Hearthstone's Arena Team is Testing a 20% Increase in Spells During Drafting
Hearthstone's Dean Ayala was recently on reddit responding to a thread discussing arena win-rates being higher without the coin. Within this thread, he mentioned a few things we thought were worth bringing up.
- They are currently testing a 20% increase in the amount of spells you will see during drafts.
- Another test is changing the card pool over to Standard. It is "A good idea".
- We will hear more about the upcoming changes in the "nearish" future.
What sort of changes would you like to see to the Arena?
Quote from IksarHSMy Arena Experience (Source)
Winrate with Coin: 53.9%
Winrate without Coin: 71.21%My thinking (mostly a theory) is that this has to do with decks being so heavily minion based in arena. Traditionally, decks that are more reactionary tend to do better with the coin. Priest, Rogue, Etc. I imagine the reason for this is because they would rather wait and respond to what their opponent does instead of playing minions proactively. The coin does a good job helping those reactive decks respond at the right moment. So in a world where decks are more reactive and the minion to spell ratio is a bit closer together... maybe going 1st vs going 2nd win rate feels less imbalanced than it does now. There are a number of game-to-game quality changes coming for arena, this is one of them.
Have you ever thought about increasing spell occurences in arena picks? I think that would be more fun if the percentage of spells were a little higher.
Right now we're testing at about a 20% increase. We think having spells occur more often and the card pool being standard is a good idea, but the thing we fight a bit is that when you have a smaller card pool and increase the rate of any set of cards....those cards appear quite frequently. I'm fairly certain it's not a good idea for every Mage deck to have 4 Volcanic Potions or every Shaman deck to have 5 Jade Lightnings, but it might be a good idea to increase the rate at which you get spells or the most recent set. In any case, we have a number of changes in test now and hope to announce the final changes in the nearish future.
Standard arena? Bad idea...
20% increase in spells? Bad idea... It will only promote in making Mage, Lock and to some extent Priest, even more strong in arena because of the retarded amount of removal spells Blizzard gave to these classes. Not to mention the retarded amounts of discover/get a random spell minions they already have.
If arena goes Standard, they will kill the last currently enjoyable product this game has to offer. What a terrible shame it would be with Standard ladder as cancerous as it is.
At the very least, they should push the Standard arena only IN ADDITION to wild arena and just give players the option to enter which one he or she prefers. Making it outright standard is a MISTAKE.
BLIZZARD are you listening? IT WOULD BE A HUUUUUUUGGGGE MISTAKE! Listen to your players for once!
What if Wild Arena cost less and gave Wild packs as a reward?
Making the arena Standard will make everyone (most of the people) forget about old cards.
I don't understand why they keep pushing the standard arena thing... Everyone (from random players to Arena streamers) are against this. Arena is the only mode in Hearthstone that still have the element of surprise(ignoring tavern brawl). Yes,the spell increased rate is good,changing some cards rarity would be another good thing.
Making the only interesting mode(Arena) standard,like the most repetitive mode(constructed) is awful and it will ruin the experience for all arena veterans out there. Why would i pay gold or money just to play with and against same cards in ranked? For rewards? What's the point of those rewards if the game becomes repetitive/boring for me?
The streamer Ratsmah suggested something like a petition for not changing the arena into boring mode. Seeing Blizzard keep pushing the Standard thing,his idea becomes quite good.
if they want to fix arena without messing things up all they have to do is change the rarity of some cards
Blizzard please just make a PTR for Hearthstone so we can tell you if this is a good idea or not.
Forced standard arena is not a good idea, it is a terrible idea. If you want Standard Arena, make it a separate mode. I wouldn't play it.
Increase in spells is a good idea, but it doesn't solve the problem that many of the game breaker spells are in higher rarity slots, making their appearance inconsistent. Lightbomb for instance can win a game on its own, because since it's an epic slot you assume that no priest you're playing against will have it, making the rare case when one does devastating. Brawl is another example.
Standard Arena??!! idk who even comes up with this really bad idea.
nice! :D
Everyone bitching about standard arena, not realizing magic only uses the most current set for sealed formats (think arena) and has been basically since inception. With the limited cardpool for hearthstone standard arena doesn't really work, but I think a cube style system where blizzard creates a custom draft environment for each expansion release would work wonders. Of course this would take a ton of work, and I have serious doubts blizzard is capable of making a fun, dynamic, and balanced draft pool.
The problem as it is now leaves arena feeling a lot lower skill than it should be. You can't rely on drafting synergies, and basically just have to curve out better than your opponent and pray for no board clear. As the game goes on this will only become worse as there will be so many cards in the arena environment, the problems of no synergy, and having to playing curvestone will be magnified. It also makes arena more unapproachable for new players, as you essentially have to be familiar with every card in the game, and how well they perform in arena.
Honestly, this is why Team 5 scares the shit out of me and I fear for the future of this game when they say things like ''Standard Arena is a good idea'' when basically everyone else instantly realizes how bad it actually is.
We need Legendarys, Rares and Epics appearing more to improve decision making and variance. Not the opposite.
Wrong, it makes no sense to play around board clears if the card pool has 3 board clears for 500 cards.
You can't play around anything right now in Arena because there are so many cards that it's unlikely for your opponent to have most of the ones you'd play around. The smaller the card pool the more skill involved.
Kripp says that there's no reason to play around anything because there are too many cards in the pool and he has the highest win rate in Arena of all players as shown by data released yesterday by Blizzard so he is clearly right.
Am also on that Top 100 list, there is better solutions than Standard Arena so going that route is not correct.
it's nice to see that, while the ladder is 60% shaman and the jade druid is the most illogical and broken deck ever, they still have time to ruin arena also
Reading this made me think back to what Kibler mentioned about Arena. Here's the link to it: Kibler Video (Check 12:32-18:50)
However for those who don't have time at the moment he talks about each class having a 'Custom Draft Pool'. This would mean that every so often the players would only be able to cards that Blizzard would have decided to be in that Arena set, but at the same time the cards you can choose from would be cards that work well together.
The problem of just having a Standard cards in Arena means that any card that get rotated out could only be used in Wild or Tavern Brawl (depanding on the week), which to me doesn't encourage players to buy more card packs. If anything it would most likely drive Arena players to go somewhere else.
Sorry but can I ask why that idea is worst? What am I missing?
I really don't like the idea of standard arena. Beeing wild makes the arena so much more fun.