Ben Brode on Basic Decks New Player Experience
In a reddit thread which asked for a revamp of basic decks, Ben Brode came out to discuss some philosophy behind them.
- Basic decks should include the basic cards classes come with.
- Players should start with a lower power level so that they can progress more. Higher power initially = less progression.
- Allowing players to edit their basic decks helps introduce players to deck building earlier. Deck recipes also helps!
- Casual mode keeps new players together for an amount of time and does a good job at giving players a 50% winrate even with low power decks.
- Allowing new players to access ranked early on may be a fault of the system and not basic decks themselves.
Quote from Ben BrodeThose decks (and I believe you're talking about the ones players unlock when they first unlock a class - we call them 'Basic Decks' internally) have some specific goals.
- The decks should include the basic cards that you unlocked when you unlocked the class. There are 5 of these so 10 cards in each deck are class cards. This is a little light, and with any less a deck could just feel like a deck of all neutral basic minions. There aren't any swaps to make besides neutral minions because players don't own any other class cards yet.
- The power level should start fairly low. We quickly give players new basic cards and classic packs. The feeling of earning new cards and making your deck better makes the early part of Hearthstone a lot more fun. Starting at a higher power level means less opportunity for progression.
- Building a deck is one of the biggest hurdles for new players. A year ago, you had to start from scratch, and we made a change which gave new players editable decks (instead of empty slots) so that their first deck building experience would be taking out Magma Rager and putting in Frost Bolt. (Or something similar). The Innkeeper gets up in your face to recommend you add it to your deck and we glow buttons to guide you to the right place. This flow (we think) is better than starting from scratch in a world where some players may not understand the concept of a mana curve yet. Putting a couple obviously bad cards in the decks makes this first edit hopefully a little easier. To give you some context, new players who used our old auto-deckbuilder (which we've since improved, it was essentially random except for a basic mana curve before) were much more likely to win games than those who built their own decks. The addition of deck recipes (especially the 'classic' ones) was also intended to help with this problem.
- Giving new players powerful decks only helps if they are playing against players who aren't also new (because otherwise they are both using low power decks, which is fine). In Casual, we only pit new players against other brand new players for a period of time, unless a player's collection passes some internal metric that makes them unsuitable to continue playing in that matchmaking pool. Even outside of that, player win percentages in Casual are close enough to 50% that we aren't seeing major detriment from lower power decks. Note that this definitely wasn't always the case. We've been making big improvements to the new player Casual Matchmaker experience since many of you may have started playing, and this is a continuing area of focus for us. Ranked is another story. Because we match on stars (and not MMR, except for Legend), we don't currently differentiate between new players and those that just haven't played in long enough to drop to rank 25. This is either a failing of the ladder system or the fact that we let new players screw themselves by unlocking Ranked too early.
I do think there is a lot of room for improvement in our new player experience. I just wanted to help give some context for where some of our goals are (or have been in the past).
Maybe they should make something like special decks fully available for free after having reached lvl10 on all classes.
Eg. you get for free ALL C'thun cards.
That should allow for some decent laddering in the 20-15 brackets, even for new players, without ruining the meta or giving unfair advantage.
They could bind such a mechanic to each new year expansion: Year of the Kraken: C'thun cards, next year some new subset, etc.
Giving that horrible, self building auto pilot deck idea to new players would be just straight out bad idea. It would discourage practicing deck building and make the low ranked/casual meta stale and boring.
We get you guys really want to get new players into HS.... but just saying getting new ones isn't hard... keeping the ones you have is. Give some love to the older players and maybe we'll stay for longer investing in the game more, and hey maybe more people will wanna see what the fuss is about... That's kinda how WoW or LoL do it.. Don't see why this shouldn't follow suit.
It would be very simple to not drop people so far on the ladder at the start of the season. I think that is the main reason the ladder is so skewed, in addition the useless grind back up to legend is frustrating for veterans. If all legends fell only to rank 5 it may seem like it would make it easier to grind back to legend, and maybe it would, but it would still only be legend class players in legend, so i'm not sure what the big deal is. As it is I only introduce new players to heartstone at a specific time of the month and encourage them to start ranking towards the end of the month. It's like the ladder get's PMS at the start of every season... a player that regularly hits rank 5 should never on a regular basis be playing a rank 20 (or whatever it is) against completely new players.
Edit: and it would be incredibly easy to fix - as I saw someone else post - doubling the amount of stars given at the end of the season makes a really nice ranking curve for the start of the new season.
An easy way to do this is to make it like the "3 win Streak bonus". so to every 3 stars you got the end of the season, you'll get an extra one. Not confusing to new players, solves the problem, and it also makes it slightly more rewarding, solving one extra problem.
