Little note: If you are going to smash your face into the keyboard over and over again in blind rage, at some point you need to move past believing in clickbait and actually answer why financial numbers submitted to regulatory authorities don’t line up with what you want to believe. The conversation is cute in that ‘debate on the internet’ kind of way, but once it reaches “because that’s god’s will” logic, I’m out.
Speaking of Blizzard, and recent surprises from customer service following my Comcast interaction, over the weekend I reached out to them to get my ancient Battle.net account back (rolling my face across Hearthstone as we speak, and we seriously need a new term than dumbed down, because yikes!). The account is so old WoW was never linked to it, and I went into the whole thing 50/50, part of me thinking the account with the associated email was lost forever.
My first attempt was through email, but that ticket was rather quickly closed with the advice to do this over the phone. Bad start, but on some level it made sense, plus filling out a form with your phone number isn’t all that painful; it’s not like you are sitting on hold waiting.
In the 15-20 minute estimate that was given, someone called me. They spoke English and sounded human, so we were already off to a very promising start. After some basic info was provided, the agent found my old Battle.net account. Success. He then tracked down my long-since hacked WoW account to link together. The funny thing about that? Even though the account was hacked and linked to some random Battle.net account, it wasn’t looted since I didn’t have enough ‘stuff’ for the hacker to bother adding time to loot it. WoW inflation helping me out, who knew. As a final nice (I think?) gesture, my old WoW account has 15 days on it, so I can check out all the recent (since TBC) changes. I guess I should?
By contrast, my ticket with SquareEnix for my FFXIV account still sitting in limbo days later. (I recently reformatted, tried to reinstall FFXIV, used the Steam key, and the game says the Steam key has already been used (by me, duh) Any ideas?).
Hardcore Casual 
I’ll take blog post titles I never thought I’d see Syncaine write for $800, Alex.
…
But then again aside from EVE what other MMO is there that has a real firm future of sorts I suppose.
My brother and all his friends are back, after swearing it off once they killed the Lich King years ago. There’s a movement afoot for people being more interested in Draenor than they have in previous expansions. I’m not sure if it is demographic related, or nostalgia related. It will be interesting to see what happens if these relative “old schoolers” actually hang around for a bit.
Why do you think Hearthstone is so dumbed down? Is it really or are you being elitist? Would you consider Skyrim a dumbed down version of other Elder Scrolls games that came before it? I think I remember reading your blog posts about you enjoying Skyrim. I do like that you are a contrarian, I’m simply curious about why you feel the way you do about Blizzard’s games.
No it very much is. The cards and gameplay is just very simple compared to MtG. Did you watch the world final for instance? Shorty, very simple, to the point where even the announcers could predict what as going to happen turn-to-turn. That suggests a very simple game, without the need for any heavy thinking. I’ll have a post in more detail at some future date.
I appreciate you taking the time to answer! I’ll try to go back and watch the championship. It may be that you’re just used to card games? I used to play MtG back in the day… Hearthstone kind of annoys me, though. I can’t seem to get the hang of it.
Having played both MtG:Online and the latest PC version from Steam, the overall flow of the game compared to Hearthstone is significantly worse. The core issue people bring up about HS being dumbed down is the fact that you cannot react to your opponent’s round.
While this mechanic works in a tabletop format (because you simply yell out that you want to interrupt the stack), while online it bogs down to such a degree that a single player turn takes multiple minutes. Not a fun expereince, AT ALL, and in the end adding complexity for its own sake, is a terrible design mistake.
Regarding the announcers, of course they could tell a good amount of the plays, they are pro players themselves, reaching high ranks of legend. It makes sense.
You basically can’t react to anything really. Even most secrets are either trigger on the attacking unit, or a random one, but never “pick a target” style.
Attacking is the same; because there is no ‘declare’ phase, the only thing ‘unexpected’ that can happen is a secret, but even then you at least know if one is in play or not, and since they are so basic and often tied to a class, they aren’t hard to bait out.
Hearthstone, after deck building, is almost like playing Life or Candyland. Yea, you are rolling the dice or spinning the wheel, but in reality you aren’t playing so much as watching randomness determine the outcome. I mean, after how many matches of Hearthstone do you walk away thinking “man, I only I had played X instead of Y, I could have won that”? It’s certainly not every game, but is it even half?
I think it’s much more subtle than that, to be honest. There’s a lot more depth in thinking about what the cards you haven’t seen yet are, and playing not only to your hand but also your potential future hand.
Otherwise, if it’s so easy why not copy a pro deck (there are plenty of sites out there which list them) and play perfectly until you are the best player in the world, get invited to Blizzcon and become rich (RICH!).
Copying a pro deck (assuming access to all those rare cards of course) would massively increase anyone’s winning percentage, agree?
Now compare that to people copying pro players in LoL. It’s a freaking disaster even in plat solo queue.
Not entirely sure about that Syn, there are a lot of subtleties on how things trigger (i.e. two secrets, buffs and silences, order trigger of multiple deathrattles etc) that don’t show themselves until you’ve put in some time. And besides, the fact that there is no declare phase is what actually is its biggest (imo) advantage over the competition.
