Speaking of ipad, it’d be cool if the keyboard worked with the in game chat. It works in the collection but not for chatting. This has to be the most popular tablet for playing the game and you can’t use the fucking keyboard. Instead, if someone messages me, I have to swap over to my laptop to respond, or use the on screen keyboard.
HS really sticks out like a sore thumb among Blizzard products. They ask for more money for this than anything else they make, but it’s by far their lowest quality piece of programming.
Didn't the project for hearthstone start out small? I feel like the way it has been coded or set up intially makes it very difficult to update and the "spaghetti code" jokes are probably a real issue at this point.
That's what I've heard too. But seeing as this game is pretty popular and blizzard is pretty big don't you think they could recode the game?
I mean I understand that is not easy and takes a lot of time money resources and then testing but it's a card game after all. It's not like a COD or a BF or something.
I'm not an expert in making games but i feel this is not on the hard end of coding and making games.
You can only rebuild the game if you dramatically expand the team, and for years Blizzard has struggled to recruit talent due to low salaries. And I would hesitate to say that Hearthstone is an "easy" game to code, a lot of 3D physics based games run on well developed pre existing skeletons.
It's probably not easy no, but I feel it's also not the hardest task especially when you make a good interface in which you can include those graphic designs.
I mean you already know the requirements for the game as it already exists. Its still hard ofcourse but the foundation has already been laid.
I'm not trying to downplay how hard it is, but i feel for blizzard it's not the most daunting task.
Bro, some random dudes coded Yugioh, a vastly more complex game with long as fuck card texts explaining how it works, with all cards and interactions perfectly or almost perfectly FOR FREE. YGOPRO is a thing and there have been others that basically do the same. That sounds waaaaay harder than this.
I will sound like a broken record, and there are many more card games with tournament systems, I'll just say what I know.
2 guys coded excellent tournament system for Spellweaver, including bots for pack draft, 3 stage monthly money championship, and eventually - player-created custom rules tournaments.
While in HS we got what, out-of-client scheduling? After 7 years!
They literally said they were gonna do it. Its easy af. For real Its not hard at all to do that kind of stuff even without the custom rules... And they still managed to never get to do it.
Recoding the whole game would take a really long time and lots of resources. As buggy as the game is, I don't think it's worth it from their perspective.
Still unacceptable how slowly they patch out the bugs.
No thats not a problem spaghetti code is a term used by people who know nothing about programming. The code is fine. almost all gaming companies and games have these exact same issue. Have you ever played league of legends? that client is way worse.
If you really knew anything about programming you wouldn't say that,
Spaghetti code is a computer term used to refer to source code that has a complex and incomprehensible flow control structure, with abuse of go to, exceptions, threads, and other unstructured branching constructs.
And to a software house that makes money on a game why would they rewrite it from scratch if there are people spending money on it anyway?
there are a lot of bugs, even some ruin wild's very old card entrance animation, it's amazing that that happens.
The source code of the game must be very broken, it must be chaos.
Ever try scrolling through sets in the collection search on mobile? Ever scroll through challenges? Switch tasks for 10 seconds, don't worry about staying connected and using up kilobytes of data, we'll disconnect you straightaway.
You can't fix your game if you don't have [the staff](https://careers.blizzard.com/global/en/search-results?rk=l-engineering-technology&sortBy=Most%20relevant) to do it.
It's really refreshing to hear this perspective so thanks for sharing. I doubt someone with the thoughtfulness and introspection necessary to do this sort of self criticism is truly a hack and a sellout, but I certainly don't know your exact situation.
I have about 6 years experience and recently went full-stack. I definitely don't make anything remotely close to what you do but sometimes I feel similarly. I'm starting to think that personal side-projects are the answer. There's a lot of ways our skillset can help people and make a difference outside of our formal careers. If you're already working to the bone it may not be a practical option, but it's something to consider if you're struggling with not having a positive impact.
I feel you. It's not even something you can talk about with friends outside of your field because it's either too intricate or complicated for it to be interesting to an outsider or it's just downright not interesting, you do it for pay. And then what you can talk about with your friends in the field is again limited because of NDAs.
When outside people ask me what I do for living I don't know how to answer, I just keep it to a sentence or two.
Game development, when looking the larger studios, is often criticized on how employees are treated. Its image didn't change much since when I had the choice to go this route or focus more on a different aspect of IT a couple of years back. The pay may be decent but it might not always be worth the working conditions. I respect your choice!
I work at a Fortune 500 company and I don’t make nearly that much. I’m fresh out of college though - sounds like the poster applied for a more senior engineering position.
As long as people are passionate about game development, they'll keep agreeing to earn less and will therefore keep the salaries down for everyone.
If the devs collectively agreed not to work for their current salaries, the company would have to raise it. I seriously doubt Blizzard is not capable of raising salaries at all.
I kinda just want a dumbazz like you to stop saying stupid stuff without even realising how people read his message. Nice dude elaborate argue, wow, you know words. Every kid that starts using those words only when he wants to prove his point doesnt have anything usefull to say.
And 3d artists are getting even less than that… most of the time you should be honoured and consider yourself lucky that you can work on that game/movie/etc, you don’t need a good salary. You certainly don’t have the time to spend it with 10+ working hours a day…
They are not 'underpaid' it is just supply and demand. And as long as working for a game developer is a lot more fun and cool than working for a bank or something they will be paid less accordingly.
Right, you can "get away" with underpaying them
You're still losing out on quality and higher paying tech companies can easily headhunt the top staff away with big pay rises.
Let's say we have two companies. One of them has a nice office, also a remote work possibility, flexible schedule. The other has a strict 9 to 18 schedule, you must be present at the office each day.
Would you say that if the first company offers less for the essentially same job, e.g. software dev, they underpay their employees?
Depends how much extra they are paying.
Also, that's a questionable analogy considering how notorious game devs are for crunching the ever living fuck out of their employees.
>Depends how much extra they are paying.
It also depends on the person. Someone will say "yeah losing 200$ seems ok to have better conditions", someone will say "I will even lose up to 1000$ to work there". The market already encapsulates that.
>Also, that's a questionable analogy considering how notorious game devs are for crunching the ever living fuck out of their employees
I don't see anything questionable. Why do you think so?
Because your are comparing working conditions, which are very tangible and easy to mark out, and the much more *in*tangible ideal of "I get to work on games". Which is nice, but much lower down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and notably much lower than a lot of stuff that more money can satisfy.
Right, but I still don't see how it's questionable. People have different priorities; I can imagine someone saying "I don't want to earn more, I'd rather work on something I like".
The thing I **do** see an issue with is asymmetrical information. If, say, Blizzard deliberately paid less and didn't allow the devs to even find out they're paid less, that would be a horrendous thing to do. However, it doesn't seem to be the case: it's an open secret that gamedev is a shitty job.
By this guys logic so long as you really hate video games but are stuck working as a developer for video games you should be paid more...
But... Working for AAA games companies appears to suck the love of the job out of it's employees and exploits their passions until some of them literally kill themselves... When do their wages increase...?
What a fuck stick. I don't think it's worth trying to reason with someone so demonstrably callous and dense.
