One of the videogames I still play regularly is Hearthstone, and one of the things that keeps me playing is the friends I have made there.
This is partly by the design of the game itself, that there are quests which reward having friends who also play – notably “Watch and Learn”, which grants a card pack for spectating a friend win a match, and “Play a Friend”. which gives you and the friend 80 gold for playing together (regardless of who wins).
I play Hearthstone on all three servers: North America, Europe, Asia; and often encounter interesting language quirks from my friends on the latter, many of whom don’t speak very much English in their daily lives but still make a sterling effort when we chat in-game.
Today I had the double whammy of “Watch and Learn” + “Play a Friend” in my questbook so watched my friend 夜黎 trash a Priest opponent in Wild with a Warlock deck I had never seen before. 夜黎 won by putting multiple Mal’Ganises into the hand over the course of the match and then outground the opponent by casting them one after another late in the game until the adversary had simply run out of removal and died to the powerful demon.
After watching the match and winning my pack, I snuck in to challenge 夜黎 so we could both get our 80G from my other quest. We played a quick game and chatted thus:
My “<3” is a fairly well-known shorthand for a heart symbol ❤️, but what about “3Q”? I had no idea!
But then I remembered that 3 is “san” and so naturally “3Q” = “thank you”.
A bit of research reveals there are different forms, varying in crypticness:
3Q or 三Q or 39 or サンキュー or さんきゅう
“san kyū”
thank you
I wonder how to pronounce 夜黎’s name? It could be Chinese or could be Japanese. I will ask them when I next see them online! 🙂
Annotranslate 
Finally a post not about the micro-seasons (: While those posts are cool, since I know little about them micro-seasons it’s hard to chime in with any real content.
Hearthstone is great, I used to play it sometime back and was so into it I actually wrote a Hearthstone simulator for the iOS platform. It was on the Apple store until Apple decided they didn’t want it on there anymore. Was a really cool programming project though!
Nowadays the main game I am into is Starcraft 2, which is by the same company.
By the way, 黎 is a pretty kanji, but since it does seem to be used in Japanese (as 黎明), I’m guessing that is a Japanese name.
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Hahaha yes sorry about the Microseason spam! They’re supposed to be interspersed with the meatier content but I’ve been so busy it’s been almost only Microseasons for months! On the plus side, many of my readers really like them (they’re accessible to people who don’t know much about Japanese language!) and find the other entries have a bit too much of a barrier.
That is super cool you wrote a Hearthstone simulator. Amazing!
What race do you place in Starcraft? (My guess: Protoss, but maybe Terran. I’d be surprised if you play Zerg though I don’t know why.) I love that game too but I absolutely suck at PvP. Big fan of the coop mode though. I’m a super casual scrub XD One day I will have time to learn PvP properly.
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Back in the ‘old days’ I used to play only Terran.
Now I play only Zerg. I like massing a lot of units but I more than anything I enjoy creating all units from a single location. Makes hotkeys easy!
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