BlizzCon 2016 Hearthstone Q&A Panel - Live Recap
The panel has concluded and our recap can be found below. Today's Hearthstone Q&A panel saw the following members of Team 5 answering questions from the audience.
- Game Designer, Peter Whalen
- Senior Game Designer, Matt Place
- Principal Game Designer, Mike Donais
- Senior Game Producer, Yong Woo
Quote from BlizzardArena
- Arena is one the parts of the game they are very passionate about.
- One designer in particular is working on tuning the arena to be the best possible.
- There is a lot of things they can still try out, like if you picked a Murloc maybe you could get yet another guaranteed Murloc.
- Recently the Karazhan card drop rate in Arena was reduced to normal because the team felt players had enough of a Karazhan heavy draft.
Classes
- No new classes will be added if the new classes will steal the niches from the current 9 classes.
- Midrange shaman was at a 57% winrate before the recent card nerfs. It's now in the 50-55% range.
Community
- Even the negative feedback is good for the team, it helps prioritize tasks within the team.
- Millions of players don't engage on sites like reddit and Twitter, and it's important for the team to keep that in mind when looking at community feedback.
- Hearthstone is a constant learning experience for the team, they don't want to always do the same old thing. Community feedback helps!
Cosmetics
- The goal for alternative heroes is to have them available for every class.
- New creative ways of obtaining heroes are always being considered.
- Specifically with Tyrande in China, they are working on making it available.
- They've discussed "Platinum heroes", something past 500 wins, but they haven't figured out the best thing to do with that yet.
- It's understood newer players would love to obtain some of the older card backs. It's actively being discussed, but no announcements at BlizzCon.
Mean Streets of Gadgetzan
- Dragon Priest, No Duplicate Cards Priest, and Spells / Tricks Priest are all archetypes they are looking to improve with Priest this expansion.
- They wanted players to feel like they were signing up with a faction, like Jade Lotus, when they play with their cards. You get to play around with mechanics of other classes while being your main class.
- Each family in the tri-class cards plays very differently from each other and they can't wait to reveal them all.
- Mean Streets currently has less random cards than other expansions. They want expansions and adventures to feel different from one another.
PvE
- They really enjoy making co-op content in Hearthstone.
- They've been talking about making more co-op stuff and making it easier to play with your friends.
- Improvements to the interface for co-op content is something they're looking into doing. The current iteration was simply using the tools they already had.
- Heroic boss balance is very challenging for the team because all players have different card collections.
- They want to make heroic bosses the most fun for the most players possible.
Systems
- The chance of a Hearthstone API is six and a half. No plans in the near future.
- They're looking into ways to help export and import your decks to share with friends without requiring 3rd parties. All the devs are interested in it.
- They're looking into possibly changing the way you gain your initial ranks in a new season. Maybe players at Rank 5 should start a bit further up the chain so they have to grind less to get back there.
- Brawls are great because they can test new stuff quickly and get feedback. Heroic Brawls could go in any direction.
- Sideboarding is something they could maybe try in Tavern Brawls. Players having a variety of decks is already a sort of sideboard.
- No plans currently for custom decks AI matches. Find a friend to play against instead, use forums to find new friends!
- They could potentially invest more time into the AI system to become a better training partner.
- The engineering team has never limited design space. There is always a way to get a certain kind of card done, even if it has to be delayed a little bit.
- Engineers get excited when they are presented with new card ideas that they don't know the exact answer to right away.
- They think it would be nice to be able to organize your collection the way you want, perhaps through something like favouriting cards.
- No plans right now for the collection manager to do that, but they're passionate about it.
- Deck recipes and templates are more useful than the auto-fill decks.
Misc
- Mike Donais is joking around about buying a flannel in the Gear Store. #SellOut
- They're looking into the possibility of expanding Hearthstone lore with short stories.
- Constantly evaluating the best way to release new cards. There could be opportunities outside of Expansions and Adventures but they're happy with the current card release method. Definitely interested in new and crazy ways of doing it.
- They love the Discover mechanic to use over random effects because it adds an amount of skill to player decisions.
- Tournaments are a hard system to implement into the game because everyone has a different idea of what tournaments are.
- Tempo swings are important and we see AoE making a bit of a return with Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. There isn't always AoE included in expansions because they want to keep things fresh and not always the same tools in each set.