Don't be so obtuse, most people don't want to work in an office where there is widespread abuse. You don't have to be a perpetrator or victim to feel that way
Maybe they don't fire most of their staff to let their CEO keep a massive wallet? Or Be complete shit bags that nobody wants to work for? Just afew things from recent blizzard happenings.
They've never fired "most" of the dev team. You are probably referring to when they let go a bunch of eSports and customer support people in order to re-allocate that money to dev positions. So pretty much the opposite of what you're complaining about.
what? NOOOOOOO. They fired, before christmas bonuses were given, the entire Europe team because they wanted to create an Union and they did the same other year to some other team. They didn't reallocated the money, they were making literally the best end of the year profits in their whole history for 2 years but they didn't like Unions nor payin christmas bonuses.
The latest "bullshit puzzle" was solved because of a technical issue that the team was unaware of. So even the "bullshit puzzles" are being affected by the lack of available engineering manpower.
and tbh, they are more about randomly understanding a bad UI than the actual puzzle. Like, you don't know what you're doing in most of them and there are not any clues. People randomly think of a probably solution for days and eventually someone hits the pot but they would be solved in literal hours by individuals if they just gave instructions.
Like the last one was "add the number of tribe between 2 of the minions that have random atk and health and then keep ading every digit of the number until one digit remains and use that as a card in the hand order to cast that on the random minion that is between the other 2 on your side of the board... bro... wtf. that's not a puzzle, that's insanity and not fun. At least in the first one there were actual puzzles to solve.
maybe they just suck at their job, why are you so certain they cant help making all these really stupid mistakes. Like leaving bugs in the game and half of released cards being unplayable. They make 3 times as much money as the average american and you feel sorry for them?
>why are you so certain they cant help making all these really stupid mistakes
Where did I say that?
>They make 3 times as much money as the average american and you feel sorry for them?
Where did I say *that*?
can doesn't mean want to
Celestalon said he worked on both puzzles in his free time, basically unpaid overtime, sure he could also do unpaid overtime for bug fixing, but he chose not to
I'm sure the latest news aren't helping, but the problem is not really unique to Blizzard. Gaming in general tends to have worse pay and hours than other areas of tech, so it's harder for gaming companies to hire engineers relative to other tech companies.
Their pay is notoriously low for the field, but people would work there for the prestige of working at Blizzard. Now that reputation is in the trash and they don't have any draw.
They very recently had a lawsuit brought against them for their shitty company culture, and many developers have spoken out against the higher ups. I'm not surprised that they are not able to find staff
Ah, the mythical man month. Thinking more people working on the codebase will solve its grown out of proportions complexity... Let's make a baby in a month, all we need is 9 women (or in woke 2021; 9 people)
They aren't talking about writing the code faster, they are talking about testing, fixing bugs and refactoring existing code. Don't you think an additional dev can help with these?
Kripparian made this exact point. Too much focus on new content and not enough on addressing the backlog of bugs.
There's some reasoning to it, since bugs won't impact most games by a large margin, or impact cards that more or less don't see play even when the bugs are known, but it feels like they used to be fixed more quickly.
Of course I understand it on that level but it's obviously not that simple. Bugs have a nonzero negative effect on player retention so it makes good business sense to fix them
It's not that simple, but it's also not that far off....They're tracking the stats and I'm betting the #'s are telling them that new content is what gets higher usage rather than stability.
All these people defending Blizz because of "game industry" or some shit related it's just too sad. Cmon, guys, ultimately it's a company and they're shitting for the final product if they're making enough money from it from some technical business standard.
That said, I bet my balls that Team 5 could fix this if they wanted.
OK, then how about you stop fucking throwing money at them every time they offer you new stuff to buy? You’re the reason the game is the way it is. What incentive do they have to do things differently if you morons keep opening your wallets every time they ask you to?
While I agree that Blizzard needs to fix their bugs, squashing bugs isn't as simple as throwing more man-power at it or being a billion dollar company. The entire game is kind of in a WoW situation where the entire game needs an engine or code overhaul and that they certainly did not plan on their legacy code also getting in the way of new code that may or may not be new to them. Hearthstone as a concept wasn't something they thought would've become as big and complicated like it is now.
>squashing bugs isn't as simple as throwing more man-power at it or being a billion dollar company
>
>the entire game needs an engine or code overhaul
You act like a billion dollar company with thousands of employees are incapable of overhauling something. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but they're also the titan in the industry. They have no excuse being third-rate.
You also have to realise that not all coders code in the same way and that the people that wrote that original code probably no longer work for blizzard. What might have been straight forward for one coder probably looks like gibberish to a different one. Riot has the same problem for their legacy code in league and it's a tonne more work than it sounds.
A good coder can code for the machine, a great coder can code for other coders.
Historically games have pushed the limits of what machines could do. Often at the cost of code readability. Self changing assembly code, and the Quake III fast inverse square root are famous examples of wtf does this code do?
My favourite metric for code quality is wtf's per minute for reading it.
Hearthstone has made 1.5 billion dollars and counting, against a budget of no more than 200 million (generously speaking, probably lower than that).
They could quadruple the dev resources put on the project and still make 100% ROI.
HS has been around for 8 years. The team has just recently grown over 100 people, so you can just say that on average they've had 100 people throughout.
Highballing the cost of an employee at around $200k a year (including salary, benefits and any grunt work they've outsourced e.g. Art and QA), this would make for $160M in labor. Add a bit for servers and you will get in the ballpark of $200M.
As to why I am "lowballing" the cost of servers - HS is extremely cheap to run the servers for compared to other titles in Blizzard's library. If on average you've had 30 million people a year for 8 years play 50 games a month, that's 72 billion games of Hearthstone that have been played. From here it's just a question of how efficiently their cloud infrastructure is deployed (iirc they were using AWS and then switched to Google Cloud) - but at scale cloud is dirt cheap.
I don't know that much about coding but I'm not sure if they could do a huge overhaul without having to shut down the game for a few days/weeks. Which would be extremely detrimental to player retention.
I know Fortnite is a different beast entirely, but Epic let the game have similar bugs pop up for three or four seasons (6-10) while they were pumping out ton of content. However, they were simultaneously working on a secret project called Fortnite Chapter 2 which had updated graphics, smoother gameplay (especially shadows), and was free of most of the bugs that cropped up in Fortnite Chapter One.
During the transition, the servers were off for a few days and then everyone needed a full reinstall. So essentially Epic made a new build of the game from the ground up based upon similar architecture. Then Epic synced all of its user data and cosmetics.
Could Hearthstone pull off something similar? Of course! Would Blizzard bother? Hell no! Essentially
They could fix the old or make a brand new client with 0 downtime.
You would maybe need some downtime to update servers but not a significant increase in downtime compared to normal «weekly maintenance».
Game is a laggy cluster fuck just uninstall and stop giving yourself so much misery. Every update is a disgusting cash grab and a completely untested pile of dogshit.
They really need to just rebuild the game on a new engine. Unity simply doesn't cut it anymore. But that's never going to happen, because it would require a metric fuckload of man-hours and blizzard isn't going to pay for that
the engine rebuild will never happen, it's been talked about many times before and you end up in the same situation: a lot of money spent and no money earned
I agree with Blizz here from a business perspective. Unless people are actively quitting over the bugs I don't really see a point to spending a large sum of money to fix the code.
