Max McCall on Keywords in Standard Format
Max McCall was out on the forums recently and talked about Keywords in the Standard format. Specifically, he mentions:
- Too many keywords would be overwhelming.
- Keywords aren't needed to give people new strategic options and to make for interesting deckbuilding.
- Less keywords means more support for those mechanics through special interactions.
Check out his full post below. What are your thoughts on keywords in Hearthstone? Are there any that you'd like to see more of?
Quote from Max McCallHaving too many keywords in Hearthstone would be overwhelming. Most of our sets have a new keyword, and some of them have more than one. If, in addition to a set’s new mechanics, we also kept around Spare Parts and Inspire and so on, we’d quickly reach Peak Keyword. Every set is someone’s first set, and learning Hearthstone is tough enough without a bevy of cards with words you don’t understand.
The marginal benefit of the twentieth keyword in the same Standard environment is small. We don’t need many keywords to make deckbuilding interesting and give people new strategic options. So, we do most of our keywords on a set-by-set basis, and they naturally sunset when Standard rotates. Because we have fewer keywords, we can support those mechanics more; having a theme is more fun than having a card or two with Inspire. Instead, we can layer cards like Maiden of the Lake and Garrison Commander on top of Inspire to give the mechanic more depth. We wouldn’t be able to do that if we had more keywords, because we don’t have enough cards in each set to do so.Couldn't this be relatively easily rectified by simply adding some sort of appendix or something the website that lists all the in-game words as well as what effects those words apply? Screen shots for a visual aid could help a lot as well.
Far be it from me to question your design philosophy, but it just seems like a non-problem that could be easily fixed with a new player section on your website that provides useful information pertaining to the game as well as a list of key words.New players rarely use resources like these. It's a lot to ask for someone who may have only played the game for a couple of hours to hop out of the game, go to a website, and look up relevant information. It's even worse if you're playing on your phone and you need the information immediately.
I get the impression that some people think that reducing the number of keywords in Standard is catering to new players at the expense of experienced ones. It's not. It does reduce comprehension complexity, but it doesn't reduce the space for strategic decision-making. Consider if every card in a set had its text replaced with a keyword: the set would be no more or less complex strategically. It would just be harder to understand. Indeed, doing fewer mechanics and devoting more cards to them gives people more options for deck construction.
Figured I've give my two cents on an issue that's been bothering me lately. Why does blizz introduce a new mechanic and then abandon it?
Naxx - New deathrattles and deathrattle synergy, this mechanic was abandoned until WotoG and JtG
GvG - All about dem mechs, since then we've seen zero mech synergy and mabye 3 mechs total
BrM- Dragons. Now this is an exception to this theme, and that good. Dragon decks got slowly better, as every other set out in New Dragon or Dragon synergy cards, and eventually there was enough cards the some previously considered staples could be teched in or out
TGT - Inspire and other hero power shenagains. Not only did the idea of an inspire deck fall in its face (showing once more how having a set based on a gimmick is a bad idea) but the cards and therefore the mechanic were forgotten until MSoG, where a grand total of two of them were used in a janky priest OTK deck.
LoE- Discover I guess? But you can't make a discover deck as there's no discover synergy cards, so I guess this expansion dosnt have a gimmick
WoToG- The old gods, remember those guys? Oh wait they were never seen past Karazan, except N'Zoth but that's because he dosnt require your deck to be built around him like the other three do.
ONiK- Portals, didn't get any synergy and will never be seen again, honesty this adventure was such a flop I think we can gloss over it.
MSoG- The three gangs. This expansion introduced three gimmicks, which not only made it worse for new players (oh wow it's a legendary! Oh wait it's Kazakus whose only good in a deck that requires two adventures and 3k dust) but all those mechanics have all been left behind!
JtG- Quests and Elementals. Do you really think these cards will stay good? Because next expansion we'll all be playing Arthas decks from the Icecrown expansion, and then those will be left to rot because now only soldier decks are good from the Battle for Stormwind expansion.
So what's the problem you might ask, didn't that just make each expansion exciting, well yes it does but think about this, let's say your a new player and during mean streets you crafted a full on jade druid, well now that deck sucks because it got no new cards from the latest expansion, so you either have to constantly grind arena, meaning you never get to play with the cards you get, or you buy packs to stay competitive. And don't give me the you can go play wild stuff, wilds really hard to get into, why should you drop 4k dust on cards that you'll only be able to play have to time? Anyways that's my thoughts and thanks for reading this wall of text.
Nice write up. Hopefully you are a wordsmith by trade. Couldn't have said it ... ahh neve rmind!
There are still people who are playing Yogg - even on pro tournament level, for example at China vs EU at the moment.
