Ben Brode: The New Player Experience Needs Work
Ben Brode took to reddit this morning to touch upon the new player experience.
- Tweaks made throughout the years have increased player retention.
- Casual matchmaker has been improved to increase new player winrates by around 15%.
- Ranked is becoming more difficult for new players.
- New players play in different pools with other newbies with similar sized collections.
- The introductory missions feel good but then it turns into a cliff.
How do you feel about the new player experience? Have any of your friends recently joined the game and turned away?
Quote from Ben BrodeHey there!We agree that the new player experience needs more work. We've been tweaking it for years and have seen significant increases in retention among new players since launch. Most new players start playing against the AI and then take on other players in Casual. The Casual matchmaker has gone through a lot of iteration and new player winrates have increased by ~15%.
Ranked is a different story. Ranked is becoming more difficult for new players over time. I spoke about some of the challenges we are currently facing with our ladder system before I left for paternity leave here: [See quote below - Ben on Ladder]
Something you may not realize is that new players actually play in a seperate matchmaking pool for their first several sessions. In Casual, we match them entirely against other brand new players with similarly-sized collections.
That all said, we think the introductory missions up through Illidan feel pretty good, and after that it still feels like a bit of a cliff. It's definitely something we're aware of. Thanks for your feedback, and for the feedback of everyone else who's been chiming in on this over the last few months.
Ben on the Ladder System
Quote from Ben BrodeSeeing some comments here about how people are enjoying easier laddering due to this bug, and hoping we leave it unfixed. I thought I might chime in and talk about the ladder a bit, and hopefully get some feedback!We have been discussing the ladder system a lot recently - we're not 100% happy with it.
Here are some things we are currently discussing:
Rank 18 players are higher ranked than 50% of HS players. That number doesn't make you feel like you are in the top 50%, and that's a missed opportunity. We try and counter this by telling you all over the place what the mapping is to the rest of the population, but it'd be better if expectations and reality matched here.
We've received feedback that the last-minute jostling for high Legend ranks at the end of a season doesn't feel all that great.
We've received feedback that the ladder can feel like a grind.
We are reanalyzing the number of ranks, the number of stars per rank, the number of bonus stars given out at the start of the season, and other parts of the system.
We are developing simulation systems that let us predict what changes to the ladder would do to the population curve. If we inflate too many stars, the whole population ends up in the Legend bucket and while that might feel great for a single month, the entire system falls apart eventually. People who played waaaay back may remember when "3-star master" was the pinnacle of achievement, and it meant nothing because so many people ended up in that bucket. With better simulation tools, we are planning on trying a lot of crazy things. Iteration is important in design, and getting the tools to iterate quickly is very important.
Something I want to emphasize is that while I think we can improve the ladder, the metric for that improvement isn't necessarily any one player's individual rank increasing. Players want the better rewards (and prestige) associated with high ranks, or the Legend card back, so any change we make that increases the chances of those are likely to be perceived as "good", at least for the short term. But part of what makes the ranked ladder compelling is that exists to rank players. If you want to see how you stack up, ranked is the place to do it. So while some inflation might improve the experience, we need to be careful and make sure we end up with a system that makes people feel rewarded for increases in personal skill or for finding a new deck that breaks the meta.
I just want them to change the ladder so i don't have to start at rank 16 each month....
Besides the downvotes he's so fcking right! Ben Brode is just a puppet.
Kinda unrelated but what is even this year's ranked theme? Last year was Kraken, so what's it changed to?
Standar year begins with next expansion that's when we'll find next horoscope sign.
It's not yet changed
Kraken Year is associated with Standart rotation, but not with real calendar
3 years, not including beta, is not enough data? Come on!
This, among other parts, implicates that the situation is changing, which can be seen otherwise as well. Almost all data older than an year is close to irrelevant. There's also the analyzing part, and the data from game play can't be always applied.
If the data older than an year is "close to" irrelevant, what else do you need? So you have 1 year of data and that's not enough? How can it ever be enough data when you reset your data every year? That doesn't make sense.
You completely dismissed the rest of my comment, you don't just look at the data and be like "lulz here's a solution ez". See the second quote?
They think legendary cool thing, but it's OP 1 drops and 2 drops.
I gave up a long time ago with trying to get my gaming friends into this game. Even my friends who play MtG won't get down....feelsbadman.
I really don't understand their logic of resetting legend players back to early ranks every season. If you want new players to have fun on ladder, you need to keep the highly skilled players with every card away from the guy who just started playing a week ago. I mean, I guess you could argue that they want it to be rewarding for the climb or whatever. I feel most legend players just race to legend so they can relax and have fun though. Just let them stay in legend. If they don't log in, drop them to rank 5, if they don't log in the month after drop them to rank 10 etc.
You understand legend players start at r15 after season start, don't you? Most new players hardly reach this rank by the middle of the season.
Not the best option, but, yes, ladder must be changed. Maybe they change it in new season=(
There should be soft reset every month, return all legend players to Rank 1, gold rank players to Rank 6, silver rank players to Rank 10... and hard reset at start off new standard season return all players back to Rank 25.
I could get behind this...
At first glance seems good but sooner or later too many players will hit the legend and better players will ask to make platinum rank above legend rank and so on and so forth
They should do a "Tavern Brawl" version of the Solo-Innkeeper, where they put players against different deck recipe decks each week and reward players with specific common/rare cards from those deck recipes. It could have pop ups on how that deck recipe works and plays. For instance, one week the deck recipe could be "zoo," and you could play against the Innkeeper to win cards like Knife Juggler and Abusive Sergeant.
Another thing they could do: If I want to start playing Shaman, it would be nice to be able to buy a few card packs of just Shaman cards.
New players don't need help getting all the cards. They just need help getting that one first deck going. So these kinds of tools to help that happen would be great.