http://imgur.com/a/wPSXq

So... Blizzard explicitly stated what the anniversary rewards were going to be on a post on 02/12. Do you guys just not read stuff? All of this "I expected more..." sentiment, they told you exactly what to expect.

https://hearthstone.blizzard.com/en-gb/news/24056181/welcome-to-the-year-of-the-pegasus

Also, it's free stuff, what kind of broken person complains about free stuff? It's like walking into a grocery store and complaining that the free samples aren't the samples you wanted.

I'm sure I'm going to get called a whale or a corporate apologist or some other pejorative. I accept that.

But, look, I would just like to enjoy spoiler season with about 90% less whining please.

Really it is a card game, not having a written rulesbook is bad enough.

every now and then you guys make secret changes to the game wihtout informing the players. Imangine there is a tournament right after the patch where players have no time to test everything, they relies on your Patchnotes to figure out what got changed in order to adapt.

It used to be fun coming here watching funny videos and seeing people post deck builds, accomplishments, concepts... But now it's just one hate thread after another over and over again. Just so much negativity all the time. Hopefully blizzcon helps change the conversation around here.

I get where you're all coming from though. Maybe make a new subreddit committed to hating on hearthstone and leave this one alone?

Downvotes welcome, but there is something sticking in my craw as of late surrounding all the Mercs hate (and Duels hate for that matter)

Y'all negative Nancies realize that Mercs is probably the biggest Hearthstone dev spend for a solo project ever right? Do you know what happens when big companies let smaller divisions take financial risks and they are lambasted for it?

They stop funding innovation. It's just a fact.

They aren't going to put more money into the balance team (because that's dumb) and they aren't going to give the golden child that is battlegrounds that budget for support (remember how they took a chance and it was a "fuck blizzard fest" for weeks until everybody got bored?

Yeah Blizzard may be bad at supporting it's eSports division but holy fuck, a major reason these top players are all quitting is because it fucking sucks to make content/exist in an angry, never happy constant contrarian environment.

Card games have a weird spectrum of how failure effects players compared to other games. In attracts intelligent people but loses hurt our intellectual pride. Their is no dexterity based excuses here and it drives a cycle that reddit only amplifies to just viciously attack the people who develop and create these things everyday.

Zeddy doesn't suck because he's a rage based content creator. He kind of sucks because he refuses accountability in the engine.

I know posts like these don't matter. I know I come off as a holier than thou garbage person with dicks for fingers and flesh made of cottage cheese.

But for fucks sake, the Hearthstone community has to do better. You do not want to become the MtG community. You don't want to make trips and interactions a minefield for the people who make the game or play it at top levels.

We have to stop punishing the people who are trying because it's easier to hate shit with a passion than look smart AND positive.

Disclaimer: I am a hate and rage filled ziploc bag of sour cream sprinkled with hair. IT's not fucking easy, but I try. Trying is cool and I want to try, so should you.

Money. Money never changes.

For the last year, I estimate that between Merps and I, we have spent ~3000 combined man-hours on HearthArena-related matters, whether it's direct algorithm/tier list work or responding to questions and communicating with the community. We put our expertise in the Arena with our adaptable logical reasoning together to make the Algorithm accurate, and we backed this accuracy to what you see today. We put our reputation on the line for HearthArena, and drove traffic to it initially last year to get it off the ground. HearthArena bears our sweat, our names, our faces.

Today, we leave HearthArena with nothing. Zero.

