Ben Brode: The New Player Experience Needs Work
Ben Brode took to reddit this morning to touch upon the new player experience.
- Tweaks made throughout the years have increased player retention.
- Casual matchmaker has been improved to increase new player winrates by around 15%.
- Ranked is becoming more difficult for new players.
- New players play in different pools with other newbies with similar sized collections.
- The introductory missions feel good but then it turns into a cliff.
How do you feel about the new player experience? Have any of your friends recently joined the game and turned away?
Quote from Ben BrodeHey there!We agree that the new player experience needs more work. We've been tweaking it for years and have seen significant increases in retention among new players since launch. Most new players start playing against the AI and then take on other players in Casual. The Casual matchmaker has gone through a lot of iteration and new player winrates have increased by ~15%.
Ranked is a different story. Ranked is becoming more difficult for new players over time. I spoke about some of the challenges we are currently facing with our ladder system before I left for paternity leave here: [See quote below - Ben on Ladder]
Something you may not realize is that new players actually play in a seperate matchmaking pool for their first several sessions. In Casual, we match them entirely against other brand new players with similarly-sized collections.
That all said, we think the introductory missions up through Illidan feel pretty good, and after that it still feels like a bit of a cliff. It's definitely something we're aware of. Thanks for your feedback, and for the feedback of everyone else who's been chiming in on this over the last few months.
Ben on the Ladder System
Quote from Ben BrodeSeeing some comments here about how people are enjoying easier laddering due to this bug, and hoping we leave it unfixed. I thought I might chime in and talk about the ladder a bit, and hopefully get some feedback!We have been discussing the ladder system a lot recently - we're not 100% happy with it.
Here are some things we are currently discussing:
Rank 18 players are higher ranked than 50% of HS players. That number doesn't make you feel like you are in the top 50%, and that's a missed opportunity. We try and counter this by telling you all over the place what the mapping is to the rest of the population, but it'd be better if expectations and reality matched here.
We've received feedback that the last-minute jostling for high Legend ranks at the end of a season doesn't feel all that great.
We've received feedback that the ladder can feel like a grind.
We are reanalyzing the number of ranks, the number of stars per rank, the number of bonus stars given out at the start of the season, and other parts of the system.
We are developing simulation systems that let us predict what changes to the ladder would do to the population curve. If we inflate too many stars, the whole population ends up in the Legend bucket and while that might feel great for a single month, the entire system falls apart eventually. People who played waaaay back may remember when "3-star master" was the pinnacle of achievement, and it meant nothing because so many people ended up in that bucket. With better simulation tools, we are planning on trying a lot of crazy things. Iteration is important in design, and getting the tools to iterate quickly is very important.
Something I want to emphasize is that while I think we can improve the ladder, the metric for that improvement isn't necessarily any one player's individual rank increasing. Players want the better rewards (and prestige) associated with high ranks, or the Legend card back, so any change we make that increases the chances of those are likely to be perceived as "good", at least for the short term. But part of what makes the ranked ladder compelling is that exists to rank players. If you want to see how you stack up, ranked is the place to do it. So while some inflation might improve the experience, we need to be careful and make sure we end up with a system that makes people feel rewarded for increases in personal skill or for finding a new deck that breaks the meta.
Well good for all new players but how about working on the ladder environment in general instead on focusing on aquiring new spenders?
What I feel like in my experience is that isn't really worth it to reach legend every season once you got it once. I mean, I use to get easily rank 2-3 every month without grinding but pushing to legend is way to boring and I don't feel like the reward (1 more golden common card? come on) is comparable with the effort to pass from rank 5 to legend.
You noticed that experimented players liked the idea of getting golden cards as you checked in the heroic tavern brawl (they almost have the entire collection), so I'll be pushing for that. Also it would be nice an idea I had some time ago: let cards to be "upgraded" to golden without had to waste too much dust... maybe using any token reward that you could obtain every season.
It would be nice if they could throw a little support towards the arena as well, as far as making it more new-player friendly.
I think a massive improvement would be as simple as just buffing the rewards heavily, at least for low wins. Make it worthwhile for a new/bad player to do an arena run. It gets more players/decks in the arena pool which honestly just benefits everyone.
In beta/vanilla, arena was THE BEST way to build up your card collection and start earning extra gold. I've never spent a dime on Hearthstone and it's all because of playing a fuckton of arena early on. But now, new players just avoid it entirely because they're basically throwing gold away.
A good idea but the mutiplier should be something like 2 and the recieved dust should always be multiple of 5.
