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).
I'm feeling conflicted about this line. On one hand, pushing winrates by changing how matches are made is a great idea. Considering how a good number of the quests are "win" quests and "specific cards played", match-pairing can do three things: 1/ allow players to not be discouraged from the game, 2/ lets each player room to make sub-optimal plays, 3/ let players understand the skill level of their plays by comparing them occasionally with better or worse people, 4/ have better players not be bored by bullying weaker opponents. So, this clause I can definitely agree with.
But casual mode keeps new players together.... nahahah good joke Blizzard. While there certainly are more creative and Murloc-flooded decks in Casual, it doesn't really succeed to become the den of beginners. The main reason why is because we only have TWO constructed modes. Hence, any intelligent yet non-competitive players will move to Casual, and hence the beginner group remain to feel oppressed. In fact, I feel oppressed when starting out the game (by both Arena and Casual) such that I took 6 months long break, before my friends convinced me back into this.
There is also a good amount of beginners who feel that their card pool is not large enough, and Arena becoming less gold-profitable is not conducive for their desired play.
My suggestion: make more divisions/ game modes. It is possible to let these game modes to have less gold gain, but in exchange lets one to complete quests much more easily. Maybe a different format Arena too. It would be fun for beginners if there is Arena whose entry cost is mere 100 gold (max gold gain can be capped at much lower)
MMR?
You face opponents with similar MMR (matchmaking ratio), and when you win it gets higher, and when you lose it gets lower. Thus it means all players will have 50% win rate.
A lot of talk to the community these days, thats a positive thing.
"...unless a player's collection passes a certain metric..."
Huh. I didn't know they tracked that, but neat info.
I'm just imagining Brode laughing in a green sea of binary
It's pretty clear that they can track this, but there has never been a confirmation before that they do.
For example, it's plausible for them to track my win rate to a close enough degree that they know I play worse at 6am - when I just woke up and I can't see straight - and therefore match me against worse opponents (in casual mode) at that time of day. It's unlikely that they would do so, because there's an awful lot of cost involved in accounting for such variables.
Knowing that something is possible and knowing that it is happening are different things.
All I get from this is that they want to make basic and classic cards worse so people buy more packs as all they will have is useless
I wish this was a TCG. Imagine the secondary market if you could actually trade cards!
If you could actually trade cards, the drop rates for rarity would have to be much much lower for trading to have any meaning, else everyone would soon have all the cards they wanted and trading would grind to a halt.
Think about the auction house in early Diablo 3. Because drop rates were so low, you could go for weeks playing casually and hardly ever see a legendary drop. I don't want that sort of environment for Hearthstone. It would kill it.
I first started just in November 2016 so am a new player and I didn't even know there was ladder play and only clicked on it by accident and glad I found it as have been grinding it ever since. Wish they had something on there that would of got me started. Don't find it any harder than casual at level 20 etc and you get rewards and you feel like you are trying to get higher - is some motivation and some satisfaction in that.
It's nice to hear, I hope they deliver.
I believe though, Introducing other game modes early on would increase the interest further than the initial "I need this, that and two of those before I can win".
It's hard for me personally to imagine the new player experience, even if I would start a new account I still have my experience. When I started, at launch. My experience was wonderful, more because everyone else was new as well. Sometimes initial limitations that sound harsh could be good for the game. Most people would say unfair perhaps, but something the hand needs to be slammed into the table.
So what Ben is saying is that if you are a new player who happens to enjoy being competitive as soon as possible : TOO BAD .
The problem was never about casual mode . That is fine .
If you go into ladder and you do not have a "META" deck you know what happens ? You get absolutely demolished by META decks . That's just not fair for a new player who has to pay hundreds of dollars to get even a single META deck up and running or enjoy an abysmal win rate and stay below rank 15 .
Too bad? If you're a new player in any card game, no matter how competitive you are, you've really got no business on the competitive scene and you will get crushed by the competitive meta decks.
That is not fair for a new player to pay over-exaggerated amount of money to get a single meta deck? Welcome to every tcg ever made!
You are arguing against something that is completely normal and expected in any card game. Getting into competitive play takes time, practice and money. You don't get to do that instantly.
Ladder is changing?