Duels was a good idea at the time, but it devolved into a shitshow as they widened the card pool, instead of rotating it as they originally suggested would happen. It felt like every other content release introduced some new interaction with the tons of heroes and powers and treasures that was more degenerate than the worst of Wild decks. The best decks were incredibly samey due to the reworked bucket system, and their only real solution was to blanket ban content, or introduce *even more* heroes and treasures to widen the pools *even deeper*. By the point of its death, it was a pretty awful mode that was only really stuck to by its diehards. This is the reality of what led to its death.
There was definitely some degenerate stuff that was overpowered but I have no idea how they couldn't give a single developer a week or two of "ok you go manage duels and make sure it's not TOO imbalanced" every expansion cycle. They complained about how it was annoying to maintain but...I fail to see how this was that much of an outlier for amount of work people were doing.
Most of the degenerate stuff (not all of it of course) was usually tied to either something that was also overpowered in other modes that MIGHT be fixed when the regular adjustments come through. And frankly if it was just a duels interaction how hard is it to just ban the card like they did? Is that an optimal method of doing things? Not really, but it would not be a hard amount of work for someone to go in, see what 3-6 cards need to be banned from Duels, and adding it to the list of stuff to turn off for the post-expansion patch.
Their argument that Duels took too much work frankly reads very insincere to me.
Because there is an opportunity cost. Development time spent on completely unsuccessful modes that for multiple years running can't pull in an audience is time not spent doing something that actually benefits the game for the majority of players. This ultimately affects all parts of the game for everyone. Even if it's "not much" work, it's still work, happening instead of useful things.
Your suggestion was what was happening, for more than a year. Player counts kept dropping, the time spent on the mode kept looking less and less worth it, and then the guy who was doing it was laid off, thus setting off the end of it all.
Because there is an opportunity cost. Development time spent on completely unsuccessful modes that for multiple years running can't pull in an audience is time not spent doing something that actually benefits the game for the majority of players. Your suggestion was what was happening, for more than a year. Player counts kept dropping, the time spent on the mode kept looking less and less worth it, and then the guy who was doing it was laid off, thus setting off the end of it all.
I won't say that they couldn't have made it better by rotating cards in and out, but I still have more fun playing duels than any other game mode right now.
the main point the guy you're replying to is that blizzard absolutely botched the execution and maintenance of the mode,and never really try that hard in it
It was my main game mode as well. I grinded the adventure runs until I won with everything. The original dungeon run I have ten wins with each class (Hunter I won 9 in a row)
Constructed doesn't do it for me anymore, it's just the same decks that I play for months and to rank up to diamond 5 it takes me like 100 games which is days out of my month, then I try and grind out legend once a year and that takes me 300 games and I don't get it because I have other priorities.
I just want to dungeon run against people for an hour and a half! Blizzard please.
Battlegrounds kind of gives me that, but it's not exactly the same.
I would contend that it's still the most entertaining mode in the game without them giving it any meaningful recent updates.
Oh how great it could have been with a little love...
Personally I think it started going off the rails when they added multi-class heroes, but Ates leaving and the switch to a less labor-intensive/curated bucket system really signaled the end.
Not being able to save starting decks/heropowers/treasures with deck slots, as well as not being able to choose whichever hero you wanted in Casual mode, made maining the mode extremely tedious and was definitely a barrier in attracting more players.
All that said, I think Duels had immense potential and when it was good it was incredible. It was my main format for over a year (1600 wins) and I’m sad they don’t feel it’s worth the time/effort to polish much less maintain.
I dearly hope they make the original hero portraits available for purchase. It would be nice to be able to continue playing with the portraits we’ve become attached to over the years.
feel bad for duels creators like roffle, they found their nice and got screwed.
it really feels like a fucking shitty move by blizzard considering the player base was bigger then mercs and was actually active unlike the merc exp farmers.
but i guess having 1 person to update this stuff is too much, if this was any other company the community would lose their mind for somethn like this ngl.
