Ben Brode on Arena Player Rewards, Game Balance, Card Sets, Features, and Ben Facts
Ben Brode was streaming live on Twitch earlier and said words! We've recapped the interesting bits below.
Quote from Ben BrodeSorry About That
- The sorry emote didn't have a lot of use, and they already had the wow emote recorded so they switched it because they thought it was more useful.
Arena
- They're currently looking into ways of celebrating arena players more.
- Iksar is doing a lot of work on figuring out ways to show top arena players without incentives.
- They want to be careful with incentives, they don't want players to burnout.
- It could be cool to change the arena drafting pool periodically.
Priest
- Priest may be the worst class now, but there could be cards [that exist in the game now] that bring it back up.
Shaman
- Shamans received very powerful cards with Old Gods because they had a lot of room for improvement.
Warrior
- Mech Warrior caught Ben and the team off guard. The cards were available for a while but no one had picked it up.
- Mech Warrior was one of the top winrate decks.
Game Balance
- Hearthstone's balance, and the balance of card games in general, shouldn't be compared with games like Overwatch or StarCraft.
- It's easier to nerf and buff in other games as you can do so at a much smaller level - micro changes.
- Changing any number on a card is a major change and is more noticeable.
- They'd rather players come up with solutions to problems as they arise then changing cards all the time.
- Creating cards that counter other cards is stuff that they should support more in the card pool.
- One class will always be the worst, even if its by a small percentage.
Card Sets
- New cards added to sets aren't always for high level play.
- Tons of players have fun with Majordomo Executus, but he isn't necessarily competitive.
- Adding more cards to the reward set is tricky, since it's a wild only set. They don't want to push new players towards wild.
- The way they choose what will be the next card set is by setting up a whiteboard and shouting out ideas.
- Then they talk about possible mechanics and flavor with each idea.
- Ben pitched 4 different adventures with card ideas before they had done Naxxramas. He won't talk about them though because we may see them one day.
New Features
- Being able to choose random card backs is a cool idea but isn't on the top of their list of things to do.
- Ben is hesitant to say yes to a tournament mode built into Hearthstone, it's a complicated issue with many different implementations.
- Golden hero borders at 500 wins for the paid heroes aren't technically possible at this time due to the single image the entire hero backdrop uses.
- Ben doesn't think that adding more classes is needed.
Ben Facts
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- In Overwatch, Ben likes to play Zenyatta and Pharah.
- Ben delivered a Pizza to Blizzard 13 years ago.
- Ben ate In-and-Out for dinner this evening.
- Ben is responsible for the Hearthstone troll mumbling found in background music.
- Ben is responsible for the World of Warcraft death sound of The Prophet Skeram.
- Ben was a pretty big pet collector in World of Warcraft.
- If the back of a hotdog bun opens up, its a sandwich.
Why is nobody talking about how they said Mech Warrior was viable? Why, because they had Siege Engine, Iron Juggernaut, Warbot, and Screwjank Clunker? Yeah they had a good amount of mechs, but they were either mediocre or bad.
Warbot: 1 mana, 1 power, 3 health statline; Enrage +1 attack. At best this is a 2/2 for 1 mana, which isn't great
Screwjank Clunker: 4 mana, 2 power, 5 health statline; Battlecry: Give a friendly mech +2/+2. Okay, decent battlecry, but a statline that contests almost nothing in the stage of the game, especially as a warrior. If it was priest mech it'd stick alot easier.
Siege Engine: 5 mana, 5 power, 5 health statline; Gain +1 Attack whenever you gain armor. Decent statline, but it requires a hulk warrior to fully utilize it, and during it's life cycle that was proven to be not a good deck against aggro time and time again.
Iron Juggernaut: 6 mana, 6 power, 5 health statline; Battlecry: put an exploding mine in your opponent's deck. This has a great battlecry, IF you are already winning. If you aren't you are playing this against something that came out 6 mana and up in cost, it's dying and you have to pray that the mine explodes for a lethal hit.
All around, these cards weren't truly competitive in any way. They rely too much on outside sources, so why the hell are they saying it had one of the best win rates? Sure that could happen if you have 2 people playing the deck that win 3 matches in a row for their quest and dump it.
