Dean Ayala Talks About the Nerfs, Jade Concerns, and the Different Hearthstone Design Teams
Dean Ayala was out on reddit this evening talking about the nerf announcement. You can check out our summary, or the quoted text, below.
- They can't know exactly how the meta will play out once the nerfs go live, but they can get a reasonable idea through play testing.
- Aggro shouldn't go away as a result of the Small-Time Buccaneer change, which keeps Jade at bay.
- If Jade was going to make up half the meta post nerfs, they would have gone a different route.
- The design team is made up of 15 people, through multiple teams. 4 work on Balancing. They all tend to help eachother out though.
- Live Content - Brawls, Firesides, Other Events
- Initial Design - Card Designs, Mechanic Designs, Set Flavor and Theme
- System Design - Ranked Systems, Tons of Other Systems
- Final Design - Set Tuning, Card Design, Mechanic Design
- Mission Design - Mission Design, Card Design
Quote from /u/IksarHSIn your testing of the nerfs, how has Jade Druid/Rogue improved with the nerf of STB/Claws? I think it's good if it improves a little but if it gets too strong it could be just as infuriating to play against.
This is something that is mostly a prediction rather than a result of testing. Whether or not Jade Druid and Rogue will be 'good' is meta dependent. I don't think these changes will magically make Jade decks strong against aggressive decks, but I think it's safe to say the meta slowing down at any % is a good thing for Jade. (Source)
Wait you guys didn't test these changes in a ladder environment?
Of course we do, what I mean by prediction is not predicting how good or bad particular matchups are, but predicting what people will actually choose to play. Jade decks still aren't great vs highly aggressive pirate decks, even after changing small-time buccaneer. If pirates are still played at the same volume they are now, I don't imagine Jade will be very strong. We can playtest every matchup in the game between the 3-4 of us but that won't tell us the exact rate at which each deck will be played on ladder, though it does put us in a good position to make a reasonable prediction. (Source)
There are only 4 guys on the balance team?!
Yes. Design team is around 15 people now. Live Content (Brawls, Firesides, Other Events), Initial Design (Card Designs, Mechanic Designs, Set Flavor and Theme), System Design (Ranked Systems, Tons of Other Systems), Final Design (Set Tuning, Card Design, Mechanic Design), and Mission Design (Mission Design, Card Design). We also have Ben that directs the ship and another sort of jack of all trades designer than works a lot on new player experience, matchmaking, and flavor things. That said, well all help each other out quite a bit and the real list of things each individual person does is more like 20 bullet points rather than 2. That's the general jist though. (Source)
Thanks for the answer! Part of me really hope that with such a small team every single one of you are millionaires. The other part kinda thinks this number is really low! But I am just a Internet dude. One more question! I think is safe to say that the vocal community is tired of losing to aggro, do you guys think is fair criticism to say that the team could be doing a better job at balancing aggro?
To clarify, this is also just the design team I'm speaking to. There are many other people of various disciplines like art, engineering, production, community, QA, customer support, marketing, business, etc that make an equally large impact on the game. (Source)
Why waiting until the end of February? Why not nerf the cards today?
I'm not an expert in this area, but it has a lot to do with being a game on multiple platforms. In order to patch simultaneously on PC/Mobile there are a number of things that have to be submit and approved being we can release a new patch to the public. (Source)
If the wolf population is keeping the rabbit population in check and you weaken wolves, that will probably increase the frequency of rabbits?
This isn't too far off. The hard part is determining how many rabbit-eating-animal decks will appear as a result of the increase of rabbit frequency, and if the introduction of said-animal-rabbit-eater introduces a new animal we've never heard of. (Source)
So why not do something regarding jade now then just wait for us to have to deal with 2 months of jade being infuriating to play against in any control matchup?
Jade is fairly weak to aggressive strategies, and I don't think those are going to go away as a result of STB change. There is still some room between hyper-aggressive pirate things and heavy control things that will keep us pretty far from all-jade-all-the-time meta. At least that's the idea. If we thought as a result of these changes Jade would be all (or half of all decks) that were relevant, we would have gone a different route. (Source)
Step:
3.5. Ben Brode's laugh.
Make sure step 2 has minimum time period of 6 months.
Did they ever mention what is going on with the Classic/Basic cards moving to Wild? Is that still a thing? If anyone knows, please reply. Thank you.
Patches was good because of Buckner. Like I lot of people I crafted patches because everyone else was playing him so you needed him to be competitive. If I knew he was going to be nerfed and only good in pirates I don't like a lot of people would have spent the dust. Blizzard needs ti give us a full remind to dust patches.
What does that even mean?
Switching from the pirate meta to the Jade meta, yay. The tri class system wasnt the best idea. Pirates destroy jade Lotus. And Lotus destroy Kabal. And Kabal destroy the pirates. These 3. Those goons? Never heard of them.
This is what made the game the same all the time. I love playing my Kazakus, it's just really powerful but still. It's always the same. Even in wild it's just standard with 2-6 wild cards in each deck.
I think the control community is more prevalent on forums. Aggro wants to do things fast and be done... forums aren't exactly in line with that frame of thought-> they're more like 5 minutes... better spent on a game than posting online.
Greedy control players will always be around to cry nerf this nerf that. NERF 10 mana random effect card that I lose to 10% of the time (even though I had already lost prior to that).... so the nerf threads will never dissipate and aggro will always have some class to cling to.
Sooo the last question is about how Jade decks completely destroy any control deck.
And he answers by saying Jade is not OP because it's bad vs aggro decks.
.............. What...? Just don't reply to the question at all if you don't want to answer it?
AKA- They're fine with rock paper scissors idea of decks. They don't care if a deck-style loses 70% of the time to jade if that same deck is viable versus other parts of the meta. At least that is how I read it.
Even if they played 150 games versus eachother with a ton of different meta decks- things are going to come out when millions of people play over a month that their interactions won't catch. Even if they have a testing team they release things to when they feel more finalized, millions of people playing will catch things they will miss. Also- Blizzard has never been the type of company to pay 100s and 100s of testers. Just like with the Beta and Alpha... release to the crowd you are ready for and they'll test it for you. Then release it to more to get more data... It isn't necessary to pay testers. Their quality has been "pretttty good" compared to other CCG's I've played where the power balance is much more ridiculously in the legendary cards favor.
It's possible that 4 people is the tipping point of diminishing returns. When running a business (which is what Blizzard is) you have to consider the cost vs value of more employees. If you're paying $100k a year per person to balance a game (It's a random number, but it's likely in the ballpark after salary+benefits+ect.) then 4 people is $400k a year. Adding more people to a team like this has diminishing returns, so is it really worth an extra $600k a year to make the team 10 people when the results you get are likely to be quite similar to the results they are already getting? Without actually seeing the data I couldn't tell you for sure, but it's something to think about.
It takes a couple days after an expansion and millions of player to test everything and find optimal lists that are only a little different than the lists that players start out trying on day 1, so how much difference would a couple extra people make on a team compared to that? That's the real question.
If you hate the game so much, please leave. We'll miss you, but somehow we'll get over it. And we all look forward to your much more successful company.
I am.
Didn't they just update the client so we don't have to do that anymore?