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
You've subscribed to ben facts!
- 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.
I really want to see deathknight and monk and demon hunter.
Lol. It wouldn't be arbitrary because lots of players would support it. Either way it's not like pretty much every decision the team makes isn't arbitrary.
You say they aren't needed now, but the fact we only have 9 heroes available is a huge restriction, long term speaking. Either new heroes, either alternative hero poweres... or some other way to chance the way classes work. Trust me, it will come at some point.
Good. Then assuming anything Ben says has any merit Priests will receive very powerful cards with the next adventure because they had a lot of room for improvement.
Let's replace the Wow emote with a "Ben Brode is a nincompoop." emote. That would immediately become the most used and most accurate of all the emotes.
"The way they choose what will be the next card set is by setting up a whiteboard and shouting out ideas."
FOUR MANA. SEVEN. SEVEN.
Uh, Ben? I was just kidding, why are you writing that down? BEN STOP, THIS IS MADNESS!
Wild doesn't count.
Yes it does.
cant wait the panda adventure release
"Hello? Please, I would like to unsubscribe Ben Facts. I didn't pay for this."
So, if the front of a hotdog bun sticks together, is it a burrito?
"sorry" was better!
Rly?
Im pretty sure that it was one of the most used though :D
Ben apologizes to no one so he didn't use it. He just mistook it as general situation.
It was nice to have sorry if you roped at the start of the game because you had to go to the bathroom or answer the door or something, it was a legitimate way of saying, "sorry for wasting your time, I'm not intentionally BMing and the rest of the game will go smoothly."
So much information.... no useful information.... and nothing about the new adventure.. oh yeah It can be one of the 3 remaining ideas before Naxx Lol
"We certainly talked a lot about Karazhan, and I would be surprised if we didn't do it at some point in the future." That was from an interview back in March 2015, so there's one adventure idea down, two more.
"If the back of a hotdog bun opens up, its a sandwich."
THANK YOU.
This is really starting to piss me off now, I have played death knight since 2008, it should have been in this game on day 1 let alone 2.5 years later. I suppose they don't understand that people have favorite classes in world of warcraft and want to be able to play them in hearthstone.