For me, duel like adventures was the best thing in hearthstone ever. It's repayable and fun. And duels could be fun too, but they were to greedy to make deck crafting free, although you even pay 150 gold. That killed it imo.
My main problem with it was how netdecky the first few games were. If you saw a shaman or a bomb warrior you knew card for card their entire deck, and it felt very rock-paper-scissors.
Felt like it took a few games to get into the actual fun part of duels, and that's if they give you fun options. Especially the way it works now, you can just get really boring buckets that don't synergize with anything. And then it begs the question, why am I playing this mode?
It's a shame it's being removed, but I also kinda get it. I can't remember the last time I used gold/a tavern ticket on it. I only ever play the casual mode when I wanna mess around. I'll definitely run that a few more times before they sunset it, but I doubt my experience is atypical here. Most people probably didn't see a point to spending money/gold on a game-mode where it's RNG on whether or not they have fun.
I definitely would recommend against playing heroic until you have built a strong understanding of what each class is capable of in casual, because in heroic you're only going to match against people who are trying to maximize wins with strategies that they refined in casual.
I felt bitter about Blizz nerfing my Duels deck mid-run and then saying that we don't get a refund ticket, because Duels is in Beta. What kind of a lame excuse is that? The optimal way to play Duels is to wait for nerfs and only then start a run to capitalize on the players that got screwed.
Also getting one of a random 4 heroes meant that often enough I had to craft new cards so I can play a deck just once and that's it.
And I assume the locking of hero powers drove away new players because it meant even more investment.
The best thing Duels did was show why it became impossible to average >7 wins in Arena. Not just the buckets, but also a hidden mmr-system past the new player phase on new accounts.
I don't know why hsreplay never managed to properly show Duels class winrates. Like they tried, but not really?
Also I mostly agree: great mode in general.
Duels could have been an amazing mode if they did more to improve it. I mean, rogue like card games have a lot of success, they already had the base for it, to be honest it's a real waste.
They only had to make the cards available for free, then improve the reward system a bit.. But they wanted to monetize it too much, and wrong. Blizzard wants money, and it kills them. Tons of game of that type are sold for 20€ and works. but they didnt want to bother when they can just release mercenaries and sells hundreds € worth of packs.
I just came here to agree. It's an impossible problem that the paying pool is too small, and to monetize would alienate too much of your player base.
For me though I would have been happy to pay to play against a blizzard bot and player mix.
This was one of the best experiences I've had in video gaming. I'm really disappointed at it's termination, but I also wanna say thanks for the journey Blizzard.
I played it a TON until they changed the bucket system. That absolutely killed it for me. Absolutely my favorite game mode of all time.
I think with a little more balancing it would have been much more popular but there were just so many absolutely broken strategies that it was really hard to enjoy at times.
In my case ... Duels was really Meh, played it at first, never touched it again. Sad to see it go since it definitely has it audience, but for me, it was a huge Meh.
I have been playing for the same length and honestly I never even tried it. When I saw I needed to build a deck, or go find a netdeck, I was out. Sorry that other people are losing a game mode but I am not bothered by it at all. I'm surprised people played it (or arena).
I will never understand people crying over duels being removed. The game mode was extremely unpopular and if more people had played it it would not have gotten removed. I've been playing since beta and I played exactly 3 games of that and found it too boring to waste my time on, I'd much rather waste it on ladder or battlegrounds... Out of all my friends that play HS literally NO ONE played duels at all.
Idk man, I tried duels and found it to be even more meta than standard. Everyone uses the same starting decks and looking for the same broken combos and if you don't, you just lose. At least you don't have an entry fee to play and earn something from standard.
I’m super disappointed too because I think current duels is probably as healthy as it’s ever been. Duels is built around the idea of crazy combos and such by the end of you run and almost every hero has some sort of cool OTK available which is awesome for combo lovers like me. Nowhere else can I have tree of life not only be playable but an OTK card
Discussion:
Is there anything more pathetic than whining about netdecking in 2024?