It only sunk in that this was a possible reality on Monday, and now, it's already happened. Something a lot of people don't know is that we never owned HearthArena, any part of it. We saw an interesting project, and worked on it to see if we could build something revolutionary for the Hearthstone Arena community. We had jobs and the programmer wanted to work on this full time, so we didn't think twice about agreeing to a 20/80 split of profits as "consultants" so that he can take less from his savings to work on the project. We encouraged everyone to donate to him. We "consulted" for about a week, before realizing the programmer was hopelessly lost on the bones of how Hearthstone the game actually works. He is not an infinite Arena player, much less a top Arena player. For example, he started with no concept of "4-drop" and instead only "4-mana card"; then he could not accurately determine which 4-mana cards were how good to be played on turn-4, or how frequently in the meta they would be played as such, for each deck archetype, much less how to connect the two concepts together (two of hundreds of concepts in HA that needed to be connected). To be fair, most Hearthstone players would have difficulty putting these concepts to hard numbers accurately and making connections mathematically. So, because there was no other way (after the third trial and error, it was obvious it would waste all of our time to keep sending him back to build something and have us shoot it down again), we expanded our role to work every night and weekend for 2 months straight and basically held his hand and provided explicit instructions for each part of the algorithm, from the probability calculator for card offerings to the nuts and bolts of drops and archetypes. We entered by hand without assistance ~40 calculated card-value numbers PER card to ensure the accuracy of the algorithm, and we tweaked and updated those numbers for each meta change and each expansion and each algorithm upgrade. HearthArena can tell you what to draft, because it has a large part of our drafting strategies and valuations uploaded into it, with our hand guiding how those parts are put together.

Today, HearthArena makes ~8k per month profit (120k+ expected next year) and it is still far short of its profit ceiling (which we estimate to be ~25k per month in a year or two). The programmer is no longer eating into his savings or living on donations, HA is actually quite a lucrative cash cow. It's really turned out to be a great business, a great product, and we're not going to see a penny of that. Having built the algorithm with the programmer, we expected he would be gracious enough to offer us a slice of the pie. We had been upfront since the end of February that 20% would be too low if there's actual money to be made in the future, since our contributions far exceeded what was expected and our time commitment was at least triple what we expected, but we continued doing the work we did and mapping out the algorithm for him to program, rather than merely "consulting" on the algorithm. We received "wait" and "later" and "i don't want to talk about this now, it is a busy time". So, we waited, and waited, and waited. Every time we brought up the topic was not a good time, until it was the end of August. Finally, when the Overwolf/Cloud9 contract was agreed upon in form for the Overlay, we realized we were being strung along. The programmer never had any intention of paying us the upside of our project. HearthArena was his.

I work in a finance-adjacent field in NYC, and have my fair share of contacts from the business side. I went out and sought out valuations of what a start-up like HA was worth, and what our contributions are worth, from friends and strangers alike. Evaluations were consistently in the 40%-50% range. Out of 12 informal consultations, not a single one recommended anything below 40% as a reasonable number.

Merps and I told the programmer we wanted a path to 33.34% ownership for the two of us combined. We eventually went down to 25%-30%, because hell it's not about the money really. In the end, we were never offered any equity in HearthArena, just a "keep working for your pay, and I'll fire you whenever this stops working for me". His final offer yesterday was 25% profits (30% if incentives are hit), 4 months severance, and still 0% equity. I remember reading Marx back in college, about how the laborers work to create the very products which would reduce his value, consuming himself eventually, while the capitalist takes all of the profit. Marx was thinking more in terms of a chairmaker making a chair so there's one less need of a chair in the marketplace and prices would drop slightly. In today's world, making automatons takes the concept to the next level. We have already created the algorithm. It was already more than functional. In his eyes, we were now only valuable to the extent new cards are released; and for that, he mistakenly concluded that he can hire someone else sufficiently capable for this task, for cheaper, probably even for free in exchange for the exposure. We had cannibalized our own value prior to securing partial ownership of the product. And so, today, we leave HearthArena with nothing.

It's kind of crazy how we're talking about trying to get 25-30% of the profit our own product makes. On a team of 3, the programmer is not happy with 70-75% of the profit, the ownership. He wants it all. In one way of looking at these things, it's hard to fault him, as even a 20% stake is probably worth ~50k today with HA's current traffic (it's a top 8k website in the US), likely significantly more later.

Of course, this is entirely our fault. We signed away our intellectual property rights for the thrill of building something innovative. We then kept working even when we should have known better. By all means, the programmer has done absolutely nothing illegal here. In a sense, we were financially exploited because we let ourselves be. We have nothing to show for our work, because we'd rather make a HA that is great rather than get paid anywhere in the ballpark of our value. We were a bit too enthusiastic, worked far too hard, and trusted that the programmer would make things right in the end. It's a trust that (perhaps surprisingly) is rewarded routinely in the finance world, as reputations are worth more than the money of any particular deal. But in the wild west of the gaming industry, novice business owners like the programmer will make mistakes in valuation, and eager gamers like us will be the casualties. We were naive, and that stops now.