Our BlizzCon 2016 Coverage
Looking for more coverage from BlizzCon 2016? You can find all our BlizzCon 2016 articles right here.
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I personally would trade those golden cards from ranked play rewards for some of the older cardbacks.
I do hope the know about Hearthpwn.
I hope these short stories mentioned in misc will be some playable PvE content likr a short adventure which can be bought with money or gold. Card packs/dust/card back could be the reward at the end of the story.
With all the talented art designers that are on the HS team, I would say these stories would probably be in a form of a short Comics, or short written stories with some pictures on the sides.
They do a lot of stuff like this with Wow, when new content is to be released. Comics, short novels, audio tracks, etc.
I know these, absolutely quality stuff, I agree but since there will be only 1 adventure per year many of us gonna miss the entertaining PvE content :(
can they please make card numbering or something so i could know how many cards i have left to complete the collection etc
Card backs should be about changing the appearance of a deck to make it feel more like yours. For other card games you don't always go buy the sleeves with fancy art but you will get your favorite color or a color to match the archetype of your deck. Being that icecrown was one of the only seasons i missed its extremely frustrating to me that i cant have an ice card back for freeze mage. People that didn't earn a season one card back in season one for example, don't have that sentimental connection to run it and most of the people will choose a different card back that they think looks cooler or fits the deck better.
I did not mean open up all card backs. Thank you for adding.
PVE section:
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I really enjoy adventure mode that requires more use of cards, pending collection or limited collection of course. However, yeah a lot of people tend to "rather not bother" whereby "a different mode" should use more "variety of cards" when Normal Mode tends to "allow ladder or meta decks" to "rather easily accomplish the task, aside from "taking up the "zero dust challenge" that most people post up on here for the newer players and top budget challengers. I think that cheaper decks are cool to watch but if people still use a different mode's deck to do the same job without changing up a few cards to interact (when they clearly have the collection to do so, then the "adventure mode" should not be "called/termed adventure mode" as it is same mode as playing "ladder/casual" etc...
But anyway, I really enjoy the adventure mode coverage. I do often enjoy watching to see how different people tackle heroic mode... unfortunately as soon as they unlock the cards, the purpose of the game returns to the ladder then heroic mode presents less chance to get played (for those that clearly prioritizes, I mean the point is to prioritize ladder in most cases to earn points etc) but yeah, heroic for "some" goes untouched due to "rewards" or just "not using more cards when they clearly have more cards" for those that don't have more cards obviously will find that it is clearly a challenge.
Okay, i am not saying that they are doing nothing but i am sure they can do better. Hearthstone is a nearly three years old game and they are the designers. We are still hearing words like "we hope, we try, we think, we passionate" and such but what we need is "done". We really need designers that gets shit done. Anyway its a game and devs are you know humans and etc. No need to be salty while considering what the possibilities are. 4/10 for you from me guys.
Surely that's because they are looking forward rather than banging on about what they've already done?
No one asked a single question about keeping some cards in the standard set? I thought that was a big issue.
For people that do not see it, Blizz is fucking with us, not only they take money from that who pays but also lie and are not certain about their plans. Game may remain in this "boring to death" state for years. They're not going to expand the game and bring any freshness. This means cycled repriting of previous cards that rotated out of Standard because almost no one cares for wild, continuing in power creep, pre-building archetypes of metas that are not going to change for now. Shortly that who supports Team 5 now, wants to play monotone game of not changing play style and mechanics, with the same cards with another names. To see all possible varieties of current cards visit: http://www.hearthcards.net/ .
why bother when people are gonna drop min 50 bucks for any expansion. most people will stfu for like 2 months complain 2 months and then repeat when the next cards are out
Platinum heroes!? Isn't it hard enough to get a golden hero :P
I feel like this would be something like 2,000 wins or something, and how would they be able to make it so that it felt more special than a golden hero &/or a skin?
I really need that shit. Just like how Heroes of the storm increased maximum hero level to 20, Hearthstone needs to reward players who enjoy playing like specific few classes, maybe one even.
2000 win is overkill, 1000 win would be fair. And i want the reward to be different golden art/animation for the same hero. Like Malfurion would turn into Malfurion with Stag hat (Malfurion master skin in HoTS). And Uther with full plate armor and helmet. Idk it just sounds silly to me now