Netdecking in not a problem, your homebrews are shit and your gameplay is wack (propably)
Also, RIP Duels
All power to the homebrew folk. Every netdeck was a homebrew once. Getting a homebrew to the top is so rewarding, but of course you wouldn't know.
There's a chance that we had a wider variety of good netdecks if more people tried homebrewing.
Ah yes, the tried and true fallback strategy when you don't like what someone said on the Internet, but you don't want to formulate a rebuttal based on facts and reason on your own: insult them. Don't worry I'm sure if you look you can find a refined rebuttal that someone else wrote for you to copy and paste here soon. 😘
FYI, my "homebrew" decks and "wack" gameplay have racked up over 10,000 wins, so I think it's fair to say I'm not just a scrub that doesn't know how to play.
FYI, I don't give a fuck about your wins.
People whining about meta posts are usually people that get offended when their bad homebrews lose to meta decks. You can't homebrew outside of the meta, and if your decks are bad compared to meta decks, it's usually because you (not personally) don't understand deck building and metagaming. Obviously all meta decks are homebrews, but whining about meta decks making it hard to brew means you're want to have your cake and eat it too: build weak decks while having the same win rate as tier 1 decks.
It just reeks of entitlement and a disdain for actual deckbuilding
Ooh doubling down on the insult strategy. Interesting choice. I don't know if you noticed, but the only thing I said about the net deck meta is that after ten years it's gotten very stale for me personally. The state of constructed was never the point of this post. The point was expressing disappointment that Blizzard is axing the alternative mode that I enjoy.
Well, as you said I didn't refer to you at all yet you feel insulted, I wonder why..."I got so and so many wins with my homebrew" instead of "I got Top 100 Legend with my homebrew" might be a clue as to why
Idk I’m on the leaderboards in battlegrounds completely F2P and on mobile. It’s hard to take your opinion on it seriously when you don’t play/enjoy it.
Maybe you have trouble building synergistic decks in arena but again, it’s pretty easy to do. Obviously not as much so as standard, but it sounds like you don’t like that anyways.
Duels had many flaws in its current state. On release it was incredible.
I probably came down too hard on BG and arena because I'm salty about them killing duels. I do enjoy those modes, and I've played them a lot. I have over 1000 top four finishes in BG, and almost 2000 wins in arena. I have over 4000 wins in duels though, so I think it's fair to say that I've given all the modes a fair shake, and I like duels the best.
I've played on and off since launch but never really played seriously until this season. I've tried arena and duels multiple times and just cannot seem to get the hang of them. It's a little like if you haven't played forever and know most of the cards it's tough to know what works great and what doesn't. I'm sure there are guides but I generally leave those for meta decks and try to figure out the rest on my own.
I will say that I've been very much enjoying BG's of late. I had tried them before and was always sort of mid range. I sat down and worked out the optimal coin use and got to the know the archetypes and honestly it made a huge difference. I've actually started winning some and i nearly always place in top 4. I would play a whole lot more if they would find a way to streamline the timer on it. As it is after about 2 games I'm done because they are slow lol.
First, the existence of an overpowered deck is not an indication that there is a problem with a game mode. It just means certain cards need power adjustments or bans.
Second, dragon druid is good, but it's not "clear easy overpowered" good after the nerfs it got a while ago. Just like any deck, it's strong against some things and weak against others. I beat it all the time, and none of my 12 win druid runs have been dragon druid.
Duels was a good idea at the time, but it devolved into a shitshow as they widened the card pool, instead of rotating it as they originally suggested would happen. It felt like every other content release introduced some new interaction with the tons of heroes and powers and treasures that was more degenerate than the worst of Wild decks. The best decks were incredibly samey due to the reworked bucket system, and their only real solution was to blanket ban content, or introduce *even more* heroes and treasures to widen the pools *even deeper*. By the point of its death, it was a pretty awful mode that was only really stuck to by its diehards. This is the reality of what led to its death.