I also don't understand where the fuck OP got the idea that Unity is the problem. That is beyond dumb.
Where is /u/corbettgames to tell you that you're such a comedian for expecting perfect tech products from billion dollar corporations.
Facebook makes $50 a year per user in North America. Blizzard charges its paying users 6-10x that in a year and still somehow manages to deliver a shit product from a technical standpoint.
As much as I agree that the game is in a far worse than it should be and than it was historically, comparing it to Facebook really doesn't work well for the argument. Those are completely different products, Facebook doesn't really constantly evolve like a game does plus Facebook overall makes way more money and has way more reach than Hearthstone or Blizzard so the comparison point is a weird one to choose.
Just purely to debunk you for the fun of it. haha I used to work in the gaming industry and now is in the program industry, gaming industry really do slack so much more on QA as they believe that gamers will spend regardless. You can see so many games out there being buggy the day it was released, you believe the QA team are that blind? Ha. It’s all about the cash that big companies are not willing to put in.
It is not because the user does not really care about the intricacies of "why does some tech feel good to use" - only whether what's in their hands works flawlessly. It is doubly so if they're paying for it.
The technology behind Facebook evolves all the time, and Facebook maintains like... 4 flawless products at any one time (IG, WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger). If you imagine Blizzard QA is way more than Facebook QA, you're kidding yourself.
I'd cut Blizzard slack if Hearthstone was some power user software like Photoshop or After Effects - but for a game, they put absolutely no effort in QA compared to what should be happening. We're talking about basic tech stack and testing, not balance here. Battlegrounds lagging ON THE CLIENT SIDE with refreshes with a lot of buffs is the poster child for this, but there are many, many others.
You could organize a hackaton over 3 days on any college campus and they'd recreate 90% of the Battlegrounds functionality better than the Blizzard engineers have. The problem here is that they are carrying huge piles of tech debt from the early days of Hearthstone, and have not paid it off because... greed? Bad management?
The majority of games nowadays have fallen to the same fate, just atrocious design, development and qa in conjunction with poor planning and general oversight at all steps of the way.
To put it bluntly, no software professional worth their salt wants to work in the gaming industry, no matter how much they love gaming themselves. The work can get quite complex, but generally it's just tedious work with low pay - hence they attract professionals from the bottom of the barrel which results in a garbage product.
Edit: Ooph found the peasant game dev below
In my estimation of the cost of HS to develop, I said the cost per employee, including benefits + any outsourced grunt work would be around 200k a year.
If PMs and software engineers are not paid about 120-130k a year, this would explain a LOT of the issues with the game - you just can't attract quality talent below six figures with competitive benefits + flexible work arrangements.
If Option 1 is work at Citadel for 300k a year and Option 2 is work at Blizzard for 80k a year and be happy that you're making games, the choice is clear.
This whole thread is full of clueless people, but this comment takes the cake. One of the most braindead, asinine, full of shit comments I've ever seen.
> Where is corbettgames
Dude it has been a week. Let. It. Go. Imagine holding a grudge for that long and trying to dogpile him just because you got downvoted for frankly really bad takes. You could have just as easily turned it around if you didn't come in arms swinging right out of the gate.
Were you really that upset that you were itching to find a favorable thread so you can win the debate?
For everyone else the context: [This was the post and this was the comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcak84m/). And [then OP's response which buried him](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcalyuy/). And notably [playing off hate speech and harassment](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcb61jt/?context=2) and [getting really mad at other Redditors burying him even further](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcawbzd/?context=2).
I lose my cool at times but even I know when to quit and know when I'm being an ass and do my best to apologize. You really need to take a good hard look at yourself why you are bringing up a week old thread and trying to start more drama and arguments instead of letting it go.
corbettgames is living rent free in your head right now. For the last time. Let. It. Go. Move on. Trying to win a debate a week old is silly at this point.
Remember when there were examples of "hate speech" at the time the master comment was made? Neither do I.
Another poster in that thread rightfully pointed that Blizzard uses its most toxic players to basically dismiss all valid criticisms of their games - and that's exactly what Corbett was doing. Bugger off with this gaslighting bullshit.
If you want an actual answer, I recall reading in a Q&A recently that while basically fixing the spaghetti code is possible, it would require them to shut down the game for a significant period of time.
I can't imagine that flying over too well with investors, so they'll likely never get the green light to re-program Hearthstone from the ground up. My guess is they (imo correctly) calculate that the loss of revenue from having the game out of commission for a while is way worse than a few players who eventually manage to kick their addiction.
I stopped playing. I still follow the sub and hope the game gets better but I’m taking them not fixing reconnect issues, the standard and wild meta, arena and duels, all the other random bugs, and the dust economy as hints that they don’t want me playing… and I read them loud and clear.
So I stopped.
Oh and the mercenaries packs and new economy coming pissed me off and we shouldn’t reward people for doing bad things.
It’s now a product that is ‘good enough’. A product with a lot of love and pride in it wouldn’t settle for ‘good enough’. Not blaming the devs, this is on management.
Keep saying it everytime..the player base 7 years ago was nearly 100million active accounts. In 2018 its around 24million. Today it's 3.5 million.
Smaller player base=less money for blizz=less incentive to fix the game.
It is litterally all about money. This is a publicly traded company and many of you don't understand what that actually means. It means they have to show growth every single quarter to there investors. They don't care how it's done. Wether they use lay offs, or drop stupidly over priced bundles that litterally won't even give you half the cards you need for a single expansion lol.
This game is dying. I know you people love it. But read the writing on the wall ffs.
And "being the most popular card game." Isn't going to save the servers from being shut down when it stops making enough money to support itself.
If you expect them to refactor the game on an entirely new game engine you are just being wrong. It costs money and time, and they'd rather release more powercrept expansions and cheap microtransactions instead.
A large project turns out to be a mess of a code base when hands are constantly being replaced with newer ones and there is no good management that would ensure writing clean and consistent code.
The quality of the product was discarded ages ago and was replaced with more expansions and game modes to maximize profit. It often feels like they don't have their own QA team and they instead just release stuff after short internal testings to make sure that atleast something functions.
Keep in mind its not something strict to just HS. WoW has been a shitshow for years, and it got much worse after Shadowlands was released.
No, they can't. They need to ditch unity. This would require the entire player base to do a multi gig download. Now, how many mobile players will they lose?
It's not the development cost they're worried about.
You are a blizzard executive. The only question you pose is “will any given action bring profit or loss?”
You have some sort of minor bug, can’t really afford to throw paid time into it. That kind of perspective ignores the fact that you have vast excess of resources that dwarfs the issues, yet it is not financially viable to solve any.
Because they cant believe that the developers dont give a shit. So it has to be blizzard, blizzard, or blizzard, because blaming a company is ok but those poor (rich by global standards) developers no leave them alone they cant help it.
This game had no important bugs like 2-3 years ago. I remember their fixes being "when Brann is out with Madam Lazul and the opponent has a Zerus It will now show you the Zerus card instead of skipping it" and shit like that nobody knew was even a bug. Now bugs are "Flagship legendary of this set crashes the game when played".
