Dean Ayala Talks About the Nerfs, Jade Concerns, and the Different Hearthstone Design Teams
Dean Ayala was out on reddit this evening talking about the nerf announcement. You can check out our summary, or the quoted text, below.
- They can't know exactly how the meta will play out once the nerfs go live, but they can get a reasonable idea through play testing.
- Aggro shouldn't go away as a result of the Small-Time Buccaneer change, which keeps Jade at bay.
- If Jade was going to make up half the meta post nerfs, they would have gone a different route.
- The design team is made up of 15 people, through multiple teams. 4 work on Balancing. They all tend to help eachother out though.
- Live Content - Brawls, Firesides, Other Events
- Initial Design - Card Designs, Mechanic Designs, Set Flavor and Theme
- System Design - Ranked Systems, Tons of Other Systems
- Final Design - Set Tuning, Card Design, Mechanic Design
- Mission Design - Mission Design, Card Design
Quote from /u/IksarHSIn your testing of the nerfs, how has Jade Druid/Rogue improved with the nerf of STB/Claws? I think it's good if it improves a little but if it gets too strong it could be just as infuriating to play against.
This is something that is mostly a prediction rather than a result of testing. Whether or not Jade Druid and Rogue will be 'good' is meta dependent. I don't think these changes will magically make Jade decks strong against aggressive decks, but I think it's safe to say the meta slowing down at any % is a good thing for Jade. (Source)
Wait you guys didn't test these changes in a ladder environment?
Of course we do, what I mean by prediction is not predicting how good or bad particular matchups are, but predicting what people will actually choose to play. Jade decks still aren't great vs highly aggressive pirate decks, even after changing small-time buccaneer. If pirates are still played at the same volume they are now, I don't imagine Jade will be very strong. We can playtest every matchup in the game between the 3-4 of us but that won't tell us the exact rate at which each deck will be played on ladder, though it does put us in a good position to make a reasonable prediction. (Source)
There are only 4 guys on the balance team?!
Yes. Design team is around 15 people now. Live Content (Brawls, Firesides, Other Events), Initial Design (Card Designs, Mechanic Designs, Set Flavor and Theme), System Design (Ranked Systems, Tons of Other Systems), Final Design (Set Tuning, Card Design, Mechanic Design), and Mission Design (Mission Design, Card Design). We also have Ben that directs the ship and another sort of jack of all trades designer than works a lot on new player experience, matchmaking, and flavor things. That said, well all help each other out quite a bit and the real list of things each individual person does is more like 20 bullet points rather than 2. That's the general jist though. (Source)
Thanks for the answer! Part of me really hope that with such a small team every single one of you are millionaires. The other part kinda thinks this number is really low! But I am just a Internet dude. One more question! I think is safe to say that the vocal community is tired of losing to aggro, do you guys think is fair criticism to say that the team could be doing a better job at balancing aggro?
To clarify, this is also just the design team I'm speaking to. There are many other people of various disciplines like art, engineering, production, community, QA, customer support, marketing, business, etc that make an equally large impact on the game. (Source)
Why waiting until the end of February? Why not nerf the cards today?
I'm not an expert in this area, but it has a lot to do with being a game on multiple platforms. In order to patch simultaneously on PC/Mobile there are a number of things that have to be submit and approved being we can release a new patch to the public. (Source)
If the wolf population is keeping the rabbit population in check and you weaken wolves, that will probably increase the frequency of rabbits?
This isn't too far off. The hard part is determining how many rabbit-eating-animal decks will appear as a result of the increase of rabbit frequency, and if the introduction of said-animal-rabbit-eater introduces a new animal we've never heard of. (Source)
So why not do something regarding jade now then just wait for us to have to deal with 2 months of jade being infuriating to play against in any control matchup?
Jade is fairly weak to aggressive strategies, and I don't think those are going to go away as a result of STB change. There is still some room between hyper-aggressive pirate things and heavy control things that will keep us pretty far from all-jade-all-the-time meta. At least that's the idea. If we thought as a result of these changes Jade would be all (or half of all decks) that were relevant, we would have gone a different route. (Source)
I'm not too concerned about jades being out of control. Just yesterday I beat a jade Druid using my deathrattle dragon paladin and the jades were at 14/14 and 15/15 by the end of the game. And I don't even have every necessary dragon card for the deck. By the by, I friended the guy afterwards cause I appreciate any person that plays a deck whose sole purpose isn't to win by turn 5.