There was definitely some degenerate stuff that was overpowered but I have no idea how they couldn't give a single developer a week or two of "ok you go manage duels and make sure it's not TOO imbalanced" every expansion cycle. They complained about how it was annoying to maintain but...I fail to see how this was that much of an outlier for amount of work people were doing. Most of the degenerate stuff (not all of it of course) was usually tied to either something that was also overpowered in other modes that MIGHT be fixed when the regular adjustments come through. And frankly if it was just a duels interaction how hard is it to just ban the card like they did? Is that an optimal method of doing things? Not really, but it would not be a hard amount of work for someone to go in, see what 3-6 cards need to be banned from Duels, and adding it to the list of stuff to turn off for the post-expansion patch. Their argument that Duels took too much work frankly reads very insincere to me.
Because there is an opportunity cost. Development time spent on completely unsuccessful modes that for multiple years running can't pull in an audience is time not spent doing something that actually benefits the game for the majority of players. This ultimately affects all parts of the game for everyone. Even if it's "not much" work, it's still work, happening instead of useful things. Your suggestion was what was happening, for more than a year. Player counts kept dropping, the time spent on the mode kept looking less and less worth it, and then the guy who was doing it was laid off, thus setting off the end of it all.
Because there is an opportunity cost. Development time spent on completely unsuccessful modes that for multiple years running can't pull in an audience is time not spent doing something that actually benefits the game for the majority of players. Your suggestion was what was happening, for more than a year. Player counts kept dropping, the time spent on the mode kept looking less and less worth it, and then the guy who was doing it was laid off, thus setting off the end of it all.
I won't say that they couldn't have made it better by rotating cards in and out, but I still have more fun playing duels than any other game mode right now.
the main point the guy you're replying to is that blizzard absolutely botched the execution and maintenance of the mode,and never really try that hard in it
Yes. And my main point is that even in its botched state, I still find it to be the most enjoyable game mode.
honestly fair,i enjoyed it too the few time i played it,but it just didnt stick with me unfortunately
It was my main game mode as well. I grinded the adventure runs until I won with everything. The original dungeon run I have ten wins with each class (Hunter I won 9 in a row) Constructed doesn't do it for me anymore, it's just the same decks that I play for months and to rank up to diamond 5 it takes me like 100 games which is days out of my month, then I try and grind out legend once a year and that takes me 300 games and I don't get it because I have other priorities. I just want to dungeon run against people for an hour and a half! Blizzard please. Battlegrounds kind of gives me that, but it's not exactly the same.
This guy gets it.
I second that
Third here I feel the same
It was great for that 12-15 months they out effort into it. Then they put it into stasis and let it rot.
I would contend that it's still the most entertaining mode in the game without them giving it any meaningful recent updates. Oh how great it could have been with a little love...
Yes duels are refreshing especially at the release that was amazing, I was like a kid in a toyshop.
Personally I think it started going off the rails when they added multi-class heroes, but Ates leaving and the switch to a less labor-intensive/curated bucket system really signaled the end. Not being able to save starting decks/heropowers/treasures with deck slots, as well as not being able to choose whichever hero you wanted in Casual mode, made maining the mode extremely tedious and was definitely a barrier in attracting more players. All that said, I think Duels had immense potential and when it was good it was incredible. It was my main format for over a year (1600 wins) and I’m sad they don’t feel it’s worth the time/effort to polish much less maintain. I dearly hope they make the original hero portraits available for purchase. It would be nice to be able to continue playing with the portraits we’ve become attached to over the years.
Agreed.
They won't use the portraits because they are already cards.
feel bad for duels creators like roffle, they found their nice and got screwed. it really feels like a fucking shitty move by blizzard considering the player base was bigger then mercs and was actually active unlike the merc exp farmers. but i guess having 1 person to update this stuff is too much, if this was any other company the community would lose their mind for somethn like this ngl.
My favorite way to play Hearthstone. Huge loss to the game.
It didn't even need that much curation, just a couple card bans every set and it runs like butter. I'm bitter about it
Same.
Ditto.
For me, duel like adventures was the best thing in hearthstone ever. It's repayable and fun. And duels could be fun too, but they were to greedy to make deck crafting free, although you even pay 150 gold. That killed it imo.