How is Jade weak now? Jade Druid is Tier 2 at the moment according to the meta report from Tempo Storm.
"Why does blizz introduce a new mechanic and then abandon it?"
It's simple - if the decks with the new mechanics are always better than the old ones, you will be forced to buy lots of new packs to remain competitive.
This is literally the reason. Greed.
Made spare part in GvG and then abandon it
Only Inspire from TGT and Discover from LoE still remain
Made Adaptation in theme of Un'goro creature How would adapt continue to the next expansion?
Seem like T5 look at design only set by set No long term plan for keywords.
Only Discover. Inspire was only in TGT.
Reusing keywords would make the game more straight forward and build consistency for standard and wild deck building. The only way for the team to introduce new mechanics is by way of situational cards like Second-Rate Bruiser and Blackwing Technician. Hoping for the new themes for each class in the upcoming expansions would be viable, and also fun to play.
Whenever they say something about new players what they actually mean is we don't want to work too much and we're too lazy.If they cared about new players so much they should actually try to help them. These new expansions are expensive af it would take months for a new player to actually have a decent enough deck with this crappy meta. Shit... even shadowverse (lol) has a better new player experience than hearthstone..
Also shadowverse has a thing where you hover over the damn card and you can see what they do kinda like hearthstone but better. If you actually want more info on the keyword you could click on it a whole description would pop up. Hearthstone devs are too lazy to even put that in their game... Honestly I can go on but whatever.
Love the game, hate the laziness. I also find it funny how they think new player are completely stupid...
(now to wait for the blizzard fanboys to dislike the fk out of my comment.
You can hover over a minion and see what the Keyword does in the game... (it works on mobile, im pretty sure it works on PC too)
Sorry dude, you call developers of ANY game lazy and you get a downvote from me. Means you have no idea what you're talking about.
OK so I see what he is saying, but if they are worried about trying to create new keywords because there are not enough cards in a expansion to use a new keyword every time, why not use keywords that haven't been as useful (or even broken) and give them a twist.
For example we have the 'Joust' keyword. Instead of drawing a card from the deck, why not allow the player to choose a card from their hand and their opponent's. Both players then see the mana cost of that card without showing the card and if that player's mana cost is greater than the card he chose from his opponent, he wins the Joust draw. You could also make 'Inspire' effect active only when a player places a buff on a minion or maybe if you place a minion that costs more than that Inspire minion next to it.
Now I'm not saying this would work perfectly (maybe some testing would need to be done), but if Blizzard could change the effect of a keyword that already exists, all they would need to do is make a message appear at the start of the game telling players that the effect has changed and explain how that change would play out. That way you are recycling the not so good keywords and try to make them better for players, but also you could possibly make some cards more useful to play than they were before.
new player scant figure out what charge does
feelsbadman
dragging mouse to face is the hardest gameplay mechanic ive seen in my life
you HAVE TO put more keywords into the game with every new release (at least 2/set)
experimenting with new deck ideas already is pretty limited, it gets figured out way too fast and therefore becomes stale very quickly
the essential idea of deckbuilding needs to be improved upon drastically to stay interesting
I get what they're coming from in the sense that it's not confusing, but rather overwhelming for new players. However, ironically, I think this a good thing. Why? Because it adds a skill curve in the game. Sure, there's that brief period of time where get used to the mechanics of Hearthstone (card draw, mana curve, attack hero or minion, etc.), bu there's not much else beside learning what the new meta is like.
By adding new mechanics, you have these advantages:
I'm not saying that we should add like 15 keywords per expansion. But something around 3 will do. MTG follows this formula, and nobody seems to be complaining.
To give a good example, take Return to Ravnica or Ravnica from MTG. When I first played MTG, which was the second card game I ever played (the first was Hearthstone), I first looked at the cards from these expansions. Ravnica contained 10 keywords; Return to Ravnica had 11. Was I confused? No. I got the idea of each mechanic right away. Was there no synergy for the keywords? No, there were TONS. And I enjoyed exploring each and every one of them. Every game I felt like I was playing a new one. Seeing how certain keywords faired. Seeing their potential. Wondering if they could be used in the future. Why not bring this feeling to Hearthstone?
The skill requirement of a game like Hearthstone shouldn't come from the difficulty of remembering what the words on cards mean.
MTG uses liberal doses of keywords compared to Hearthstone for one reason: it simplifies players reading and understanding card interactions themselves, since there's no computer to do that work for you.
swap charge (seems to be gathering a lot of complaints) for flying, add trample to the game already.
Lol this is just the Blizzard way of telling that they are way too overwhelmed with Inconcistencies
New players from Blizzard point of view.
Generally speaking that's probably not far from the truth, all things considered