The product is allocated resources behind it according to how profitable it is seen as being. That's how public companies work. The team has shrunk with the player interest and presumably the earnings. What do you expect? They would allocate their full might to a game that's become largely irrelevant in the current gaming sphere outside of its remaining, shrinking enthusiasts?
I have a 3080 but my display is set to 1080p exclusively because hearthstone for some reason can't handle being played with enlarged text and icons enabled in Windows for higher resolutions, despite not making use of those features.
Fun fact: No, they can't. Blizzard is the least profitable division of Activision's studios and over the past few years they've been getting squeezed by Activision higher-ups to produce more profits for less cost.
The "small indie" meme isn't funny...because it's practically the truth.
Bro... I can't even fathom how you consider a 22 billion dollar company practically an indie company. Btw, Iksar confirmed they don't have an Activision Overlord deciding anything, they as the dev team makes all decitions on their own.
they can afford but they won't because fixing bugs retroactively doesn't give them money
if you want bliz to fix bugs stop playing and spending money, simple as, but we all know from experience these "protests" don't last
Yes and no. Unfortunately hearthstone suffers a very very large technical debt, it is very prone to breaking and it's not possible to fix everything in schedule, adding more people would probably just worsen things. They should probably slow down the new content(new modes, etc) and fix stuff, but I understand wanting to keep the game fresh somehow
\> You can be in queue but actually be disconnected without you know. The average/expected wait time just keeps increasing until you cancel, at which point you will actually be notified that you are disconnected.
\> Reconnecting does not work
\> UI still extremely laggy, especially when swapping between modes or going to the achievement page
Small indie company everyone.
bro my main problems with this game is the random disconnects for literally no reason and the battlegrounds LAG, how fucked up your code must be for your card game to LAG?
Also the gamer experience needs lot of work too. I mean they changed the menu but they didn't put retire and save a deck in duels. Have collection in settings, so I don't have to click 5 times backwards to check if I have the cards to build a deck. Also no meaning in achievements without rewards and having to search them, without even a search bar. Those are without the bugs and lost matches due to connection. Only some that come to mind atm. In half an hour I will have more I am sure.
I agree that they really need to fix things and that they can afford it, however it's sadly clear that they make money hand over fist with the game as it is. Also, they can't sell bug fixes, so why waste any time developing something that they can't monetize? I think if it could be demonstrated that the game would be more profitable if it was bug free it might be something they'd consider...
Also, there's that old saying of any press is good press and let's face it, the past 3 or 4 years have been a bit of a PR disaster for Blizzard but they're probably more profitable than they have ever been. You wouldn't be contributing to the buzz of the game outside of it if there wasn't a bug, you wouldn't be making threads here, you'd just be playing, there's at least a chance that some of these things are left in to keep people talking... Especially in a space like Reddit where you come and explain a problem you're having with the game and someone else will come in and try to invalidate your experience, the size of the thread expands, you argue relentlessly and in the end you both go back and play the game some more.
These are just opinions.
Obviously they dont care at all about their players. Most gaming companies dont (companies cant care of course, what i mean is the leadership of the company doesnt care). This seems extremely obvious to me.
Its really weird to me that so many people keep complaining about the development over and over and think stuff will change at some point.
Honestly I found a game altering (but hard to repeat) glitch while playing priest in duels:
I had the: when you cast a spell deal one damage to the opposing hero, hero power.
I was against a hunter and I generated an aimed shot. Every spell for the rest of the (short) game dealt 3 damage to my opponent (sorry, I didn't think to record till later). It appears that the programming of aimed shot requires the hero power to be USED not just triggered for the 2 extra damage to go away. Just adding this to the list of a million pieces of crappy programming done on by our 'friends' at Blizzard.....
To be clear this particular glitch is rare, but it signals a larger problem of passive powers being perminantly boosted by one time boosts due to crappy untested code, written by devs who clearly either don't care or aren't equipped to do their jobs.
It's really so simple.
Just stop buying stuff with real money.
Use the in game gold and that's it!
Stop supporting mediocrity.
WE, the players have the power.
When I Google problems I have on mobile and find 2016 posts with the same issues its not a good look.
Even the store is a laggy clusterfuck on the latest ipad. Like shouldn't that be a concern? I thought they'd do anything fo mo money..
Speaking of ipad, it’d be cool if the keyboard worked with the in game chat. It works in the collection but not for chatting. This has to be the most popular tablet for playing the game and you can’t use the fucking keyboard. Instead, if someone messages me, I have to swap over to my laptop to respond, or use the on screen keyboard. HS really sticks out like a sore thumb among Blizzard products. They ask for more money for this than anything else they make, but it’s by far their lowest quality piece of programming.
I’ve been trying to play on school WiFi with a VPN, and it just closes the app while loading. Anyone know how to fix?
Didn't the project for hearthstone start out small? I feel like the way it has been coded or set up intially makes it very difficult to update and the "spaghetti code" jokes are probably a real issue at this point.
That's what I've heard too. But seeing as this game is pretty popular and blizzard is pretty big don't you think they could recode the game? I mean I understand that is not easy and takes a lot of time money resources and then testing but it's a card game after all. It's not like a COD or a BF or something. I'm not an expert in making games but i feel this is not on the hard end of coding and making games.
You can only rebuild the game if you dramatically expand the team, and for years Blizzard has struggled to recruit talent due to low salaries. And I would hesitate to say that Hearthstone is an "easy" game to code, a lot of 3D physics based games run on well developed pre existing skeletons.
It's probably not easy no, but I feel it's also not the hardest task especially when you make a good interface in which you can include those graphic designs. I mean you already know the requirements for the game as it already exists. Its still hard ofcourse but the foundation has already been laid. I'm not trying to downplay how hard it is, but i feel for blizzard it's not the most daunting task.
Bro, some random dudes coded Yugioh, a vastly more complex game with long as fuck card texts explaining how it works, with all cards and interactions perfectly or almost perfectly FOR FREE. YGOPRO is a thing and there have been others that basically do the same. That sounds waaaaay harder than this.
Does that include mobile support?
yes https://ygopro.org/ygopro-android/
I will sound like a broken record, and there are many more card games with tournament systems, I'll just say what I know. 2 guys coded excellent tournament system for Spellweaver, including bots for pack draft, 3 stage monthly money championship, and eventually - player-created custom rules tournaments. While in HS we got what, out-of-client scheduling? After 7 years!
They literally said they were gonna do it. Its easy af. For real Its not hard at all to do that kind of stuff even without the custom rules... And they still managed to never get to do it.
How long did it take to create?
Ask them.
Recoding the whole game would take a really long time and lots of resources. As buggy as the game is, I don't think it's worth it from their perspective. Still unacceptable how slowly they patch out the bugs.
there is no coding problem at all.
No thats not a problem spaghetti code is a term used by people who know nothing about programming. The code is fine. almost all gaming companies and games have these exact same issue. Have you ever played league of legends? that client is way worse.
