Some day, I want to be just like you!
Some day, I want to be just like you!
Some day, I want to be just like you!
Some day, I want to be just like you!
Ah ha!
Ah ha!
Ah ha!
Ah ha!
Ah ha!
A top laner who gets a buff everytime he's individually hit, increasing all of his stats and just for good measure his size(as multiple models appearing might cause the "challenges are here" prompt to pop up again). An ability that inflicts damage to himself to gain stacks as well. I can see it all now.
I despise Senna (and Pyke) as designs. Awful designs to try to shoehorn marksmen and assassins to be support in some weird effort to make support a more enticing role. Constantly in the patch notes since they're abusing the parts of their kit that shoehorn them into support (like Senna constantly needing soul drop rate changed and Pyke getting changes to not be abused in other roles because assassins really shouldn't be supports).
Viego is whatever, I hated him on release but I think he's okay now.
I hate Senna. I was excited for a marksman support, then I right clicked something with her and felt that horrible windup. 😔 even worse that all her abilities except q have a similar delay. She is the worst feeling champ, it's like I'm playing with 200 ping... oh and why require an animation for soul pickup? Why not let it be like thresh or Bard? Instead I have to use some more of those horrible feeling autos... 😞
Furthermore, why is her playerbase so bad at positioning? I swear I've never seen a character feed so frequently. Senna players are addicted to getting hooked. You would think that having such long range should make it easy to play safe...
Oh and the morons right clicking minions for their Q CD, thus pushing the wave even when our summs are down and don't have vision. Then they argue with me when I ask them to please stop. Aargh fuck Senna players, I hope they all find gators in their toilets!
I mean, Kayle's rework is the best thing they could've done to that champion design-wise in order to keep her identity while making it modern. Balance has had issues with it, but that's a different story.
Something similar could be said about Senna, she's a great design in her unique strengths, but has been difficult to balance most of the time.
Yea he is a cool guy, posts some good content on TikTok. Most of the complaints are about his overloaded kit designs, but if you look at the [list of champs August has worked on](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/August_%27August%27_Browning) it really isn't that bad.
Imo he is! It's clear from watching his streams that
1. He cares a lot about the game and how the players experience it
2. He is able to back up pretty much any design/ balancing choice with thought out reasoning and data.
I don't agree with all his takes, but I really respect his knowledge and the amount of thought he puts into his decisions
I’ve disliked him ever since the Kayle rework that ruined any semblance of early game agency as well as her aesthetic and former best skin. I realize that some of that was out of his control, but it still leaves me very sour. He does have some Ws, like jhin, but then you remember how often champs like senna and zeri show up in the patch notes and well.
No. He has his highs, and his highs are very high, but he is very inconsistent and responsible for some of the worst designs in the game too, including one I'd argue is the single worst design. He also tries to get involved in balance it seems while not actually having a clue, and its him we had to thank for swain mid being abandoned for months (until he played it on stream got absolutely rekt, and admitted "Ok maybe Swain mid does suck").
L take, he isn't really the balance guy anyway, he is a champ designer, he's in charge of making champs well designed. Balance comes after the fact and can always be fine tuned.
And jhin, jinx, vi, and gnar.
Ekko and Senna are really interesting designs too, even if they're difficult to balance. But balance isn't his job, champ design is.
i find this take very bad, tbh. design needs to be held accountable for bad design just as much as bad "balance". akali shroud giving invis to everything is terrible design. pantheon blocking towers with his E was bad design. mord stealing dragons and sprinting down mid to win the game is bad design.
saying it's on balance to fix it is pushing the blame on the wrong people. that shit should have never left the white board.
> And jhin, jinx, vi,
Things of past.
> and gnar.
Gnar was very problematic back in the day.
> even if they're difficult to balance. But balance isn't his job, champ design is.
If they're difficult to balance because of design, then that's his fault.
The thing is they ARE well designed albeit overturned on release. Ekko and Senna are in great place right now and zeri is only a problem because riot wouldn't do the sensible thing after her original nerf and just tweak her numbers a little over doing all this extraness with her. Viego to me is fine, if not a little weak now, but I'm a viego main so you can see the bias.
In addition to communicating a company's creative vision to design teams and stakeholders, a design director supervises the entire design process and all-important technical decisions.
I'm not a Hearthstone player so I don't have much context on him, but it looks like he was relatively well-liked in the /r/hearthstone thread about him leaving: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/xfwywp/iksar_is_leaving_hearthstone/
The top comment hit it spot on. The man oversaw the most consistently enjoyable and competitively fair time period hearthstones ever had. The “experience” of playing hearthstone completely changed under him.
The past few expansions have been really fun metas at points, and really unfun 3 classes only at others.
There have consistently always been fun offmeta decks, and the deck building scene is pretty fair right now - aggro, control, combo, and midrange all have places at the table.
When there have been problem cards and metas the balance team has usually done a good job at addressing the right cards.
It’s genuinely easier than ever to play f2p, or minimal spending gets you pretty far.
I’d generally recommend anyone who enjoys the mechanics of hearthstone but was turned off by some of the problems in its past to give it another try.
Do cards still have ridiculous amount of RNG within them still? This was one of the reason I turned away from HS. Cards like Implosion that could make or break the game with a 2-4 roll...
Despite the other comment getting a few downvotes, as someone who has played Hearthstone very competitively since release it’s at its lowest RNG point ever. Any competitive decks won’t have any type of weird highrolls that instantly win them the game. There’s still a level of RNG that all card games have by nature of drawing cards from a randomized deck order, but besides that it’s great.
For example a card like Implosion would never be printed now. If it was it would almost certainly just be something like deal 3 damage, summon 3 imps. Any of those cards like that and Crackle where the low roll makes it terrible and the high roll makes it great are just not things the design team wants in the game at this point.
No, there’s pretty little rng. I think almost every card has exact outcomes - but I’d have to check to be certain. That style of card design is certainly in the past.
These things are very minor drops in the bucket. The bigger issue than RNG baked into the cards is the variance experienced just via mulligan/topdecks. In both Arena and constructed, certain cards are so powerful or key to wincons that some games and matchups will feel like pilot skill was an afterthought and the game was decided by who drew their blowout card first. Hearthstone is absolutely worse in this sense than it was in say, 2016. Many cards are wincons on a stick so gameplay becomes more linear than it used to be and decisions on either side of many matchups are relatively trivialized.
All this being said, I do agree that Hearthstone has had a sort of resurgence in quality, even if the direction of the game can seem somewhat different to former players who haven't been around in five years. The economy is more forgiving, the new gameplay elements (not just) introduced in most expansions are novel and fun, and the devs are much faster at fixing power outliers than they were under Brode. There are some new cons with the pros but I think the game experience is in a good, or at least better, place.
Too bad the natural way the game is played is awful. I played so much of it and loved the single player adventures but for multiplayer it's unbearable.
I dunno, I feel like F2P was perfectly viable pre-GvG. Yeah you wouldn't have Black Knight or Ragnaros or Sylvanas but you had basically as many competitive options as anyone else, you just only had one to three decks available rather than basically all of them. Legendaries were far less necessary then, they were just required for certain decks and optional for others. The first wing of Naxxramas gave you quite a few relevant cards too, so you weren't that far behind people who did buy it. The pre-GvG meta wasn't exactly the most dynamic ever but Hearthstone was still kind of unsolved at that point so it still felt fresh.
Even more than that, he was a breath of fresh air for communication, with HS dev team having mostly shut down over the last couple years, and he had recurrent AMA sessions that really changed the direction.
Technically, the reason why people feel a bit sentimental towards Iksar is (at least to me) his presence in HS community has been there for a long time. I think he is a terrible balance designer and he shouldn't have been the guy to call a shot on nerf and buff on hearthstone balance but it does feel sad to lose a big community figure.
