by OtakuMZ - 8 years ago     show comments

This week, two of G2Esports‘ Hearthstone players, namely Lifecoach and RDU, released very interesting content which may lead to a more competitively interesting future Hearthstone.

Lifecoach – Helping to improve the next expansion

Lifecoach released the above-linked video this week. Because it is in German, I will give you a summary of the main points he talked about which I mostly grabbed from VdeVenancio’s Reddit post.

Translation of the main points [slightly altered by me to be more accurate] which was originally grabbed from a youtube comment:

• Lifecoach was tilted increasingly often during his streams while playing HS within the last year. Mostly because of the fun mechanic we call RNG. That‘s why he sometimes stopped playing.
• He offered Blizzard to help altering the next expansion and fix the metagame for competitive play. Blizzard accepted! They invited him to Blizzard HQ for 1 week. Lifecoach also offered not play competitively in the beginning of this expansion/new meta to not have an unfair advantage. He hopes that Blizz will listen to him and implement his ideas to fix competitive Hearthstone instead of focusing on “fun game mechanic” aka. RNG.
• Apart from that, he is thinking about his future … Lifecoach did “Life-Coaching” during his stream in German, and people really liked it. He will probably do a cluster (90-105 min) of real life coaching in German, during his stream every day. The viewers will choose the topics out of three he comes up with.

What I found most interesting is that Blizzard accepted. I am so glad they did. Lifecoach is one of the most analytic Hearthstone players and I think he will be more than capable of helping to identify and fix problematic Hearthstone mechanics and cards. I already started to pray (and praise Yogg) that they will listen. Well done Lifecoach, I love you for doing this for us all!

RDU – New tournament format: Destiny

RDU imagines a new tournament format to play Hearthstone, which should fix the problems that we know from either “Conquest” or “Last Hero Standing”. His ideas for his “Destiny” format look really interesting. I will give a short summary of what this tournament format:

• Every player brings 3 decks of three different classes
• No decks get banned

• 3 vs 3 decks means there are 9 possible matchups
• Every player will be able to ban two matchups, bans are made alternating between players

Matchups played are chosen according to the following rules:

• The higher seeded player chooses the first matchup played
• After that, the losing player chooses the next matchup
• The first player to achieve 3 wins takes the round

I think his ideas are great, and he is on the right path. I am no ambitious tournament player myself and no one that is able to plot in-depth tournament strategies, but his arguments seem very reasonable and promising. His proposed format offers more in the aspect of strategy than the actual Conquest format, that’s for sure. The actual strategy of most pro players is to queue randomly for not being able to be countered. It IS in line with Blizzard’s emphasis on RNG, but a more strategic approach should reward players that understand the matchups and their strengths / weaknesses and not punish them for being predictable.