This is how games start the path of destruction. The devs just ignore what the players want, resulting in not that much interest. They make certain parts of the game broken, and keep "secrets" hidden to keep players wondering. Its quite annoying actually.
If this is just the interesting bits, I wonder how much garbage was in that stream. Seriously, there's nothing here that a person with half a brain doesn't already know. What rubbish. And I don't mean anything against the site, I'm talking about the devs and this "community interaction". It's just gossip, nonsense, and excuses. Nothing constructive at all. Gold borders for paid heroes? The Sorry to Wow emotes? Really? Well I guess when the next patch is game mode icons for tavern brawl and casual, I guess you can see where they are spending their time... Great job guys.
I'm telling you Ben, this philosophy you have of "There doesn't need to be more classes" or "You can't just buff and nerf every card like it's Overwatch" needs to go. There are clear extreme balance problems that if they don't get addressed, people will get frustrated and stop playing altogether.
As for more classes, new classes would add more variety to the game, therefore more replayability. At least have new classes as a thought instead of saying "No, we're never going to add new classes." Having that kind of mindset is highly destructive in a game dev's mind. Sakurai said he was never going to add DLC to Smash Bros, and now look. Never say never Ben, for that's what causes people to leave your game and hate you.
One last note, instead of implementing random card backs, how about you give us the option to choose our gameboards?
He seems like the type of guy that if you were to work for him and you had a great idea he would shoot it down just because he wouldn't get credit for it, so you have to make it seem like it's his idea from the get-go just so it can happen. Maybe that's the angle we need to work, instead of pointing out how bone-headed he actually is we should tell him how genius this all has been if only there was something... like an option to choose something or even purchase that would open up more content within the current playable characters... nah he's probably too dense and we'd end up with another save the pandas hero or something.
ben is a charlatan a perfect politician telling alot of nothing, honesty is so rare these days
Got a tweet back from him last night.
"I wasn't saying there is a deck that hasn't been discovered. I'm just saying it's possible there is. Metas change."- Ben Brode
So there ya have it. All very confusing, I'm giving up.
Just so there is no confusion I didn't ask him about a deck this is what I said to him
"about your stream from last night, I was hoping you might give some hint about what current priest cards you had in mind. Thank you"
i want wild heroes
That Priest statement only makes me a bit angry to be honest. They should either admit they dropped the ball or say nothing at all. That secret deck thing is so childish, its bs. Its like mockery.
You know nothing Ben Brode
I didn't get the hate on Ben Brode until now.
I'd actually say Priest has never gotten the worst class legendary, however it has gotten fairly regularly and equally bad legendaries, whereas the classes with extremely bad legendaries have also gotten very good ones (Wilfred Fizzlebang and Lord Jaraxxus, Flame Leviathan and Archmage Antonidas, etc). Let's hope Priest gets some good cards in the next expansion (but not the Shaman treatment).
And what the fucking bullshit is this? Didn't they say after the formats were introduced that they'd be happy with any percentage of players playing Wild or Standard? How would this even push the new players into Wild? What the fuck would be the problem with that?
I get your point but maybe he doesn't want the new players go wild because it's a bigger card pool.
Did any new players even get, or even try to get Captain's Parrot or Old Murk-Eye?
I'm noticing a lot of people starting a witch hunt over this elusive Priest deck that BB mentions, saying things from 'he thinks the community is full of idiots' (in slightly more derogatory terms) to demanding he give us the decklist for this undiscovered deck.
In that mind, I just want to clarify something - when he says that there could be an undiscovered Priest deck, he's not saying that there is a magical mystical top tier Priest deck, he's just musing that you shouldn't completely rule out Priest. In the vein of Mech Warrior, which wasn't played for a long time until it was suddenly discovered and used to great effect for a while, there could be a Legend rank Priest list out there - he doesn't know what it is, or even if it exists, but there could be one.
I dunno. pretty sure there's an awesome meta breaking Priest deck out there and they're just trying to hide it from us! it's a conspiracy I tell ya!
Just kidding of course.
Either way, gonna try real hard to come up with a decent competitive Priest deck that beats zoo, hunter and shaman.