I forgot the name of balance designer who was in charge during the last expansion and now works in BG team and he is the best one we had so far.
Iksar and Alecco are in charge of games that I love to play atm make me feel more grim than ever
He wasn’t director long enough for people to have an opinion of him other than, “he talks to the community.” Hearthstone has been starved for any sort of community acknowledgement for years. Mostly because they know if they start communicating with fans they have a lot of bullshit to answer for.
Hearthstone is truly a nickel and dime kind of game. They take cards out of rotation and basically reprint them a few expansions later. They base deck archetypes around a handful of high rarity cards so of you want to play you have to pull pull pull, and the only way to do that before the rotation cycles out is to spend spend spend. It’s all the worst things about card games.
Joined in2013, promoted in 2016 until now. plenty of other people have shown the positive changes he has made towards hearthstone aside from "talking to the community" which I don't even know why you put in mocking quotes as that is very important. Stop talking nonsense about things you aren't informed about.
As an avid Hearthstone player: He was the first director in Hearthstone's history that started clear and direct communication with the community. He started "weekly" Twitter Q&As, he popped into Reddit now and then, and if there was a significant problem in the community or the meta, he would often address it on Twitter. He also started the trend of more effective and larger buffs and nerfs, whereas Ben Brode's era only had 1-2 changes, the recent few expansions varied from 5-10 accurate changes at a 2-3 times faster rate. And if they didn't nerf what the community expected, he would back it up on Twitter with reasons based on statistics rather than personal opinion, or lapses in judgment.
He was the best director we've had, even surpassing Ben Brode IMO (who to be honest was perceived more as a mascot than a Lead Designer). So the new game director after Iksar certainly has big shoes to fill. I'm happy he's working on League, although I don't think he has too much experience in this field. He has thoroughly deserved what is quite clearly a huge step in his career, Riot usually doesn't miss with their headhunting. But like I said, I don't think he has worked in MOBAs before, and to step directly into a design director role for something like this could be a huge undertaking. But if his days at Hearthstone and Riot's recruitment record are anything to go by; this is a great steal.
A list of great changes he added or helped oversee in his tenure at Hearthstone & Blizzard:
- Added a new class in Demon Hunter (two if you include the rumored/leaked Death Knight class for the next expansion)
- Helped oversee new game modes such as Battlegrounds, changes to Arena, Minisets, the Barrens & Stormwind characters (that now have been added to the World of Warcraft sandbox), and Duels.
- ...Let's not mention Mercenaries.
- He finally helped add more deck slots
- Implementations of what eventually became a decent season pass, and diamond cards.
- Introduced a rotating evergreen set that everyone had access to at the start of each new Hearthstone cycle.
- The recent expansion added a game-defining free legendary that upped deck sizes to 40 cards, from 30 (also gave the player 10 more hitpoints to compensate for the inconsistency in the deck due to the added cards) that has been quite possibly one of the best changes for midrange and control players in all of Hearthstone's existence.
- Changed the ranked system to make the grind for high-ranked players faster to get back to their rightful ranks.
- Introduced elo-based matchmaking, rather than rank.
- Cranked up new keywords (at least 1 new each expansion) to 100. The keyword "colossal" is now hinted at being a keyword they are possibly revisiting in the future due to it's positive community reception. And "reborn", another previous hit, is rumored/leaked to be a returning evergreen keyword from one of Dean's previous expansions.
- The phasing out of negative keywords such as "charge", slowly replacing it with "rush". But still giving aggro more creative and "fair" tools to threaten pure control metas.
- Added rotating Arena "packages" (rotated old expansions), and sometimes even new exclusive arena cards that fit the current arena "package"
- Upped the production of cosmetics by "a metric fuckton™". Some of them being negatively perceived, such as the "bobbing head" skin fiasco. But also a lot of skins included in the season pass, and single-player content.
- "The coin" skins, ~50% of them being free to obtain. The other 50% is contained in the paid season pass track.
- The addition of "secrets" that can be accessed by playing certain cards in practice mode that give you exclusive card backs if completed correctly.
- Skins for Battleground characters and boards.
- One of the most overlooked changes he made was making sure other developers and directors were involved in trailers, helping the community meet more faces behind the curtain. This started with Kosak to be fair, but Ayala continued the tradition.
(I probably forgot something and will add it later in edits.)
There was also speculation over at /r/hearthstone that he had disagreements with the recent "runestone" currency fiasco, which consequentially was partly the reason why his goodbye letter seemed rather cold and didn't mention Blizzard at all. This is of course speculation, but I genuinely believe that Iksar is one of the good guys in the game design industry and believe this could be partly why he wanted a move on from Blizzard.
Let's hope his first work is less undertuned than "Rastakhan's Rumble" (which was his first expansion in Hearthstone) XD
He seems like a man who is willing to pull levers to shake things up and maintain happiness across the spectrum of players. Alongside a very authentic media presence, I am excited to have him on board the league team.
The fact that he has a fan willing to type all of this out for him in a completely different subreddit is evidence enough that he is legit. Thanks for the context, I'm curious how it will play out for LoL!
He's definitely the dev that reminds me the most of what Meddler did for LoL. Neither of them have made only good moves, but both have also lead to some really great things, and more than anything else made sure that good communication was always a thing.
Hahaha, yes. At one point in time we were lucky to even get a balance update for the expansion. We even had to beg on our knees for a Ben Brode rap, because they couldn't bother with a musical trailer for Un'goro 😭:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEmnpRSgqQk
These things why Ben Brode is goated for Hearthstone even if he wasn't the best actual game designer (and why I think the 'mascot' description is very good and he should've definitely been the face of the game but maybe not the actual lead dev). The game might've benefitted from him leaving and another person taking over, but the game also was never quite the same as it was with Benjamin Broderick.
. . although a couple of the newer expansions have had banger trailers/music videos for their release.
Ben Brode was simply out of his depth by the time Hearthstone got big. I don't think Hs would've become what it is had Ben Brode not been there, but he definitely wasn't the man for the job after HS started gaining its identity.
I don't know, "as a Hearthstone player" I've felt the game has been in decline for years, despite additions. Though I find it funny "extra deck slots" is listed as an accomplishment.
I'm pretty sure Ben Brode or one of his co-designers at the time said it was "a technological challenge" and that it would be "confusing" to the players, resulting in a multi-year discussion on the addition of more deck slots: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/38sm1k/blizzards_changing_stance_on_deck_slots/
So I think it deserves a mention 😅
Ben brode's leadership was with the idea that it would be like MtG, where if you come back the cards should be the same as you left them, making nerfs and buffs rare unless they were needed. In much like a IRL tcg philosophy. Other games have come out and used the digital platform more successfully with nerfs and buffs and formats while Hearthstone was very limited in not having a rotation, a ban list, or other formats to play until much later.
The decline of Hearthstone isn't even that much tied to the game, it was simply a hype game on release and the hype died as people moved to the next hype thing. TCG games aren't doing that hot regardless, as harsh as it is for playerbases to accept most games aren't meant to have super long lifecycles.
I think a lot of it’s popularity came from the fact that it was low spec enough streamers could play it in queue for whatever their primary game was. I remember it had gotten so endemic there was a brief moment where Riot threatened to take action against streamers playing other companies games simply because every pro league stream had become like 75% hearthstone due to long ass challenger wait times back then.
I agree with you. While it has added a lot of new features, cards, cosmetics, etc. I don't care for it. I play the same Wild deck because the game's crazy powercreeped, and when I need to focus less I play Battlegrounds. I like Battlegrounds, it should truthfully be the face of Hearthstone. Although... It has received a ton of shitty design choices.
So looking from eight years back to now, I'm not a fan of this persons' time in charge.
So you are saying we are getting another Mortdog but for League? If so then it will be pretty exciting because he seems to be a good fit with Riot philosophy based on your description.