50 wins = 100 dust
51-52 wins = 105 dust
etc
The new game name should be: Grindstone: Heroes of Legend
On a more serious note... As someone who has played Hearthstone since season 1 and reached Legend as a f2p I can say the following about ranked:
There should be placeholder ranks like rank 20 and Legend. You reach them and can't fall back until the end of the season. I think ranks 20, 15, 10, 5, Legend are perfect for that so people can experiment with crazy decks on ladder without dropping in rank too much.
It would be great if there were puzzle modes. For example: find the lethal puzzle. Those modes could even be designed by community members and the rewards could be something like a normal version of one of the cards used. There should be some more goofy fool around modes for players to have fun.
We need a reason to replay old adventures. There was no reason to remove Naxxramas for new players. It's fun and could simply be free with no card rewards (just the card back). There could be adventure mode quests like Defeat all bosses in wing X of adventure Y for 60 gold, or a heroic version for 100 gold (available only to players who have already completed the heroic versions of the wing) and so on.
Well i like the placeholder idea, but i can think of 1 big drawback... There will be a lot of people at rank 5 conceding over and over again until they face the class they counter best or have the perfect opening hand. So for all honest players, at those checkpoint ranks all games would be either free wins or guarenteed losses.
There would ofcourse be solutions to this, but it's definitely something to keep in mind for Blizzard.
And they would get to 1 star and then back to zero.
Meanwhile in Shadowverse: They give you 40 packs and 10 arena tickets after you complete the tutorial.
Meanwhile in HS: They give you 1 pack per week and one free arena run.
Yeah... it need a lot of work.
I love shadowverse! Much more interesting than hearthstone meta atm.
That's because Shadowverse isn't as popular and it's new so they have to attract new players just to stay afloat. Hearthstone doesn't need to do that, so they don't have to give away so much stuff for free.
If they cared about new player experience, they wouldn't have nerfed Charge and destroy new player access to a legend-capable and skill-intensive deck they can craft on day 1 of playing Hearthstone. RIP F2P OTK Warrior.
with the release of MSoG my free to play account is basically worthless, i havent touched it because there is no real content to play, random midrange budget decks dont cut it against pirate warrior and reno decks. but im glad they know its an issue. now we just wait for them to fix it "soon"
1- new player experience is flawed.
No shit, have you seen the amount of players seeking help as to how to start to build their collection on the forums?
2- Rank 18 is above 50% of the player base.
Impossible, unless you consider people who don't even touch the ladder and are forever rank 25 or are inactive. Rank 18 is fucking retarded, if you're putting effort into the game and can't go any further, stop wasting your time and uninstall. It doesn't feel great because it isn't great.
I think giving a free welcome bundle will help new players, give a free class classic legendary and 10 classic packs after you complete the tutorial and you get 51 free cards to help you start off, the normal welcome bundle will still be in the shop so if they want to spend $5 they can get another free class classic legendary and another 10 packs then they would have 102 classic cards. Thats a good start of classic cards and would give them somewhat of a catch up to start the game.
$... $$... $$$...
ban card is really bad idea.
the player need to atlesst 3-4 viable deck to climb which not applicable to f2p and newbie. Budget edition or replace ban card with something else will make them get stomp by full collection player. They have no chance to climb. Average 5k dust per deck in msg compared to average 3k dust per deck in old god time. Some pay player or experience player also include extra 1-2 legendary to improve mirror match up. Which make the deck around 7k dust. How f2p build multiple meta deck? Unless they grinding 100 gold every day.
Simply put if you want new players to be able to get into the game you need a proper catch up mechanic. Standard was helpful since it limited the amount of cards you need but there is still a massive wall of necessary things you need to really be able to stand a chance to compete as a new player. There are a few different ways to do this but I think price is an important point.
Why are older packs and adventures still full price? Once the new expansions/adventures come out like whats the point of even keeping those at the same prices I'd be really curious if people still buy those old packs frequently at all and if the people who do buy them frequently are new or older players. I can see older players buying up old packs for chances at golden cards or something to that effect but it still seems silly as all hell. It's just confusing to new players but if they could buy older packs for 50-70% off depending on how old they are would be really helpful.
Also at this point I think there should be a mechanic in the game to get all of the classic cards without buying any packs. Maybe have new quests that give you a classic pack that guarantees to give you cards you don't have (including legionaries) and just lower the amount of dust classic cards can give you and have this quest show up as a daily once a week as a bonus daily for new players until they get the classic set.
You know that Blizzard is still a company right? And they want to earn money. 50-70% off seems too high to me, maybe 25-45%.
The pack with cards you don't have seems like a decent idea, but it includes legendaries and till you have the whole classic set? Ive been playing almost 3 years and I still miss legendaries, granted I don't buy classic packs anymore. So the only classic packs I get are from brawl or quests at this point. However I don't think blizzard likes to give me packs with 5 legendaries.