Tokyo: Being coveted by my wife, I just want to play games

Chapter 438 Armed to the teeth!
The response in the live broadcast room was very enthusiastic.

After drawing several out-of-print hero Q-version characters, the so-called [first batch of skins for the public beta], Futaba Koyama, who was lying in the arms of Toru Fuyukawa, began to build a deck under the watchful eyes of countless fans in the live broadcast room. The first deck she wanted to build was the Explosive Rogue.

It must be said that although Futaba Koyama looks cute, her gaming style is actually not as gentle as those ordinary girls. Her gaming style is very aggressive.

For example, in "World of Warcraft", Futaba Koyama is still the guild leader of "Fuyukawa Family's Nest".

When "World of Warcraft" was first released and the whole family was relatively relaxed, both Fuyukawa Tetsu and Miyano Mitsuko and the others, under the leadership of team leader Koyama Futaba, conquered the Molten Core dungeon. At that time, they played the dungeon every night until one or two in the morning.

What’s even more interesting is that Miyano Mitsuko, Sato Fujiko and Ohara Chika, they did not enter the game industry because they like playing games. For example, Sato Fujiko, she studied law in college and joined SATE in the legal department. It was only later due to a series of coincidences that she eventually became one of the heads of SATE’s game department.

Therefore, it is definitely not true that the mature beauties like Miyano Mitsuba hate games. But it is also definitely not true that they are proficient in games and have sharp skills. In fact, because of the heavy workload, their gaming skills are not as good as those of some female college students who play games every day.

That was why, when the [Fuyukawa Family's Nest] guild was pioneering the Big Screw, Miyano Mion and the others were often bullied by Koyama Futaba.

The "little maid" who usually feels wronged at home, directly turned over and sang. And it's different from usual times. If it were usual times, when Futaba Koyama chirped a few words, Miyano Mitsuba and the others would glare at her, and this E-cup loli would be timid, but when playing games, the stubborn side of her character that was usually hidden was exposed.

Of course, the result is usually that Futaba Koyama is subjected to a back cross armbar by the angry Miyano Mite and the others, but it is obvious that Futaba Koyama is indeed much more active than usual when playing the game, and she is not the kind of player who likes to follow the rules.

Therefore, the deck she is currently building in Hearthstone is also a rather [weird] deck - the Explosive Rogue.

Explosive thief.

This Rogue deck was not the first card to appear in the original Hearthstone. However.
On the one hand, the first version of Hearthstone’s decks were not very interesting and were not as good as Yu-Gi-Oh! Hearthstone only reached its peak after the Naxxramas version with Noah’sb and the Goblins vs. Gnomes version with Dr. Boom.

The mistakes of the past are lessons for the future.

Dong Chuanche didn't need to go through the pitfalls that Blizzard had gone through, but should take the essence and discard the dross and directly enter the more interesting version.

On the other hand
The changes he made to Hearthstone this time are actually quite big.

Not only did he change the profit mechanism from card drawing to monthly card, he also made a lot of adjustments to the gameplay.

The original Hearthstone was indeed considered the world's top game in those peak versions. But to be honest, Hearthstone is indeed a game with many shortcomings. One of the more obvious shortcomings is that the card decks and gameplay of each version are somewhat fixed.

For example, in the T7 Hunter and Slave Warrior versions, after reaching rank 10, you basically don’t see many decks from other professions. And if the decks of players are too homogeneous, the gameplay will change from a game of ideas to a game of luck.

It is not a good thing that luck dominates the player's gaming experience.

The most typical example is LOL.

Why did LOL's popularity decline later?

The game has been open for too long, and has been in operation for too long, and has passed its prime. On the other hand, there may be some problems with League of Legends' game mechanics and matching mechanics.

Because LOL aims to be an e-sports game, the development team has been strengthening the linkage between heroes and the cooperation between players.

To put it simply, the development team of LOL is weakening individual heroism and has been avoiding the emergence of heroes who can beat several opponents at once when the gap in technical ability is not too big.

This is actually one of the reasons why LOL e-sports is more popular than DOTA.