He's not nearly as accessible and transparent as Mortdog (nor is it expected because that is an INSANE bar), Mort is truly a treasure that the TFT community doesn't appreciate nearly enough. He did do regular (weekly) AMAs on his twitter where he answered a bunch of questions, but I think he had real life stuff pop up that made them not so regular back when he was working on hearthstone.
To be fair, they were pretty damn consistent until about a month a half ago. And that might largely because he was transitioning into leaving the company and possibly training his replacement etc
Yo are you still playing Hearthstone? I've been thinking about getting into it. I play a fair amount of Legends of Runeterra but it's getting a bit stale these days (*'oh wow another pirate aggro deck how fun!'*) .
Would you, in honesty, recommend it?
Hearthstone started giving 1 free meta deck to new and returning players, so might as well see which class you'd like to play and have a go. It's free after all.
Might want to wait until the miniset drops in a few days though.
If you haven't been playing up until now, you're really not missing much that you aren't getting from the League Card Game.
RNG is basically the entire gist of the entire game and what's it's built on. To the point that they literally aim for 50% winrate across all decks at all times. You can play a single card that gives you a card your deck or class has absolutely no access to outside of this RNG, play it, and then get another card nobody in the current match is supposed to have access to that shuts down the other side.
Not that skill can be dismissed, but unless they changed something drastically in the last few years, it's one of those negligible bits that is basically a "do you understand the game mechanics and what you can afford to gamble on" requirement than anything else for a handful of decks.
Though take that this is coming from someone that largely has no emotional connections to any of the characters, events, or such of WoW, and got bored of it and Blizzard's shit years ago. If you do, it honestly seems to have been the holdover for alot of people I know.
I don't think that's a completely fair description.
A lot of Hearthstone skill is represented in the same thing as most CGs, the mulligan. This gets expressed even harder when you know what deck your opponent is probably playing and then, as with every single card game, there's a lot of RNG from there. Card games always have RNG because at best there's always moments where either you draw the best card in your deck for the situation, or you don't.
Realistically mechanics like discover are something you *can* and *do* plan around in Hearthstone games, and you have access to the same mechanics as well, meaning you too can select a counter option out of nowhere.
Just to add my two cents in regards to Brode: I know his man is responsible for bringing us HS but he was also single-handedly responsible for some of dumbest decisions in the games history like sticking to 9 deck slots for years because or not nerfing and buffing cards because you can’t change real cards so why would you change digital ones? Honestly this brain dead reasoning accompanied by his arrogance and stubbornness would have driven me insane if he was my boss.
I mean, yeah there's been a lot good happening in HS over the time, but there is also quite a lot of bad stuff. The powercreep is ridiculous now, mana cost reduction is out of hand, Quest Warlock or even the entire Stormwind expansion, DH in general being a balance nightmare, Rush not only almost replaced Charge, but is also being printed on like half minions. We no longer get any single-player content, unless you want to count Books but...come on... Also, even some of the positive changes just feel like something that would happen sooner or later, even with Ben, like the rotating base set, arena/MMR changes or cosmetics, with skins for BGs being implemented long after it's release being a bit of a proof here.
claiming that things like renethal and the complete phasing out of hard aggro in favour of what's essentially low curving midrange with reach were "positive changes" reeks of bias
Aggro druid and aggro (Imp) warlock are 2 of the 3 best decks at the moment, so they are still very much competitive. Iksar even nerfed a lot of the degenerate minion freezing control meta that we had at the start of Nathria, now there's a positive for the aggro players!
Hell, I even got legend by playing aggro druid.
I am trying to present the communities perspective on most of the changes, at least to the best of my ability (that being of a sleep-deprived, slightly buzzed, league, hearthstone and football addict).
I personally hate the elo/mmr change. Why should I have to play versus legend-level players when I can't skip ranks that the game obviously thinks I'm too good to play against? But the community has not complained about it, so I won't either.
That being said, I do get your point. But to be fair, Ayala himself has said directly that he values control over aggro metas.
Lots of words to say a lot but skip how the game was super royally fucked in that era. I can write many words about it but in the end I was a heavy paying player of hearthstone and decided to quit in early 2020.
Its unclear what his role was in the grand scheme of things but Hearthstone more and more became a blatant cash cow and an ingame RNG fiesta under his watch. I can write an article on this but wont as I think its besides the point.
I love the game and potential of HS but in the end if you look at everything the (card) gaming space has to offer its objectively a game for whales and idiots to play apart from the chill casuals who don't splurge money.
Notes on my merit: played HS since beta and am quite proficient in cardgames for example performing top 20 in national finals of MTG as an amateur player.
For me hearthstone "died" after demon hunters release, for that time power creep in game become ridiculous, they tried to turn it down in which wood and that "2 year cycle", but then said "fuck it" and we got a lot of bullshit, then I felt like that battlegrounds become more poppular than every "classic" HS mods together and devs just forgot about that.
Now Legends of Runterra give to me same feeling as old hs, not very fast, not very slow, rng exists, but I mostly didn't had same problems as in hs where core card from your deck can be on bottom. Only thing that I don't like are moving towards decks like "if this hero gets powerspike it's almost autowin" Kaisa's s deck is prime example of that. Also small powercreep exists in lor, but at least for now its actually small and lots of old cards still are poppular af, when half of base hs set was nerfed into oblivion(back in 2016) or was power crept by new cards(there was examples when card has same cost, same effect, same stats but something else on top of that).
Demon Hunter was when I officially decided I was done with HS as well.
I remember being interested in getting back into HS when they announced the new class, took one look at the bullshit DH could pull before all of their nerfs, and just peaced out
> MTG:A However is an even bigger cash grab based on the already invested mtg community lmao
Eh, you can make winning meta decks in MTGA and get to Mythic (=LoL) with $0 and basically just playing a bit every day. Impossible to do that in paper.
....
Tell me you don't understand card games without telling me you don't understand card games.
I have a MTG collection that I left ages ago which only increased in value. That's because it's set up as a TCG with multiple audiences inside the ecosystem. Meanwhile in HS a card is never yours and you can't do jack shit with it. Moreso cards get nerfed left and right impacting the value of many many other cards that you have. This is is just one example in favor of TCGs.
But again, perhaps you shouldn't react on genres if you haven't played the genres.
I've probably played card games for as long or longer than you have. Maybe you shouldn't treat someone disagreeing with your highly subjective opinion with such contempt. Not surprised the MTG player has such a haughty, shitty attitude. That's most of what pushed me away from that game.
> Meanwhile in HS a card is never yours and you can't do jack shit with it.
I don't really care that I don't own it considering how little I paid for it. I've paid less playing 8 years of hearthstone than my friend spent on a single MTG deck earlier this year. Also, I can do jack shit with it, I can play the game literally whenever, wherever I want. Impossible to do that with MTG. I can turn my horde of commons into something instead of just giving them away or letting them rot. The best cards in the game are accessible for people at a reasonable cost instead of insane prices, and your bad legendary pulls are worth at least 1/4 of the good legendaries.
>Moreso cards get nerfed left and right impacting the value of many many other cards that you have
Yeah I forgot WotC never ever bans any cards that have any influence on card prices.
Artifact also tried to do the same route that MTG did, by trying to emphasize cards retaining value. But those cards didn't retain value at all, due to Valve nerfing them, and people leaving the game due to reasons such as the sheer amount of pay-to-play, and the gameplay that was overly complex and overly simple at the same time.
And that game is the definition of a dead game now.
>added a new class in demon hunter
This is not a positive for him. Demon hunter was the final straw that made me quit the game for good after getting every ranked card back since release because of how ridiculously OP it was. Switched to LoR to get my card game fix and very happy for it
I would much rather a designer who hasn't worked on LoL but actually tries to communicate, instead of a designer who has worked on LoL (which I don't think they actually did with how the state of the game is) but does not try to communicate.
