It’s been quite a few years since the official release of Hearthstone – and with Dungeon Run coming up as a brand new game mode, it’s perhaps worth going through the many, many basic features the game is still missing. Maybe it will help us figure out a few things about the developers’ priorities?
Welcome to the Grand Tournament
Perhaps the most egregious absence is the lack of a tournament mode for a game that has already crowned three World Champions and is quite close to the rise of the fourth. Anyone who even barely dabbled in the competitive scene could easily explain the problems with all the third-party organizations. This ranges from the incompetence and the downtimes to the downright sinister cases of collusion. People who don’t properly speak the same language trying to decode game states by screenshots will never be an acceptable alternative to something in the client – unless you are Team 5, that is.
The spectator mode is also full of problems: it is essentially useless for tournament organizers as it bafflingly flips the cards of the second player when you try to spectate both at the same time. Not only that, but the hand on the top is much smaller than what you normally see. Meaning broadcasters are still forced to run multiple instances if the game client and spectate both players separately, then mushing something together in their streaming software. It’s a mess. On the other side of the spectrum, there is still no way to spectate a friend’s arena draft or pack opening, and if I had to guess, probably never will be.
The lack of a disconnect feature has also been a major source of consternation for competitive players. With the current policy advocating for a replay in every case when a player drops out in an official event unless there is lethal on the board. This approach is both problematic and potentially abusable, and also something that other Blizzard games have figured out ages ago. There is no viable alternative to an in-game tournament mode with reloadable or at least pausable game states. These are the minimum features for a good competitive experience.
So many numbers
Another long-requested feature is a more detailed statistics display in the game. While there are multiple widely used third-party apps, the data they collect is nothing compared to what the Blizzard hivemind has available. Unfortunately they are only willing to display some minimal winrate-related numbers in the client and maybe some other interesting tidbits via e-mail if you sign up for their marketing material alongside it. Again, not something that would be difficult to provide as the data is already collected. It’s simply something they don’t find valuable to share.
It’s also worth mentioning that a new player has no idea about the secret achievements like Chicken Dinner either. These are also something that the game could expand on along by being more transparent. The game is also sorely lacking a PTR, something that is commonly used for many Blizzard games. While it is understandable that the developers do not want to spoil cards in advance, these features would be useful to test botched game concepts like the synergy picks in Arena in a similar fashion.
There is also zero support in the client for the many content creators and streamers that are such a huge part of the game’s economy. We’re in an odd situation where the broadcasting platform has done more work with the game in that regard with Twitch’s Innkeeper app than the developers of Hearthstone have. It’s borderline ridiculous.
But hey, at least there’s always a new cardback every month…
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment via hearthstone.gamepedia.com.
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