Ben Brode on Basic Decks New Player Experience
In a reddit thread which asked for a revamp of basic decks, Ben Brode came out to discuss some philosophy behind them.
- Basic decks should include the basic cards classes come with.
- Players should start with a lower power level so that they can progress more. Higher power initially = less progression.
- Allowing players to edit their basic decks helps introduce players to deck building earlier. Deck recipes also helps!
- Casual mode keeps new players together for an amount of time and does a good job at giving players a 50% winrate even with low power decks.
- Allowing new players to access ranked early on may be a fault of the system and not basic decks themselves.
Quote from Ben BrodeThose decks (and I believe you're talking about the ones players unlock when they first unlock a class - we call them 'Basic Decks' internally) have some specific goals.
- The decks should include the basic cards that you unlocked when you unlocked the class. There are 5 of these so 10 cards in each deck are class cards. This is a little light, and with any less a deck could just feel like a deck of all neutral basic minions. There aren't any swaps to make besides neutral minions because players don't own any other class cards yet.
- The power level should start fairly low. We quickly give players new basic cards and classic packs. The feeling of earning new cards and making your deck better makes the early part of Hearthstone a lot more fun. Starting at a higher power level means less opportunity for progression.
- Building a deck is one of the biggest hurdles for new players. A year ago, you had to start from scratch, and we made a change which gave new players editable decks (instead of empty slots) so that their first deck building experience would be taking out Magma Rager and putting in Frost Bolt. (Or something similar). The Innkeeper gets up in your face to recommend you add it to your deck and we glow buttons to guide you to the right place. This flow (we think) is better than starting from scratch in a world where some players may not understand the concept of a mana curve yet. Putting a couple obviously bad cards in the decks makes this first edit hopefully a little easier. To give you some context, new players who used our old auto-deckbuilder (which we've since improved, it was essentially random except for a basic mana curve before) were much more likely to win games than those who built their own decks. The addition of deck recipes (especially the 'classic' ones) was also intended to help with this problem.
- Giving new players powerful decks only helps if they are playing against players who aren't also new (because otherwise they are both using low power decks, which is fine). In Casual, we only pit new players against other brand new players for a period of time, unless a player's collection passes some internal metric that makes them unsuitable to continue playing in that matchmaking pool. Even outside of that, player win percentages in Casual are close enough to 50% that we aren't seeing major detriment from lower power decks. Note that this definitely wasn't always the case. We've been making big improvements to the new player Casual Matchmaker experience since many of you may have started playing, and this is a continuing area of focus for us. Ranked is another story. Because we match on stars (and not MMR, except for Legend), we don't currently differentiate between new players and those that just haven't played in long enough to drop to rank 25. This is either a failing of the ladder system or the fact that we let new players screw themselves by unlocking Ranked too early.
I do think there is a lot of room for improvement in our new player experience. I just wanted to help give some context for where some of our goals are (or have been in the past).
Yeah, and the moment they step out of the basic deck shadow and get lambasted by a stacked deck with legendaries and synergies?
You have no catch up mechanic for a new player whatsoever, except spending hundreds of dollars.
As a new player, you can't play casually and ever expect to build a competitive card collection without spending money.
The problem is when we try to get our friends into this genre of TCG, even if they are WoW fans and are generally interested in the characters and themes surrounding the game they are still reluctant on the followings:
1. the tutorial doesnt include elements to help with progression and continuity
2. the free to play portion is not very entertaining due to card limitations
3. they dont have a clear picture or know how much this game costs in order to be "competitive" or "catch up" to the current meta
and unfortunately i'd say the players that give up are 1. 50%, 2. 40% and 3. 10%
You wont believe what i just said
The beginner pack should worth just a little bit more.
have anyone used the "deck helper" once?
Playing one of these accounts now. At first I just steamrolled everyone, but once I hit 20, the lack of cards is a limitation. Still haven't got to lvl 20 on a hero to be able to brawl, but after, things might pick up. I could envision reaching 15 by season end. Problem is I have done well by my experience to capitalize on opponent mistakes and anticipate their decks - a real 'new' player doesn't have this to help them break through.
What Blizzard doesn't seem to understand is that, when a player loses against cards he doesn't have, he sees the game as pay to win. Whenever you feel like you need to spend money to be competitive, it becomes a pay to win game. Which Hearthstone IS indeed to a certain degree. Sure, you can get to the pay to win level without spending money but you needs months of gold grinding and lots of luck in pack opening. So, if we were to consider Completely Free games those that only have vanity items for sale, Hearthstone is definitely not among them. I wish people wake up one day and realize that Hearthstone is not really free to play. Maybe Blizzard will then adjust the business model for Hearthstone. Right now, no one is complaining so they take advantage.
It's a COLLECTIBLE Card Game. It's right in the name. Every player has a collection of cards, and if someone else's collection has better cards than yours, then it'll be harder for you to win. You may claim HS isn't "truly" F2P, and that's your opinion; what Blizzard can, and should, do to combat that is make the game more rewarding. Compared to newer CCGs, HS takes a lot of grinding and a lot of games to gain substantial rewards. They need to adjust to the competition and allow new players to build competitive collections faster. The long-term goals that Blizzard wants to have, in order to keep people playing, already exist in the form of Golden cards. Not everyone cares about them, sure, but I'd much rather have it be quite easy to fill out a non-Gold collection completely, then grind for many months to build a Gold one.
Actually, I don't think there is anything a new player playing F2P could do right now to get to pay to win level. They are so, so far behind the curve that they will never accrue a set of the classic cards and all the new expansions that rivals someone who paid.
Do you know how long it takes to get enough dust for a single legendary on the 50 dust average pack? And many decks need specific legendaries to even work right (how many rogue decks lack Van Cleef for instance? Paladin decks without Tirion?). And new players don't even get dust, because they need to fill up their collection with the cards they're getting from packs.
I've been playing F2P since GvG, have missed maybe 3 daily quests since then, and don't even have 2 of most epics in the classic set, and only 3 of the 9 classic class legendaries. Not to mention none of the other key cards certain decks need like Alexstraza or Ysera or Malygos or Leeroy.
F2P simply does not yield enough rewards and Blizzard fucking knows it. But I'll never give them a dime.
@Bladehawk
I mostly agree with your statement. This was mostly my point also. The game is not rewarding enough.
They can give new players different rewards than when the game had 300 cards.. the current format have over 1000 now( counting 2 copies..) and the rewards and begginer stuff are the same! So.. that's how you improve new player experience.
I really agree with this concept as a new player
Absolutely agree. I liked the alternating adventure/expansion rhythm a lot better. If they actually start the 2017 rotation with an expansion I am going to have to think over how much I want to spend on his game.
Actually I'm going to suggest this on twitter
"@bdbrode Please, in the service of those who love meta shifts, please create a mode where you could create "rooms" with different rules and different sets - you could "buy" a "room" for a modicum of gold or money, select sets to use, special tavern brawl type rules, B03 tourney style etc, then people could enter your room, or you could make it private for your own tourney or friends. "
We should just spam him with this idea.
Edit: Lol, I forgot about the character limit on twiiter, I made a condensed message and sent it to him.