Hearthstone - redux

Way back in January, I posted about Hearthstone.  Can't believe I started playing this game in January although to be fair, I don't actually play that often.  Partly, this is due to time.  The other reason for this is actually related to the nature of Hearthstone as a CCG.

To be fair to Blizzard, they have done a good job of creating a CCG where you can play and have fun even without spending money.  However, if you do spend money (or spend a ridiculous amount of time grinding in order to build up your deck), you will have a better deck.

What this means is that I have gone into games and never had a chance simply because my opponents had significantly better cards.  Again, to be fair to Blizzard, they have done a good job of making even basic cards semi-competitive.  But semi-competitive doesn't count for much when you are being destroyed by other players.

What this means in practice is that the game is only worth playing at certain times.  Primarily, playing in the evenings from the second week of the month onwards.

That may sound odd but both of those relate to the type of player playing at that time - specifically, people playing that match those criteria tend to be more casual (like myself) and hence, you are more likely to run into a similar level deck to yourself.

Play in the evenings
Most people have work and family commitments etc.  This tends to take up most of the day and hence, the "casual" players tend to only be online in the evenings.  Fairly obvious but if you play during the day, you are going to be playing against relatively hardcore players who will have uber decks (relevant to mine).  I know this for a fact from playing during daytime at the weekends as well as playing it briefly once when I was off from work due to sick leave.

My advice - do something during the day.
:)

Play from mid-month onwards
This might sound odd but will make sense once you realise how the ranking system works.

The game actually starts you off at rank 25 and you have to work your way down from there (so rank 1 are the best players).  However, each "season" only lasts a month and at the end of the season, your rank is reset.  Not completely reset as you get a bonus based on the rank you achieved in the previous season (so I tend to start each month at rank 23).  What the reset means though is that at the lower levels at the start of the month, you are playing against people who should be at a higher level than you but aren't simply due to the rank reset each month.

By skipping the game at the start of the month, you avoid that group of higher level players and will have a more enjoyable time overall.


One last point to mention - even if you follow the above, you will still get owned on a semi-regular basis by people with amazing decks.  This is just a problem with the game community in that there are groups of people who should be high level players, but they actually deliberately delevel themselves so that they can play low level decks and pwn them.  This is actually a well known problem in the community but there is currently nothing that can be done about it.

On the plus side, a game doesn't take that long so even if you get destroyed, you can quickly get into another game.