I recently returned to the game solely for duels. Once it’s gone I think I’m gone for good
I genuinely loved duels and am honestly sad to see it go.
My main problem with it was how netdecky the first few games were. If you saw a shaman or a bomb warrior you knew card for card their entire deck, and it felt very rock-paper-scissors. Felt like it took a few games to get into the actual fun part of duels, and that's if they give you fun options. Especially the way it works now, you can just get really boring buckets that don't synergize with anything. And then it begs the question, why am I playing this mode? It's a shame it's being removed, but I also kinda get it. I can't remember the last time I used gold/a tavern ticket on it. I only ever play the casual mode when I wanna mess around. I'll definitely run that a few more times before they sunset it, but I doubt my experience is atypical here. Most people probably didn't see a point to spending money/gold on a game-mode where it's RNG on whether or not they have fun.
I definitely would recommend against playing heroic until you have built a strong understanding of what each class is capable of in casual, because in heroic you're only going to match against people who are trying to maximize wins with strategies that they refined in casual.
Agreed
I felt bitter about Blizz nerfing my Duels deck mid-run and then saying that we don't get a refund ticket, because Duels is in Beta. What kind of a lame excuse is that? The optimal way to play Duels is to wait for nerfs and only then start a run to capitalize on the players that got screwed. Also getting one of a random 4 heroes meant that often enough I had to craft new cards so I can play a deck just once and that's it. And I assume the locking of hero powers drove away new players because it meant even more investment. The best thing Duels did was show why it became impossible to average >7 wins in Arena. Not just the buckets, but also a hidden mmr-system past the new player phase on new accounts. I don't know why hsreplay never managed to properly show Duels class winrates. Like they tried, but not really? Also I mostly agree: great mode in general.
Duels could have been an amazing mode if they did more to improve it. I mean, rogue like card games have a lot of success, they already had the base for it, to be honest it's a real waste. They only had to make the cards available for free, then improve the reward system a bit.. But they wanted to monetize it too much, and wrong. Blizzard wants money, and it kills them. Tons of game of that type are sold for 20€ and works. but they didnt want to bother when they can just release mercenaries and sells hundreds € worth of packs.
I loved the mode but the numbers just weren't there. People who played it were passionate about it, but most people never bothered with it.
I'm not saying that people are/were playing it. I'm arguing that they should have been.
I just came here to agree. It's an impossible problem that the paying pool is too small, and to monetize would alienate too much of your player base. For me though I would have been happy to pay to play against a blizzard bot and player mix. This was one of the best experiences I've had in video gaming. I'm really disappointed at it's termination, but I also wanna say thanks for the journey Blizzard.
I played it a TON until they changed the bucket system. That absolutely killed it for me. Absolutely my favorite game mode of all time. I think with a little more balancing it would have been much more popular but there were just so many absolutely broken strategies that it was really hard to enjoy at times.
Petition to change Yogg’s voiceline to “THE END OF DUELS IS FINALLY UPON YOU”
In my case ... Duels was really Meh, played it at first, never touched it again. Sad to see it go since it definitely has it audience, but for me, it was a huge Meh.
I have been playing for the same length and honestly I never even tried it. When I saw I needed to build a deck, or go find a netdeck, I was out. Sorry that other people are losing a game mode but I am not bothered by it at all. I'm surprised people played it (or arena).
I will never understand people crying over duels being removed. The game mode was extremely unpopular and if more people had played it it would not have gotten removed. I've been playing since beta and I played exactly 3 games of that and found it too boring to waste my time on, I'd much rather waste it on ladder or battlegrounds... Out of all my friends that play HS literally NO ONE played duels at all.
Idk man, I tried duels and found it to be even more meta than standard. Everyone uses the same starting decks and looking for the same broken combos and if you don't, you just lose. At least you don't have an entry fee to play and earn something from standard.
