Hey! Listen! Our friends at GwentDB are giving away 15000 Gwent Beta Keys!
Developer Insights Live - Year of the Mammoth Q&A
Today's live edition of Developer Insights featuring Ben Brode and Mike Donais has concluded. You can find our recap of the stream below, or watch the vod further below that.
Top 3 Takeaways
- We're going to see a blog post later this week talking about the upcoming changes to the Arena Mode!
- Hearthstone needs to continue to be a legitimately Free to Play game and they're committing to it.
- Missions within Expansions will be harder than they were in Adventures due to not locking required content behind them, though they will reward card packs.
Recap
This is a work in progress. Formatting will be improved post-stream.
Quote from Ben Brode and Mike DonaisArena
- We will see a blog later this week talking about upcoming Arena Changes!
Year of the Mammoth
- One thing they're focusing on this year is making small changes to make the game better.
- Cards moving into the Hall of Fame set will no longer be found in packs and must be crafted using Arcane Dust.
- Three expansions felt more fun for Hearthstone which is why they decided to do that this year.
- Expansions allow them to have a bigger impact on the meta and explore more mechanics than an Adventure would.
- The missions within future Expansions will reward players with card packs.
- Missions in the Expansions will be harder than they were in Adventures.
- They'll be harder because there isn't any gameplay required cards behind them unlike in previous Adventures.
- They won't be doing Heroics, but this could change in the future.
- There's a lot of potential approaches to fixing the "samey" feeling you get a few months into a new expansion. They're looking at it.
- Power Overwhelming wasn't necessarily an issue going forward for Standard, but they wanted to be able to give Warlocks more variety in future expansions and wanted to get rid of some potential crazy burst.
- Gadgetzan Auctioneer was close to being added to the Hall of Fame but they like that it's a very high skill card.
Free to Play
- Hearthstone needs to legitimately be a free to play game and they're committed to it. They're going to watch this year to see how it feels.
- One thing they've been doing over time is to give players more packs for playing the game.
Standard
- Ben isn't sure if they're going to end up filling Classic card voids, but it could be cool.
- They want to move away from lots of burst damage in Standard.
- The ultimate goal of Standard is to make it feel fresh.
- They'll evaluate their plans for card changes next year once they get through most of this year.
- They don't want to sacrifice fun decks from the game because of Standard.
- There is no hard rule that decides if a card is nerfed or moved into the Hall of Fame.
- Classic cards ultimately need to not be the dominant card set and those cards are more likely to be moved.
- Expansion / Adventure cards are more likely to be nerfed.
Wild
- Ben thinks Wild is going to be awesome this year. They have more work to do with it though and will do so.
- Wild ladder rankings will end up on in a blog, like Standard.
- They're still working on figuring out how they're going to deal with Wild-only content. No announcement to make yet.
Ranked
- Ladder floors in Ranked do not solve all the issues and they know that.
- Floors should help add more stars into the system to push other players up slightly more.
- They don't want to balloon the amount of people in Legend as it could make it lose prestige.
- 40% of all players on ladder are around rank 20.
- They are talking about more ranked ladder changes but aren't ready to announce anything yet. The problems needs to be solved though.
Philosophy
- Buffing cards doesn't feel like there is a good upside. They'd rather add new cards in the future.
- Adding powerful healing to Neutral cards isn't likely to happen again. It makes classes lose their identities and the cards are in a lot of the decks out there on ladder.
- It's important to have a lot of different types of Combo decks within Hearthstone and they try to add something in each expansion to help grow them.
- Good combos are ones that can give you some kind of advantage that doesn't kill your opponent, or those take a few turns to get setup to achieve the effect.
- Bad combos are the ones that can kill you in a turn.
- They're experimenting with Stealth, Deathrattle, and Tricks with Rogues going forward. Some Thievery too!
Decks / Deck Recipes
- Blizzard doesn't feel like they need to be promoting certain decks like many community sites do.
- They're experimenting with Deck Recipes a bit and maybe there's more they can do through those.
Public Test Realm
- A big problem right now is determining how long new content is fun for. A Public Testing Realm could make a new expansion stale on day 1.
- One thing they could do with a PTR is testing balance changes. There is still risks though in that people could solve the new live meta before its actually live.
