Update 3:40 PM EST: Added ordered list of brawls by number of games played.
Tavern Brawls and Open Q&A - BlizzCon 2015 Live Panel Recap
Update 2:05 PM EST: The Tavern Brawls and Q&A Panel for Hearthstone at Day 2 of BlizzCon has ended. The recap is available below, we're working on getting it organized now.
The panel featured Mike Donais, Yong Woo, Ben Brode, and Pat Nagle (yes, that's his real name).
Quote from BlizzConTavern Brawls!
- Tavern Brawls are weekly content. Its there to give players variety between expansion launches.
- Tavern Brawls need to be fun. You want to keep playing because you love it.
- When they first discussed Tavern Brawls, they wanted to do a ranked ladder, including a legend rank.
- They didn't go with the ranked ladder so people don't feel pressured to play it for rewards but instead play it just because they want to.
- Build your own deck brawls are exciting for people who want to innovate since it changes the value of your collection.
- They've learned a lot from the pick your own class tavern brawls.
- A deck of just 30 minions wasn't very fun. Adding some random spells into the mix to fix that.
- All pick your class tavern brawls will use both minions and spells.
- Individual premade tavern brawls can appeal to different people and that's okay.
- They've released 21 brawls so far.
- The graph (see below) shows the amount of games played for each brawl.
- They will continue to improve upon brawls, including making new types.
- They've learned players like to really play with new cards with a new expansion launches, so they'll try to do stuff with the new cards when a new expansion launches, but maybe not all the time.
Individual Brawls
- Randomonium is the most popular brawl yet. But don't worry, they'll continue to innovate.
- They think Randomonium was the most popular because games were quick, you got to play with cards you may not have, and you can play strong stuff early on.
- People really like Encounter at the Crossroads because its helpful to complete class quests.
- The Webspinner brawl came into existence because of feedback during the Naxx adventure.
- Ragnaros vs Nefarian will be coming back next week. Nefarian will start with one less mana crystal.
- The Summoning Stone was created due to the popularity and fun of The Great Summoner's Competition.
- Summoning Stone was originally Shaman only, but it was more fun as Neutral.
- They tried to launch Captain Blackheart's Treasure a week ago to show off the Discover mechanic.
- This will launch is about 3 weeks.
The Mechazod Co-Op Brawl
- We saw the first co-op tavern brawl this week, they've received lots of great feedback for it.
- This was the most difficult brawl to create yet.
- They didn't have time to re-engineer the game to make the first co-op brawl very different from regular play, because they wanted to get it out this year.
- Thats why Mechazod floats between the sides of the board rather than having his own space.
- They tried many different placements for Mechazod.
- Middle of the board doesn't work, there's no room for it.
- They tried the center column, and players wouldn't be able to play minions there.. that was awkward.
- The top corner was also discussed.
- They didn't have all the things in place to stop things like Equality, Hunter's Mark against Mechazod, so they went with creating premade decks for the brawl.
- Premade decks promote working together with the synergy given to you. Really good for playing with friends.
- There are algorithms in place to make the brawl less random, but not entirely.
- For example, he won't just cast overclock every single turn, then he'd never attack.
- If Lorewalker stayed in played too long, the game got out of hand. That's why Lorewalker Cho dies after one turn to the Kill the Lorewalker card.
Q&A Period
- Yong Woo, Ben Brode, and Pat Nagle have now joined Mike Donais on stage.
- Pat Nagle works on Tavern Brawls!
- Ben Brode helps with content design and creative direction!
- Yong Woo is the producer. What does he do? He works with the team to figure out whats the most important for the team and works on their schedules to make sure stuff "happens correctly".
- They think a lot about randomness in the game and recent experiments with cards has taught them a lot.
- They like when you are guaranteed to get something via RNG, such as with Webspinner or Shredder.
- One of the concerns players have is with accessibility as the game ages.
- They have a designer on the team dedicated to new player experience.
- There is a special queue just for brand new accounts where they play only with other new players for a little bit.
- Tavern Brawls have been a nice way to give newer players more cards for their collections. It may be slow, but it's something to help.
- Uh oh, question about arena golden cards.
- Brode has been asking to see his collection's golden cards in the arena since forever.
- They're working on so many other awesome things, having your golden cards in the arena isn't something they've gotten to work on yet.