DOTA is not DOTA2.

The gameplay of DOTA also has some shadows of the RPG maps of Warcraft 3. Many heroes reach the late stage and have complete equipment, so it is a no-brainer to fight five at once, such as Spectre's Radiance at 18 points, or Phantom Assassin's six-piece set of equipment.

Generally speaking, in DOTA at that time, as long as these late-stage heroes had complete equipment, they could truly turn the tide. No matter how bad their teammates were, they could lead them to victory by themselves. But LOL is different.

Unless there is a huge gap in strength between a King and a Gold or a King and a Silver. Generally speaking, in a situation where the other four teammates are all collapsed, no matter how well one of them develops, he cannot win the game.

Admittedly, this setting optimizes the game balance, emphasizes the teamwork of the game, and raises the upper limit of the benefits brought by game operations, making professional e-sports competitions look more interesting, at least more interesting than professional competitions of other similar competitive games.

This cannot be denied. After all, the LOL professional league is the most popular professional league in the world, and the facts are before us.

but
Under these settings, the experience of ordinary players becomes weaker.

The reason is very simple. Anyone who has played LOL has probably encountered a situation where the opponent has been killed on their own lane, but the opponent comes to their teammates to withdraw money, and then their own teammates also play randomly in team fights.

In this case, even if you kill your opponent, you still can't win the game.

Because in order to make e-sports competitions more interesting, LOL has strengthened the importance of teamwork and emphasized the balance of the game. This means that unless the level gap is as big as that between gold and king, and teammates are willing to listen to commands in the middle and late stages and want to win, and don't play around, it is really difficult for one person to lead the team to victory. At this time, the game becomes [it's better to rank well than to play well].

Carefully looking at the lineup to choose heroes, concentrating on the laning phase, etc., is not as good as the system matching two normal brains and teammates with strength that can belong to this segment. Once this phenomenon is noticed by players, the enthusiasm of players will be greatly hit.

The same is true for Hearthstone.

In the original Hearthstone, there are only a few strong decks in each version. After reaching level 10, if you want to move up, it mainly depends on time, or in other words, time and luck.

There's nothing you can do about it, Hearthstone relies too much on luck.

When late-game decks encounter a fast-attack deck, if they fail to grab key board-clearing cards in the early stages, they will have no room to maneuver and can only watch their opponents kick them to death.

Similarly, when a fast-attack deck meets a fast-attack deck, there is often not much negotiation involved; it just depends on who can grab the key card.

Of course, Dongchuan Che did not deny that there were players who relied entirely on their own intelligence to defeat their opponents and reached the legendary level with a win rate of 60 to 70 or even 70 to 80 percent.
The number of such players is very, very small.

Just like not everyone has a talent for reading, not everyone has a talent for playing games.

In the past, those famous professional e-sports players were able to reach the top after just one or two months of playing the game. But among ordinary players, how many people can reach the top in just one or two months?
To put it bluntly, many people who have played League of Legends for more than ten years may not even know what the diamond ranking interface looks like.
This is the scarcity of talent. Although Dongchuan Che is preparing to organize some Hearthstone competitions, he is not planning to make Hearthstone the main e-sports competition. Therefore, the group he pays the most attention to is naturally the majority of ordinary players who are not talented enough to play professionally.

He hopes to provide this type of players with a better gaming experience, and one of the changes to improve the gaming experience is to add more deck styles.

Why has Hearthstone become a game based on luck?
One of the big reasons is that there are only two or three strong decks in each version of Hearthstone.

After reaching the 10th level of the ladder, which is comparable to the gold segment of League of Legends, the enemies you encounter will always have the same few very strong decks. Fixed decks represent fixed weaknesses, and fixed weaknesses mean that players know clearly how to deal with these decks. At this time, the factor that determines the outcome of the game has changed from a brain game to a luck game.

If the key cards come faster than the opponent, you can defeat him.

If the key card sinks to the bottom, it’s GG.

To be honest, Dongchuan Che can't solve this problem itself. Random card drawing is the core element of card games like "Hearthstone Legend", and he can't change it, but.
Another core element that leads to the situation where luck is more important than thinking and gambling is that there are relatively few deck routines in each version of the original Hearthstone.

