Yong Woo and Ben Brode on the Designer Insights Video Series
There's been some talk lately, which grew from the Hearthstone 2017 Wishlist question, about wanting to see more of the Designer Insights video series and why they haven't happened very much. That lead to an explanation of why they aren't done very often and we've summarized it below.
- The team wants to do more designer insight videos.
- Ben does the videos at home in off hours due to not having a good spot at the office to do them at.
- It isn't as simple as talking to a camera for a few minutes.
- Videos go through multiple takes, and then some more after the team provides feedback. It can take days to get one episode right.
- They are working on getting space that is a permanent setup for this type of content.
- More developers being on them could happen, though some don't want to be harassed by the community.
I really don't like to make articles here personal, but the final point is one of much importance. We've gotten to an interesting point where we want more of something but due to the toxic nature of many comments directed at the Hearthstone team, no one from the team wants to come out and talk and it's actually not very interesting at all, just sad.
Although you may not agree with certain philosophies that the team may have about the game, it is important to post with respect and stay constructive. We should be welcoming communication first and foremost, so let's make that more of a priority this year and not feed those who want to cast plagues upon the creators. On the moderation side we can only do so much since we're only one site of many within the community, but as a whole, we need to stop letting the really toxic posts stew.
Anyway, back the to regular scheduled programming of the sources for this post. Oh, and if you want to vent a bit about not being able to win games, we've got our group therapy thread.
Blue Posts
This conversation has taken place over Twitter and reddit.
Tweet to Yong Woo
The initial question was posed by @Spideraxe30 wondering if they'd consider doing more.
Quote from Yong WooHas the team ever considered doing more designer insight videos since i think a majority of the community enjoys them
It takes significant amount of time for people involved to make those but we want to do more for sure!
Ben Brode Responds on Reddit
A thread on reddit which linked the above tweet got some discussion brewing about the topic so Ben decided to chime in on it. He also shared a picture of his setup. Please send us huge Hearthstone backdrops, they're rad.
Quote from Ben BrodeA little more context for you!I make those videos at home after my son goes to bed. Since daylight savings hit last spring my son goes to bed at 8:30 instead of 7:30, so I have an hour less time each night. I have to move my computer because otherwise you see my bed in the background (like in my first video) and that's a bit weird/unprofessional. Also because I record at night, I have to set up my studio lights. Once I have it all set up, I do several takes. Often I flub a line so bad I start over. I hate editing together cuts because I think it looks kind of jarring and distracting.
Once I have something I think might work, I send it to the rest of the people who care about this stuff on the Team, like Jason Chayes (Production Director). Sometimes they remind me of key points I totally forgot to mention, and I have to find another free night to do another take.
This is all pretty dumb, so we've been working on getting space that is permanently wired for making these types of videos at work. It's more challenging than you'd imagine as often we have trouble finding an empty conference room to have a meeting in, much less a room we want to leave empty all the time so nobody messes up our lighting rigs.
Regardless! I love doing videos, and I think I can convince more of the team to get involved, so it's not just me. Not everyone is as excited about being a public face as Yong and I are, though - there is a lot of harassment that comes with being more public.
My 2 month paternity leave ends next week. I'm excited to get back to work!
I don't think you know what the word toxic means when talking about a community. Your post is a thousand times more toxic than any player who decides to queue up with whatever deck they damn well please.
HS already allows intellectual and creative players to succeed beyond spew your hand simple play styles.
It's still a card game and card games have random elements. It actually creates more balance and competition amongst the players. It's like the bellcurve of competitive card games and gives everyone a chance to some varying degrees.
Don't believe me look at any final table in professional poker. Poker, a game of total RNG yet the same players can make final tables again and again over 100,000s of players... Why is that? Because there's still optimal and risk vs reward plays and intellectual players will always capitalize on that increasing their odds of winning.
All your statement has done is bolster nocontrol1111's argument, which is right.
That dog is so cute!
You do know that all the money Hearthstone makes doesn't go back into Hearthstone, right? It goes to Blizzard, and then they decide how it is distributed between Team 5, servers, and higher ups. It's quite possible that the Hearthstone team doesn't get much money, despite what they bring in.
it is not at least for the people who are publicly known
You say like community support and communication is responsibility of single individual in the team. The company should have thought about this much earlier and spent a little resource from the massive revenue they've been earning from this product a long time ago. Its pretty ridiculous to think the money for this video should come out of some dev's own pockets in their off time.
This is not just some small indie company working on small projects. Blizzard is a massive entertainment corporate that has done many official videos like these for a lot of their games and Hearthstone is definitely one of their profitable game right now.
Overwatch does excellent communication and makes alot of developer insight videos and even makes videos for each of their charaters. Heroes of the storm makes character overview and little movie for each of their heroes and makes update videos and such.
These videos don't come out of some single developer's own pockets and Hearthstone official videos can be so easily made if blizzard made it one of its priorities.
I was actually pretty surprised when BB mentions excuses why its so hard to make these videos in his own time. How does this corporate get anything done? Does hearthstone team get less support from blizzard or something?
