

I’ve spoken to some people about it, and seen comments online, that this problem wouldn’t effect official Hearthstone events (because Blizzard surely wouldn’t do that), but 1) that still sucks for all the smaller events and 2) even this very first time they’ve done this, it impacted a fairly big-deal event (the WSOE 2 Hearthstone Showdown–a large invitation-only, women/non-binary-only tournament featuring notable professionals and personalities, and many of the “premier” casters, and which had been promoted by the Blizzard on official channels), so I’m not sure where the line for “official” is drawn, or even if we could expect it to be respected. That adds a ton of extra stress (and cost) to your partners, and hurts the integrity of the game as an esport, so I’m not a fan. Clearly, the intention is to remove as much of that “lame duck” period between nerf announcement and implementation that many players hate, but it comes at the cost of destabilizing the entire tournament scene because now every single player and tournament organizer will always have to have some sort of contingency plan for what happens in the event that the cards are different tomorrow than they are today.

It is massively uncharacteristic and something that the team is definitely experimenting with. The (almost complete lack of) time between announcement and implementation would have caught me by even bigger surprise were I not sleeping through most of it. Logically, it seems like it makes more sense to talk about the former and then the latter, but I wrote this whole thing out and found that it read more easily to hit the shorter topic first, so… There are two distinct issues of timing with this nerf announcement and implementation: 1) the timing of the nerf within the expansion cycle and 2) the (incredibly short) time between announcement and implementation. They did a few new things here, and specifically asked for our input on it, so I’m going to devote a lot of words to it.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this nerf announcement and implementation is the timing of it all.
SPELLHUNTER DECK HEARTHSTONE BRAWLISEUM PATCH
In fact, the nerfs went live early in the day as well, so I barely even saw the announcement before I saw that the patch was live! I have had a chance to read the announcement, though, so let’s talk about it. It was a terrible mistake because mere minutes after I must have put my phone down, Hearthstone dropped a bombshell on us ( link)! There were to be nerfs to several meta-defining cards, and the nerfs were going live tomorrow.

It actually became a bit of a problem, so two nights ago I made the conscientious decision not to pick up my phone after I washed up and got into bed. That has led to increased caffeine intake just to make it through the workday which, in turn, has led to further issues sleeping. Most recent nights, though, I’m not “good.” Instead, I usually spend half an hour to an hour on my phone (bad sleep hygiene!), playing one of my various phone games and/or browsing Twitter for an hour or longer past my self-imposed bedtime. When I’m being good, I get into bed at around 10 or 10:30, kiss my wife goodnight, and immediately try to go to sleep.