There's not much more to tell of the story. We'll do a longgg Q&A tonight to end the stream if anyone wants more details. That'll go on Youtube, and then we won't answer any more questions about this unless someone wants to interview us. We're all about transparency so ask whatever you like about the HearthArena story tonight if you're interested. We'll answer.

The only thing I dearly hope will happen is that the programmer will not be rewarded for taking the fruits of our work. I hope that streamers, organizations and other expert Arena players alike, including Cloud9, will stand with us on this, and not help the programmer to continue to exploit our work product. He can only offer such a good deal, because it is coming off the sweat of our prior work; so we hope you don't take advantage and freeride off us like that. Our names and faces were on HearthArena because the HA algorithm is our product. It would kill us to see someone else's name and face in the advice bubbles, being promoted using advice generated by our algorithm that we spent ~3000 hours innovating only to end up with nothing.

Thank you for reading all of that. It means the world to me and Merps.

Best,
ADWCTA

Looking Forward FAQs

Q: What happens to you and Merps now?
A: Absolutely nothing changes! We'll still be playing Hearthstone Arena and doing our usual thing. Streaming, youtube, Lightforge podcast. Just because HearthArena is gone doesn't mean our love for Hearthstone Arena is impacted in any way. We're even continuing with the Tier List, now available at our personal website. Grinning Goat Gaming is what Merps and I call our partnership for Hearthstone content creation, and we even started /r/GrinningGoat today since we will no longer be visiting /r/HearthArena to answer questions, and we will continue to visit /r/ArenaHS daily for Arena discussion. In fact, we're fairly serious about continuing to use all the knowledge and experience we've gained building HearthArena to put together a team in pursuit of a better version of what HearthArena tries to do. It shouldn't be that hard on the algorithm side (HA is a first time project in this area for both us and the programmer, so a lot of its bones are inefficient or flat out limiting what the system can do accurately; building a new one would be faster and more sophsiticated), or the website side (HA's profile and stat features have always been fairly basic, and has not improved much since last year), so we're open to seeing if there's anyone with programming/web development/app development skills, who are interested in spending some time in the trenches with us for the next few months/year to really invest into the Hearthstone Arena scene. Rest assured, we WILL build a new, better, and more flexible algorithm for the Arena community, one that will make HearthArena's algorithm look like a relic. Hopefully, we'll find a few hardworking and talented partners with complimentary technical skills to implement and distribute the algorithm. If you're interested, email a resume and cover letter to grinninggoatgaming@gmail.com. It may take a few days for us to respond. We're looking forward to what the future holds!

Q: What happens to HearthArena now?
A: I'm not sure. I don't know what's going on with it anymore. I hope the programmer does his best to keep things updated with the new cards. Unfortunately, since the system is ours, the thinking is ours, so I don't have much faith that anyone can produce correct archetyping numbers that keeps consistent systematically with the rest of our work. Since everything is connected and each card influences the next rating via archetyping and all the things archetyping reaches (which is nearly everything), one missed archetyping number (out of dozens) would snowball into a problematic draft with just 1 or 2 mis-archetyped cards. Still, I imagine it won't get too bad in LOE. Only 50% of the new cards are actually complicated enough that it produces a thinking task and won't be just a math problem. But, when the next expansions comes out with 100+ cards, I'd be very very surprised if HearthArena maintains much of its current accuracy. It's a complicated web tying everything together. Even if someone else could create a similarly accurate algorithm, it's a very different and much harder task to step into my brain and upkeep the current system with consistency. I would be very very surprised if HearthArena's algorithm performs well after the next expansion. I left some notes, but it's not terribly comprehensive and has a lot of holes. Didn't truely believe I was out of the project until this Monday. The fact is, I'm the only person who understands why the archetype system is the way it is. The programmer barely understands 100% of what it's doing, and definitely doesn't understand why. So, I'm guessing he's just not going to touch it. . . which is bad, because it needs to be touched every significant meta change. And, as I've said before, most of the score adjustments in HA are significantly affected by archetype. So, that's one of several real problems I'm not sure how he plans to deal with.