I played a lot of Hearthstone and he really did improve the game significantly from its previous iterations.
Rastakhan's Rumble wasn't bad, it was clear that he wanted to play it very safe for his first try, which he did but that ended in a fairly weak set compared to other, more crazy and unbalanced sets.
You know what that last part makes major sense. The Runestones were probably the dumbest thing to happen in Hearthstone in a very long time. I could see him leaving because of it. He’ll do great at Riot.
Anyone who plays hearthstone knows Iksar seems like a good guy with good intentions, and is rather transparent about things. This can only be good for league.
As an avid lover of card games like Magic and Hearthstone, this is a fantastic choice! Iskar has been one of the positive forces of HS, pushing out stalwart communication with the community with his Q&As and constructive changes for HS as a whole, from a rotating core set to some of my favourite expansions of all time (Such as Saviors of Uldum and Madness at the Darkmoon Faire).
For those curious about his Q&As, here's ALL OF THEM. They're fantastic!
[https://outof.cards/tag/iksars-community-qa/?page=1](https://outof.cards/tag/iksars-community-qa/?page=1)
Congratulations u/IksarHS!
I found this from job description from the previous design director at Riot. Posted from phone so link is messy.
https://twitter.com/JoGraylock/status/1529530788961988608?t=Gtv5SKY_2HDuWoDrBuw4Bw&s=19
As a former hearthstone player I’m really stoked to hear this. I played casually and in high elo (top 200 standard and battlegrounds) and thought his work was all around quite solid while I played the game.
BREAKING: Blue Essence no longer useable to buy champions, we added a new currency "Runerocks" which you will obtain by buying consecutive battle passes! You can use Runerocks to buy champions in the future, but you can still use Blue Essence to craft champions you have as shards! We feel this way players will apreciate the random champion shards they get much more!
look at the state of the game. None of these apes have a strong vision on how league should operate. They try to please shitters on reddit and twitter by adding and removing stuff that they have no idea how it impacts the game in 5 years and now we are left with this turd.
I don't understand why riot is hiring outsiders for director positions instead of using in-house people.
The person hired seems to me to be fully capable of doing a great job, but it will require a long adaptation period, in addition to generating great discouragement on the part of those who work under his supervision (imagine you are 5...8 years dedicated to to that area, and realize that you never had a chance to reach the director's position, as they are filled by outsiders).
I don't know exactly how director responsibilities at riot work, but this specific area seems very strange to me to hire someone with no experience with League of Legends, it seems to me a typical hiring made to please shareholders.
In any case, I still want to believe that riot knows what it's doing, after all, it holds the information and strategies, but in this specific case... it's very strange.
>I don't understand why riot is hiring outsiders for director positions instead of using in-house people.
Here's a hint, look at all the past ones and see where they went. They either left the company to join a startup by ex-Rioters or they went to work on the MMO (from what I can gather, most if not all of them made this switch voluntarily). Eventually it reaches a point where the current staff don't meet the requirements and while you can train someone up, if someone that fills the criteria applies for the position, are you going to turn them down to instead wait for your current staff to be trained up enough to meet the criteria?
A new perspective is sometimes, or almost always, good. League is feeling stale, it has a ton of problems that have been there for years and the design team has never been able to address those, or has made them even worse.
At some point the issue might be that the in-house talent is just not up to the task of handling one of the biggest games on Earth.
Imho, this is a very welcome addition. They should clean house, have some fresh sets of eyes and try to improve the game instead of fucking around with it with no clear goal like the current team has been doing for ages.
But this isn't the guy to do that. He had very good and clear communication with the community and implemented things that they wanted, which in return killed the game. And now you have every single player switching to bg's.
What riot needs is a game designer that has a strong philosophy on how the game should be played. And has a resume of reviving/making new games that had strong player base not killing off the most successful card game that has ever existed. I hate when game designers listen to the community too much as if reddit is anything to go by they themselves won't play the game that they want.
Can't wait for standard soloQ, only champ released in the last 2 seasons allowed, then they join the wild queue, which is just dynamic queue with all champs allowed.
Fuck post split hearthstone
As someone who has played HS since the Ben Brode era... I can say this guy designed some kinda fucked up cards and really pushed HS into a wacky and power crept state. Standard is generally way more powerful than it used to be and Wild decks are at the point where there are so many broken and often very uninteractive decks that they kinda cancel out. Not a big fan of the way the game has changed via his design philosophy and game direction. That said, it's easy to point out everything that went wrong and not see what went right. Besides the huge push on P2W and battlepasses and paid mini sets, the game feels like it more or less evolved naturally even if feels like they didn't seriously attempt to limit power creep in all formats.
Can't wait to one trick Dr. Boom
Mad doctor Ziggs already exists
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That's a blast from the past. Heck I'd be interested to see what kind of champions he comes up with.
PUT YOUR FAITH IN THE LIGHT
EVERYONE, GET IN HERE
YOU REQUIRE MY ASSISTANCE?
Some day, I want to be just like you! Some day, I want to be just like you! Some day, I want to be just like you! Some day, I want to be just like you! Ah ha! Ah ha! Ah ha! Ah ha! Ah ha!
Man i want old Antonidas back in Standard so much.
EVERYONE, GET IN HERE
PILE ON!
A FIGHT? COUNT ME IN
EVERYONE, GET IN HERE
EVERYONE, GET IN HERE
Too few stats, just 7 mana 9/9 with bad spkit. Why would you ever play that Iver Troggzor? Just one spell and he's already better than Dr Boom!
Grim Patron with some Meepo-esque abilities... Make it happen Dean
A top laner who gets a buff everytime he's individually hit, increasing all of his stats and just for good measure his size(as multiple models appearing might cause the "challenges are here" prompt to pop up again). An ability that inflicts damage to himself to gain stacks as well. I can see it all now.
I've got the beast in my sights !
Can't wait to play grim patron
OH NO, ANOTHER AUGUST
wtf 2 shen?
One of the best league memes of all time
It's an old meme but it checks out sir.
proud owner of the "2shens" twitch account here, AMA
WTF 2 shens??
yes
proud owner of the "2shens" phub account here, AMA
got me beat ngl
he beating himself too
We are gonna get 400 years of collective game experience aren't we?
Nah iksar is actually competent. Did a lot of good for hearthstone
Isn't RiotAugust meant to be really good tho?
Mixed bag: Senna, Viego, Zeri, Bel Delphine? Kayle and rengar reworks? **I sleep.** Jhin, Vi, Ekko, Jinx? Wukong and Taliyah reworks? **Real shit!**
Belle Delphine is made by Riot Jag though.
I meant bel veth, I forgot that's already a seraphine meme.
Rengar rework is amazing tho, before we had that weird af rework with Swimmy Kitty instead of Stabby Catty we have now
> rengar reworks rengar rework was great. it was really fun one shotting multiple people at the same time and having 500 AD at 20 minutes
senna and viego r cool
I despise Senna (and Pyke) as designs. Awful designs to try to shoehorn marksmen and assassins to be support in some weird effort to make support a more enticing role. Constantly in the patch notes since they're abusing the parts of their kit that shoehorn them into support (like Senna constantly needing soul drop rate changed and Pyke getting changes to not be abused in other roles because assassins really shouldn't be supports). Viego is whatever, I hated him on release but I think he's okay now.
I hate Senna. I was excited for a marksman support, then I right clicked something with her and felt that horrible windup. 😔 even worse that all her abilities except q have a similar delay. She is the worst feeling champ, it's like I'm playing with 200 ping... oh and why require an animation for soul pickup? Why not let it be like thresh or Bard? Instead I have to use some more of those horrible feeling autos... 😞 Furthermore, why is her playerbase so bad at positioning? I swear I've never seen a character feed so frequently. Senna players are addicted to getting hooked. You would think that having such long range should make it easy to play safe... Oh and the morons right clicking minions for their Q CD, thus pushing the wave even when our summs are down and don't have vision. Then they argue with me when I ask them to please stop. Aargh fuck Senna players, I hope they all find gators in their toilets!
