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BatStone Is an Example of What Competitive Hearthstone Needs
Hearthstone
Posted
2016/09/18 at 12:36 PM
by
Skiffington
To many, competitive Hearthstone is flatlining. Thanks to the amount of RNG in Hearthstone, let alone the inherent amount of randomness card games have, in general, it's nearly impossible for players to stay consistent across multiple open tournaments.
has become the poster boy for the current situation and many viewers are demanding change faster than Blizzard can react. To be fair, the developer has had the Hearthstone Championship Tour (HCT) schedule locked down (at least beyond the point of changes) for the entirety of 2016. After the latest World Champion is crowned at BlizzCon on November 5 the studio will have its chance to make changes, but given its track record, many aren't very hopeful for that.
Standard was supposed to be the revolution that made competitive Hearthstone great again. Instead, it's become predictable from a deckbuilding standpoint and increasingly affected by RNG. Not to mention the problems many players have with
the Conquest and Best of 5 format
itself.
It doesn't help that competitive teams have been shuttering left and right.
Na'Vi suddenly dropped
its entire squad including last year's champion Ostkaka,
Team Archon has slowly bled out
and face of the organization Amaz has departed for NRG,
Hearthlytics released all of its players
citing no long-term sustainability in the scene, and just yesterday
Team Dignitas
did the same.
Archon in particular stings a little bit as they've been one of the biggest innovators in competitive Hearthstone. Back in August of 2015, they hosted the Archon Team League Championship (ATLC) which brought together six organizations and 24 players to compete for $240,000. To this day it's one of the few team based tournaments ever hosted.
Since then it's been relatively quiet. Archon says they'll be an ATLC 2 at some point, but outside of your typical open tournaments and GEICOs One Nation of Gamers (ONOG) circuit, there's not a ton out there to sustain competition.
But Cloud9's Firebat had enough recently and announced his very own BatStone tournament.
In it, fans could vote on five cards they would like banned from the competition. They were of course predictable, voting on what they thought was the most overpowered and not what actually was. So , , , , and bit the bullet.
But this wasn't really enough to shake up the meta so Firebat had another twist up his sleeve, each of the seven invited players and the one open qualifier would each get to remove one additional card. These were much more targeted and fully eliminated certain archetypes while forcing many others to adapt, truly opening up the realm of possibilities. You can see the
full ban list here
, we won't go over each of them in depth, but this is where the hype really started to get going.
The best part? There was zero prize pool going into the competition but the amount of support was higher than we've seen all year long in competitive Hearthstone.
Reddit thread after Reddit thread celebrated each series, commenting on how the changes really made those that adapted well shine and even resulted in some very unexpected decklists.
In total
246,000 hours
were watched over the course of the nine-hour long stream. On average nearly 27,000 viewers were tuning in, a number rarely seen outside of Hearthstone's most popular streamers let alone during the HCT streams. With a peak of 46,000 right before the stream, unfortunately, crashed during the final match of the final series, BatStone was a resounding success and there weren't even stakes, it was just something different.
Maybe that's what competitive Hearthstone needs, more tournaments with fun and interesting rules. We don't need to force players into silly or weak decks, but it's clear that the Blizzard sanctioned scene isn't changing enough and fans want change. Perhaps Blizzard could bring more variety to its seasonal qualifiers, it's conceivable that the development team opts to rotate the Standard sets as the content releases rather than one big swing at the beginning of each year.
All we know is that
the esports scene isn't rewarded enough
right now so it comes as no surprise that any large scale organizations are struggling to stick around. And that's unfortunate because it's often those that can pony up the money, sponsors, and organization to run these other large tournaments that are crucial to the health of Hearthstone.
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Comment by
mantose262
on 2016-09-25T10:03:28-05:00
Yogg is terrible. It's never fun playing a game that lasts 15-30 minutes only to be decided by one card, no matter how much one player was winning by before Yogg was played.
I can only imagine how much worse it is if there is a large prize pool and the winner was determined by the Yogg coin flip.
Never fun really? What about if you're the player far behind and Yogg is your only hope? And every game is decided by a "coin flip" you just don't notice because it's buried deep in the game
No, it's not fun no matter which side you are on. How is it fun to waste 10-15 minutes on a game that will be decided by the randomness of 1 card?
No, you are absolutely wrong ... games are not decided on some coin flip buried deep in the game. There are many decisions that need to be navigated before the completion of a game. There is very little luck involved, even less luck for skilled players. With Yogg, it's just a simple drop it and pray.
Comment by
Squishalot
on 2016-09-25T20:52:58-05:00
That's not a reason why they don't need it, it's a reason why they can't have it!
The fact that it's possible for a computer game to be successful without the exposure generated from the competitive scene demonstrates that it isn't essential.
Unless the theory is that PVP games require more promotion that PVE games to be successful. If so, I'm not sure why?
Ha, you've caught me out on my simplistic statement! I would say though that the PvE games don't need as much promotion because they're generally much more evolved games. Nobody has ever accused CS or LoL of having the same depth of development (including but not limited to storytelling, world, soundtrack, pretty much anything) as a Skyrim, Final Fantasy, Baldur's Gate, WoW, and so on. Great PvE games are successful because they're beautiful, engrossing worlds that almost compel you to evangelise to your friends. They provide you with 50+ hours of gameplay experience while always encountering something new.
By contrast, where does 50 hours get you with CS, LoL, Hearthstone, or other PvP games? For the mixed PvE / PvP games like Starcraft, you might finish the single player modes. But for those purely PvP games, you're basically repeating the same process over and over again. The new experiences come from the interactions and the people and the strategies you play with. The competitive scene is what helps drive those.
Having said that, the competitive scene doesn't hurt to spread knowledge of the game but I think you need to already be into such things otherwise you'd never be exposed to it anyway.
I never even knew about e-Sports or paid much attention to streaming until last year when I got myself a virtual ticket to Blizzcon. I didn't get into Hearthstone through e-Sports but, admittedly, watching Blizzcon did encourage me to try Star Craft (can't say I took to it, though).
I think general streaming can be just as good as tournaments when it comes to exposure for the game and what makes streaming the most fun is the random stuff that the professionals complain about for the tournaments. It's not immediately obvious to me, which of the two might help the game the most in terms of exposure but I think the fun of RNG and the ability to be able to beat better players through RNG is probably better for keeping people engaged and still playing than facilitating the tournament side by making games more about skill. Ultimately the retention of the player base and word of mouth amongst the player base is probably going to be a more important factor in Hearthstone's success than a thriving tournament scene. Not that I've any objection to the latter as long as it doesn't sacrifice the former.
I think you're generally of the same mindset as me in terms of how streaming benefits the community, but I'm making an additional assertion that the competitive scene helps general streaming. For me, it's not an either/or. I think that the two go hand-in-hand. I do think that the only reason game streaming became such a worldwide phenomenon is because of the advent of gaming tournaments like MLG and the entire South Korean e-sports industry.
In terms of RNG, I'm a fan of the world view that the harder you practice, the luckier you seem to get. You can always tilt RNG in your favour by being a better player and getting into a better position to either mitigate your opponent's RNG, or enhance your own RNG. I generally don't have that much of an issue with RNG (which the game is all about anyway, with decks and all). Or, you could
just be Day9.
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