I don't understand why this "new player experience" is such a problem. Maybe it's a generational thing? I started playing in September of 2016 and instantly fell in love with the game. I had previously played MTG so I knew a little bit about Deck Building, Mana Curve, etc... That being said I quickly realized that if I wanted to Rank Up and be competitive I needed to learn quite a few things and also buy a LOT of cards/adventures. I started playing the game a lot, watching streamers, watching YouTube videos, looking up guides and advice, hitting reddit. My point is, there is only so much Hearthstone can do to introduce you to the game and then it's up to you to figure it out and grow. Just like any other game, or any other thing that is worth getting good at. It sounds like he is trying so hard not to offend anyone while trying to find a way to apologize for not holding everyone's hand through the game who doesn't quite get it. It's not like they don't show you how the game works initially. I made sure I beat the computer on expert before I ever attempted Ranked Play. New Players should do the same if they are serious about the game.
-Ant
This is a very important point.
They should put up a message the moment you unlock Ranked play:
This mode is extremely competitive. You are going to suck -- and suck HARD -- until you watch a few videos, read a few guides, and actually learn how to play the game well. Do not make the mistake of believing that you are losing because of your cards. At least half of the blame lies with you and the terrible decisions you make as you play.
The problem is, HS is competing with mobile games. And those are usually extremly easy to pick up and play.
If you instal the game, struggle for an hour in the tutorial and then you get you ass handed to you 10times in ranked, you aren't probly gonna stay for a long time.
I mean we got millions of Hearthstone players already (I guess).
But we need milliards of people. This is kind of the problem that all Blizzard games have. They try to make all games viable for new players but in fact lose a lot of core players then (e.g. WoW got too easy and therefore lost a lot of players. Now with Legion they won again a lot of people because you need more skill now than in MoP/WoD).
It is fine if you want to make this game viable for new players but I mean you shouldn't really give that much of an effort to this topic. If you could give half of that effort to new content, this game would get crazy PogChamp
I am not saying that Blizz shoudln't care about new players experience. I am talking about the fact that Blizz' highest priority is the new player experience.
Just saying that decreasing the new player's experience for more content would benefit both sides (like they did with tavern brawl. Like the number of wins in tavern brawls don't even have any meaning right now. They could barely increase this by giving additional packs for 10 wins as an example and new players could actually farm their packs there. Maybe even for a short amount of time and no packs for people who play for like 3 months or I dunno).
There are many ways of increasing new player's experience without really decreasing the experience of players who enjoy this game since years. The only problem is Blizzard's strategy to keep the amount of free content as low as possible. I mean sure in marketing perpective this is cool and fine but they could do it better and I don't really think that free content for even the first month decreases their benefits as these people will most likely keep playing afterwards by buying adventures and packs
I really think that the problem in HS for f2p players is the way you get new cards. One daily mission is too little in my opinion. I think that, if they add one more daily mission per day, it would make a huge difference, like, the minimum amount of gold you would recieve is 80g, so if you win 6 matches, you would be able to buy a pack. In the actual situation, you gain 40g for completing a mission, and need to win more 30 matches to buy a pack, and that is too F many matches. Also, it would help new players to obtain old expansions, like Naxxaramas, and soon to be, Blackrock Mountain. For exemple, in 1 week playing everyday the minimum, completing the 2 missions and winning 6 matches, you would be able to buy one part of an old adventure. This would help a lot. I started playing a little while, but i will not buy Blackrock Mountain, just because its rotating from standard soon.
I don't know man, thats my opinion, and how i think new players and older players would few more confortable play this game we like so much.
I introduced a few friends, they bought some packs, some adventures & played for a few months, but couldn't get anywhere on ladder. Not without BUYING more packs. They eventually got bored and deleted the game
It may not be fun for some, but for instance when I started playing last year I bought nothing. I think the first adventure I actually bought was karazhan after like 6 months of playing.
I played solo adventures, casual for quests and got to rank 20 each season for the card back. Once I was sure this was a game I felt was worth investing in to play more competently I bought all the adventures and started hitting up card packs.
I didn't let ranked get me down, because I understood ranked was a competitive format, that went further than just playing cards against each other. If you want to be a competitive player you need to invest and I think that's what people can lose sight of. You see "f2p" and we automatically think everything about the game should be free, and that we should be able to win tournaments/blizzcin without spending a dime.
While I do think it wouldn't hurt Blizzard to give new players expansions that have already rotated out of competition, I don't see the need in making sure everyone can hit legend by doing no more than buying your welcome pack.
he will tell you basic deck can legend. No need pay in HS.
continue introduce more rotation, more profits & tell you f2p can legend again.
now the cheaper meta deck is 5k dust m nice job blizzard.
old time around 2k dust you can build recent meta deck to climb. Of Couse,you can build budget edition but you will loses all the mirror match and tough matchup.
"I do think there is a lot of room for improvement in our new player experience."
Rip new players then!