of the really good streamers have taken fresh accounts to Legend rank without spending any money, meaning they are doing so without many of the cards considered the best.

 

That said, net-decking is a big deal, and the meta generally focuses around a handful of decks at any given time, just like the Magic tournaments you described. These do shift slowly over time as counter-decks are discovered, and refinements bring older decks back into play. That this happens even with a small card pool bodes well for future card releases. The first expansion is coming within a month or two, and the new cards are mostly themed around Deathrattles. The new cards look like they offer new possibilities for sure. 

 

A lot of what i was thinking after this episode has pretty much already been summed up here. It was good to hear some casual opinions but it did feel a bit like the episode could have done with someone who had put more time in.

 

One subject that seemed which got little attention was on the choice that Blizzard made on how to divide its card pool size, more specifically how it has a huge pool of neutral cards everyone can use unlike games like Mtg who's base sets (around 350 cards) are roughly divided amongst its 5 colours, with a much smaller common pool of neutral cards.

If you consider this release HS base set then a HS player is actually picking from a bigger chunk (25 class cards + 195 neutral cards =220 card pool) of a bigger overall pool (420 cards) than his MTG equivelent (working on a assumption of two colour each with around 55 cards, (110 total) 30 multicolour, & 30 artifact = 170 card pool). even if you assume a full block of cards you dont end up with significantly more cards to choose from.

Its a choice which also deals with another problem mtg has always had, thatt many sets need to contain near identical cards to previous sets, with many different variations on names for the  2/2 for 2 "Grizzly Bear" or a 3/3 for 4 "Hill Giant", HS seems to cut straight to the point here and just makes those base building blocks accessible to everyone.

 

I would have loved to see a deep dive on this choice and on other interesting design decision with blizzards choice regarding keeping player interaction confined to their own turn seemingly prime for more discussion than it received. It seems like it is the one decision that is essential to keeping the entry level to the game low but which also creates much of the problems which are beginning to evolve at high level(the one turn kill deck being a reoccurring issue). 

 

I mean there's even a interesting discussion to be had over whether all players having access to this big pool of efficient neutral minion helps keep under control the that the occasionally solitaire nature of some decks create.

[Joarath]

I have to say I agree with most of the people. That the cast of overly critical or critical for the wrong reasons. Especially that opening statement about how irritating people are who think Hearthstone is a good way to do virtual TCG. Dismissing the opposing viewpoint as 'irritating' was quite a different attitude than the one I have come to expect from Three Moves Ahead.