Has my gaming changed over the years?

I was sitting here thinking about a question that a podcaster asked for their show recently and how I was going to answer it as they posted that the show was being recorded. Specifically I’m talking about The Nexy Show an MMO gaming podcast and the question was, “Has your gaming changed over the years? Interests and/or values? If so, why?” and since I did not get to share my answer for that show I am writing it.

Analysis of Argument: Developers Think Minority Players are 'Worthless'

On Friday an article made waves through the WoW themed twitter bases and as always I play catch up to these things because I follow the very edges of this community having only really concerned myself with gold making while I was in the game.  The article in question is obviously Polygon’s opinion piece Erasing your audience isn't 'fun' written by Todd Harper. In the article he is described as an MIT researcher in their Game Lab specializing in eSports and queer/gender representation in games. 

When I was going through the article and organizing what I thought about this it became clear that I needed to separate my thoughts (and now by extension my post) into my analysis of points and arguments brought up in the source piece and then distant from that decide how I think this subject matter in general affects games and ‘gaming culture’ so bear with me as I first break down the article and then ramble through a much more generalized opinion maybe later. 

Hearthstone - Open Beta Thoughts

 I did a post after just a few weeks in Hearthstone back at the beginning of the Beta over at Cold’s Gold Factory: Play HearthstoneOverview & First Thoughts and now that we are in Open Beta I wanted to close out my thoughts. What have they been doing right, how I think the opening will do, and other random musings? 

I did a post for beginners back in October (Hearthstone:Philosophy for Beginners) that may be of some use as the advice is relevant even if the cards or the ‘meta’ [means what is popular right now] have changed. This post now will not be a preparation style post or anything for the new players coming into Hearthstone.

Once Open Beta started I got my wife to run through “Day One” activities on her Battle.net account getting a perspective from a non-gamer. My views on the tutorial and mode layouts remain mostly unchanged. The tutorial is adequate only lacking in areas such as targeting (hitting the wrong thing with damage or a buff is common for beginners) and had enough ‘story’ elements to it to keep interest. Of course Ranked mode in proper has been added to the game now and while there are no direct rewards for what rank you reach, there is at least an incentive built into the system to continue playing and the effectiveness of these little ‘carrots’ (ranking up) cannot be understated. 

Continued after break..