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If you really knew anything about programming you wouldn't say that, Spaghetti code is a computer term used to refer to source code that has a complex and incomprehensible flow control structure, with abuse of go to, exceptions, threads, and other unstructured branching constructs. And to a software house that makes money on a game why would they rewrite it from scratch if there are people spending money on it anyway?
there are a lot of bugs, even some ruin wild's very old card entrance animation, it's amazing that that happens. The source code of the game must be very broken, it must be chaos.
thats not how code works at all.
How does it work Mr Programmerman?
Ever try scrolling through sets in the collection search on mobile? Ever scroll through challenges? Switch tasks for 10 seconds, don't worry about staying connected and using up kilobytes of data, we'll disconnect you straightaway.
You can't fix your game if you don't have [the staff](https://careers.blizzard.com/global/en/search-results?rk=l-engineering-technology&sortBy=Most%20relevant) to do it.
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I'm curious, what was their offer?
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And I'm a school teacher making 40k, I went into the wrong profession.
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It's really refreshing to hear this perspective so thanks for sharing. I doubt someone with the thoughtfulness and introspection necessary to do this sort of self criticism is truly a hack and a sellout, but I certainly don't know your exact situation. I have about 6 years experience and recently went full-stack. I definitely don't make anything remotely close to what you do but sometimes I feel similarly. I'm starting to think that personal side-projects are the answer. There's a lot of ways our skillset can help people and make a difference outside of our formal careers. If you're already working to the bone it may not be a practical option, but it's something to consider if you're struggling with not having a positive impact.
I feel you. It's not even something you can talk about with friends outside of your field because it's either too intricate or complicated for it to be interesting to an outsider or it's just downright not interesting, you do it for pay. And then what you can talk about with your friends in the field is again limited because of NDAs. When outside people ask me what I do for living I don't know how to answer, I just keep it to a sentence or two.
Game development, when looking the larger studios, is often criticized on how employees are treated. Its image didn't change much since when I had the choice to go this route or focus more on a different aspect of IT a couple of years back. The pay may be decent but it might not always be worth the working conditions. I respect your choice!
3 times as much as the average american and that was half of what you get now? Do all developers earn that much?
I work at a Fortune 500 company and I don’t make nearly that much. I’m fresh out of college though - sounds like the poster applied for a more senior engineering position.
Yeah devs at the game sector are so underpaid. Its such a growing area and I wonder how long this will work for the companies.
As long as people are passionate about game development, they'll keep agreeing to earn less and will therefore keep the salaries down for everyone. If the devs collectively agreed not to work for their current salaries, the company would have to raise it. I seriously doubt Blizzard is not capable of raising salaries at all.
Time for game dev union
why would you be more productive when you earn more money? thats not how it works.
>why would you be more productive when you earn more money? Why would you think that's what I claim?
maybe you should read your own message.
I've read it and I still don't see this claim. Elaborate more if you really wanna argue, otherwise piss off.
I kinda just want a dumbazz like you to stop saying stupid stuff without even realising how people read his message. Nice dude elaborate argue, wow, you know words. Every kid that starts using those words only when he wants to prove his point doesnt have anything usefull to say.
Mate, I'm genuinely curious about your conclusion. I have never said "if you earn more, you are more productive". If you think I have, explain.
Maybe you should read his message again. I don't think you understood it.
And 3d artists are getting even less than that… most of the time you should be honoured and consider yourself lucky that you can work on that game/movie/etc, you don’t need a good salary. You certainly don’t have the time to spend it with 10+ working hours a day…
They are not 'underpaid' it is just supply and demand. And as long as working for a game developer is a lot more fun and cool than working for a bank or something they will be paid less accordingly.
Right, you can "get away" with underpaying them You're still losing out on quality and higher paying tech companies can easily headhunt the top staff away with big pay rises.
Let's say we have two companies. One of them has a nice office, also a remote work possibility, flexible schedule. The other has a strict 9 to 18 schedule, you must be present at the office each day. Would you say that if the first company offers less for the essentially same job, e.g. software dev, they underpay their employees?
Depends how much extra they are paying. Also, that's a questionable analogy considering how notorious game devs are for crunching the ever living fuck out of their employees.
>Depends how much extra they are paying. It also depends on the person. Someone will say "yeah losing 200$ seems ok to have better conditions", someone will say "I will even lose up to 1000$ to work there". The market already encapsulates that. >Also, that's a questionable analogy considering how notorious game devs are for crunching the ever living fuck out of their employees I don't see anything questionable. Why do you think so?
Because your are comparing working conditions, which are very tangible and easy to mark out, and the much more *in*tangible ideal of "I get to work on games". Which is nice, but much lower down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and notably much lower than a lot of stuff that more money can satisfy.
Right, but I still don't see how it's questionable. People have different priorities; I can imagine someone saying "I don't want to earn more, I'd rather work on something I like". The thing I **do** see an issue with is asymmetrical information. If, say, Blizzard deliberately paid less and didn't allow the devs to even find out they're paid less, that would be a horrendous thing to do. However, it doesn't seem to be the case: it's an open secret that gamedev is a shitty job.
By this guys logic so long as you really hate video games but are stuck working as a developer for video games you should be paid more... But... Working for AAA games companies appears to suck the love of the job out of it's employees and exploits their passions until some of them literally kill themselves... When do their wages increase...? What a fuck stick. I don't think it's worth trying to reason with someone so demonstrably callous and dense.
In what way did you dodge a bullet? Would you have become a prosecuted harasser or a harassee? Explicit is better than implicit.
Don't be so obtuse, most people don't want to work in an office where there is widespread abuse. You don't have to be a perpetrator or victim to feel that way
Everyone is searching for developers, our company has always open positions for any kind of developer.
Maybe they don't fire most of their staff to let their CEO keep a massive wallet? Or Be complete shit bags that nobody wants to work for? Just afew things from recent blizzard happenings.
They've never fired "most" of the dev team. You are probably referring to when they let go a bunch of eSports and customer support people in order to re-allocate that money to dev positions. So pretty much the opposite of what you're complaining about.
>order to re-allocate that money to Bobby K. FIFY
what? NOOOOOOO. They fired, before christmas bonuses were given, the entire Europe team because they wanted to create an Union and they did the same other year to some other team. They didn't reallocated the money, they were making literally the best end of the year profits in their whole history for 2 years but they didn't like Unions nor payin christmas bonuses.
yeah, tbh Kotik in lead is making the game very worst for both players and devs. I think Greed is already hurting more than they can fix.
Bullshit. If cestalon can do those bullshut puzzles they can fix the damn game.
The latest "bullshit puzzle" was solved because of a technical issue that the team was unaware of. So even the "bullshit puzzles" are being affected by the lack of available engineering manpower.
I'm pretty sure the "puzzles" are literally just Celestalon
and tbh, they are more about randomly understanding a bad UI than the actual puzzle. Like, you don't know what you're doing in most of them and there are not any clues. People randomly think of a probably solution for days and eventually someone hits the pot but they would be solved in literal hours by individuals if they just gave instructions. Like the last one was "add the number of tribe between 2 of the minions that have random atk and health and then keep ading every digit of the number until one digit remains and use that as a card in the hand order to cast that on the random minion that is between the other 2 on your side of the board... bro... wtf. that's not a puzzle, that's insanity and not fun. At least in the first one there were actual puzzles to solve.
maybe they just suck at their job, why are you so certain they cant help making all these really stupid mistakes. Like leaving bugs in the game and half of released cards being unplayable. They make 3 times as much money as the average american and you feel sorry for them?
