Lightning Talk on Buff Bar feat. Wyatt Cheng, Limited Rebirths
Greymane Not Coming This Week, Epic Plays 58 Christmas Special
Legion - Moose Mount, Blue Tweets, Poll, Survival Hunter and Fire Mage Previews
Happy Holidays From HearthPwn
Everyone here at HearthPwn wishes you the best of times during the holidays. Enjoy your time with your friends and family, but don't forget to give the Innkeeper, and us, a visit too!
Ben Brode on Deck Slots, Alt Card Art, Beginners
Senior Game Designer, Ben Brode, took to reddit to clarify a couple of questions and concerns which stemmed from his recent vlog on Card Text Consistency.
Quote from Ben BrodeI just wanted to pop in and hopefully clear up a couple things.We don't focus only on beginners, it's just that we bring them up a lot because many vocal players are already representing the other major group (engaged players). Most of what we do is for engaged players. In fact, just releasing any kind of content is pretty bad for new players. You've identified the fact that we are making the game worse (higher barrier to entry) for new players despite our apparent focus on them. That's because we really are trying to focus on everyone, impossible though it may be.
Also, I agree we do need to do something about the barrier to entry. I'm not sure it's catastrophic right now, but it won't take too many more expansions before it is. I made a video about this recently, you can check it out here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGc6hAr8r6c
We are pretty close to having some actual plans to share with everyone about this. Sorry I can't share more right now - still hammering out some details.
A couple more clairifications [sic]:
- Deck Slots - we are actively working on this.
- No alt art card rewards - this is more to benefit engaged players than new players. The game is somewhat more fun when you don't have to read your opponent's cards, and you just let the art inform the gameplay because you've just memorized it over time.
- No Weekly balancing - this also isn't for new players. Made a video about this, you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ioY1KO79A
Hearthstone Jingle Bells
Gloudas put out quite an impressive version of Jingle Bells which uses the sounds of Hearthstone!
Would love extra deckslots and a tournament mode!
Why are so many people obsessed with a "tournament mode"? I've yet to hear one specific "tournament mode" proposal that isn't both awful and unnecessary.
Explain it then. Explain what tournament mode would be. That's all I'm missing is an explanation for what the mode would actually be that would actually add something new to the game.
I mean... It's not like there's not another online TCG out there with various tournament queues that they could model it after....
Oh wait, there is. that's right...
Examples
Daily Constructed Swiss: You can play ONE of these per day.
Cost: 500 Gold or $5.00
16-128 Players, Lasts 6 Swiss Rounds
Rewards based on match wins for 3+ win, bear in mind this is an example. I realize that's a lot of packs, but to incentivize people playing in this queue once a day could be worth it. 500 gold or $5.00 for a chance at 10 packs + Gold
6 wins : 10 packs + 500 gold
5 wins : 8 packs + 400 gold
4 wins : 6 packs + 300 gold
3 wins : 4 packs + 200 gold
Everyone else, gets 2 Packs with some dust, etc....
On Demand Limited Tournament Queues: Play as many as you want.
Arena Style drafting of your deck, actual booster drafting, or getting a set number of boosters and building a deck from those boosters + basic cards would be interesting.
Cost 250 Gold or $2.99
8-16 Players
4 Rounds of Swiss style Play, Win as many matches as you can.
4 Wins: 2 Packs + 250 gold
3 Wins: 2 Packs + 175 gold
2 Wins: 1 Pack + 100 gold
1 Win: 1 Pack
Limited or Constructed Single Elimination: On Demand Queues, play as often as you want.
Cost: 250 gold for Constructed, 500 for Limited (Sealed/draft/arena draft)
16 Players
Winner: 4 Packs + 300 Gold
2nd Place: 3 packs + 200 Gold
3rd-4th: 2 packs + 100 gold
There are plenty more examples out there... It's not that they're necessary, but they're fun. Also, MTGO has pro tour qualifiers 100% online, with some work Blizzard could conceivably do the same thing, and even offer Pro Points for certain tournaments, with commensurate costs of course.
Personally speaking, I'd play more if I could do some more competitive play besides laddering. I also think there are plenty of people there with me on that sentiment.
Drachenlord, how would the play experience of those proposals differ any from Ranked or Arena then? As far as I can tell, just an entry cost and rewards, which frankly I don't think are enough to justify it.
I still don't understand why they're agonizing on how to implement additional deck slots. Just look at the deck selection screen. Many folks may not have noticed this but there's a banner that says "Custom Decks" with an arrow button on the left. Click on the arrow button and you now can select nine different already built decks called "Basic Decks". So just add an arrow that points to the right and give us nine more "Custom Decks". Q.E.D.
They also nerfed Unleash the Hounds and killed Starving Buzzard. In my opinion Knife Juggler is overpowered and should be nerfed.
What about kind of a league/rank mode based on how much dust you have on your whole collection? Could bring new players for sure :)
What's up with all these Ben stuff recently? Is he finally (pretending to be)listening to the players? Is he feeling insecure?
Yeah that's why I added "pretending". Recently he is really into making himself look like he cares/listens. We all know he never does lol
With all this talk about how the developers are "working on new deck slots" I can only assume this means we'll be getting a bit of an overhaul of the deck builder UI as a whole and that's why it's taking so long. There is no way in hell it takes this long to add a scroll bar or a new tab of decks, the reason it's taking this long has to be because they're making a rather substantial amount of changes. Hopefully we see the fruits of that labor sooner rather than later though, and new hero portraits too lol.
The cake is a lie!
I myself have not understood the high demand for extra deck lots, but maybe I'm in the minority. Even if i do have all 8 deck slots filled, I can usually find one slot with a deck that hasn't been touched in weeks or months that I can delete with ease.
I'm the guy that has 50+ decks on the Deck Tracker and imports them to the game when I wanna play them. And this sucks. Whenever there's a new expansion or adventure, I need to save all my decks to make space for new ones and make the heroic adventure's decks. And this keeps repeating, again and again, it really sucks. There's a lot of uneccessary work here, new deck slots would be the best update in the game for me.
I agree with you, I even stopped playing some weeks ago, because I got tired of re-building every fun deck I wanted to try with the LoE release and waiting for those bloody additional deck slots for months...
I know that feel, bro
Ben Brode knows how to say something without saying anything - a master of marketing ^^