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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.
most bullcrap ever, damn americans, no(powerful) healing cards in netural , really? so priest and pally will have a crap tons of heal and we can't even last long enough to kick their butts.
Edit 02
1st they say stuff about making so the game has more decks to play with , then they take away reno and then they say they will add more healing card to counter aggro and the they say no , we like aggro so no more heal, we're keeping pally and priest super tanky though so non of you can kick they butt,
keeping the class identities , what kind of retard argument is that? the game is broken and won;t ever be fixed, they just make up shit and nerf and nerf.
Blizzard and all american game companies are bunch retards and liars, i don't support any of this shit. FREAKING PLEASE MAKE UP YOUR MIND AND SOP CHANGING STUFF. Why X box one sucks, schools sucks, got trump or hillary for choice of president,you guys only get to choose between worse and worse.
(Yeah i'm ranting bunch crap together.)
everything is just meow
Wow! So they killed the adventures to stamp more filler trash legendaries and they have the cheek to say "WE WANT TO MAKE THE GAME F2P" "WE GIFF PACKS" so this is what will happen: they will "Give" out 20 free packs MAX! In 20 packs you can't get a decent epic let alone a playable legendary it's all a scam bois they are leeching company they always cared about $ not about f2playes, f2players are just cannon fodder for their paying customers to have fun with. And they continue doing so with the "Hall of Fame" bullshit. The rich become richer (11k dust holydickonastick) and the poor peasant newbie f2players go even more neck deep in shit. I mean think about it what f2p guy has golden legenadry cards? (I'm not talking about trump and the streaming nerd co. I'm talking about the fresh meat they so want to bring to the community by feeding lies and get them oon the hook) Am I right? They are feeding us shit just so they can stamp more filler crap and make a fuckton on G's. This CG is officialy DED!
fak
hm, just curious about:
how exactly do they mean this? "Whenever you cast a spell, draw a card." the card says. Very high skill?
http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/20475356
in terms of skills, i guess you still need to know how to play it properly else you still end up with auctioneer that is not doing anything, or a hand full of cards and not know what to do next,
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.
Oh, I thought they were just lazy to design the boss and wanted to earn more money.
Undertaker, Reno, Spirit Claw were the examples adventure impacted the meta
Ben Brode please join Trump with you fake knowledge of card games. Azure, Rag and sylvanas to wild only... killing all manner of control and letting no skill face decks even rule more. And for a brake you can play another skills deck with jades... fooking hell man, you smoking what?
I'm sad that they didn't even focus on the important question - "When will we see the new deathknight class and the undead tribe?"...I know they didn't want to have too much connection to warcraft, but come on that is why must of us started to play this game anyway - Undeads is a big part of the newer warcraft universe and should be included as a tribe - just saying.
Better yet, if you craft golden Sylvanas, you get 3200 free dust! And a golden Sylvanas!
To word it better, you get a free golden sylvanas, and if you disenchant it, you get free 1600 dust.
yes, basically, if you craft a sylvanas and ragnaros now, then you're essentially getting them for free.
so go with golden one if you can afford it.
and just to add... if you have 800 dust and an idle legendary, dust that legendary and you will now have enough to get a sylvanas or ragnaros. once you get your full dust amount back, you can either get back your old legendary, or go with a new one.
I am now confused, how in the world do you get free anything? I have syl and rag, Ill get dust if.. i .. dust them! Which means i lose them.. You are making it sound like you get to keep a golden syl AND the dust.. how do you keep both? How does this make sense? Arent we just getting back full cost AS PER USUAL when a card changes? why would i want to give up my syl and ragnaros? what am i missing here? You just mean free .. for now til you refund the dust and LOSE the card. I dont see how we are using the word free here. Dont you just mean pay full price.. but in a way free to play until you get a full refund and lose the card and get the dust back? Lastly I am obviously missing something.. whats happening to my beloved Sylvanas?!?! I love both syl and rag, i sneak them into just about any build =(
If I have a golden and non golden to I get dust for both?
they say their gonna do a lot of stuff, buy why take to long to do it??? speed up the content release
I honestly believe that it will try to stay as a free to play game, but at the same this is a TCG game. While it's good that you don't have to buy cards if you don't have much to spend, the problem which I see is that players who are seeing this as a TCG game will feel disappointed at how hearthstone is at the moment.
Because even though these players can expand their card collection, if there is a low amount of decks that are game winning (which is happen right now) then they look elsewhere to a game where they can create more unique decks, which at the same time, are good enough to used in any format.
So to me the problem isn't will it be free to play, but rather "Even though I can play for free, why should I purchase more cards? What will I get if I purchase?"
As much as I like seeing the steps to please free to play players, I would like to think they could do more to please the TCG players.
There's probably a dusin of the same question here, but here it goes: I have a golden rag, golden sylvanas, golden drakes and golden PO. Am I getting a shit ton of dust without DE any of them?
SMOOOOOOOOOTH
I'm missing ice lance in golden.. but I'll settle down with 9600 dust.
Wow. This day just got a hell of a lot better:D