- "Lets get it done!" - Ben Brode 2015
- Having a chat with your opponent during a co-op tavern brawl when playing with a random person isn't something they're opposed to.
- They made the tavern brawl card pack reward from co-op require just playing the game instead of winning due to the communication issue.
- Maybe they can let you add each other as friends before the game begins.
- They like to create build around cards, especially when they encourage you to use weaker cards. Mysterious Challenger.
- They're watching Mysterious Challenger closely.
- Now with Patron Warrior out of the way, players can make decks to fight against secret paladin.
- They like the variety in having quests that progress at different rates.
- They try to split releasing content from releasing features to limit the risk with huge patches.
- They have a couple of patches planned before the content release after The League of Explorers.
- They don't think doing a baseline amount of certain tribes in each expansion is needed. Its more fun to mix it up.
- They will continue to explore new mechs.
- With the way the hearthstone service is setup, its difficult to have your collection travel with you.
- They really like the idea of tournaments in the game, but they aren't sure what exactly tournaments would be. They do talk about it though.
- They're working on deck slots.
- Brode wants to put some kind of marker on heroes which shows you have an active quest for them so you don't need to keep going back and forth to the quest log to confirm which quest(s) you have.
- Huge Toad - Name came from a QA analyst named Hugh Tod. Friend of Brode.
- They wanted to add more rewards of Classic Packs to help catch people up on the collection.
- Not a ton of super positive feedback with the arena pack reward, they're looking at it still.
- Having a variety of good options across the board for minions is important. They don't always just try to predict the meta when deciding to create new cards.
- Its possible they could create different ranked systems of play, but no current plans to announce.
- Yong Woo has threatened Ben Brode with beatings due to this comment.
- Digital-only can let them do a lot with formats, announcements soon, they're planning on radical stuff.
- Reno Jackson - There isn't a plan to have any kind of UI hint to show that you still have second copies of cards in your deck. They'll talk about it though.
- Alternate art scares them a bit. Art tells you what a card is right away. Heroes is a bit safer to do. They'll talk about promo cards more though.
Ben Brode on the Main Stage Stream
- They were brainstorming the idea behind The League of Explorers back in 2011.
- Chris Metzen had brought up The WoW faction Explorer's League and said they didn't receive a lot of love in WoW. The Hearthstone team saw an opportunity to use their previous brain storming to go with them as a theme.
- Legendary minions should be legendary. Elise Starseeker is no exception.
- They gave the artists time to do just whatever they wanted. One of the artists went all out on Elise and her tokens.
- Wing by wing, the new cards will make it into the arena. The drop rate of the new cards in arena will increased when the adventure is out to promote it.
- Ben was playing a Majordomo mage deck at the start of this season with Secrets, and dragons. He was knocked down to rank 20.
Brawls Ordered by Number of Games Played
Thanks to ShadowsOfSense for putting this together!
Blue - Pick Your Class
Green - Brawl Provides Deck
Orange - Build Your Own Deck
- ◼ Randomonium (Week 18)
- ◼ Encounter at the Crossroads (Week 11)
- ◼ Too Many Portals! (Week 14)
- ◼ Showdown At Blackrock Mountain (Week 1)
- ◼ Encounter at the Crossroads (Week 5)
- ◼ Heart of the Sunwell (Week 6)
- ◼ Too Many Portals! (Week 7)
- ◼ The Great Summoner Competition (Week 4)
- ◼ The Great Summoner Competition (Week 9)
- ◼ Grand Tournament Match (Week 10)
- ◼ It's Raining Mana (Week 12)
- ◼ Who's the Boss Now? (Week 19)
- ◼ Double Deathrattler Battler (Week 13)
- ◼ Boom Bot vs Annoy-o-Tron (Week 16)
- ◼ Spiders, Spiders EVERYWHERE! (Week 3)
- ◼ Underdog Rules (Week 15)
- ◼ Clockwork Card Dealer (Week 17)
- ◼ The Masked Ball (Week 8)
- ◼ Banana Brawl! (Week 2)
So let me get this straight.. No one at the Q&A asked anything as far as Arena? I highly doubt that
I'm a bit surprised no one asked about Alternative Heroes. When will we see the rest of them? 'll be honest, I thought they would introduce them in a more rapid succession and more than one alt per hero. Not something that interests everyone but it interests me.