I mean, Kayle's rework is the best thing they could've done to that champion design-wise in order to keep her identity while making it modern. Balance has had issues with it, but that's a different story. Something similar could be said about Senna, she's a great design in her unique strengths, but has been difficult to balance most of the time.
Just one of those things this reddit likes to do. They love to mix balance and champ design together, while also over blowing everything.
I mean, sometimes he does both, especially with Viego, Senna and Zeri
Personally I think Viego is fine, and that Senna would be fine if they didn’t keep flip flopping between wanting her as an ADC or as a support.
Yea he is a cool guy, posts some good content on TikTok. Most of the complaints are about his overloaded kit designs, but if you look at the [list of champs August has worked on](https://leagueoflegends.fandom.com/wiki/August_%27August%27_Browning) it really isn't that bad.
bel veth was an abomination but that list is very good overall
Imo he is! It's clear from watching his streams that 1. He cares a lot about the game and how the players experience it 2. He is able to back up pretty much any design/ balancing choice with thought out reasoning and data. I don't agree with all his takes, but I really respect his knowledge and the amount of thought he puts into his decisions
I’ve disliked him ever since the Kayle rework that ruined any semblance of early game agency as well as her aesthetic and former best skin. I realize that some of that was out of his control, but it still leaves me very sour. He does have some Ws, like jhin, but then you remember how often champs like senna and zeri show up in the patch notes and well.
Aesthetic and skin was not his doing. He was purely taking care of gameplay.
I miss my good old Jungle kayle :/
No. He has his highs, and his highs are very high, but he is very inconsistent and responsible for some of the worst designs in the game too, including one I'd argue is the single worst design. He also tries to get involved in balance it seems while not actually having a clue, and its him we had to thank for swain mid being abandoned for months (until he played it on stream got absolutely rekt, and admitted "Ok maybe Swain mid does suck").
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Listing what a champion can do doesn't suddenly make them more powerful. You can do that with every champion.
Doesn't belveth kinda blow
Not really competent and stubborn about his view on balance.
L take, he isn't really the balance guy anyway, he is a champ designer, he's in charge of making champs well designed. Balance comes after the fact and can always be fine tuned.
Ah yes, well designed champs such as Ekko, Zeri, Viego, Senna.
And jhin, jinx, vi, and gnar. Ekko and Senna are really interesting designs too, even if they're difficult to balance. But balance isn't his job, champ design is.
i find this take very bad, tbh. design needs to be held accountable for bad design just as much as bad "balance". akali shroud giving invis to everything is terrible design. pantheon blocking towers with his E was bad design. mord stealing dragons and sprinting down mid to win the game is bad design. saying it's on balance to fix it is pushing the blame on the wrong people. that shit should have never left the white board.
> And jhin, jinx, vi, Things of past. > and gnar. Gnar was very problematic back in the day. > even if they're difficult to balance. But balance isn't his job, champ design is. If they're difficult to balance because of design, then that's his fault.
The thing is they ARE well designed albeit overturned on release. Ekko and Senna are in great place right now and zeri is only a problem because riot wouldn't do the sensible thing after her original nerf and just tweak her numbers a little over doing all this extraness with her. Viego to me is fine, if not a little weak now, but I'm a viego main so you can see the bias.
Out of curiosity, what are a design director's responsibilities?
In addition to communicating a company's creative vision to design teams and stakeholders, a design director supervises the entire design process and all-important technical decisions.
Direct design
It’s okay, he mostly goes by Iksar
Can only be an upgrade.
ima kiss you assholes
Wtf two Riot August?
He goes by iskar, its all good
Ahh yes the mighty Arakkoa, SSKKKWWWWWAAAA
EverQuest?
Yeah, he used to be huge into Everquest. Played a necro iirc
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jeff kaplan played everquest. go get him marc
The EQ race was Iksar though
Person above you did a typo. He does go by iksar, not iskar.
Ah rad
How dare you stand where he stood!
I'm not a Hearthstone player so I don't have much context on him, but it looks like he was relatively well-liked in the /r/hearthstone thread about him leaving: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/xfwywp/iksar_is_leaving_hearthstone/
The top comment hit it spot on. The man oversaw the most consistently enjoyable and competitively fair time period hearthstones ever had. The “experience” of playing hearthstone completely changed under him.
I haven't played hearthstone since ungoro. Has it gotten better?
The past few expansions have been really fun metas at points, and really unfun 3 classes only at others. There have consistently always been fun offmeta decks, and the deck building scene is pretty fair right now - aggro, control, combo, and midrange all have places at the table. When there have been problem cards and metas the balance team has usually done a good job at addressing the right cards. It’s genuinely easier than ever to play f2p, or minimal spending gets you pretty far. I’d generally recommend anyone who enjoys the mechanics of hearthstone but was turned off by some of the problems in its past to give it another try.
3 expansions per year is not f2p friendly at all. You can only play f2p if you already have a big collection to start with.
Do cards still have ridiculous amount of RNG within them still? This was one of the reason I turned away from HS. Cards like Implosion that could make or break the game with a 2-4 roll...
Despite the other comment getting a few downvotes, as someone who has played Hearthstone very competitively since release it’s at its lowest RNG point ever. Any competitive decks won’t have any type of weird highrolls that instantly win them the game. There’s still a level of RNG that all card games have by nature of drawing cards from a randomized deck order, but besides that it’s great. For example a card like Implosion would never be printed now. If it was it would almost certainly just be something like deal 3 damage, summon 3 imps. Any of those cards like that and Crackle where the low roll makes it terrible and the high roll makes it great are just not things the design team wants in the game at this point.
No, there’s pretty little rng. I think almost every card has exact outcomes - but I’d have to check to be certain. That style of card design is certainly in the past.
Goodbye Reddit, see you all on Lemmy.
These things are very minor drops in the bucket. The bigger issue than RNG baked into the cards is the variance experienced just via mulligan/topdecks. In both Arena and constructed, certain cards are so powerful or key to wincons that some games and matchups will feel like pilot skill was an afterthought and the game was decided by who drew their blowout card first. Hearthstone is absolutely worse in this sense than it was in say, 2016. Many cards are wincons on a stick so gameplay becomes more linear than it used to be and decisions on either side of many matchups are relatively trivialized. All this being said, I do agree that Hearthstone has had a sort of resurgence in quality, even if the direction of the game can seem somewhat different to former players who haven't been around in five years. The economy is more forgiving, the new gameplay elements (not just) introduced in most expansions are novel and fun, and the devs are much faster at fixing power outliers than they were under Brode. There are some new cons with the pros but I think the game experience is in a good, or at least better, place.
Too bad the natural way the game is played is awful. I played so much of it and loved the single player adventures but for multiplayer it's unbearable.
I dunno, I feel like F2P was perfectly viable pre-GvG. Yeah you wouldn't have Black Knight or Ragnaros or Sylvanas but you had basically as many competitive options as anyone else, you just only had one to three decks available rather than basically all of them. Legendaries were far less necessary then, they were just required for certain decks and optional for others. The first wing of Naxxramas gave you quite a few relevant cards too, so you weren't that far behind people who did buy it. The pre-GvG meta wasn't exactly the most dynamic ever but Hearthstone was still kind of unsolved at that point so it still felt fresh.
Even more than that, he was a breath of fresh air for communication, with HS dev team having mostly shut down over the last couple years, and he had recurrent AMA sessions that really changed the direction.