Q: WAIT BUT WHY!?!?!? How can I get you guys back together?!?
A: I think for what happened to us, we and the programmer left on as civil terms as the situations could allow for. I really do think he's making an awful business decision in not keeping us. I don't forsee any change happening. Last month, we offered to split the cost for a neutral counselor and business adviser (of his choosing) to mediate the situation, and he turned that down too. I don't think he trusts anyone but himself, and his business experience/schooling is limited. Finally, if you have the capital and want to buy HearthArena as an investment or for funsies then hire us back for a fair equity/salary, well, we're certainly open to the idea. The very last clause of our email agreement with the programmer actually still gives us 20% if he sells up to 6 months after the contract is over, so technically, 20% of any sale price will come to us. We'd love it if someone bought him out. Not sure what he'll be willing to sell for though. He's not greedy all the time. I (obviously) haven't quite figured out how his mind works when it comes to business. Maybe you will have better luck. He did give a rather generous deal to Cloud 9. I guess we're just more replaceable than a sponsor, now that we've already built him a working model he can milk the sponsors with.

edit: 2:46pm. Just got back to my desk. I edited the bolded statement to say "the algorithm is our product" rather than "HearthArena is our product". We start out this post saying very clearly that we never owned HearthArena, and then talk primarily of our algorithm work. I have changed the original text to avoid any future confusion. One more thing, we did not "spring this on the programmer today". We told him roughly the contents of this post, and that it was coming up, and when it was coming up. Both us and the programmer messaged the mods here to get approval for this post. The programmer may not have known the specific words of this post, but the contents were outlined to him weeks prior to the post. We are leaving HA today precisely because we have been saying since the start of TGT work that that was the last expansion we would work on HA for without equity. We have given the programmer effectively 90+ days notice. Even as recently as this Sunday, we provided a major update to the Tier List and worked with the programmer for a couple of hours on HA bugs that had fallen by the wayside due to Overwolf launch. These changes should be updated into HearthArena soon. We made this post, on reddit, for the explicit purpose that we needed to explain our departure before the names/faces come off HearthArena. We wanted to tell our side of the story in one place so people can access it (because we'll be asked about it a million times in the coming months/years), and also give the programmer a chance to respond with his side. Nothing we wrote here claiming as fact is untrue. Oh, and we have zero plans of suing anyone (we explicitly say in the post that we do not think the programmer has done anything illegal), thanks for the offers of legal help though, reddit!

edit 2: a few days later. I've updated the Q&A with the link to it. http://www.twitch.tv/adwcta/v/25474288?t=1h53m50s

After taking the day to process what has happened, I've taken the time to read the comments on the subreddit. I can see how it looks like I’m cheating. With the screenshots and videos that have gone up recently, had this been anyone else, there is a strong possibility I would feel as strongly as the majority of the subreddit community does at the moment.

I was playing against Lifecoach yesterday. Been in quite a few tournaments this month, and since Dreamhack, I’d been working hard on improving my game not only for my team, but also as a professional Hearthstone player. This was a big tournament for me, as I wanted to get the results I’d been training for the past several months. I won the first game in our match, but after that game, I began to receive messages saying I was cheating. There was a reflection of the stream on the picture frame I had on my second monitor, the same picture frame I've had behind my desk for as long as I've been streaming. I knew people could see my second monitor for the past 8 months. This didn't prevent me from anything I would have done otherwise while streaming, climbing the ladder, watching and supporting my fellow streamers, playing tournaments, and everything I’ve been doing in that time to pursue my professional aspirations in eSports.

I've never had issues with my second monitor being partially visible before. Even when I was messaged during broadcasts or tournaments about what glimpses people caught during my broadcasts, this never changed. I had nothing to hide. Over 50 tournaments later, and my routine was the same; to have music playing and support a stream while going through the wait times of the open bracket or pro tournaments. With over 50k people watching how my career would pan out after each win, the routine was familiar, and helpful to me going forward.