To put it into a SW example: feel free to switch to the Dark Side and enjoy the burst of free power, just don't complain about dying when you try to leave it. If they had the 1600dust to craft patches and chose to invest them to contribute at making the current meta the shit it is they are to blame just as much as the developers who let this happen in the first place.
so they have 4 guys there just twiddle thumbs for ages and get money for doing close to nothing for 3 months? around 320h per card? cool job, where can i apply??
we dont really care about inside into the balance process if it still takes 3 month from "spotting" a problem to doing something against it. ok they reduced the time compared to undertaker but its still too long and they still failed because jade will ruin the next expention.
whatever gwent is a well balanced game ;)
This interview was lackluster. What they need is better testing, instead of saying they keep trying to find better balance. They really should apologize that they have to nerf their own creation because they didn't adequately test what the delta would be to the existing game. I think it's pretty poor project management to think 15 guys can even closely replicate a real ladder environment. Their testing team continually allows them to:
1. Produce cards like Purify that they then have make up for in following releases, while handcuffing classes / archetypes.
2. Produce sweeping meta effects that the community has *continually* voiced they don't like, such as aggro favorable metas. They don't seem to understand that aggro decks determine a meta when designing or testing.
3. Keep tripping over the same problems with cards. How on earth did no one look at Small-Time Buccaneer and say, hey guys, we just made another Undertaker?
4. Keep making releases contain cards just to balance out the card / combo from a previous release. They are constantly in catch up mode because they never achieve balance, because the testing shows inaccurate results.
Unfortunately this is exactly what they are producing in their last few releases.
This wasn't a real interview, this was the guy randomly answering questions on Reddit.
and they even swallowed it, when we said we had 4 guys on the balancing team
its just me
lmfao xDDD
"They can't know exactly how the meta will play out once the nerfs go live, but they can get a reasonable idea through play testing."
They couldn't get a reasonable idea of the current meta through play testing, what makes them think they can predict the next one?
THE BALANCE TEAM OF HEARTHSTONE:
I've also been playing a control warrior variant that hasn't lost to jade yet, and usually beats aggro as well (it could beat aggro all the time, but has to be a bit greedy and have some OTK's to beat the jade.) so I don't buy it that jade could "run rampant". if it does than it will be easy wins for my control warrior.
Excuse the question but do you play at rank 20 ??
Because i dont know how you can be greedy against a jade druid or mid shaman when they only have to play 1 jade chieftain to get a 5/5 and a 6/6 for you to start taking damage.
Shaman can just play 1 jade card a turn and force your entire late game removals from brawls, deathwing, slam and execute and you can do nothing about it.
So unless i am completly in the wrong playing at rank 3, please do tell me how you manage not to loose to jade decks with control warrior.
You can queue murlocs and win at rank 11 my friend. Balance only concerns rank 5 to legend.
Here is a senario of a standard match of jade shaman vs control warrior :
turn 2 : jade claw...you do nothing.
turn 3 : shaman hero power...you answer with ghoul.
turn 4 : jade lightning...you play axe and kill that 2/2 jade golem.
turn 5 : azure drake...you slam+ second durability of the axe.
turn 6 : Aya....you slam the aya and he has now a 3/3 and a 4/4 golem on board.
turn 7 : jade spirit get a 5/5 golem+ hero power....you have to brawl.
from turn 8 and on every jade card will be a 6/6 or higher....you is sitting on a confortable 4 or 5 cards in hand , maybe flametongue totem to trade his totems...you can play it however you want , sleep with the fishes , be greedy with brawl or with gorehowl, but the thing is he still got at the very least :
1 jade claw + 1 jade spirit + 2 jade chieftain + 1 azure drake + 1 jade lightning + 2 hexes + 1 or 2 devolve + brann if he ever want to get more golems +2 or 3 AOE + 2 healing cards.
You tell me that you can get greedy with your removals and you stall but the truth is shaman can play the long game, play 1 jade card at a time and wait for you to deal with it , you can not stall a 6/6 or higher hitting your face and all your real threats like sylvanas, gromash, deathwing will get answered with a single card.
And believe me when i say i mean no disrespect for rank 11 players, but they just dont think too much when they play...things are very different when you play at rank 5-legend.
First of all, it's not "omfg 4 people balancing cards hurhurhur!!", he said people all pitch in cross teams. Second, so what if they only have 4 people balancing cards? What do you guys want, like 20 people arguing over cards? If you want that just look at any garbage thread on this website. Since when has it been about the quantity of people?
in my mind one of the biggest reasons, why there is a "lack of diversity" of decks in the meta is because of the card-amount of the expansions they roll out! with only about 130 cards per exp. you are clearly lacking always a few cards to be able to realize decks like the goons, demonlock, beast druids and so on....; i also think it would be a fresh feeling, if they would add like 1-2 cards every week to the game; the implementation is probably kinda hard, not only because of the mobile clients, but in wich card-packs should they be available... but the mobile clients are the real problem imo, cause u always have to download the whole game - and thats probably the reason for this massive delay of patches to be released (besides, its a joke they only have 4 ppl on the balancing team; and they obviously arent good at what they are doing :D - solving a problem with another problem is no solution (aggro and jade))