There are only a few fixed decks, and when you encounter those fixed decks, you have to draw certain cards at certain stages. It is the rigidity of the decks, plus the element of luck, that leads to the boredom and frustration of ordinary players when they are on the ladder.

Although he cannot change the mechanism of random card drawing, he can optimize the game experience of players by increasing the deck routines and reducing the probability of players encountering a single deck. In this regard, he has a much greater advantage than the original production team of Hearthstone.

There is no other reason, just that he has money and connections.

The original Hearthstone project was launched in 2008, and from the launch to the end of the internal test, the Hearthstone development team had only 15 members. In fact, in the early days of the project, due to some problems within Blizzard, the number of people on the project was reduced to only two.
It must be said that Blizzard was indeed full of elite soldiers and generals. The development team of Hearthstone was so popular, but it was developed by such a small number of people, and it was really completed. However.
On the one hand, this shows that Blizzard had a lot of top talents at that time, but on the other hand, the production team was too small and did have irreparable defects in some aspects, such as the size of the content and the balance of the game.

In other words, these two questions are one and the same.

Hearthstone is, strictly speaking, also a competitive game.

The most important thing for competitive games is to balance the gameplay and data. The more game content there is, the harder it is to balance it. There is too much data that is cross-collected. This requires not only more staff, but also top talents.

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This is actually one of the reasons why there are only a few powerful decks in each version of the original Hearthstone.

They couldn't design more decks during the internal test, because adding a deck would require the entire system to make data adjustments, which was too much work.
To be honest, Hearthstone was the mainstay of Blizzard during its heyday, and the production team was not short of people or money. But this involves the behavior of large companies and the corporate system of Activision Blizzard.

Generally speaking, large non-investment enterprises will not rush to do things that are too risky because they already have sufficient financial resources. When a project can make money, they will not blindly make drastic reforms to the project, but will follow the existing successful path and make various fine-tuning to extend the life of the project as much as possible.

This is probably most evident in the film and television industry.

For example, the Marvel movies are basically the same old story. The names and abilities of the heroes may change, the content of the story may change, but the narrative structure of the entire movie is basically the same - [normal life → encountering a low point → gaining spiritual salvation → saving XXX, and then returning to a happy life].

There may be some minor changes, but overall, the structure is still basically the same.

Of course, there are some exceptions, such as "Joker".

The narrative structure of the movie "Joker" is different from other superhero movies, and the overall tone of the story is darker and more serious. However, the production cost of "Joker" is less than 60 million US dollars.

Compared with other superhero movies, this production cost is very low.

Obviously, large companies are willing to try some changes, but when it comes to changes with greater impacts, there will be greater internal resistance, and the most direct manifestation of this resistance is financial caution.

At the same time, Activision Blizzard is a listed company, which was wholly acquired by Microsoft for $687 billion in its previous life. To put it bluntly, Activision Blizzard in its previous life was richer than Dongchuan Che is now, but the problem still remains - the president and CEO of a listed company must be responsible to the board of directors and shareholders, and in this case, the strategic planning of most listed companies will become more conservative and cautious.

In fact, these two points are strictly speaking the same as the feudal dynasties of China.

Most feudal dynasties had famous radical reformers, but generally speaking, such reforms were more likely to succeed only in the early stages of the dynasty.

This is not only because the ruling class in the early days of the dynasty were all the best of the best who emerged from the competition with a high elimination rate, but also because in the early stages of the dynasty, the dynasty generally had not yet established a way to obtain stable benefits.

After a dynasty has been established for a hundred or so years and stable interest groups and channels for obtaining stable benefits have been formed, there are basically no successful cases of reform.

The essence of this is that mature large-scale [enterprises] already have sufficient profits. They are not the kind of small companies that cannot survive unless they take a gamble and change themselves. Therefore, their internal interest groups are prone to lack of motivation when making large-scale changes.

Therefore, if the original Hearthstone had received a lot of manpower and funds from the company before the internal test, it might have achieved greater success. And when Hearthstone became popular, the development path of this game was basically determined.

