The Circlejerker's Copypasta Encyclopedia, Vol. 2

It’s been nearly a week since the release of Whispers of the Old Gods and the reaction to the expansion online seems to have been generally positive. Let’s not forget that this patch also brought in the Standard and Wild formats to Hearthstone, which was again given generally positive praise. However, I believe that these changes have created something that is potentially very dangerous for the game.

Old Gods, broadly speaking, is an expansion that encourages players to build decks around big 10 mana cost minions. The champion of this idea is C’Thun, the Old God all players get when they open a WotOG pack. This act of generosity by Blizzard was meant to make using many of the OG cards that interact with C’Thun easier as you already have the legendary (http://www.pcgamer.com/hearthstones-ben-brode-on-old-gods-and-reynads-match-making-theory/). And boy did it work.

Anyone who has played Hearthstone this past week will know the meta has split into 3 factions; C’Thun decks, Aggro decks/Zoo and Shaman. The reason for this change can be explained quite simply.

  1. Shaman received extremely powerful cards that got people excited.

  2. Aggro decks and Zoo have always existed because it’s very hard to reduce the power level of low mana cost cards.

  3. C’Thun decks exist because they’re easy to build.

It’s the last point I want to talk about.

Firstly, it’s important to recognise what C’Thun is; it’s a marketing ploy. There’s a definite marketing and financial reason Blizzard launched Old Gods with C’Thun – it looks really cool, to new players and old. New players are important here, but we’ll come back to that.

In making C’Thun, Blizzard surely knew the card would be popular, and so they had to make the card playable – thus we get the C’Thun buff cards.

These minions (for the most part) have excellent stat lines for their mana costs and buff C’Thun quite effectively, forcing an opponent to deal with not only the big man himself, but all his cronies before him. This is very flavourful, and it also means a new player can jump in very quickly and have a competitive deck, which is also great. Or is it?

One of the long term concerns about Hearthstone was that as more content was released the barrier to entry would become too high and thus player numbers would stagnate. The cure for this, according to Blizzard, was to announce Standard and Wild, essentially producing a game mode that was friendly to new players as well as old (http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/19995505/a-new-way-to-play-2-2-2016). Obviously, the advent of C’Thun is just a natural extension of this recruitment drive – new players can play Standard with a limited card pool and win with a relatively cheap and easy to play deck. I love Hearthstone, and honestly, the more the merrier.

But Blizzard doesn’t want new players because they want to expand the community. They’re a business, and new player’s equal greater revenues for the game that is fast becoming Blizzard’s cash cow (http://gamerant.com/heartstone-profit-monthly-900/ it’s difficult to find exact comparable figures since Blizzard doesn’t release them). Ultimately, the formula behind C’Thun is simply;

*C’Thun creates hype that attracts new players.

*Standard creates a low barrier of entry and a free C’Thun creates a competitive deck.

*Additional C’Thun minions encourage new players to purchase packs.

Now, is there anything wrong with that? No, of course not, from a business stand point at least. But there is from a player’s standpoint.

C’Thun belittles the deck building experience, which is at the core of meta development. It also lowers the required skill level of the game (quite intentionally) which will, in the long term, trounce on Hearthstone’s eSports reputation.

The advent of C’Thun decks also speaks volumes about the design philosophy of Team 5. C’Thun is lazy design, and it’s uninspiring as a deck builder. It doesn’t encourage me to experiment with new cards; if anything it lets me know that my deck will suck if I don’t play a particular 6 or 7 cards, and that’s really depressing.

But more than that, it makes me sad for the game in the future to come. C’Thun will rotate out eventually but the floodgate is now open. Rotation will become just an annual recruitment drive for new players, which will mean more big flashy minions and low skill decks and a predetermined meta. It’ll make a game that’s more about hype and less about long term playability.

In summary, C’Thun has helped Hearthstone achieve some of its key business objectives and has defined the current meta, but the existence of C’Thun shows a short term focus centred around creating hype, which will be to detriment of the game in the long term.

/r/hearthstonecirclejerk Thread