So you’re level 70 with a full ration of blue bar? You could be 90 by Thursday.
Regarding your FFXIV issue, I’m not sure how the Steam installation works, you shouldn’t need to input your game key again. When is the game requesting it?
Try fiddling with a file called FFXIV_BOOT.cfg in your “My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV – A Realm Reborn” folder. I remember a friend of mine having a similar problem to yours, and he fixed it with some change in that file.
For reference, here are the contents of mine:
Version 2
Language 1
Region 2
EulaAgreement 1
StartupCompleted 1
B4EulaAgreement 1
BootVersionCheckMode 0
ConfigReset 0
Heh, wordpress ate my angular brackets. At the beginning it should say:
{FINAL FANTASY XIV Boot Config File}
{Version}
Replacing { } by less-than and greater-than.
Well, that’s not something I expected to read here ! As long as you’re having fun, that’s the bottom line I guess, even if it’s short lived like so many other online games. Always nice to hear a good story involving customer support. Way too much crap is done in this domain and we, as consumers, don’t spread the goods enough.
You have more patience with Blizzard and interest in getting back to Azeroth than I do. I got the “free week” email a while back and finally decided to see if my old characters were still around, mostly to get a blog post out of it.
I have all the log-in details and the last thing I did before I left was link the WoW account to a Battlenet one. I have all the confirmatory emails. I even have all the original boxes and codes.
When I went to log in the only thing that was recognized was my Battlenet account, which had no games attached to it. I opened a ticket and got a replay in about two-three days telling me there was no trace of my account or of me. Apparently I never played WoW.
Since I did in fact only play WoW for three months, found it to be moderately enjoyable but certainly nothing special, and would place it probably somewhere down in the 20s in my 100 best MMOs of all time list, I doubt I will bother to pursue things any further.
Really, all the talk of how Blizzard does x, y or z better than everyone else is as mystifying to me as hearing a U2 fan explain why they are so much better than all the other guitar groups. In addition to that quasi-religious brand loyalty, however, there certainly seems to be a new retro-hype train rolling for WoW in particular. It’s going to be fascinating to see just how long it takes to come off the rails.
WoW has yet to come off the rails since it launched. It has been in decline but Blizzard probably has another five to ten years of milking their cash cow. If EQ2 is still around with such a smaller population, it is safe to say WoW has got some life in it yet.
I don’t think WoW stands out as much in the market anymore save for the Blizzard name. Most people have taken WoW and done their own take on it so it no longer seems unique. However, at the time it launched I think it was better than anything else out there including EQ2. The only game that could have rivalled it at the time was FFXI (It had a better world I think). They unfortunately did not implement the quality of life improvements to make the game less frustrating in terms of playability and the grind was excessive (even for an MMO).
Copying a pro deck (assuming access to all those rare cards of course) would massively increase anyone’s winning percentage, agree?
If that were actually the case, you would not see so many people stuck in the lower brackets. There are plenty of budget decks that hit Legend, and yet not very many people in said rank.
The World Championship game was a blowout, but it’s rather ridiculous to presume it was all a bunch of dice rolls, or at least moreso than the average MtG game. Just go watch Amaz’s stream (or anyone’s, honestly) sometime and tell me some random person could “copy” that.
The suggestion that there is just as many decisions to make during the average Hearthstone game compared to a game of MtG is pants-on-head levels of stupid man. Please tell me you don’t honestly believe that?
I’m specifically addressing your “CandyLand” randomness point. There are indeed more decisions points in MtG, but there are also plenty of dice rolls when it comes to being mana screwed, top-decking, etc.
What you were basically claiming is that all the top players in HS got there by chance, which is similarly dumb.
“Hearthstone, after deck building, is almost like playing Life or Candyland.”
Think you missed that ‘almost’ word.
Meanwhile, related to luck vs skill:
“or at least moreso than the average MtG game”
Which is the pants-head statement, thinking that luck plays an equal role in MtG and Hearthstone, or that the skill curve is comparable.
You’re really equivocating over “almost” when the very next sentence was:
Yea, you are rolling the dice or spinning the wheel, but in reality you aren’t playing so much as watching randomness determine the outcome.
There is no question that MtG is a more complex game; the existence of a Blocking phase alone opens up a lot of bluffing space and uncertainty. That said, in terms of how many games you lose no matter how well you play? I think it is comparable. No amount of skill will get you out of a land screw.
That next sentence was clarifying Candyland/Life, not talking about Hearthstone, since Hearthstone doesn’t have dice or a wheel to spin…
The point about Hearthstone over MtG is simple though; in MtG more games are determined by the decisions of the player, while in Hearthstone more games are determined by luck, because player-decision is so limited and basic.
Of course in either game the odds can stack in such a way that you auto-lose, but that’s not the point and never was. Just like in Hearthstone you could have the best deck but if you decide to just smash the ‘end-turn’ button, your level of ‘player skill’ will cause you to lose. Again though, not the point.
The point is looking at the outcome of an average game, not some outlier, and how insane it is that you stated the two games are equal in that regard.