Unless the game is about to fail, Blizzard is unlikely to make drastic reforms to Hearthstone, that is, keeping the core gameplay unchanged while constantly introducing new elements to extend the product's life cycle.

That is why each later version of Hearthstone is basically the same as the early version, with only a few decks fighting each other, and no major expansion of the gameplay in this regard. Because the early success has proved that players can accept this game mode. But he is different.

Although men over thirty are naturally less ambitious than they were in their early twenties,
He, Dongchuan Che, is somewhat of a perfectionist.

Since he saw the problems of the original Hearthstone and could bear the consequences of failure, he was still willing to try to make some changes. And this "little change" of his.
Let's put it this way, the core members of the development team of Hearthstone of the Holy Light Society have more than 200 people! In addition to being a professional game numerical designer, he also has in-depth cooperation with the economics field of the University of Tokyo!

Yes, many economics professors at the University of Tokyo are nominal consultants to the Holy Light Society!

When he was making World of Warcraft, in order to make it appear more realistic and to make all kinds of life professions attractive to players, unlike in his previous life where the entire economic system of the game collapsed, Dongchuan Che had some in-depth communication with the president of Tokyo University when he went to Tokyo University to attend the recruitment meeting during graduation season the spring before last.

Since then, not only have many economics professors from the University of Tokyo come to join the Holy Light Society, but a [Game Economic Environment and Numerical Balance Research Society] composed of students majoring in economics has also been established within the University of Tokyo.

This club mainly studies how to stabilize the economic system within the game and how to stabilize the numerical balance within the game.

Clubs are common in Japanese universities, but this club is different.

Every quarter, Chika Ohara, who is an economist, meets with the members of the club for an afternoon chat. If a meaningful paper or idea is born in the club, the entire club will receive a bonus of 20,000 to 500,000 US dollars!
This amount will be distributed according to the amount of contribution, at the same time!
The best among them will be directly selected by the Holy Light Society. If the students are willing, the Holy Light Society will directly recruit them as full-time employees and allow the students to work part-time while studying, but their wages will not be reduced!

This is a huge temptation!
Not to mention the $20,000 to $500,000 bonus, which is tempting enough. After all, for those social elites who have worked in a certain industry for more than ten years after graduating from the University of Tokyo, $500,000 may not be a huge sum, but for those students who are still studying and rely on their parents for support, it is an astronomical figure!
What's more, you can directly become an employee of the Holy Light Society!

Shengguang Society offers high welfare, high salary and high performance-based profit sharing. At the same time, it allows employees to independently set up studios within the company after they have a certain amount of experience. The company will give priority to investment review qualifications!

All of this is world-famous. Now, except for those students who have a good family background, have already arranged a job, or do not want to have too much pressure in the work, which student studying game-related industries does not want to join the Holy Light Society? !

That’s why the [Game Economic Environment and Numerical Balance Research Club] immediately ignited the students’ emotions when it was first established! And what’s interesting is that it’s not just the University of Tokyo. Ohara Chika graduated from Waseda University, and Yuezhu Asuka graduated from Kyoto University. Some relevant school leaders from these schools also contacted them through their connections.

In fact, because the Holy Light Society recruits new members from major universities around the world every year, last year some students from Harvard approached the Holy Light Society staff during the recruitment process and said that they hoped to establish such a club in their school!

Of course, bonuses and employment offers and other benefits are also desirable.

Dong Chuan Che naturally had no reason to refuse such a good thing. After all, few smart bosses would dislike having more talents. As for the hundreds of thousands of bonuses,
To put it in a more exaggerated way, if he took out any of the famous watches in his cloakroom and sold them, it would be enough to pay scholarships to famous universities around the world for more than ten years.
To put it bluntly, although the market valuation of Dongchuan Che is not as strong as the 70 billion US dollars of Activision Blizzard, a listed company, he actually has more cash flow and more power. At the same time, he also has more talent reserves!
In this case, Hearthstone can be said to be armed to the teeth by him!

(End of this chapter)