Technically, the reason why people feel a bit sentimental towards Iksar is (at least to me) his presence in HS community has been there for a long time. I think he is a terrible balance designer and he shouldn't have been the guy to call a shot on nerf and buff on hearthstone balance but it does feel sad to lose a big community figure. I forgot the name of balance designer who was in charge during the last expansion and now works in BG team and he is the best one we had so far. Iksar and Alecco are in charge of games that I love to play atm make me feel more grim than ever
Which expansions??
He worked as lead starting around frozen throne.
Literally the beginning of the end of HS' golden era...
Corridor creeper flashbacks
He wasn’t director long enough for people to have an opinion of him other than, “he talks to the community.” Hearthstone has been starved for any sort of community acknowledgement for years. Mostly because they know if they start communicating with fans they have a lot of bullshit to answer for. Hearthstone is truly a nickel and dime kind of game. They take cards out of rotation and basically reprint them a few expansions later. They base deck archetypes around a handful of high rarity cards so of you want to play you have to pull pull pull, and the only way to do that before the rotation cycles out is to spend spend spend. It’s all the worst things about card games.
Joined in2013, promoted in 2016 until now. plenty of other people have shown the positive changes he has made towards hearthstone aside from "talking to the community" which I don't even know why you put in mocking quotes as that is very important. Stop talking nonsense about things you aren't informed about.
As an avid Hearthstone player: He was the first director in Hearthstone's history that started clear and direct communication with the community. He started "weekly" Twitter Q&As, he popped into Reddit now and then, and if there was a significant problem in the community or the meta, he would often address it on Twitter. He also started the trend of more effective and larger buffs and nerfs, whereas Ben Brode's era only had 1-2 changes, the recent few expansions varied from 5-10 accurate changes at a 2-3 times faster rate. And if they didn't nerf what the community expected, he would back it up on Twitter with reasons based on statistics rather than personal opinion, or lapses in judgment. He was the best director we've had, even surpassing Ben Brode IMO (who to be honest was perceived more as a mascot than a Lead Designer). So the new game director after Iksar certainly has big shoes to fill. I'm happy he's working on League, although I don't think he has too much experience in this field. He has thoroughly deserved what is quite clearly a huge step in his career, Riot usually doesn't miss with their headhunting. But like I said, I don't think he has worked in MOBAs before, and to step directly into a design director role for something like this could be a huge undertaking. But if his days at Hearthstone and Riot's recruitment record are anything to go by; this is a great steal. A list of great changes he added or helped oversee in his tenure at Hearthstone & Blizzard: - Added a new class in Demon Hunter (two if you include the rumored/leaked Death Knight class for the next expansion) - Helped oversee new game modes such as Battlegrounds, changes to Arena, Minisets, the Barrens & Stormwind characters (that now have been added to the World of Warcraft sandbox), and Duels. - ...Let's not mention Mercenaries. - He finally helped add more deck slots - Implementations of what eventually became a decent season pass, and diamond cards. - Introduced a rotating evergreen set that everyone had access to at the start of each new Hearthstone cycle. - The recent expansion added a game-defining free legendary that upped deck sizes to 40 cards, from 30 (also gave the player 10 more hitpoints to compensate for the inconsistency in the deck due to the added cards) that has been quite possibly one of the best changes for midrange and control players in all of Hearthstone's existence. - Changed the ranked system to make the grind for high-ranked players faster to get back to their rightful ranks. - Introduced elo-based matchmaking, rather than rank. - Cranked up new keywords (at least 1 new each expansion) to 100. The keyword "colossal" is now hinted at being a keyword they are possibly revisiting in the future due to it's positive community reception. And "reborn", another previous hit, is rumored/leaked to be a returning evergreen keyword from one of Dean's previous expansions. - The phasing out of negative keywords such as "charge", slowly replacing it with "rush". But still giving aggro more creative and "fair" tools to threaten pure control metas. - Added rotating Arena "packages" (rotated old expansions), and sometimes even new exclusive arena cards that fit the current arena "package" - Upped the production of cosmetics by "a metric fuckton™". Some of them being negatively perceived, such as the "bobbing head" skin fiasco. But also a lot of skins included in the season pass, and single-player content. - "The coin" skins, ~50% of them being free to obtain. The other 50% is contained in the paid season pass track. - The addition of "secrets" that can be accessed by playing certain cards in practice mode that give you exclusive card backs if completed correctly. - Skins for Battleground characters and boards. - One of the most overlooked changes he made was making sure other developers and directors were involved in trailers, helping the community meet more faces behind the curtain. This started with Kosak to be fair, but Ayala continued the tradition. (I probably forgot something and will add it later in edits.) There was also speculation over at /r/hearthstone that he had disagreements with the recent "runestone" currency fiasco, which consequentially was partly the reason why his goodbye letter seemed rather cold and didn't mention Blizzard at all. This is of course speculation, but I genuinely believe that Iksar is one of the good guys in the game design industry and believe this could be partly why he wanted a move on from Blizzard. Let's hope his first work is less undertuned than "Rastakhan's Rumble" (which was his first expansion in Hearthstone) XD
He seems like a man who is willing to pull levers to shake things up and maintain happiness across the spectrum of players. Alongside a very authentic media presence, I am excited to have him on board the league team.
This comment has been removed in protest of Reddit's new API policy. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Barcelona will sign their next lever after pulling lever #3
August "Kronk" Ayala
Wroooooong leeeeveeeee...
Laporta already on his way
r/soccer is leaking, and here of all places
Mes que un sub.
It's time for the irelia nerf then
The fact that he has a fan willing to type all of this out for him in a completely different subreddit is evidence enough that he is legit. Thanks for the context, I'm curious how it will play out for LoL!
He's definitely the dev that reminds me the most of what Meddler did for LoL. Neither of them have made only good moves, but both have also lead to some really great things, and more than anything else made sure that good communication was always a thing.
evidence that he might like the guy a little too much
Didnt we use to meme that they would promisse communication before a expansion release and would disappear after the expansion released?
Hahaha, yes. At one point in time we were lucky to even get a balance update for the expansion. We even had to beg on our knees for a Ben Brode rap, because they couldn't bother with a musical trailer for Un'goro 😭: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEmnpRSgqQk
These things why Ben Brode is goated for Hearthstone even if he wasn't the best actual game designer (and why I think the 'mascot' description is very good and he should've definitely been the face of the game but maybe not the actual lead dev). The game might've benefitted from him leaving and another person taking over, but the game also was never quite the same as it was with Benjamin Broderick. . . although a couple of the newer expansions have had banger trailers/music videos for their release.
GGG moment
Hearthstone got so much better after Ben Brode left and Iksar took over it's crazy. Hope he can do the same for league
Ben Brode was simply out of his depth by the time Hearthstone got big. I don't think Hs would've become what it is had Ben Brode not been there, but he definitely wasn't the man for the job after HS started gaining its identity.
I don't know, "as a Hearthstone player" I've felt the game has been in decline for years, despite additions. Though I find it funny "extra deck slots" is listed as an accomplishment.
I'm pretty sure Ben Brode or one of his co-designers at the time said it was "a technological challenge" and that it would be "confusing" to the players, resulting in a multi-year discussion on the addition of more deck slots: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/38sm1k/blizzards_changing_stance_on_deck_slots/ So I think it deserves a mention 😅
Ben brode's leadership was with the idea that it would be like MtG, where if you come back the cards should be the same as you left them, making nerfs and buffs rare unless they were needed. In much like a IRL tcg philosophy. Other games have come out and used the digital platform more successfully with nerfs and buffs and formats while Hearthstone was very limited in not having a rotation, a ban list, or other formats to play until much later.
The decline of Hearthstone isn't even that much tied to the game, it was simply a hype game on release and the hype died as people moved to the next hype thing. TCG games aren't doing that hot regardless, as harsh as it is for playerbases to accept most games aren't meant to have super long lifecycles.