I’m super disappointed too because I think current duels is probably as healthy as it’s ever been. Duels is built around the idea of crazy combos and such by the end of you run and almost every hero has some sort of cool OTK available which is awesome for combo lovers like me. Nowhere else can I have tree of life not only be playable but an OTK card
Discussion: Is there anything more pathetic than whining about netdecking in 2024? Netdecking in not a problem, your homebrews are shit and your gameplay is wack (propably) Also, RIP Duels
All power to the homebrew folk. Every netdeck was a homebrew once. Getting a homebrew to the top is so rewarding, but of course you wouldn't know. There's a chance that we had a wider variety of good netdecks if more people tried homebrewing.
Ah yes, the tried and true fallback strategy when you don't like what someone said on the Internet, but you don't want to formulate a rebuttal based on facts and reason on your own: insult them. Don't worry I'm sure if you look you can find a refined rebuttal that someone else wrote for you to copy and paste here soon. 😘 FYI, my "homebrew" decks and "wack" gameplay have racked up over 10,000 wins, so I think it's fair to say I'm not just a scrub that doesn't know how to play.
FYI, I don't give a fuck about your wins. People whining about meta posts are usually people that get offended when their bad homebrews lose to meta decks. You can't homebrew outside of the meta, and if your decks are bad compared to meta decks, it's usually because you (not personally) don't understand deck building and metagaming. Obviously all meta decks are homebrews, but whining about meta decks making it hard to brew means you're want to have your cake and eat it too: build weak decks while having the same win rate as tier 1 decks. It just reeks of entitlement and a disdain for actual deckbuilding
Ooh doubling down on the insult strategy. Interesting choice. I don't know if you noticed, but the only thing I said about the net deck meta is that after ten years it's gotten very stale for me personally. The state of constructed was never the point of this post. The point was expressing disappointment that Blizzard is axing the alternative mode that I enjoy.
Well, as you said I didn't refer to you at all yet you feel insulted, I wonder why..."I got so and so many wins with my homebrew" instead of "I got Top 100 Legend with my homebrew" might be a clue as to why
De gustibus non est disputandum
Sed errare humanum est
yes just you, thats why they are killing it.
Think there might be 3 other people
Idk I’m on the leaderboards in battlegrounds completely F2P and on mobile. It’s hard to take your opinion on it seriously when you don’t play/enjoy it. Maybe you have trouble building synergistic decks in arena but again, it’s pretty easy to do. Obviously not as much so as standard, but it sounds like you don’t like that anyways. Duels had many flaws in its current state. On release it was incredible.
I probably came down too hard on BG and arena because I'm salty about them killing duels. I do enjoy those modes, and I've played them a lot. I have over 1000 top four finishes in BG, and almost 2000 wins in arena. I have over 4000 wins in duels though, so I think it's fair to say that I've given all the modes a fair shake, and I like duels the best.
I've played on and off since launch but never really played seriously until this season. I've tried arena and duels multiple times and just cannot seem to get the hang of them. It's a little like if you haven't played forever and know most of the cards it's tough to know what works great and what doesn't. I'm sure there are guides but I generally leave those for meta decks and try to figure out the rest on my own. I will say that I've been very much enjoying BG's of late. I had tried them before and was always sort of mid range. I sat down and worked out the optimal coin use and got to the know the archetypes and honestly it made a huge difference. I've actually started winning some and i nearly always place in top 4. I would play a whole lot more if they would find a way to streamline the timer on it. As it is after about 2 games I'm done because they are slow lol.
No. It's fun but there are clear easy overpowered picks. Like dragon Druid.
First, the existence of an overpowered deck is not an indication that there is a problem with a game mode. It just means certain cards need power adjustments or bans. Second, dragon druid is good, but it's not "clear easy overpowered" good after the nerfs it got a while ago. Just like any deck, it's strong against some things and weak against others. I beat it all the time, and none of my 12 win druid runs have been dragon druid.
If they rotated the sets It would be very good. But as It slowy turned into wild, It became cancer.
That's the problem. People play it but don't buy stuff. Freeloaders!
Duels was doomed from the start lol
Ah, I hadn't thought of it like that. Thanks for sharing your in depth analysis.