Update 7:27 PM EST: Made a slight update to our statement on Ben Brode pushing deck slots. It was meant to be more about community-developer communications and not that he was pushing it internally. Sorry!
Exclusive Hearthstone Developer Interview with Yong Woo
We got a chance to sit down with Hearthstone's Senior Producer, Yong Woo, at BlizzCon today to get your questions answered. We've recapped what we learned from the interview below.
If you use Twitter, go ahead and give Yong a follow!
Quote from Yong WooAbout Yong Woo
- He is the Senior Producer on Hearthstone.
- Joined the team 3 years ago and was team member #12.
- Makes sure the team has everything they need to function. Do they need new hardware?
- Talks with the engineers and designers to figure out what they need to do, and works to establish a timeline for building and shipping content.
- Live operations! When the game servers die, someone has to help make sure we have the right people involved.
- More recently, as the team grew, Yong has others to help him manage some of these things. Running a 45 man team by yourself is too much.
- Now Yong is more into features and new content updates for the game. Making sure the team understands what is needed to get everything out the door.
- Does not have a pool.
- Yong Woo has a sister and shes on the Hearthstone team. Previously came from the WoW Team.
Deckslots
- They know people are tired about hearing about how new deck slots have been in progress for so long.
- Having a long list of deck slots isn't the right way to handle it, and they especially think that's the case for newer players.
- If all they cared about was getting us deck slots right away, there's definitely a way they could have gotten it done already.
- They don't think that we're dumb, they know we can handle more deck slots.
- Ben Brode has actively been communicating to the community that they're working on the design.
- They're hoping once deck slots are released, we'll all see why it took the extra time to get it out.
- Yong feels it would be wrong for them to make more deck slots a micro-transaction. This is a personal comment.
Class Portraits
- Great way for more diversity in the game, let's people connect with different heroes they really like.
- They're currently trying to figure out the best way to move forward. What's the best way to distribute them?
- We will definitely have more Hero portraits added to the game.
- He will not be commenting on the leaked evidence that they've been working on heroes. (Laughter)
Player Catch-Up Mechanisms
- It's obvious to them if they keep doing what they're doing for 20 years, there's going to be too many cards. Something will have to change, it isn't sustainable.
- They should be looking at new players and how they can accelerate their collections.
- Tavern Brawls are one way that they can help newer players grow their collection. There's a reason its a classic pack.
- The Classic Pack is of high value for newer players.
- The "new" Watch and Learn quest for spectating helps bring more of these Classic Packs into the hands of new players.
- They're going to continue adding more quests.
Tournament System
- They're having a problem trying to come up with specialized names for what it could be.
- What exactly would a tournament mode in the game be? Lobbies? Sitting around for 10 minutes? 8 players?
- Would they emulate what they do with the World Championship? Do you bring 3 decks to the table in conquest format?
- Waiting around, is it cool to wait for others to finish their games? It can feel like it goes against Hearthstone's philosophy of having the game be played around your life, and not taking control of it. Especially with mobile and being on the go.
- They know players want a more hardcore system to compete against each other in a short time-frame rather than the ladder legend grind.
- They definitely aren't ignoring it, they just want to figure out the best way of doing it.
- They can learn from other things happening at Blizzard, like what they're doing with StarCraft II.
Adventures and Expansions
- Yong thought it would have been interesting to announced a content update and then just have it immediately available. Hearthstone is about delightful surprise, and that is a pretty good way of going about it.
- Things could get boring if every release announcement was the same.
- Another pre-purchase is not off the table. They really wanted to just surprise us this time.
- They want to keep variability (RNG) in the game. It's very important to keep all your games exciting and not feeling the same.
- Discover helps with variability, but gives you a choice between cards, which can each help different depending on your situation. Strategic depth.
- Some members on the team are not only working on the next piece of Hearthstone content, but even the one after that. They need to continue to get ahead.
Tavern Brawls
- They've been talking about co-op for a while and want to take it slow. Crawl, walk, run!
- We'll see more co-op brawls in the future.
Auto-Squelch
- There's pros and cons to such a feature.
- Yes, emotes can emotionally touch you in a negative way, it is a way to connect to the enemy player.
- Emotes are safe.. unlike enabling chat.
- Feedback is appreciated on it, but they aren't careless.
Patch Notes
- Writing good quality patch notes is very time consuming, especially when you're patching the game so often.
- There's value in detailed patch notes like the ones World of Warcraft produces, it just hasn't been prioritized.