Video
The stream has concluded but you can watch the vod to experience the magic.
Yea, that makes a lot of sense when you consider all the whining threads all over HS forums, game being ''rigged'' to work specifically against you, players being ''constantly screwed by RNG'', asking for pointless nerfs and so on. Yes, taking all of that into consideration, these numbers do make a lot of sense.
Everybody can see this number in the questlog on the current rank icon. Anyway it's somehow surprising
I disaggre with
Iconic characters like Illidan Stormrage, Nozdormu should be playable. Varian should be in classic. They can change stats or effects so it feels like we are in the world of warcraft.
allow me to translate: we dont care if you open unplayable crap in packs, we just want you to buy more packs in next expansions
They refuse to keep releasing neutral healing cards.
Right now of it wasn't for Reno Jackson, there wouldn't be a good control deck besides maybe Control Warrior.
Good luck after Reno rotates out. I'll be playing the most aggresive deck.
Wow, this community only wants 2 things: all cards in the game with little to no effort and for aggro to not be a thing... I feel like thats all i read and the only comments that get more than 3 likes lol
Feels like they just want nothing but Tempo decks and are actively trying to remove anything else in the game. that is about as lame and as boring as it gets IMO.
I like how they never mentioned Fiery War Axe.
It's part of Warrior's identity. It will never be nerfed; I guess it could possibly be relegated to HoF but FWA is what defines Warrior.
Adventures provided F2P players like me, a solid foundation for building a competitive deck to compete at lower to mid ranks. Devs' excuse that they felt Expansions would add more substance and new mechanics is nonsensical - just look at LOE and impact it had on the game. If the Adventures don't add enough cards to the new card pool - well that's easily fixable by increasing number of wings and/or increasing number of rewards.
3 expansions in a year is going to be roughly 360 new cards. Somewhere between 50 and 60% of those cards are filler cards that are completely unplayable, including the majority of legendaries. Even if I log in daily, complete all daily quests (I'd say average ~50 gold reward per day), win 6-9 games a day (20-30 gold extra), that is ~5-6 packs a week, 260-312 packs a year. How likely am I even to obtain 30% of the new card pool?
Can you really blame people for playing, cheap aggro decks after this and a boring stale meta?
Hearthstone is beginning to remind me those slot machines or terminals you find in bookies.
Also you get one pack weekly from tavern brawl.
But, seriously, if you wanna be f2p player, master Arena. Easy collection.
^ this. More of this. @Grynax
Thank you sir or madam. Please take my like.
Downvoted NEO111999. F2P and expecting a full collection makes you an incredibly whiny and ridiculous person. Blizzard runs a business and one of it's cash cows is Hearthstone. I run a F2P account along side my other account (which I spend money on for expansions and get an occasional gift card for holidays) and on my F2P account, after one year, I bought every adventure with gold, crafted a few legendaries, and now have most of the relevant rares of every set with a handful of must-have epics.
It's a challenge (and a fun one!) to keep my F2P competitive and I still manage to grind to rank 5 on it for the extra golden cards each month (which on this account ALWAYS get dusted).
You aren't meant to have a full collection if you're F2P, unless of course you run infinite arenas in which it just takes some time. Why would you expect to have everything as F2P? Does that make any sense at all? Are you bonkers?
"It's not as bad as the next guy" isn't a justification for something being bad. Just saying.
Out of interest if you have time to run 2 accounts, how many hours a week do you play?
Only enough to do dailies plus a few hours extra per week very late at night. Two kids, work full time... gotta be efficient with my time because goodness knows my 3-year old won't let me play while he's awake.
The F2P is always logged in my phone so it's typically played in my downtime at work; my main account on my PC.
"Buffing cards doesn't feel like there is a good upside. They'd rather add new cards in the future."
Sure thing. What they are missing tho is of no secondary importance: cards do have a NAME and a PICTURE.
Having eg. Ironforge Rifleman in its current state is simply unbearable.
That card, as well as many others, deserves to be at the very least playable.
We are not asking all cards to be meta-defining or best-in-slot or very good, either. Just playable is enough.
This philosophy, applied on Basic cards, would also soften beginners' transition from their protected environment into the jungle of casual and ladder.