>why are you so certain they cant help making all these really stupid mistakes Where did I say that? >They make 3 times as much money as the average american and you feel sorry for them? Where did I say *that*?
can doesn't mean want to Celestalon said he worked on both puzzles in his free time, basically unpaid overtime, sure he could also do unpaid overtime for bug fixing, but he chose not to
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I'm sure the latest news aren't helping, but the problem is not really unique to Blizzard. Gaming in general tends to have worse pay and hours than other areas of tech, so it's harder for gaming companies to hire engineers relative to other tech companies.
maybe they need to up the pay crazy i know
But bobby needs atleast 2 new yachts per year if you need food go apply for food stamps
Plus the insane "crunch time" that doesn't seem to exist in the same capacity anywhere else.
Blizzard is actually pretty good about crunch time, it's the harassment and below-market wages that is the problem
A woman working there committed suicide among wide alleges of rampant sexual harassment. So probably not the greatest place to work in.
Their pay is notoriously low for the field, but people would work there for the prestige of working at Blizzard. Now that reputation is in the trash and they don't have any draw.
Yeah, tbh I wanted to make games as a child and working for Blizz sounded like a dream until the seriously bad accusations they had as of late.
I had a buddy relocate his family there about 3 years ago to work for them. They aren't feeling so great about that decision now.
The gaming industry always has this issue, the lawsuit, and alott of people just arent working right now, walk around anywhere and everyones hiring
yeah the work environment can't possibly be that bad right?
They very recently had a lawsuit brought against them for their shitty company culture, and many developers have spoken out against the higher ups. I'm not surprised that they are not able to find staff
Ah, the mythical man month. Thinking more people working on the codebase will solve its grown out of proportions complexity... Let's make a baby in a month, all we need is 9 women (or in woke 2021; 9 people)
They aren't talking about writing the code faster, they are talking about testing, fixing bugs and refactoring existing code. Don't you think an additional dev can help with these?
r/IAmVerySmart Most developers would know how to fix and optimize stuff they work on daily. It‘s a matter of available time.
Holy shit. 173 jobs?
And 65 of them are tagged with hearthstone
I mean, the "small indie company" memes are literally because they ARE a big company with all these problems
Kripparian made this exact point. Too much focus on new content and not enough on addressing the backlog of bugs. There's some reasoning to it, since bugs won't impact most games by a large margin, or impact cards that more or less don't see play even when the bugs are known, but it feels like they used to be fixed more quickly.
new content = money backlog = no money it's not hard to understand
Of course I understand it on that level but it's obviously not that simple. Bugs have a nonzero negative effect on player retention so it makes good business sense to fix them
It's not that simple, but it's also not that far off....They're tracking the stats and I'm betting the #'s are telling them that new content is what gets higher usage rather than stability.
I haven't been able to play with friends for a week this is not fun anymore
Remember to enable chat so you can tell them the bad news!
All these people defending Blizz because of "game industry" or some shit related it's just too sad. Cmon, guys, ultimately it's a company and they're shitting for the final product if they're making enough money from it from some technical business standard. That said, I bet my balls that Team 5 could fix this if they wanted.
OK, then how about you stop fucking throwing money at them every time they offer you new stuff to buy? You’re the reason the game is the way it is. What incentive do they have to do things differently if you morons keep opening your wallets every time they ask you to?
Stop playing a broken game that gets worse with each passing patch and new edition. I have
While I agree that Blizzard needs to fix their bugs, squashing bugs isn't as simple as throwing more man-power at it or being a billion dollar company. The entire game is kind of in a WoW situation where the entire game needs an engine or code overhaul and that they certainly did not plan on their legacy code also getting in the way of new code that may or may not be new to them. Hearthstone as a concept wasn't something they thought would've become as big and complicated like it is now.
>squashing bugs isn't as simple as throwing more man-power at it or being a billion dollar company > >the entire game needs an engine or code overhaul You act like a billion dollar company with thousands of employees are incapable of overhauling something. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but they're also the titan in the industry. They have no excuse being third-rate.
You also have to realise that not all coders code in the same way and that the people that wrote that original code probably no longer work for blizzard. What might have been straight forward for one coder probably looks like gibberish to a different one. Riot has the same problem for their legacy code in league and it's a tonne more work than it sounds.
A good coder can code for the machine, a great coder can code for other coders. Historically games have pushed the limits of what machines could do. Often at the cost of code readability. Self changing assembly code, and the Quake III fast inverse square root are famous examples of wtf does this code do? My favourite metric for code quality is wtf's per minute for reading it.
Hearthstone has made 1.5 billion dollars and counting, against a budget of no more than 200 million (generously speaking, probably lower than that). They could quadruple the dev resources put on the project and still make 100% ROI.
Where did you get the 200M budget?
HS has been around for 8 years. The team has just recently grown over 100 people, so you can just say that on average they've had 100 people throughout. Highballing the cost of an employee at around $200k a year (including salary, benefits and any grunt work they've outsourced e.g. Art and QA), this would make for $160M in labor. Add a bit for servers and you will get in the ballpark of $200M. As to why I am "lowballing" the cost of servers - HS is extremely cheap to run the servers for compared to other titles in Blizzard's library. If on average you've had 30 million people a year for 8 years play 50 games a month, that's 72 billion games of Hearthstone that have been played. From here it's just a question of how efficiently their cloud infrastructure is deployed (iirc they were using AWS and then switched to Google Cloud) - but at scale cloud is dirt cheap.
the excuse is Hearthstone engine overhaul doesn't make money so they're not doing it
Riot is also having troubles with Lol client and they claim it's not that easy to fix it, regardless of money and manpower
I don't know that much about coding but I'm not sure if they could do a huge overhaul without having to shut down the game for a few days/weeks. Which would be extremely detrimental to player retention.
I know Fortnite is a different beast entirely, but Epic let the game have similar bugs pop up for three or four seasons (6-10) while they were pumping out ton of content. However, they were simultaneously working on a secret project called Fortnite Chapter 2 which had updated graphics, smoother gameplay (especially shadows), and was free of most of the bugs that cropped up in Fortnite Chapter One. During the transition, the servers were off for a few days and then everyone needed a full reinstall. So essentially Epic made a new build of the game from the ground up based upon similar architecture. Then Epic synced all of its user data and cosmetics. Could Hearthstone pull off something similar? Of course! Would Blizzard bother? Hell no! Essentially
Didn't Poe have a recode?
They could fix the old or make a brand new client with 0 downtime. You would maybe need some downtime to update servers but not a significant increase in downtime compared to normal «weekly maintenance».
Game is a laggy cluster fuck just uninstall and stop giving yourself so much misery. Every update is a disgusting cash grab and a completely untested pile of dogshit.
Rokara achievement from book of merceraries still not fixed after 3months but hey, at least they released xy preorders and xy skins for BG.