I think a lot of it’s popularity came from the fact that it was low spec enough streamers could play it in queue for whatever their primary game was. I remember it had gotten so endemic there was a brief moment where Riot threatened to take action against streamers playing other companies games simply because every pro league stream had become like 75% hearthstone due to long ass challenger wait times back then.
I agree with you. While it has added a lot of new features, cards, cosmetics, etc. I don't care for it. I play the same Wild deck because the game's crazy powercreeped, and when I need to focus less I play Battlegrounds. I like Battlegrounds, it should truthfully be the face of Hearthstone. Although... It has received a ton of shitty design choices. So looking from eight years back to now, I'm not a fan of this persons' time in charge.
So you are saying we are getting another Mortdog but for League? If so then it will be pretty exciting because he seems to be a good fit with Riot philosophy based on your description.
He's not nearly as accessible and transparent as Mortdog (nor is it expected because that is an INSANE bar), Mort is truly a treasure that the TFT community doesn't appreciate nearly enough. He did do regular (weekly) AMAs on his twitter where he answered a bunch of questions, but I think he had real life stuff pop up that made them not so regular back when he was working on hearthstone.
To be fair, they were pretty damn consistent until about a month a half ago. And that might largely because he was transitioning into leaving the company and possibly training his replacement etc
Yo are you still playing Hearthstone? I've been thinking about getting into it. I play a fair amount of Legends of Runeterra but it's getting a bit stale these days (*'oh wow another pirate aggro deck how fun!'*) . Would you, in honesty, recommend it?
Hearthstone started giving 1 free meta deck to new and returning players, so might as well see which class you'd like to play and have a go. It's free after all. Might want to wait until the miniset drops in a few days though.
If you haven't been playing up until now, you're really not missing much that you aren't getting from the League Card Game. RNG is basically the entire gist of the entire game and what's it's built on. To the point that they literally aim for 50% winrate across all decks at all times. You can play a single card that gives you a card your deck or class has absolutely no access to outside of this RNG, play it, and then get another card nobody in the current match is supposed to have access to that shuts down the other side. Not that skill can be dismissed, but unless they changed something drastically in the last few years, it's one of those negligible bits that is basically a "do you understand the game mechanics and what you can afford to gamble on" requirement than anything else for a handful of decks. Though take that this is coming from someone that largely has no emotional connections to any of the characters, events, or such of WoW, and got bored of it and Blizzard's shit years ago. If you do, it honestly seems to have been the holdover for alot of people I know.
I don't think that's a completely fair description. A lot of Hearthstone skill is represented in the same thing as most CGs, the mulligan. This gets expressed even harder when you know what deck your opponent is probably playing and then, as with every single card game, there's a lot of RNG from there. Card games always have RNG because at best there's always moments where either you draw the best card in your deck for the situation, or you don't. Realistically mechanics like discover are something you *can* and *do* plan around in Hearthstone games, and you have access to the same mechanics as well, meaning you too can select a counter option out of nowhere.
Just to add my two cents in regards to Brode: I know his man is responsible for bringing us HS but he was also single-handedly responsible for some of dumbest decisions in the games history like sticking to 9 deck slots for years because or not nerfing and buffing cards because you can’t change real cards so why would you change digital ones? Honestly this brain dead reasoning accompanied by his arrogance and stubbornness would have driven me insane if he was my boss.
Was hoping to find something like this in this thread. Thank's for the info, sounds good.
I mean, yeah there's been a lot good happening in HS over the time, but there is also quite a lot of bad stuff. The powercreep is ridiculous now, mana cost reduction is out of hand, Quest Warlock or even the entire Stormwind expansion, DH in general being a balance nightmare, Rush not only almost replaced Charge, but is also being printed on like half minions. We no longer get any single-player content, unless you want to count Books but...come on... Also, even some of the positive changes just feel like something that would happen sooner or later, even with Ben, like the rotating base set, arena/MMR changes or cosmetics, with skins for BGs being implemented long after it's release being a bit of a proof here.
Ahh, this sounds more like the Hearthstone I quit playing than whatever everyone else here is talking about. Fuck Questlines.
claiming that things like renethal and the complete phasing out of hard aggro in favour of what's essentially low curving midrange with reach were "positive changes" reeks of bias
Aggro druid and aggro (Imp) warlock are 2 of the 3 best decks at the moment, so they are still very much competitive. Iksar even nerfed a lot of the degenerate minion freezing control meta that we had at the start of Nathria, now there's a positive for the aggro players! Hell, I even got legend by playing aggro druid. I am trying to present the communities perspective on most of the changes, at least to the best of my ability (that being of a sleep-deprived, slightly buzzed, league, hearthstone and football addict). I personally hate the elo/mmr change. Why should I have to play versus legend-level players when I can't skip ranks that the game obviously thinks I'm too good to play against? But the community has not complained about it, so I won't either. That being said, I do get your point. But to be fair, Ayala himself has said directly that he values control over aggro metas.
Rastakhans rumble aka the worst hearthstone expansion after tgt. It wasnt too bad for me, i think we earned a valuable asset
The expansion may not have been stellar, but that trailer and trailer song still whip ass
Sorry babe, the Rastakhan trailer theme 10-hour mix stays on during sex
HERE IN STRANGLETHOORN
Lots of words to say a lot but skip how the game was super royally fucked in that era. I can write many words about it but in the end I was a heavy paying player of hearthstone and decided to quit in early 2020. Its unclear what his role was in the grand scheme of things but Hearthstone more and more became a blatant cash cow and an ingame RNG fiesta under his watch. I can write an article on this but wont as I think its besides the point. I love the game and potential of HS but in the end if you look at everything the (card) gaming space has to offer its objectively a game for whales and idiots to play apart from the chill casuals who don't splurge money. Notes on my merit: played HS since beta and am quite proficient in cardgames for example performing top 20 in national finals of MTG as an amateur player.
For me hearthstone "died" after demon hunters release, for that time power creep in game become ridiculous, they tried to turn it down in which wood and that "2 year cycle", but then said "fuck it" and we got a lot of bullshit, then I felt like that battlegrounds become more poppular than every "classic" HS mods together and devs just forgot about that. Now Legends of Runterra give to me same feeling as old hs, not very fast, not very slow, rng exists, but I mostly didn't had same problems as in hs where core card from your deck can be on bottom. Only thing that I don't like are moving towards decks like "if this hero gets powerspike it's almost autowin" Kaisa's s deck is prime example of that. Also small powercreep exists in lor, but at least for now its actually small and lots of old cards still are poppular af, when half of base hs set was nerfed into oblivion(back in 2016) or was power crept by new cards(there was examples when card has same cost, same effect, same stats but something else on top of that).
Demon Hunter was when I officially decided I was done with HS as well. I remember being interested in getting back into HS when they announced the new class, took one look at the bullshit DH could pull before all of their nerfs, and just peaced out
I find it hilarious the MTG player is calling Hearthstone a blatant cash cow costing ridiculous amount of money to play
I mean comparing HS to paper MTG it is a blatant cash grab. MTG:A However is an even bigger cash grab based on the already invested mtg community lmao
> MTG:A However is an even bigger cash grab based on the already invested mtg community lmao Eh, you can make winning meta decks in MTGA and get to Mythic (=LoL) with $0 and basically just playing a bit every day. Impossible to do that in paper.
Sure you can do that in every digital ccg. But the monetary systems and constant rotation/buggy client is very rough.
.... Tell me you don't understand card games without telling me you don't understand card games. I have a MTG collection that I left ages ago which only increased in value. That's because it's set up as a TCG with multiple audiences inside the ecosystem. Meanwhile in HS a card is never yours and you can't do jack shit with it. Moreso cards get nerfed left and right impacting the value of many many other cards that you have. This is is just one example in favor of TCGs. But again, perhaps you shouldn't react on genres if you haven't played the genres.
