Developer Insights Live - Potential Arena & Ranked Changes, Community Q&A
The live edition of Developer insights featuring Ben Brode and Dean Ayala has concluded. You can find our recap of the stream below, or watch the vod further below that.
Please note that some stuff below is simply the team sharing ideas of changes that could come and doesn't mean we'll see everything implemented. The team loves to hear feedback and are really interested in the points on Arena changes and ranked ladder.
Top 3 Takeaways
- Arena may change into a Standard format.
- Ranked is currently too grindy so new breakpoints, bonus stars, and and win-streaks past rank 5 could help with that.
- If Pirates don't lose some steam, the team will likely intervene.
Recap
Quote from Ben and DeanIntroduction
- They've never done a live Q&A before so this will be a bit different than past experiences.
- Ben thinks video format is helpful for communication and they should do more of it.
New Player Experience
- Most new players play against AI, some hit up casual, and few hit up ranked right away.
- They've adjusted the matchmaking experience over time to ensure new players get introduced to the game better.
Ranked Ladder
- The current system is very clear how it works, there's no behind the scenes calculations outside of Legend.
- It's too grindy right, especially with it always resetting.
- Monthly seasons are a good duration.
- A short-term fix is to increase the amount of bonus stars you gain so you can get back up to where you were faster.
- Trying to move more players away from Rank 20 can help with the new player experience.
- They don't want everyone to be a Legend player, that would devalue the ranking. Ladder changes shouldn't inflate this count much.
- Win-streaks stopping at Rank 5 was due to the team wanting people to get to Legend "Legit". This could change.
- They have a meeting on Wednesday to see how they can attack the Ranked Ladder issue.
The Arena
- Making Arena Standard is a consideration. New sets become more important to the card pool instead of further diluting it.
- They'd like to reduce the amount of Commons and "useless" cards you get.
- Arena shouldn't feel like constructed, but it also shouldn't just be about picking things to play on curve. More strategy / synergy would be good.
- In February, they're going to release a Top 100 ranking for Arena. It will be calculated based on highest avg wins per run with a minimum 30 run requirement.
- Some changes for Arena are already ready to be added to the game, they're evaluating the best time to patch them in.
Wild Format
- Moving specific cards from Classic and Basic sets keeps them available to that format without nerfing them to keep Standard different.
- They expect Wild to increase in popularity once the next rotation happens. Wild will have 5 format sets instead of just 2.
- Standard is about twice as popular as wild right now.
- Ben would love to see more Wild events, Blizzard has to promote them more.
Pirates
- Pirate Warrior was 30% of the meta game near Gadgetzan launch but has fallen off.
- They're a little higher than they're comfortable with, but if it doesn't change, they're likely to do something about it.
- Patches the Pirate being in all the weapon classes is great from a design perspective even if Pirates may be a bit too strong.
Meta
- There's a lot of different stuff going on in their personal meta report. Lots of decks really close to 50%.
- The top deck and 11th deck were within 3% win-rate of each other with a high end of 52%.
- Hunters and Paladins should see more play once the meta slows down.
- A healthy meta is determined largely by feel. How the community feels and a personal level of the team is important but statistics also come into play.
- Win-rates over 55% for a deck can be a sign that something is wrong, or when 25-30% (or more) of players are playing a specific deck.
- Undertaker was being played in ~40% of games which is why it ended up being nerfed.
- It's really healthy when something is really powerful initially (Pirate Warrior) but then players find tools to combat those decks. They like it when players figure things out themselves without the team intervening.
Misc
- Before Naxx, Hunter was at the top in low-end play but not as good in the high end. They tried to solve it back then by creating cards for Hunters that were harder to play so bad players would do worse and the truly good could excel.
- It's important to have a variety of skill-testing decks in the top end of play.
- It's also okay to have cards that can just be fun and not super competitive.
- They like to do cards like Kun the Forgotten King but they have to be careful with testing to make sure they can't be abused. Malygos and Aviana were cited as being tested a ton with Kun.
- Reprinting nerfed cards could happen, but it hasn't been long enough since those original Standard nerfs. You could also have up to 4 of the same card in Wild then which is an issue.
- Silver Hand Recruits, Buffs, and Healing is the identity for Paladin. More buff synergy is planned. Heals should shine more once Reno Jackson drops out.
Team 5
- Team 5 has almost doubled in size each year since launch. They'll likely get larger.
- Ben spends much of his time in meetings nowadays.
- Dean, as a game designer, spends a lot of time play testing.
Video
The stream has concluded but you can watch the vod to experience the magic.
Restricting arena to standard, instead of the obvious, fun-enhancing option, that is making it possible to choose between standard and wild arena.
Now that would be an improvement: you could play arena as it is now, or just standard.
But why limiting this? Seriously I don't get why blizzard make some things the way the make them :(
Sometimes i have feeling they are doing things, just players dont want to. Blizzard logic: nerf bladeflurry, so people will buy more new sets and etc
Sad to hear they are thinking of making Arena Standard. I really enjoy the card variety, and if it's restricted to Standard cards you will see too many of the same themes that you see in the Standard ladder. Having a large card pool ensures variety of decks, while also ensuring too much inconsistency for people to abuse the ridiculous combos available in Wild. I also think they should do away with weighting the draft toward cards from new sets, as that always just skews things toward whatever class recently got an absurd common card or two.
