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.
He has mentioned the Priest deck a couple of times now so if he's not just being mean he knows something that we don't. I'm starting to think that they had a popular Priest deck in their internal testing for WoG/Standard.
One of the last sentences should be shortened to just 'Ben is responsible for the Hearthstone troll mumbling', now it's more true.
/sigh.... when u set hearthpwn filters to priest/standard/old gods you get 189 pages of priest decks, that's 4725 deck....
And that's not include all the deck that were posted before release but with old gods card.
And it's definitely not include all the decks that weren't posted.......so please don't tell me that we didn't discover it
Ben Brode is an absolute tool that knows nothing about PR.
The best part is NOT EVER engaging in ANY communication with Priest players.
Well I went ahead and tweeted Big Ben and asked him what he had in mind about this priest deck. I doubt he'll answer me but if by some miracle he does I'll post the response here. I encourage everyone to do the same. He may be able to ignore me but surely he can't ignore all of us. His twitter is @Bdbrode if you do this try to be at least semi polite we actually want an answer here.
So, pouring salt on the wound wasn't enough the first time, he has to repeat Priest players are just too retarded to come up with a deck. Go eat a bag of male genitals, Ben Brode.
Guys, the competitive priest deck is totally patron priest. /Kappa
This is why you guys will never find the list. I just tried three different versions of Patron Priest and learned asllot. I mean, obviously that card probably isn't a part of the list, but I get sick of watching streamers "homebrew" by copying card-for-card lists out of their memory and glazing their eyes over cards like Resurrect, Holy Champion, and Temple Enforcer.
Damn it! What is this secret Priest deck they're hiding from us?!?! I just cannot fathom a Priest deck being solid against what's in the meta today. Aggro is killing me out there! I'm beating my head against the wall trying to think how we can best utilize the standard set of Priest cards. Could it be that we're not using certain forgotten cards. Let's see, we got Silence, Mass Dispel, Confuse, Mindgames, Resurrect, Shadow Word: Horror, Power Word: Tentacles, Shadowfiend, Lightwell? Those are the only cards I can think of that aren't really being used at the moment. Are we not building our Dragon Priest decks well enough? What are we missing????!!!!
Awh you fixed it now my comment makes no sense :(. But seriously priest players tend to be pretty chill to get us all fired up like this takes a lot. Good job Ben.
Fixed it. I do wish it were that easy though.
Wow...
Ben Facts (of Fiction): "If the back of a hotdog bun opens up, its a sandwich."
Changing the state of the bun, doesn't magically change what the food actually is.
A hotdog is a hotdog, and not a sandwich (otherwise it would be called a sandwich and not a hotdog).
"But, it's meat, vegetables and condiments surrounded by bread that you can eat, if that's not a sandwich then what is?" I hear you say.
If you go by that logic, then a breadbowl soup/pizza is also a sandwich.
Stop perpetuating the myth people! ( '-')v
Oh ok so the entire hearthstone community has just been too stupid to see the competitive priest deck that Ben has been keeping a secret from us. So either tell us what it is or admit that you fucked up. (Not wild, Not C'thun niether of those count) Why can't he just admit when he's wrong and stop whining about "how hard it is to change cards" and " It's hard to balance the game" that's your JOB do it well or go back to delivering pizza Mr. Giggles.
Meh, I don't actually expect the dev team to ever admit they are wrong even though they are. Honestly I'm just sick of the excuses and whining from Ben. I mean that's our job as the players! In all seriousness though we have been making ourselves heard since the reveal of the first few WOG cards that priest was looking bad and sure enough it is and not even marginally it's "can't compete" bad and all Ben can say to us is "Your not trying hard enough"? Maybe they're not trying hard enough. I can be patient though I'll wait it out till the next set which from what it looks like they're no where close to ready for. For now though I'll just play Warrior which has, what? 5 competitive decks? If every class was as finely tuned as warrior these threads would be seriously quiet.
To be fair, BB is the lead designer. It isn't his job to "change cards and balance the game" - as you might suspect, that's the responsibility of the balance team, led by Mike Donais. BB works on initial card design, and oversees both art design, and sound design (voice acting) for new content.
I see, and we may be pointing the finger at the wrong person specifically here, but Mr. Brode is the face and voice of the Dev team. So when he speaks on the behalf of the team (at least I) expect him to be able to pass the information we give to him back to that team. So maybe I'm going about this all wrong and what little outrage I have left should be pointed towards Mike Donais. Either way things certainly aren't being communicated in an efficient manner over there.
Ben doesn't think we need new heroes.
Yes, not now, but give it time. I predict that at some point something will have to be done about the lack of flexibility when it comes to deckbuilding. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point we got to see new hero powers, or new heroes, or less likely some form to mix heroes.