If there is one thing I have to give Blizzard props for, is the uncanny knack for failing in baffling ways.

Hearthstone’s latest expansion, The Lost City of Un’Goro, is a massive flop. Well, at least in a “cards useful in the metagame standpoint.” I imagine that, sadly, selling $158 gamble pets is keeping more lights on than it morally should. Anyway, in the latest patch notes, the Hearthstone devs just throw in the towel:

We understand that many of you were hoping for bigger changes. We’ve seen a lot of feedback about the strong neutral package of Fyrakk, Elise, Naralex, and Ysera, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on them moving forward. We’ve also continued to hear suggestions to buff nearly every new Quest so they become competitive archetypes. However, as we’ve shared before, too many competitive Quests in the long term can lead to a metagame that isn’t fun or healthy.

More broadly, we believe future expansions are a better place to bring community feedback to life than trying to overhaul the current set through balance patches. We fell short of our goal of introducing enough new competitive options this expansion. As we look ahead to the next expansion and beyond, we’re keeping your response to this set in mind and are using it to help shape the future of Hearthstone.

In case you are unaware, the Hearthstone devs chose to bring Quest cards back. As in, they created 11 Legendary cards, put them into digital packs, and then sold them in FOMO $50/$80 bundles. Now, I understand the notion of “pack filler” and such in CCGs… but it still boggles my mind that they reintroduced an entire archetype (presumably for nostalgia reasons) despite wanting it to be non-competitive from the start. This is on top of the overall “toning down” of the power level of the last few sets, leading to goddamn Wisp being a core card in the current meta.

A lot of people express concern about power creep, e.g. the tendency of devs to make new stuff stronger than existing stuff. While that is a problem, it’s more of a conceptual one rather than real. This is because, fundamentally, both the devs and players want the same thing: to play with new cards. If the new sets are weak, players get stuck playing with the old cards. Nevermind all the people who got scammed spending real money buying the new cards the devs intentionally designed to be bad.

I’m over here struggling to come up with equivalent comparisons capable of highlighting exactly how dumb the situation is. An MMO expansion featuring worse gear than what players already had? Or maybe a new talent tree that is worse at healing/tanking/DPS than what existed before? I could still imagine some people wanting such an expansion simply for the story and new playstyle, so it does not quite fit the situation with Hearthstone. Competition against other players is the only thing you got in terms of content. So, even if you wanted to experience new deck archetypes, the result is that you will just lose. Badly. Some of these new decks had winrates in the 20-30% range.

I really have to hand it to Blizzard though. What other company can fail this spectacularly, so many times in a row, and still have the audacity to put out $158 cosmetics?

Perhaps it’s really just us players that are dumb.