Finally they should completely ignore card rarity in Arena, and instead use an adaptive system to weight cards' likelihood of appearing in a draft. Track statistics about how well every deck with [x card] performs, if it's in the top 10% of cards or so, make it show up as much as legendaries currently do, etc. Do that for all cards so that good cards are rarer in Arena. They can't make it so good cards are more rare in the normal rarity system because that'd be too pay-to-win in constructed, so Arena need's it's own background rarity system.
Why not wild pack/cards for Wild Arena rewards and only Standard pack/cards for Standard Arena rewards ? This should be considered cause I played hearthstone when old gods was released.
I think this was a very good and informative video. I'm glad they did it. It felt real. You can tell they were both a little nervous to be live with the community which has constantly shown it's salt like it's a proud flag to be waived. I think the game is in a good place and they are aware of all that needs to be done to improve it. It's still a very new game and I don't think we should really begin judging the team unless 5 years after launch it still has consistent problems. They have done a lot of amazing things in it's short span and we gamers need to realize this. It is not at all easy to make a game that's so dependent on its players and community. That human factor will always be there.
Quick question: Will rotating Classic cards to Wild remove any chance of getting them from classic packs? For example, let's say Ragnaros the Firelord gets shipped to Wild Mode, does that mean I can no longer get him from packs? It sounds a bit counter-intuitive to me, as the card is evidently part of the classic set, and its possible to tell by the symbol on the card itself. Then again, getting a Wild card among standard cards also seems counter-intuitive, and possibly a disappointment to many people.
Yes, it will mean you can't get them from packs.
Just like anything else on Wild, it can only be crafted.
Oh, the great fall of 2017 when over 50 million players have decided to stop playing the game because there were some wild events!
You bads are funny :) Please, do move on to Shadowerse. Most of us would probably eat rusty nails than touch that weeb infested game.
If they make Arena a Standard format good chance i will quit the game, having a diluted card pool is the entire point of Arena...Never know what your going to get and you can still build synergies regardless. Going to Standard is not the answer.
I almost never do Constructed because i can't stand Standard so if Arena is much the same there is no getting away from it.
It has been suggested by other players in the community before that they could possibly have both a wild and standard arena format. Not sure how difficult it would be to pull off from a coding standpoint, but from an outside perspective, if they have the two formats in play mode why not let both exist on arena? That way people can choose which one to play. And then Maybe cater the rewards to wild packs or standard packs.
Wow I would actually love to get wild packs as rewards for a "Wild Arena" mode. I missed out on GvG as I started playing from march last year.
But i'm not sure how i would feel about "Standard Arena". For new players getting into the game, this would easier for them as they have less cards to learn about while playing arena. But a lesser card pool would make things a bit stale imo.
This mean never since the meta never slow down !
So every single expansion it's become faster? Really?
See, funnily enough, I can remember a time when things were generally very fast, lots of very aggressive hunter and paladin, low cost zoo, burn decks and whatnot. And yet SOMEHOW before MSG came out, we had a very midrange-y meta where things were slower than the meta which I mentioned, which was some time BEFORE MSG...
Huh. It's almost like... things slowed down a bit! But nahh that's impossible...
I get what you mean but the problem was that GVG was too strong and fast paced, but then along came Narxxramas that also had very powerful (almost overpowered) taunt cards.
Stuff like Deathlord and Sludge Belcher and Zombie Chow is what let the midrange meta survive.
As soon as those cards rotated out Dragon warrior came and aggro shaman so strong that they had to get the nerfs out.
Yes, they could make things slowdown by rotating out strong aggro cards or implement very powerful EARLY game defensive tools. But we can't know for sure what they are going to release and we do know that Pirate Warrior cards are not rotating out, so... Idk, I don't think the meta will slowdown.
Especially since slow control decks are dead for another year unless they nerf some of the control cards for Druid.
I really think that they should do more of these. :)
My biggest issue is that... The meta won't slow down.
Basically all the cards for Pirate Warrior will still exist in standard. Dragon warrior and aggro shaman will suffer, but most control and slow decks will also hurt and not have as many tools against Pirate warrior.
I fail to see a meta where Pirate warrior isn't dominant especially since Reno won't be in standard anymore.
The reno decks couldn't do anything against pirate warrior either. Reno doesn't help you if you die turn 5. The point is that the cards that make control shaman will still be there for example. Control shaman is a really good counter against pirate warrior. Other decks with similar functiom will be created just like after the releaseof whispers, when so many counters against zoolock were created that zoolock became obsolete after a while.
Yeah, so we said when they released Old gods and Karazhan and gadgetzan.
They keep releasing aggro tools aswell as control tools. The issue is that aggro tools are always relevant, control tools aren't because as you said before you get a chance do use them you're dead.
And it's not every game that you're dead by turn 5, reno does help a lot against aggro decks because if you manage to survive using other tools you can stabilize with it.
Yes control shaman is great and all but it is also losing a LOT of tools, don't forget Healing Wave is TGT.
All decks are losing stuff, mostly control decks because they have cards across all expansions, aggro decks don't really care much, most tools are in classic and some from the latest expansion. It is unlikely they will release enough cards that can make the meta slowdown. We've seen it last rotation, the less cards we have the less answers we have against aggression. And don't even get me started on they possibly nerfing or moving to wild some AoE and control cards because they are too powerful.
They MAY release some stuff that might slowdown the meta. But then again they might just not, and since Pirate Warrior is already a thing that WILL have all tools up on the next rotation while also being the fastest aggro deck we've seen (besides undertaker I guess) my money is on the meta not slowing down.
I'd rather they not take wild out of Arena, the more cards to choose from the better to me.