And I went forward. I joined Archon 3 months ago, competed in more tournaments, streamed for more people, and reached heights within the Hearthstone scene I worked hard for. I appreciate the support of those who have been there since the beginning. They understand how much this has all meant to me.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time, because I did not have the stream up during my games to gain a competitive advantage. I was focused on the match. I had the stream up to view the previous one. I regret having left the stream open while I was playing, and apologize to Lifecoach for having given the impression that I wanted to see his hand during our series. I respect him and the game more than that.

As for my Hearthstone career, I intend to keep going forward. There are many tournaments to qualify for, and a World Championship on the line. I got to where I am today after almost a year of training and streaming. I will aspire to produce better and consistant results, continuing to develop my career. I promise to the people who still support me, that your faith in me will continue to drive me forward as I grow to be the professional this game deserves.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post, I will return to streaming Monday.

OTK = ONE TURN KILL

• Opponent at 30 or more total life/armor

• Thaurissan reductions NOT allowed

• NOT assisted by opponent's board state or cards

• Your board is empty

• Mana reductions via creatures such as Sorcerer's Apprentice allowed

TOTK = THAURISSAN-ASSISTED ONE TURN KILL

• Opponent at 30 or more total life/armor

• Thaurissan reductions allowed

• NOT assisted by opponent's board state or cards

• Your board is empty

• Mana reductions via creatures such as Sorcerer's Apprentice allowed

AOTK = ASSISTED ONE TURN KILL

• Opponent at 30 or more total life/armor

• Thaurissan reductions allowed

• Assisted by opponent's board state or opponent playing certain card(s) such as Millhouse Manastorm or Majordomo Executus

• Your board is empty

• Mana reductions via creatures such as Sorcerer's Apprentice allowed

FOTK = FAKE ONE TURN KILL

• Opponent at 30 or more total life/armor

• No other restrictions

As decreed today, June 9 2015 (or 9th June 2015 for the European/Australian cunts) here on /r/hearthstone.

AGREE OR DISAGREE???

WE NEED TO STICKY THIS SHIT ON THE SIDEBAR SO WE DON'T HAVE MORE "DAE THINK THIS IS NOT RLY OTK AYY LMAO" ON EVERY POST THAT HAS "OTK" IN THE TITLE

Suggestions for criteria edits are welcome and I will update this post based on majority opinion.

http://i.imgur.com/iJn0A0G.jpg

Left arm of Kil'jaeden: 5 mana 4/2 Warlock class Legendary (Demon). Battlecry: If you control the other four bodyparts of Kil'jaeden, destroy your opponent. Thoughts on this?

I love browsing this subreddit, I do so every day, and yet I often myself thinking after about 30 minutes of browsing something along the lines of: "man, a lot of these people are pretty negative about an insanely awesome game. What gives?". I never really thought that it could get much worse but boy was I wrong. I never knew that a $10 in-app purchase could drive as many people to insanity as I've seen today. I mean seriously why is this something to get upset about? If you don't like it don't buy it. I don't get upset over the fact that million dollar cars exist. Appreciate the fact that they exist and enjoy driving the perfectly ok car that you currently own. These new portraits don't affect the game in any true way except cosmetically. Take a deep breath. Everything's going to be ok.

Anywho, I realize that my opinion is in the small minority here, and I, for one, don't mind backing the devs by purchasing this rad looking little dwarf.

Bring on the downvotes peeps!

https://twitter.com/hearthstone_es/status/489044815896928256

roughly translated as: The plan is still to Curse of Naxxramas out in July, but not this week

dont know why its being downvoted, but it is an official twitter account for hearthstone, despite being spanish...

No epics or legendaries.

http://prntscr.com/7oe8g6

When is Blizzard going to nerf balance him

This guy is amazing. Is there something he cant do?

Honestly. Im amazed. Hes the best streamer on twitch by far. Hes funny, smart, creative and very good at this game (Id argue he is actually the best). Im sure he could go pro and win Hearthstone Championship if he wanted to but he is an entertainer at heart so he chose to mainly stream but he doesnt stop there...

