Ben Brode Interview - Insight into Casual Hearthstone, Meta, Just for Fun, Card Bans
GamesBeat's Jack Wilson had the opportunity to sit down with Ben Brode and talk about Hearthstone. The two discussed casual mode and how there are different views of how it should work. See our recap of the interview below or go on and read the full interview transcript.
Casual Mode
- Ideally, casual mode is low stakes Hearthstone. It isn't hardcore competition where you need to be 100% focused and available.
- Casual, like ranked, still has an MMR system but it's internal - you don't see it.
- The goal is to keep you at a 50% winrate in Casual, just like in ranked.
- The better you're doing in casual, the more likely you'll see better decks [usually meta decks].
Ranked Play
- Pirate Warrior and Secret Mage are currently 14% of the meta at Legend rank.
- Those archetypes at Rank 20 are only 5% of the meta.
- Most active Hearthstone players are between ranks 20 and 18.
Just for Fun Mode
- Ben knows there isn't a great opportunity right now to just play fun decks and not having to worry about meta.
- Adding in a mode for players to have "Fun Only" isn't really possible - you can't force players to play "bad" decks.
- The mode would evolve into players playing meta decks anyway since they win.
- Ben doesn't think it's crazy to pursue the idea, but it's not immediately obvious what the best direction would be.
Game Customization
- Being able to support a feature in which players could ban certain cards for tournament play is "very compelling", especially for Fireside Gatherings.
Supporting Different Types of Players
Quote from Ben BrodeI saw a tournament in Kansas City where they had a spinner. You spun the spinner, took out your camera, shot a QR code, and that was the deck you played in the tournament. That’s fun. It focuses on the pure fun and joy of playing Hearthstone, not on competition. Some people are competitive and that’s great. We want to support that too.
But also, it’s good to try and find ways for different people who have different goals and different things they get fun out of from Hearthstone—we should be looking at ways to support that as well.
I like the idea, but this level is WAY too much. 20 packs a month and Blizzards never going to make any money. Something more reasonable would maybe be a pack for every 5 ranks or so. 4 packs for reaching legend every month is still fairly feelsgoodman, and would be more than enough reason for me to at least get to rank 5 for 3 packs. Maybe you should get 3 when you hit legend because going from rank 20-5 takes about as much time as 5-legend, But I don't know. The numbers need some tweaking so its incentive's enough for players to want to ladder significantly more, but not so much that packs are flowing in like crazy and blizzard is getting little out of it. Pack rewards for reaching certain ranks is a great idea though.
Gwent is raining packs from the skies as you rank up the ladder. Hearthstone is like squeezing blood from a stone for them to give you anything.
Why are we concerned about how much Blizzard makes off of it's player base? We are the player base, if anyone is going to make it a point that we aren't incentivized well enough, it is us. We don't need to be timid about the amount of packs rewarded either. If you make it to rank 1, you deserve 20 card packs, that's just my thought on it.
If you need any further proof, it was a momentous day when Kripp disenchanted his cards, and telling of the state of the game's reward system.
Don't apologize. Everything you said would greatly improve the HS experience. I don't know why the developers are unwilling to give a little more.
you are seriously demanding blizzard to simply give away free packs worth 630$ to every account just for leveling all classes to 60? (9*60=540 <-> 9*70$=630$)
that's the most insane demand i have ever encountered on this forum. why on earth should they do something like this? 630$? that's mental!
Just look at Heroes, originally almost all content was only accessible through micro-transactions, skins were ONLY available through purchases. They transitioned to give out rewards per level, and they still regularly deliver good content.
Plus I'm not asking them to retroactively award these packs, most players wouldn't be able to take advantage of this change, except the people that need packs the most, new players. I don't see how allowing new players a catch up mechanic is a bad thing.
I still have a hard time believing that Heroes 2.0 was a thing that actually happened. They practically gave away half of their content just for logging in.
And you know what? It fuckin' worked. At least with me. I don't even generally like MOBAs, but that actually got me to start playing it, even if only for casual fun.
See that, Ben? Maybe for Hearthstone's next anniversary, consider...fuck it, just give away the entire Classic collection to everyone for free! Or...at least for completing a laughably simple quest! It's the one set that never rotates (save for one or two Hall of Fame reductions), hence it's the only other constant the game has other than basic cards! Making THAT a pain in the ass grind is probably not helping the game's case.
Also....Daily. Rewards! Every other godamn F2P game has it! Doesn't matter what - gold, dust, random cards, just something to justify logging in every day.
We need a Pauper Mode for Wild and Standard. At least there we can play "bad decks". I loved the "Pauper Brawl"!
I agree - this seems really obvious. A sort of pauper standard where you have the newest cards, and maybe an arbitrary 'wild' set or two - maybe a random and rotating subset of basic and classic neutrals and rares too.
That would be very cool - let players experience some under appreciated cards and combat wallet warrior decks.
Not sure what it would do to Blizz's bottom line though - but rotating some wild cards through would keep up the incentive to collect collect collect and give new players some demand for dust and an easier way to ease into the pay to play formats.
People still trying to tell Blizzard on how to properly do their job is so cute. Guess what? They give a sh*t on what you are saying and still care about money and gaining new players as well as leveling up the new player experience. And yes I know that the design team is not involved into pricing but all the other teams in Team 5 do their job worse than that one famous black guy who messed up the miss universe choice last year
This game badly needs a custom settings mode.
THX, someone else with real and accurate solutions. I don't know how this could be implemented, but I also think, that this is the right way to do. Adding another format won't change anything, in fact it will add more difficulties and disputes into the game, as said above. The devs would have to use more space for this option, the application may become buggy, and at the end people can still ruin the casual experience for others by fishing with their meta decks.
So imho adding custom settings is the best and only way of handling this problem. This won't be only beneficial to casual players, but also to pro ones, who could search for partners either for the ranked format or for a tournament one.
getting too many variations in matching brings online down in all of them.
I believe that's what's happened with Mutatinos in L4D2: when they were rotated like Tavern Bralws, they were fun. When they unlocked everything, you will never know, which mode you need to go to to find someone alive, so you don't go into mutations, etc.
Over a decade ago I could host a custom game in Warcraft 3 with my own custom map with custom settings. People could join it if they wanted to.
In Hearthstone, forced matchmaking always. Why?
Well... If they wanted YOU to win every game, that means they want your opponent to lose every game. Some one has to lose, and when there are 2 people that could win to 50/50, or every other match...
I think we found the village idiot.