Your Questions for Hearthstone Game Designer Dean Ayala!
Blizzard has generously invited Hearthpwn to fly to the Bahamas this weekend for the upcoming Hearthstone Winter Championship! While at the event, we'll have a chance to sit down with Hearthstone Game Designer Dean "Iksar" Ayala to ask him some questions about Hearthstone's upcoming expansion, Journey to Un'Goro!
Do you have a great question on your mind? Write it down in the comments below and we might include it when we compile the best ones later this week!
Dean is a Game Designer on the final design team, focusing on testing and balancing new cards, making sure they're fun, trying to predict what decks they will go in and what the meta will look like. He also plays a lot of Arena! He's also very active on Twitter and Reddit, often responding to questions from the community.
How about giving us more ranked stars for our win based on how many turns it took us to win with the length of the game mixed in?
That way people who enjoy long drawnout games can get roughly the same number of stars as someone who enjoys fast paced games, rather than forcing people to play aggro decks because they are more time efficient.
(Mixing length of the game in there will ensure players from spam passing their turns to get more stars. And checking how many turns it has passed will make sure people don't intentionally rope out .)
Are there any plans to implement a taunt mechanic for spells? It is frustrating to fight back and begin to comeback in a game only to lose to 10+ damage coming directly from their hand with absolutely nothing to do to stop it since Loatheb rotated out. You have often changed cards or designed cards in the past to prevent this kind of thing happening with minions, so why not with spells?
Flagbearers would be nice, as they're really good in Magic: The Gathering. Spellskite is up to what, 20 bucks now?
Are there any plans to add additional formats like Pauper (commons only decks)?
Also, I always thought it would be cool to have a Quest or Legendary minion that encouraged the theme of playing minions with no text and no abilities (i.e. Chillwind Yeti). Is this a possibility in the future, or in your opinion, is there no place for that in Hearthstone?
Are quests going to show up in arena draft ?
They won't, and it's for the best, like the C'thun cards.
Are Weasel Tunneler interactions correct or incorrect? And if they are broken, are there plans to fix them? (Ex: Opponent's Cult Master drawing a card when your weasel dies).
They already said that Weasel Tunneler interaction is working as intended, for when it dies it becomes the opponent's minion, not yours.
Last summer we've seen many viable warrior decks, and with MSoG deck variety within classes seems more restricted to specific themes. Can you share your thoughts on what attributes to actual deck variety within a class - from dev perspective? ( I main a Priest, so... )
have you ever considered bringing back reward cards like Old Murk-Eye or bringing certain cards like Dr.Boom or N'Zoth into the classic set to preserve certain archetypes in the meta
More gold for everyone. Be it daily login, achievement unlocks or more solo campaigns.
I'd like to see a solo campaign where players who were gone for a few weeks can repeat old Tavern brawls, or have quests like "play 40 merlocs" be a "quest of the day" where you wouldn't have to log into Hearthstone every 3 days, but complete the quest and get the gold." And there'd be a bulletin board in Hearthstone where you could complete dozens of these quests. Something to give the new players some of the advantages of these Tavern Brawls that they missed that provide so much gold. Can even make bots play against players for the super old Tavern Brawls.
I think Geri993 talks about Doomguard when he is the last card in your hand, then you play 5mana 5/7 with charge with no downside and I admit there is something about it...
But usually you have 2 Doomguards and a Soulfire in hand...
I never thought about it but now you said it, I really just want a complete overhaul of the HS cliënt.
You spend so much time looking at the client / menus yet it tells you so little. There's no good way to build a community, no achievements, no way to ask other players to help you with a deck, no style that fits the recent expansion.
In WoW you have big citys where you can hang out with hundreds of people or look for guild members and stuff when you're not killing pigs. There's nothing to do in Hearthstone between the actual games that last 5 minutes each.
Hello there. I played WOW for years and I remember when the achievements came out I loved the concept and grinded a lot of them.
Have you considered adding more to the game and a lot where you can track them all? I know that there are some but we need more. Like 5000 wins in any mode, 1000 wins in ranked for each hero, 1000 arena wins, collect 100, 200 golden cards, collect a full set, kill 1000 murlocs, play 5000 beasts. Maybe some are stupid but we can ofc come up with interesting ideas.
Okay guys, let's ask him about the Red mana crystals, obviously it was a mechanic in MSG that they've abanded for some reason, but some card art and voice lines still refer to it, so does the pre-release teasers. Would've been interesting to hear what they had in mind and why they decided to get rid of it.
Go dig through the archives, there's been a blue post on that and it was featured here on hearthpwn. I don't remember the details, but they talked about the different things they had in mind and tried. At least one of those sounded promising.
Hearthstone is a fairly young game, however, cards that work with keywords have aleady been added to the game: Brann Bronzbeard, Baron Rivendare
If the game goes on long enough, these cards will enter Wild while Battlecry, and Deathrattle cards would still be printed, in this case, do you think reprints are necessary for the game?