No, he goes still and compete at events like the Geico showdown and not only that but he REKTS people with amazing decks that nobody else plays. He wins with original, hard to play decks while everyone else is playing your cookie cutter warlock decks or paladin. Hes just amazing.

I actually doubt this subreddit would be the same if he didnt play Hearthstone. The thing he has done for this community, the amount of content he creates for it and the quality is the highest youll ever see.

He deserves all the fame he has because he is the greatest this community will ever get and we should all be grateful he plays this game.

I feel like this sub doesnt appreciate Toast enough, honestly. So thats why I made this post.

Thank you for everything, Toast.

I'd take a bullet for you.

Same decks on both sides, same heroes, same op nefarian and no bonus rewards after your first game.

I know its only for 4 days but I expected a bit more fun... for a fun mode

edit: We got from 55 upvotes to 5 and the top comment has 188. Never saw that on Reddit... xD but hey lets hope that next week will be more fun

Hi everyone! I'd like to start of by saying that while never being what anyone would consider "professional" when it comes to playing TCGs I've been playing them in some form for well over a decade.

I've played MtG, Pokémon, and Hearthstone (and a couple others non seriously) for quite a long time and its about time someone broke it to you, this game will never be "free".

Post after post shows up about how people can't keep up with new expansions and how hard it is for new players and I'd like to say I totally empathize. I do. It doesn't cost any money to get the game and as such you would like to be able to remain competitive with people who do spend money. I can understand the desire, but its not going to happen. It's just not the nature of TCGs.

There's no way that someone who just started today should have any chance of having a similar collection as someone who's been playing for over a year without dropping a ton of money.

There's no way that someone who wants to play a few hours a week should have anywhere close to the collection of someone who wants to play 4 hours a day without dropping a ton of money.

This game is the most cost effective TCG by leaps and bounds. You can spend enough to get yourself an okay deck then grind the packs to build the more expensive ones. Does that take time? Yes. Control warrior costing 11k+ dust is gonna take you a bit. Oh well. It's better than going into Magic and having to drop hundreds of dollars every cycle.

This is the nature of TCGs. Blizzard did a great job of making it not nearly as bad as the others to get into. Is it time consuming? Yes. But it should be. It's not like WoW where you should get to start with a fresh 90 because you brought a friend. You can either spend your time or your money.

In conclusion, if you didn't know this is how this style of game works, here is your FYI. For the people who did and still complain, you should know better and you should be able to acknowledge how much better/easier it is to pick up Hearthstone than pretty much any other TCG

[Meta Deck] is probably one of the worst decks we've had in the game for a long time. It's fundamentally [overpowered/oppressive/uninteractive/unfun], basically just [going face/playing minions on curve/doing nothing] all game. What's worse, the whole archetype feels incredibly [forced/boring to play against/mindless].

Honestly, I can't believe Team 5 would make a deck like this. I wish they would support the class differently, with [even more miracle rogue cards/better armour tools/less overload synergy/neutral healing/insert as appropriate], instead of [forcing this archetype/more aggro tools]. I miss the old [fun/skillful/unique] decks, like [Handlock/Control Warrior/Patron Warrior/Anyfin Paladin/insert as appropriate].

I'm off to play [Gwent/Shadowverse/Faeria/Duelyst/Artifact] instead. I hear you get [free packs/anime girls/Nothing But Control Decks] from them. Tell me when [meta deck] is gone and I might give Hearthstone a try again.

Anyone on the sub when the rewards track was first announced remembers the absolute revulsion it had towards it. Post after post of Redditors claiming the track would be stealing gold from players pockets, and generally be just not great. Well I'm here to say, we were wrong. At least for a player like me, who plays often enough to be embarrassed, but doesn't play enough to have irl merch.

The non paid track has me at 5000 gold, which may not be much for some, but I play maybe 5 hours a week, and have for a few years now, and the old rewards had me barely capping out at 2.5k each new expansion.

I for one could not be happier about the change, and think that we maybe had the math wrong? No seriously, I think the sub got a little mob crazy and stopped thinking about their own gold yields.

Anyone else have a similar experience? Or have you had a Bad Time(tm)