- Your feedback about patch notes has been valued, and Yong doesn't mind hearing about it.
Hearthstone API
- Cool idea. The post on the Battle.net forums was a bit optimistic.
- They need to figure out exactly what kind of data they would feature.
♪♫ Deck slots, deck slots, deck slots. ♪♫
What I really can't get is why they don't even mention possibility of adding some feature like 'save last replay'. I mean HS is being promoted as competitive game with PvP and tournaments. Yet there is no possibility to get last game replay by the means of game (and then share it to YouTube or elsewhere).
Regarding tournaments. We have a small FB community of HS players. Sometimes we get to the bar and want to have some kind of tournament. Every time i have to take stupid notes on paper like what was the match up, outcome etc. This is just stupid.
I really like HS concept but it seems that Blizzard way of making decisions on HS improvements is something like this(just remember their last out of nowhere decision of killing Patron Warrior):
Auto-Squelch right before lethal, because i'm tired of all those games where not a single emote was given, only in the end when they kill you.
I Will Crush You!
Aww poor you. Want a tissue?
I'm wondering who in the community they are constantly talking to? Please don't tell me it is pants-on-head stupid playtesters. I really do think they believe the whole community is a joke, and have a very low opinion of us besides being walking wallets. This interview told us nothing new that we didn't learn from the summer interview.
I'd rather have a lousy implementation of extra deck slots that gets improved upon than none at all.
Still don't understand why they bring up new players every time they mention more deckslots. Like, is it really that confusing to see more spots for decks and thats going to make this game harder to play???
I find this next to useless. There seems like a lot of drama for things that seem simple to me. For instance, Deckslots aren't rocket science. 9 assumed that you would either play no more than 1 deck for every class, or would play less than every class. This was never enough. Is it really that hard to add a few more? All this nonsense about new players being too dumb to figure out how to use multiple deck slots or whatever. And now it is worth the wait because they are doing something cool with that. While this remains to be seen, say we give them the benefit of the doubt. Did you really need to do something even remotely elaborate with it? It's just deck slots...
The rest is similar. A bunch of beating around the bush and/or trying to figure things out. And the things I am personally most interested were either not even asked for whatever reason, or were just likely considered too balance related to asked. Whatever. Not like we ever learn anything from interviews anyway.
I want the deck slots!
I know. These people are so dumb in some areas. Cool people but come on. We're online like every effing day. And many are on Reddit/YouTube/whatever. Logging INTO the game and getting a patch notes pop up or better yet, having a patch notes LOG you can always check on would be great too.
and it WOULDNT be too much for goodness sakes.
Great to see the deves are listening to people and can't wait to see what they do with the game.
Yeah, hearthstone is a free to play game (the kind that usually sucks up all your money) from a company who had too much money already. They're at the point where the goal of their game isn't to rake in the dough, but to make a fun game that anybody can play from casual to pro
I agree, too much of the public is salty about minor things. I'm excited to see where they go with co-op and tournaments.
Wait a second working on heroes? Not Class or Hero Portraits? Can this be a new hero, like DK?
On the reddit people found that on the voice actor list for Japan, there were 3 characters that are in Warcraft lore that could be heroes, Tyrande (Priest or Druid, most likely Priest) Maiev (Rouge) and a Paladin I forgot the name of.
Deckslots.. Too hard to make wow.. They want us to really want it so when it's here it will be something huge.. That's a stupid way to market stuff.. Justlet us delete the basic card sets nobody uses them at all they are also garbage that will give us 9 more deck slots without efford from blizzard.
Damn, I had to delete a dragon priest deck cause I wanted to you try bolster warrior (did o...k missing gromash as finisher, and a 3 drop.. Now there will be one 3 drop!)
It just screams incompetence to me. Clearly the worse devs ever. Just give me the code and I'd have deck slot done by this evening.
Why not have multiple pages of 9 decks slots each? We already have two pages if you count the basic decks. So why not add another f*ing page.
Edit: Neg-rep away fan boys. But really we have a good point. People have been screaming for this feature for a long time...and yes they are bad devs. Look at the recent co-op Brawl - we could not see our team mates cards, so no chance of cooperation without voice coms. Something like that doesn't go unnoticed when they designed the mode. They obviously have trouble changing some aspects of the code easily (perhaps not all of it modular). Anyway screams bad game developers to me.
Yeah the patch notes comment is ridiculous. They release patches every 3 months or something. Even then very little has actually changed since beta. I supposed they don't want to confuse us. Pile of idiots working for Hearthstone if you ask me.