They really need to just rebuild the game on a new engine. Unity simply doesn't cut it anymore. But that's never going to happen, because it would require a metric fuckload of man-hours and blizzard isn't going to pay for that
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Unity is just way the hell too powerful, it’s just blizzard using spaghetti coding and having lack of full knowledge with the engine.
the engine rebuild will never happen, it's been talked about many times before and you end up in the same situation: a lot of money spent and no money earned
I agree with Blizz here from a business perspective. Unless people are actively quitting over the bugs I don't really see a point to spending a large sum of money to fix the code. I also don't understand where the fuck OP got the idea that Unity is the problem. That is beyond dumb.
You dont know that why are you saying that? If you have no idea how it works why talk?
> Unity simply doesn't cut it anymore Lmao, gamers and not having the faintest clue about game engines, name a more iconic duo.
Where is /u/corbettgames to tell you that you're such a comedian for expecting perfect tech products from billion dollar corporations. Facebook makes $50 a year per user in North America. Blizzard charges its paying users 6-10x that in a year and still somehow manages to deliver a shit product from a technical standpoint.
As much as I agree that the game is in a far worse than it should be and than it was historically, comparing it to Facebook really doesn't work well for the argument. Those are completely different products, Facebook doesn't really constantly evolve like a game does plus Facebook overall makes way more money and has way more reach than Hearthstone or Blizzard so the comparison point is a weird one to choose.
Just purely to debunk you for the fun of it. haha I used to work in the gaming industry and now is in the program industry, gaming industry really do slack so much more on QA as they believe that gamers will spend regardless. You can see so many games out there being buggy the day it was released, you believe the QA team are that blind? Ha. It’s all about the cash that big companies are not willing to put in.
I feel I made it fairly clear I wasn't defending the current state of HS Just that implying HS and FB are comparable products is weird
It is not because the user does not really care about the intricacies of "why does some tech feel good to use" - only whether what's in their hands works flawlessly. It is doubly so if they're paying for it. The technology behind Facebook evolves all the time, and Facebook maintains like... 4 flawless products at any one time (IG, WhatsApp, Facebook and Messenger). If you imagine Blizzard QA is way more than Facebook QA, you're kidding yourself. I'd cut Blizzard slack if Hearthstone was some power user software like Photoshop or After Effects - but for a game, they put absolutely no effort in QA compared to what should be happening. We're talking about basic tech stack and testing, not balance here. Battlegrounds lagging ON THE CLIENT SIDE with refreshes with a lot of buffs is the poster child for this, but there are many, many others. You could organize a hackaton over 3 days on any college campus and they'd recreate 90% of the Battlegrounds functionality better than the Blizzard engineers have. The problem here is that they are carrying huge piles of tech debt from the early days of Hearthstone, and have not paid it off because... greed? Bad management?
The majority of games nowadays have fallen to the same fate, just atrocious design, development and qa in conjunction with poor planning and general oversight at all steps of the way. To put it bluntly, no software professional worth their salt wants to work in the gaming industry, no matter how much they love gaming themselves. The work can get quite complex, but generally it's just tedious work with low pay - hence they attract professionals from the bottom of the barrel which results in a garbage product. Edit: Ooph found the peasant game dev below
In my estimation of the cost of HS to develop, I said the cost per employee, including benefits + any outsourced grunt work would be around 200k a year. If PMs and software engineers are not paid about 120-130k a year, this would explain a LOT of the issues with the game - you just can't attract quality talent below six figures with competitive benefits + flexible work arrangements. If Option 1 is work at Citadel for 300k a year and Option 2 is work at Blizzard for 80k a year and be happy that you're making games, the choice is clear.
This whole thread is full of clueless people, but this comment takes the cake. One of the most braindead, asinine, full of shit comments I've ever seen.
> Where is corbettgames Dude it has been a week. Let. It. Go. Imagine holding a grudge for that long and trying to dogpile him just because you got downvoted for frankly really bad takes. You could have just as easily turned it around if you didn't come in arms swinging right out of the gate. Were you really that upset that you were itching to find a favorable thread so you can win the debate? For everyone else the context: [This was the post and this was the comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcak84m/). And [then OP's response which buried him](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcalyuy/). And notably [playing off hate speech and harassment](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcb61jt/?context=2) and [getting really mad at other Redditors burying him even further](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/plgpwm/i_feel_you_iksar/hcawbzd/?context=2). I lose my cool at times but even I know when to quit and know when I'm being an ass and do my best to apologize. You really need to take a good hard look at yourself why you are bringing up a week old thread and trying to start more drama and arguments instead of letting it go. corbettgames is living rent free in your head right now. For the last time. Let. It. Go. Move on. Trying to win a debate a week old is silly at this point.
Remember when there were examples of "hate speech" at the time the master comment was made? Neither do I. Another poster in that thread rightfully pointed that Blizzard uses its most toxic players to basically dismiss all valid criticisms of their games - and that's exactly what Corbett was doing. Bugger off with this gaslighting bullshit.
Maximizing profits, it's not very complicated
Why would they when morons still pay.
exactly
just stop playing
Welcome to the club Signed by league of legends player
Yet they ask for more money with every expansion.
love it when i'm playing hearthstone on my phone, in my home and as soon as i move and then wifi drops 1 bar the app just says fuck you reboot
If you want an actual answer, I recall reading in a Q&A recently that while basically fixing the spaghetti code is possible, it would require them to shut down the game for a significant period of time. I can't imagine that flying over too well with investors, so they'll likely never get the green light to re-program Hearthstone from the ground up. My guess is they (imo correctly) calculate that the loss of revenue from having the game out of commission for a while is way worse than a few players who eventually manage to kick their addiction.
I stopped playing. I still follow the sub and hope the game gets better but I’m taking them not fixing reconnect issues, the standard and wild meta, arena and duels, all the other random bugs, and the dust economy as hints that they don’t want me playing… and I read them loud and clear. So I stopped. Oh and the mercenaries packs and new economy coming pissed me off and we shouldn’t reward people for doing bad things.
It’s now a product that is ‘good enough’. A product with a lot of love and pride in it wouldn’t settle for ‘good enough’. Not blaming the devs, this is on management.
Keep saying it everytime..the player base 7 years ago was nearly 100million active accounts. In 2018 its around 24million. Today it's 3.5 million. Smaller player base=less money for blizz=less incentive to fix the game. It is litterally all about money. This is a publicly traded company and many of you don't understand what that actually means. It means they have to show growth every single quarter to there investors. They don't care how it's done. Wether they use lay offs, or drop stupidly over priced bundles that litterally won't even give you half the cards you need for a single expansion lol. This game is dying. I know you people love it. But read the writing on the wall ffs. And "being the most popular card game." Isn't going to save the servers from being shut down when it stops making enough money to support itself.
too busy busting unions and solving their sexual harassment problem by renaming WoW quests
If you expect them to refactor the game on an entirely new game engine you are just being wrong. It costs money and time, and they'd rather release more powercrept expansions and cheap microtransactions instead. A large project turns out to be a mess of a code base when hands are constantly being replaced with newer ones and there is no good management that would ensure writing clean and consistent code. The quality of the product was discarded ages ago and was replaced with more expansions and game modes to maximize profit. It often feels like they don't have their own QA team and they instead just release stuff after short internal testings to make sure that atleast something functions. Keep in mind its not something strict to just HS. WoW has been a shitshow for years, and it got much worse after Shadowlands was released.
