I keep seeing male Hearthstone pros/commentators/etc lamenting the lack of skilled female Hearthstone players, and it's kind of starting to get on my nerves. I know I go out of my way to say how much I love this community, but that's fan girl toast talking, not Hearthstone player toast talking. So I want to share my own personal experiences with this.



Last spring I was hanging out with DTwo and the topic of women in Hearthstone came up, specifically the lack of competitive ones. He asked why I didn't compete because I am a decent player. Not sure what answer I gave, but truthfully it's because of an asshole pro that I had reached out to for coaching. His idea of coaching was to belittle me and make fun of every play I made instead of helping or suggesting better lines of play and I left in tears. I didn't touch the game until August other than to get my monthly cardbacks. In August Ekop and Impact decided that I was going to DH Cluj, and not only that, but I was going to play in it too. Ekop spent months prepping me and practicing with me and helped with my deck selections. Now, we misread the meta as it was right after the warsong nerf, but I feel I played my decks well, I just had bad matchups. I felt fucking great, so what if I didn't get the results I wanted, I competed in my first LAN and walked away proud of how I played. Mostly everyone at the event was supportive of me, and I got a lot of encouragement to keep it up and keep competing. Great, right? I wasn't able to attend DHW, but I set a goal for myself for 2016 to get back into competing like I did in my early days in Hearthstone.



Now, one thing to note about me is that I don't have time to grind ladder. I work a full time job, and have other personal issues that mean I can't sit down for a few marathon sessions, hit legend, and spend my days playing against other "top" players. If I want to be competitive, I need to play against better players than myself. Quality vs quantity of practice. Should be no problem, right? So many players have wished me well on my quest, said they would help, I'm fucking golden, eh?



Not exactly. I like to think I'm fairly well connected and have a fair amount of friends at the highest levels of the game. I asked a few if at some point in the future when they had a spare hour or so, if we could play a Bo5. When it worked with their schedule. Straight across the board, the answer was no. Not I'm busy now but maybe in a few weeks, but just no. I am not worth their time. Now, after that kind of rejection from people that initially offered to help, what are the chances of me having the confidence to reach out and ask someone I don't know as well if we could play a few games? How do you think I feel about playing the game in general? Probably pretty discouraged. Especially when I see these exact same players helping out male players in my situation.



Look, I'm not looking for a full time coach. I don't expect Firebat to say hey, yeah, let's play a bit! I am not opposed to paying for a player's time if it helps me get better. And I certainly don't think I'm out of line for asking the players I have spent countless hours giving motivational talks to, trying to help deal with tilt, hell, even giving relationship advice to, for a spare 45 minutes of their life. You guys say you want more women competing, but (and I speak not just for myself but for other women I've spoken to in my position) you don't take us seriously. There are a lot of great female players out there that are simply too intimidated to try, and I don't blame them at all.

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