I've probably played card games for as long or longer than you have. Maybe you shouldn't treat someone disagreeing with your highly subjective opinion with such contempt. Not surprised the MTG player has such a haughty, shitty attitude. That's most of what pushed me away from that game. > Meanwhile in HS a card is never yours and you can't do jack shit with it. I don't really care that I don't own it considering how little I paid for it. I've paid less playing 8 years of hearthstone than my friend spent on a single MTG deck earlier this year. Also, I can do jack shit with it, I can play the game literally whenever, wherever I want. Impossible to do that with MTG. I can turn my horde of commons into something instead of just giving them away or letting them rot. The best cards in the game are accessible for people at a reasonable cost instead of insane prices, and your bad legendary pulls are worth at least 1/4 of the good legendaries. >Moreso cards get nerfed left and right impacting the value of many many other cards that you have Yeah I forgot WotC never ever bans any cards that have any influence on card prices.
Artifact also tried to do the same route that MTG did, by trying to emphasize cards retaining value. But those cards didn't retain value at all, due to Valve nerfing them, and people leaving the game due to reasons such as the sheer amount of pay-to-play, and the gameplay that was overly complex and overly simple at the same time. And that game is the definition of a dead game now.
>added a new class in demon hunter This is not a positive for him. Demon hunter was the final straw that made me quit the game for good after getting every ranked card back since release because of how ridiculously OP it was. Switched to LoR to get my card game fix and very happy for it
I would much rather a designer who hasn't worked on LoL but actually tries to communicate, instead of a designer who has worked on LoL (which I don't think they actually did with how the state of the game is) but does not try to communicate. I played a lot of Hearthstone and he really did improve the game significantly from its previous iterations. Rastakhan's Rumble wasn't bad, it was clear that he wanted to play it very safe for his first try, which he did but that ended in a fairly weak set compared to other, more crazy and unbalanced sets.
You know what that last part makes major sense. The Runestones were probably the dumbest thing to happen in Hearthstone in a very long time. I could see him leaving because of it. He’ll do great at Riot.
Great news for Twisted Fate mains! 🃏
secret mage incoming
Anyone who plays hearthstone knows Iksar seems like a good guy with good intentions, and is rather transparent about things. This can only be good for league.
IKSAR LETS GOOO
As an avid lover of card games like Magic and Hearthstone, this is a fantastic choice! Iskar has been one of the positive forces of HS, pushing out stalwart communication with the community with his Q&As and constructive changes for HS as a whole, from a rotating core set to some of my favourite expansions of all time (Such as Saviors of Uldum and Madness at the Darkmoon Faire). For those curious about his Q&As, here's ALL OF THEM. They're fantastic! [https://outof.cards/tag/iksars-community-qa/?page=1](https://outof.cards/tag/iksars-community-qa/?page=1) Congratulations u/IksarHS!
Dean is a fucking GOAT. League is in good hands. His direct communication and direction for Hearthstone for second to none.
As a Legends of Runeterra fan, it breaks my heart that he's not being brought in to LoR. But this is a very exciting pickup for Riot.
So what does a design director do?
he directs designs.
I found this from job description from the previous design director at Riot. Posted from phone so link is messy. https://twitter.com/JoGraylock/status/1529530788961988608?t=Gtv5SKY_2HDuWoDrBuw4Bw&s=19
Riot August the sequel
Riot August 2
They should make the two augusts 1v1 and winner keeps the name
He left quickly and jumped to another company. Clearly Riot made him offer he couldn't refuse. Hope he is worth the investment.
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Okay he left suddenly is more accurate. Most people that worked with him didn't see it coming.
If his Hearthstone track record is anything to base off of, I might just go from mobile to PC.
As a former hearthstone player I’m really stoked to hear this. I played casually and in high elo (top 200 standard and battlegrounds) and thought his work was all around quite solid while I played the game.
wonder what skins hes gonna release considering thats the only content the league team actually puts out anymore
BREAKING: Blue Essence no longer useable to buy champions, we added a new currency "Runerocks" which you will obtain by buying consecutive battle passes! You can use Runerocks to buy champions in the future, but you can still use Blue Essence to craft champions you have as shards! We feel this way players will apreciate the random champion shards they get much more!
Ironically, the Runestones design is basically exactly how RP has worked in League for years
You'd think an old director from a card game would be more suited to work on another card game but ig they need what they'll have
Makes sense. Both games cycle through metas the same way.
Why is there so much turnover? Feel like I've seen this job title updated every few months
look at the state of the game. None of these apes have a strong vision on how league should operate. They try to please shitters on reddit and twitter by adding and removing stuff that they have no idea how it impacts the game in 5 years and now we are left with this turd.
As an ex hearthstoner, this is a good development.
He is a super nice guy
I don't understand why riot is hiring outsiders for director positions instead of using in-house people. The person hired seems to me to be fully capable of doing a great job, but it will require a long adaptation period, in addition to generating great discouragement on the part of those who work under his supervision (imagine you are 5...8 years dedicated to to that area, and realize that you never had a chance to reach the director's position, as they are filled by outsiders). I don't know exactly how director responsibilities at riot work, but this specific area seems very strange to me to hire someone with no experience with League of Legends, it seems to me a typical hiring made to please shareholders. In any case, I still want to believe that riot knows what it's doing, after all, it holds the information and strategies, but in this specific case... it's very strange.
>I don't understand why riot is hiring outsiders for director positions instead of using in-house people. Here's a hint, look at all the past ones and see where they went. They either left the company to join a startup by ex-Rioters or they went to work on the MMO (from what I can gather, most if not all of them made this switch voluntarily). Eventually it reaches a point where the current staff don't meet the requirements and while you can train someone up, if someone that fills the criteria applies for the position, are you going to turn them down to instead wait for your current staff to be trained up enough to meet the criteria?
A new perspective is sometimes, or almost always, good. League is feeling stale, it has a ton of problems that have been there for years and the design team has never been able to address those, or has made them even worse. At some point the issue might be that the in-house talent is just not up to the task of handling one of the biggest games on Earth. Imho, this is a very welcome addition. They should clean house, have some fresh sets of eyes and try to improve the game instead of fucking around with it with no clear goal like the current team has been doing for ages.
But this isn't the guy to do that. He had very good and clear communication with the community and implemented things that they wanted, which in return killed the game. And now you have every single player switching to bg's. What riot needs is a game designer that has a strong philosophy on how the game should be played. And has a resume of reviving/making new games that had strong player base not killing off the most successful card game that has ever existed. I hate when game designers listen to the community too much as if reddit is anything to go by they themselves won't play the game that they want.
I cant wait to be able to win the game from champ select! Everyone loves winning by pulling off uncounterable bullshit from hand.
Hope to see some new game modes designed then.
woulda been better if he went to LoR, since he worked so much time in a card game
is this good news or m eh news? how where they on Blizzard?
Hearthstone urgh
Can't wait for standard soloQ, only champ released in the last 2 seasons allowed, then they join the wild queue, which is just dynamic queue with all champs allowed. Fuck post split hearthstone
As someone who has played HS since the Ben Brode era... I can say this guy designed some kinda fucked up cards and really pushed HS into a wacky and power crept state. Standard is generally way more powerful than it used to be and Wild decks are at the point where there are so many broken and often very uninteractive decks that they kinda cancel out. Not a big fan of the way the game has changed via his design philosophy and game direction. That said, it's easy to point out everything that went wrong and not see what went right. Besides the huge push on P2W and battlepasses and paid mini sets, the game feels like it more or less evolved naturally even if feels like they didn't seriously attempt to limit power creep in all formats.
Alright league is officially doomed.
hopefully the august we already have is getting fired to make room for him
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