Stonekeep's Comments
Budget Secret Mage Deck List & Guide (Darkmoon Faire)
Hey! We generally don’t publish articles / guides from our readers. You can send it to me (stonekeephs@gmail.com), but I can’t make any promises that I will post it.
Budget Gibberling Token Druid Deck List & Guide (Darkmoon Faire)
Added it to the featured section + published on social media, thanks for sharing! ๐
Top Standard & Wild Legend Decks - Darkmoon Faire Week 2 - November 2020
Actually, there’s one on the list. But keep in mind that sometimes when a deck is flooding the ladder, you won’t see it THAT much on our site for a simple reason – players don’t always want to share FOTM builds online, and I can only showcase deck lists that people share online ๐
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
Uhhh… I’m definitely not an expert, but yes, incarcerating adults or fining drivers definitely does help. If there was no vision of punishment, people would break the law all the time. That’s why we have law in the first place. Let’s say someone shoplifts… what’s your solution? Should we pat him on the head and say that he can’t do it anymore? If that’s the only punishment he’ll ever get, do you really think that he will understand and change his stance? Of course not, if he knows that there’s no punishment, he will just go and do the same thing again – because why wouldn’t he? Education isn’t everything – what do you do with someone who still doesn’t care even though he knows very well that he shouldn’t do something? You punish them. Why? Because now everyone knows that if you do something bad, you can get punished, and it deters most of people from doing the same.
It’s literally impossible to build a system that doesn’t allow punishable activities. Let’s say hacking in games – of course devs will try to prevent hacks from being usable, but it’s not always easy and possible. In many games, hackers can run free for at least some time – you’re saying that they shouldn’t be punished even though it’s clearly forbidden, it’s unfair and it ruins everyone’s experience? Or example that’s closer to home – in Hearthstone, when someone invites you after game and wishes you death, your mother to get cancer and hope that your sister commits suicide – you think that it’s fine and he shouldn’t be punished? How could Blizzard “educate” him or make a “positive experience”?
What you’re saying might be true in a perfect world, but we’re not living in one. You can’t make a positive experience for everyone without punishing certain individuals who would keep ruining that experience if allowed to.
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
Depends on whether you talk about value or design. In terms of value, it wasn’t better. In terms of design – that’s subjective and I totally get why you might like it more than the new one. I like the new one more, and I think that they can really make it much better than the old one, they just need to tweak a few problematic things.
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
See, that’s the problem, people try to simplify it too much. It doesn’t work like that. It’s easy to calculate how much gold you got under the old system, but the new system is much more complicated and it might take hours to calculate it correctly.
I know that I’ve been linking it a few times already, but here’s a good calculation, with a link to excel sheet where you can put your own numbers and see how it works for you: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srg57g
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
You can try to convince streamers & popular community figures to stand on your side without insulting them or sending hateful messages. I wonder when people will learn that those do not accomplish anything. If someone is not on your side, if someone is not agreeing with you, then insulting him is the last thing that will make him change his mind. A more calm, level-headed approach, discussion, providing arguments without straight up confrontation – those are the ways that you might change someone’s opinion with.
If someone just wants to stay out if it, let them. You can stop watching them, you can stop supporting them if you don’t want to anymore, that’s fair. But don’t harass them.
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
“Please do not advocate or recommend ways to punish others (eg take away xp for a week). Always push the positive narrative.”
Why? People who are doing something wrong should be punished, I don’t know what positive narrative is there to push. Of course, they shouldn’t be punished out of blue, Blizzard should first announce that AFKing in games etc. will be punishable with X or Y, give people enough time to process that, and then still start with warnings. I didn’t mean that they should outright take away a week worth of XP from those players out of the blue, apologizes if it sounded that way.
“Try not to simply state that other people have made bad calculations, without actually presenting your own.”
I did calculations for before the Packs -> Gold changes, but I did them mostly for my own play style and didn’t have time to update them + calculate others. Sorry about that, but I’ve been so busy over the last few weeks that I barely found time to even write this long post.
That said, most of the opinions about new system being so much worse is based on the early calculations circulating around reddit and social media, where people made a lot of flawed assumptions about the new system, missed some XP sources and so on. Ever since then, most of the “good” calculations that took everything into account were drowned, because they didn’t fit the narrative. Here’s a good, recent calculation: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srg57g – Bunnyhoppor is a Chemistry PhD with background in Maths, and he provided a full excel sheet where you can adjust it for your own play style.
“Otherwise, not a bad article.
Thank you.
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
I agree that it’s a big flaw of the new Quest system, something I forgot to mention. Players should be able to finish Quests without playing Ranked mode. Finishing Quests in Brawl or Casual was often a great way for someone who just didn’t feel like playing Ranked, Arena or whatever. Taking that away is a big slap in the face, mostly for casual players.
