Blizzard is Finally Making Hearthstone Less Random

The luck of the draw.

By James Duggan

Hearthstone’s most recent round of nerfs represents the first step towards a more consistent and competitively viable card game. Yogg Saron will now stop casting spells if it dies during it’s effect and Tuskar Totemic can no longer summon Totem Golem. These changes may seem minor, but this is the first time in history of the game that a card has been changed to reduce the variance of it’s random effects.

These changes arrive two weeks after a community organized tournament called "Batstone,” in which five cards were banned from play based on viewer’s votes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top two card bans by a huge margin were Yogg Saron and Tuskar Totemic.

But how did random card effects become so universally loathed in a game that is inherently random? Why is Yogg Saron any less acceptable than drawing a random card every turn? The answer lies in the nebulous distinction between what types of random effects are good for the game, and which are detrimental.

“Good” RNG lowers the barrier for entry by giving players a chance to offset a lack of skill or experience with luck. “Bad” RNG has a huge variance of outcomes and minimizes the impact of player skill on the result of the game. A lot of cards in Hearthstone like Confessor Paletress, Sneed’s Old Shredder and Nefarian fall under this “Bad RNG” distinction, but only a few see frequent competitive play.

The problem lies in this small subset of cards like Implosion, Dr. Boom, Sylvanas and Tuskar Totemic, which are both competitively playable and incredibly random. In the case of pre-nerf Tuskar Totemic the chance to summon a Totem Golem and a whopping twelve stat points spread over two bodies for three mana was too good to pass up. Especially when you consider that the worst case scenario was summoning a basic totem and subsequently reducing the cost of Thing from Below by one.

The nerfs to Yogg Saron and Tuskar Totemic could be much more than a simple reaction to player feedback, they may in fact represent the start of a design precedent to reduce the impact of random effects on competitive play. Which isn’t to say there will be no more random cards in Hearthstone, but the days of gaining an insurmountable advantage from a single well rolled random effect could be over. As associate design Dean Alaya put it to Polygon “We obviously don’t want you to feel like every game is a coin flip. Like ‘I’m going to play my cards, and based on a thing that may or may not happen, I might win or lose the game because I played this one card.”

For more on Hearthstone, keep it here on IGN.

Let's block ads! (Why?)