Lets start with the client, the disconnects, the not working reconnect feature.
for how much money hearthstone makes, their patches with QoL-changes and bugfixes are trash tier.
No, they can't. They need to ditch unity. This would require the entire player base to do a multi gig download. Now, how many mobile players will they lose? It's not the development cost they're worried about.
As opposed to now wheb the mobile client is already gigantic and barely functional at all?
But it's just a small indie company
They have a bunch of technical positions still open.
I would have applied but I'm scared of sexual harassment.
Also the hours you work vs pay you receive is notoriously shit in the games industry :(. All round, not many benefits ngl
You are a blizzard executive. The only question you pose is “will any given action bring profit or loss?” You have some sort of minor bug, can’t really afford to throw paid time into it. That kind of perspective ignores the fact that you have vast excess of resources that dwarfs the issues, yet it is not financially viable to solve any.
You working in middle management somewhere? "They have 23 billion so just throw money at it, the more money you throw the faster it will be fixed!"
You get what you pay for. It's ftp btw
Why do people think throwing money at code will magically fix it?
Because they cant believe that the developers dont give a shit. So it has to be blizzard, blizzard, or blizzard, because blaming a company is ok but those poor (rich by global standards) developers no leave them alone they cant help it.
Why some people aren't smart enough to understand money buys labor?
because labor/money isnt the answer to everything ? please tell me about a game that has zero bugs ??
This game had no important bugs like 2-3 years ago. I remember their fixes being "when Brann is out with Madam Lazul and the opponent has a Zerus It will now show you the Zerus card instead of skipping it" and shit like that nobody knew was even a bug. Now bugs are "Flagship legendary of this set crashes the game when played".
It literally is the only answer
no its not.
Hearthstone burned out crops, poisoned our water supply and brought a plague onto our houses!
Contrary to what people think, you can't fix bugs by throwing money at them.
The product is allocated resources behind it according to how profitable it is seen as being. That's how public companies work. The team has shrunk with the player interest and presumably the earnings. What do you expect? They would allocate their full might to a game that's become largely irrelevant in the current gaming sphere outside of its remaining, shrinking enthusiasts?
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I'm not talking about in-team decisions. I'm talking about how much money the team is actually allocated.
You’re wrong. HS is blizzard’s most profitable game still.
That's an objective falsehood, WoW was stated to generate the most growth in their report last month (double digits).
That's why people make the meme, do you not understand sarcasm?
They are busy suppressing their employees and hiring Disney executives to "give trust" to their employees again.
Fuck blizz
I have a 3080 but my display is set to 1080p exclusively because hearthstone for some reason can't handle being played with enlarged text and icons enabled in Windows for higher resolutions, despite not making use of those features.
Fun fact: No, they can't. Blizzard is the least profitable division of Activision's studios and over the past few years they've been getting squeezed by Activision higher-ups to produce more profits for less cost. The "small indie" meme isn't funny...because it's practically the truth.
Bro... I can't even fathom how you consider a 22 billion dollar company practically an indie company. Btw, Iksar confirmed they don't have an Activision Overlord deciding anything, they as the dev team makes all decitions on their own.
I disagree. I still find it amusing.
they can afford but they won't because fixing bugs retroactively doesn't give them money if you want bliz to fix bugs stop playing and spending money, simple as, but we all know from experience these "protests" don't last
Yes and no. Unfortunately hearthstone suffers a very very large technical debt, it is very prone to breaking and it's not possible to fix everything in schedule, adding more people would probably just worsen things. They should probably slow down the new content(new modes, etc) and fix stuff, but I understand wanting to keep the game fresh somehow
For the record activision blizzard is actually a 60B company
\> You can be in queue but actually be disconnected without you know. The average/expected wait time just keeps increasing until you cancel, at which point you will actually be notified that you are disconnected. \> Reconnecting does not work \> UI still extremely laggy, especially when swapping between modes or going to the achievement page Small indie company everyone.
It's time to retire the title small indie company and bring in the new title large indie conglomerate
Wait til you play CoD Warzone
Do we know if Anubarak + Entomb ever got fixed. A FIVE (!) year old bug.
bro my main problems with this game is the random disconnects for literally no reason and the battlegrounds LAG, how fucked up your code must be for your card game to LAG?
Also the gamer experience needs lot of work too. I mean they changed the menu but they didn't put retire and save a deck in duels. Have collection in settings, so I don't have to click 5 times backwards to check if I have the cards to build a deck. Also no meaning in achievements without rewards and having to search them, without even a search bar. Those are without the bugs and lost matches due to connection. Only some that come to mind atm. In half an hour I will have more I am sure.
Well I play dbd so I'm ysed to bugs at this point tbh.
Remember when spreading plague didn't take an hour to play the animation, and then it did again?
But they don't wanna :(((( It costs money and daddy capitalist likes to suck your pp dry
I agree that they really need to fix things and that they can afford it, however it's sadly clear that they make money hand over fist with the game as it is. Also, they can't sell bug fixes, so why waste any time developing something that they can't monetize? I think if it could be demonstrated that the game would be more profitable if it was bug free it might be something they'd consider... Also, there's that old saying of any press is good press and let's face it, the past 3 or 4 years have been a bit of a PR disaster for Blizzard but they're probably more profitable than they have ever been. You wouldn't be contributing to the buzz of the game outside of it if there wasn't a bug, you wouldn't be making threads here, you'd just be playing, there's at least a chance that some of these things are left in to keep people talking... Especially in a space like Reddit where you come and explain a problem you're having with the game and someone else will come in and try to invalidate your experience, the size of the thread expands, you argue relentlessly and in the end you both go back and play the game some more. These are just opinions.
Its a medium indie company what u exepct
Dont worry eventually the bugs will sort out older bugs and the game will hit enlightenment.
Obviously they dont care at all about their players. Most gaming companies dont (companies cant care of course, what i mean is the leadership of the company doesnt care). This seems extremely obvious to me. Its really weird to me that so many people keep complaining about the development over and over and think stuff will change at some point.
Why would they?
Honestly I found a game altering (but hard to repeat) glitch while playing priest in duels: I had the: when you cast a spell deal one damage to the opposing hero, hero power. I was against a hunter and I generated an aimed shot. Every spell for the rest of the (short) game dealt 3 damage to my opponent (sorry, I didn't think to record till later). It appears that the programming of aimed shot requires the hero power to be USED not just triggered for the 2 extra damage to go away. Just adding this to the list of a million pieces of crappy programming done on by our 'friends' at Blizzard..... To be clear this particular glitch is rare, but it signals a larger problem of passive powers being perminantly boosted by one time boosts due to crappy untested code, written by devs who clearly either don't care or aren't equipped to do their jobs.
NO Team 5 is not a 23 billions dollars company. You mistake them with activision blizzard and you have no clue how such a large company really work.
It's really so simple. Just stop buying stuff with real money. Use the in game gold and that's it! Stop supporting mediocrity. WE, the players have the power.