Famaze is a dungeoncrawling RPG with a 16-bit pixel art style. You play as a hero looking to save the rutabaga people from the Mad King, who intends to make them into pudding! Also, they're currently turned into monsters and live in dungeons for some reason.
I often criticize Blizzard for botched releases, game imbalance and bugs... but today it's time to show some gratitude. As the above video (from Disguised Toast) shows, Blizz has been working to fix bugs and remove inconsistencies in Hearthstone these last couple of weeks. I didn't even realize some of the cards have been reworded to accurately depict the timing of their effects.
In addition, I want to say just how impressed I was with last week's Tavern Brawl - Decks Assemble! While I'm sure a lot of players were confused by the game, any fans of the deckbuilder genre were able to pick it up quite easily, and it was pretty neat. From a programming standpoint, I'm fairly certain that Brawl was one of the hardest to set up. It turned Hearthstone gameplay on its ear, and even cards with potentially problematic effects (like Emperor Thaurissan) worked fairly well. Also, I have to imagine Blizzard had to set up stronger/more servers to handle the craziness of multiple Lorewalker Chos and Nozdormus all in one game!
Kudos, Blizzard, for listening to your audience and putting in a strong effort to keep Hearthstone fun, bug-free, intuitive and fresh!
I wanted to share this video to provide some insight to new players and to show my support for fixing the inconsistencies found within Hearthstone.
As a (former) player that saw numerous text/timing/rule changes to Magic: the Gathering cards over the years, I remember the hassle of having to keep current with the new interactions of older cards. At one point, the errata/rulings for Clone (the MtG equivalent of Faceless Manipulator) was three pages long!
As a digital game, Hearthstone doesn't have to carry the baggage of errata that comes with printed cards. As the video above plainly states, many of the inconsistent cards need only a minor text rewording without having to change how they currently function.
When it comes to competitive games with numerous interactions and pieces, it's important to accurately express (as much as possible) what each individual piece does. Consistent wording on the cards allows players to better understand how those cards interact and helps to avoid confusion.
Numerous games have experienced the growing pains of rule changes, errata, and new interactions compounded by the game's growing popularity. It's important for the health of the game to periodically address these issues. In the case of printed products, this takes the form of anything from occasional rule/errata update write-ups to entire reprints or new editions of the game. Thankfully, the digital medium doesn't have to deal with that mess and can typically do text clean-up with little trouble.
Here's to hoping that Blizzard will take advantage of the opportunity to easily improve Hearthstone's long-term success. It may seem like a minor issue, but in the long run it will be worth it.