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
I get where you’re coming from, but lots of those calculations were done before the Packs -> Gold changes. Before those changes, the difference was significant. Right now, it’s not so much.
For example, here’s a more recent calculation by Bunnyhoppor (he’s a Chemistry PhD and he has a backgrounds in Maths, so I would trust him to calculate it more than most of the people, including myself) – https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srg57g
According to him, even the more “casual” player, those who play only 1 hour per day, will earn only roughly 270 gold less under the new system, BUT will have 2x Legendary card and all other rewards, so while yes, that’s less Gold (but let’s be honest – 270 is not much), but the extra rewards make up for it. Even if you “don’t care” about old packs & Legendaries, just disenchanting all of them would net more rewards than the old system (~1.5k Dust is definitely worth more than 270 Gold). And then, according to his calculations, people who play 2-3 hours basically land at the same Gold amount (8-50 Gold more) PLUS all the extra rewards.
I agree that the system should be tweaked so any player earns at least the same amount of gold, because that’s what Blizzard promised. But in majority of cases, the new system is better if we take stuff like packs & Legendary cards into the account, ignoring them would be simply disingenuous.
All of that said, my whole point is that arguing whether the new system is better or worse is not the right way to go about those “protests”. Both systems are very similar. Some people will earn slightly less, some people will earn slightly more, but the differences aren’t significant enough to be angry about it and call the new system “terrible” etc. What people should be angry about instead is the fact that it should give significantly MORE rewards across the board, because old system was bad and needed a massive improvement, especially with mini-sets coming and the game becoming more expensive.
I do really think that when the community is so outraged, it has a lot of changing power. But I feel like they target the anger in the wrong direction way too often.
My Take On The New Progression System / Battle Pass - How Bad it Really Is, How To Fix It + A Few Words About Dev / Streamer Harassment
I agree, the amount of bugs happening around the progression rework & Darkmoon release is crazy. It shouldn’t have happened, and if anything they should be fixed much faster. We’re not talking about some small issues, but stuff like people not getting any Quests at all or the game crashing on multiple occasions.
However, it’s not a part of the new progression system per se, so I’ve decided to leave it out of the post.
12 Wins (12-0) Mage - ParadoxHS - Duels Season 1 (Wizard Duels)
Fixed it, sorry, that’s what happens when players share the same name.
Budget Gibberling Token Druid Deck List & Guide (Darkmoon Faire)
Thanks, I’ll publish it soon, probably tomorrow!
You can always send them to me through social media. E.g. message me on Discord or @HSTopDecks on Twitter ๐
Totem Shaman Deck List & Guide - Darkmoon Faire - November 2020
You’re right, fixed it.
Still having PTSD from T1 Trogg into T2 Totem Golem ๐
Budget Gibberling Token Druid Deck List & Guide (Darkmoon Faire)
If you’re talking about featured decks, then it’s not a bug, only the decks I add (or any other admin for that matter, but it’s just me doing it :p) are displayed there. If you want your deck to be featured, you can send it to me with rank proof and I’ll post it.
Compensation For Missing Weekly Quests Is Out - 6000 XP + 600 XP Bonus
CM said that they’re still working on Daily Quests and the compensation was only given out for Weeklies.
And I’m afraid that 2) is on purpose, but I hope that they will decide to change it :/
Compensation For Missing Weekly Quests Is Out - 6000 XP + 600 XP Bonus
Well, it’s the only thing that would make sense, but it wasn’t specifically mentioned. I’ll give you an update if I get more info.
(Update: Starting Soon) Darkmoon Duel-Fest - First Duels Tournament - November 24
That’s the point – prize money is not increasing viewership (at least not by a lot), but if it wasn’t there, people like Kripp, Thijs, Dog, Kibler etc. wouldn’t be interested in participating. Those popular streamers are usually paid for advertisting something – it’s a part of their job, after all.
So there are two options to approach this. 1 – small money prize + paying the streamers behind the scenes. And 2 – big money prize. Second option is much better for the marketing (because you can advertise it as a big, $200k tournament), but for streamers it doesn’t really matter, because they get their money either way.
Best Duels Starter Decks For All Classes - 12 Wins Deck Lists (United in Stormwind, September 2021)
Eh, it’s hard to replace, because the card is AMAZING in the early games with this HP (late game burst for over half of your opponent’s health). But I would probably run something like Kor’kron Elite instead.
I think that the name “Libroom” was more clever, the combination of Libram and Broom. But for some reason people stopped using it and started calling it just Broom. While Broom is cool, it’s not the most important part of the deck, so I prefer to stick to the Libram Paladin name.
But yeah, Penpal would also be a clever wordplay ๐ There are so many misses good name opportunities, but sadly once people land on a certain name and start using it, it’s so hard to change it (and we need to follow the trends mostly because otherwise people googling the deck wouldn’t end up here).