Something that surprises me even more and makes me a bit annoyed, is the forced pay gate to watch this Live. They are speaking out to the community(based on your feedback/time) and promoting there commercial/PR at the same time. Closing the door on the majority of that peer just makes me feel sick to the gut. It all becomes a "pre-order for early access" and spread the word for views kind of a deal. Statistics and feedback everyone has helped them with, with there time. This is how you get repaid. Yuuuuuk!
Perhaps most people won't agree to that but I'm to old to be quite and not recognize for what it is, in all honesty, it's shameful behavior and mildly insulting.
I too was surprised there wasn't a question about Alternate Heroes. It's not something I'm personally interested in, but I know a lot of people are interested in seeing what their favourite class will get.
In regards to the 'paying to watch live' aspect, I don't see it as anything particularly nefarious. Everyone has access to the information at the time, via sites such as this, and I believe that videos become available to everyone further down the line (I could be wrong on that, I wouldn't argue that point).
I don't see how it's any different than giving an interview to a magazine - then only people who bought the magazine get the direct information, everyone else has to get it from other sources. The purchase of the ticket - for a lot of people - is more about the in-game rewards associated with it, rather than the ability to get information directly from the source. I know that I would prefer to get the news from another source, who has had time to collate all the important and interesting information, and cut out all the uhms and ahs and nervous pauses.
Yes I understand your point, but in this case, the source is you, me and everyone else who plays the game, put there time into it. The same people that is the sole reason the game is alive, the same people that do there best to bring attention to matter that will improve the game. People that spend money to keep the game growing. The people who create content for the game and entertain millions of people.
And what happens, how did Blizzard say thank you and every one for doing all that...
When they(Blizzard) do the yearly feedback that (again) you, me and everyone has provided and help with in more ways than a 1000 ways, instead giving us the option to share that with them(live, be in the moment), they want you to pay them for it. Something that has been paid by everyone time and loyalty a billion times over.
I'm sorry, I can't get behind that. I can't defend a company for doing that.
Now I'm not targeting this reply towards you only, it's just the plain lineup on why I think it's shameful.
- Just to edit and make it clear: I understand it's there company, there show and they can do what ever they want. I personally however, don't want to accept/and don't that there decision. No one needs to agree with me, but now it has been said.
I love the Blizzard graph. X- and Y-axises not labeled. Classic.
I do agree though, I first looked at it and was like, "Ok, pretty colours. Why is one column two colours? What?". Looking into it, that was the week we accidentally received 'Showdown at Blackrock Mountain' again for the first few hours instead of the repeated 'Too Many Portals', but there was no way to know that. Silly Blizzard and their silly graphs.
"
THIS
when a developer is at the worst rank in the game.. it';s like a rioter be bronze 5 in league.. wth
Because hitting rank 20 at the start of a season due to playing a deck you could consider fun is against the law.
Yeah...
Say what you will about him, but Ben Brode is not the sole designer on the team, and you do not under any circumstances need to be a top tier ultra-uber-legendz0rzzzz player to build a game.
I guess it was fun. Where is the decklist ?
They can always push back to other stuff that they're working on for HS, and get this thing sorted out, but we all know that that's not gonna happen, since it's not gonna earn them as much money as the way the system is set up right now. They could have done this for other games as well, but why bother, when you can earn more money by forcing people to have a new set of items/characters/cards for different regions.
No news about new heroes like DK and Monk. What a disappointment.
They will never have perfect balance and never had. At least they could provide more content, including heroes.
This is the only promising thing but they've mentioned it before and I'm already prepared to be underwhelmed. It doesn't seem that they are willing to tinker with the game too much.
>Alternate art scares them a bit. Art tells you what a card is right away. Heroes is a bit safer to do. They'll talk about promo cards more though.
They should maybe add emotes and art for basic heroes (like Uther ect) unlockable via levels and such... No idea why that stat is even in the game. It's also really boring after getting 500 wins. There's nothing to work for. Also an option to just use the animation of golden cards without the gold would be nice (and being able to turn of your golden hero).
were can i go back and watch blizzcon? I want to see most of it but mainly the hearthstone portion(not the championships though)
Nothing about warriors in arena? Nothing bout new Hero Skins?! No news about more deckslots?! Disappointed I am.