The hearthstone community is absolutely horrible. What really bothers me is that people complain how the hearthstone team does not care about the community. If the hearthstone team really did not care about the community, the following things would not have happen.
- Paladin, Shaman, and Priest would not got the help they needed in order to be playable
- They would not give support to ftp players such as giving free packs, giving free wings from adventures, and standard mode
- Broken and not interactive cards such as Undertaker, Tuskarr Totemic, and Force of Nature wouldn't be nerf
- Purify wouldn't be removed from arena plus the other bad cards in arena
- They wouldn't remove some of the cards from arena (broken or trash), trying to have all the classes be at the same power of level.
- They wouldn't make a video apologizing for creating Purify
- There wouldn't be a 33% compensation as an apology for MSG pack glitch
- They wouldn't look at some community created cards for ideas for their next expansion
- They wouldn't have made a post asking what we would like for hearthstone in 2017
- They wouldn't have Added Heroic Brawl for players (especially professionals) who needed a bit more of a challenge in hearthstone
- They wouldn't care about the small percentage of players who wanted to play fun, non competitive decks for the fun of it and enjoy the game casually (reason for creating Purify)
Please haters, considered how much work the hearthstone team uses to make a beautiful, easy to learn game that both new and old players can enjoy instead of constantly being so toxic. Being toxic, demanding, and telling Ben Brode to kill himself is not going to cause the hearthstone team to all of a sudden be on your side :(
I can't believe people actually downvoted this post.
I understand that the hearthstone team can make some mistakes. Plenty of big gaming businesses ended up doing this at one point. However, there is a difference between being disappointed and posting threats to scare a businesses.
I'm not trying to bring people down or create more toxic communities. I'm just stating my opinion. I just find it a little ridicules that people act like savages over a little or important change to a game.
If players really don't like this game and have such hatred for the creators, they should play some other card games instead of continuously being toxic over people who just want to have fun. That's how toxic and negative communities are created.
The reason why players downvote on the haters is because people, including me, don't want to deal with negativity all the time and don't want to experience other people to be harshly put down for something minor and witness a happy soul being crushed.
this post in completly retarded, they just do things because they have to but rarely listen to what people want, if you think that standard is just there because the community asked im sry but you dont understand anything about how to make money in a game, if no one can play it without paying 400$ a year you obviously wont sell anything at the end. this is more or so the same thing for your whole post, they rotate and change things because they need to in order to make the game enjoyable, it doesnt mean that they listen to people, they do it indeed but not a lot, or things that rly make them loose something would have been done like changing the prices on the game (pure scam) hs is not a fee to play at all for the new players if they actually wants to play the game for real, you cant stop playing for a few months and come back without paying a crazy amount to get packs full of crap, etc etc
You have completely missed the point.
Balancing and fixing their own game is one thing, and doing communication with the community is another thing. Of course they care about the people who plays their game since its where their revenue comes from! Why would you ever argue about that?
You don't even have to put your face in the camera in your bedroom and start being a blogger for these developer insight video. A lot of other game devs just do voices over gameplay footage since all we really want are some communication and explanation. Heck, you don't even have to make it a video and just write a article about it and we would still think thats okay.
And those nerfs and changes you mentioned happened WAY late than it should be. It really takes them at least half an year to year to respond any kind of overwhelming complaint the community has. Remember when it took them 2 years to make more deckslots?
I'm not talking about money. I know companies are happy when they receive money from their customers. I'm talking about the treatment towards the employees through feelings.
Hah. Loved the post about dev's not wanting to be on camera because of toxic comments. They are already criminally underpaid for working in something they love, they don't need to be harassed by a bunch of whiny, entitled, 12 year olds, or worse... grown men who still act like 12 year old's. The fact they already respond as much as they do is absolutely awesome. Way to go Blizzard.
To be fair, I think the hearthstone community is overall fantastic, lots of constructive things happen, and good criticism comes when needed. Unfortunately, there is way too much negative stuff that gets in here.
I don't think Ben was whining, you're clearly reading into things.
Anyone talking money like its unlimited doesn't understand corporations or the drop in the bucket theory at all and that all stake holders must get paid - or the game goes bye bye.
The point about the T5 Dev teams being severely underpaid for their accomplishments and time is 100% true.
Ben and his team might as well be an indie label working from a garage. The fact the guy setup his own home studio with his own money to be more involved using his already limited free time demonstrates his passion for both the game and the community. That's hardly shameless self promotion. It's more like devote commitment to the game, players and community at large.
I wish nothing but the best for Brode, his new family and his team. I hope that the guy gets a fair chance at continue to create awesome games for people everywhere to enjoy.
Can people treat the developers like normal people, sure the game may not be in the state you want it to be, but things will get better and we must understand as a community that ALL of the developers are like us, Humans.
Well the rogue complainers were total idiots and completely wrong rogue is far from bottom tier
More excuses... Honestly I am so tired of this PR bs. You either do designers insights and do it good or stop talking about your so called plans that will probably never happen.