CSGOpinions

Hearthstone: Buffs, Nerfs and My Opinions.

So, Hearthstone is, as i have stated in my introductory story, another one of my favourite games, never reaching legend but playing enough of the game to know enough about the game.

Buffs and nerfs, are, in my opinion at least, one of the most vital parts of any online game. They are vital because of many reasons, however as an example, I will use the Trading Card Game ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’. I never was great at ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’, i would challenge my brother many a time to matches, however neither of use quite understood what we were doing (to us man-eating bug was OP as all hell), I have looked into it more recently once i discovered people were still playing it and it is a prime example of why Blizzard need to seriously reconsider their laissez-faire attitude towards buffs and nerfs that we have seen in both Hearthstone and Starcraft II (which has led to Starcraft: Brood Wars to have greater prize pools in the last year), Heroes of the Storm is less so relevant as they clearly picked up that MOBA’s had to be modified or else they would get no driving force of fans. Buffs and nerfs are essential because ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ has fallen out of public eye (besides people’s nostalgia and the small-ish player-base) because it has become completely broken, the internet show ‘Extra Credits’ (which is amazing and i would highly recommend watching) have briefly touched upon this but what happens is the game has this idea of a ‘Power Curve’, the power curve is shaped somewhat like this

Take Time as manacost and Position as strength of the card

we can take that the higher the manacost, the higher the strength. So once we make a card that is below this curve (in Hearthstones case, this could be a card like ‘Poisoned blade’) this card is effectively terrible and will never be played, if we make a card that is above this curve (again, for hearthstone we could see this as being ‘Piloted shredder’) this card is seen as over-powered and is effectively an auto include in every deck as when other 4-mana cost cards are compared to ‘Piloted shredder’, they don’t have a good enough body as well as the tempo gain that ‘Piloted shredder’ gets, meaning you would rather piloted shredder in your deck. This leaves the game feeling boring and stale as this card will be seen constantly in every deck. This is not a huge problem if this is a one of, the way to make sure this is accounted for is by making the curve increase but that requires releasing an entire expansion, unless you have the power to buff and nerf your cards, this is why Blizzard need to start taking a stronger approach to buffing and nerfing, the reason ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ became how it was, with cards being an auto include in decks, the meta becoming stale as a 20 year old loaf of bread and games becoming increasingly shorter and more and more boring is because once they released one card above the curve, they had to make all other cards up to that curve, this meant the developers kept on making better and better cards to keep their audience satisfied until their game became one that, once you made one combo that wasnt hard to make, you effectively won the game. I’m not saying that this is what hearthstone will devolve to, Blizzard will realise something is up long before that point, but what im saying is that they need to realise that once they released ‘Piloted shredder’, it desperately needed a nerf and they refused that, causing the meta to completely shift all because of this 1 measly 4 drop, the entire game just completely changed.

To summarise

I feel that Blizzard shouldn’t be afraid to buff or nerf their cards, they should embrace it. I would rather a regularly changing card game than a boring stale one.

Thank you for reading

please tell me your opinions.