Mike Donais on Frozen Throne's Impact on Hearthstone, The Final Design Team
PC Gamer's Tim Clark sat down with Hearthstone's Mike Donais to talk about the impact Frozen Throne had on the game and how the final design team works. You can find our recap of the interview below.
The Final Design Team
- There are four members on the final design team, with other designers working with them sometimes.
- It's nice having a small team because they can all sit down with each other and don't have to play catch-up constantly.
- Each day the final design team plays decks they want to experiment with. Sometimes they focus on specific combos.
- Using live data, they'll grab the best decks and tweak them with unreleased cards to test how they perform.
- If a card isn't that great, they'll tweak it, even last minute.
- There is a lot of collaboration between all members of the Hearthstone team when they're looking for card design ideas.
- During Un'Goro's final design, they spent less time changing card designs and more on iterating upon the balance.
Meta
- Lots of variance during the Frozen Throne meta.
- All nine classes are viable and doing pretty well.
- It's important that players feel comfortable playing their favourite classes and doing well with it.
- The card nerfs gave players a good excuse to switch up the decks they're playing.
- They'll never be able to get an exact feel for every card during design due to differences in the live meta.
- Spreading Plague seemed weaker internally due to them testing it against a broad type of decks and not only aggro.
Standard Rotation
- If they were to rotate a set out of Standard each time a new set was released, it wouldn't change enough.
- A large rotation also makes it more likely to force players to change things up.
Cards
- Prince Keleseth was already seeing some play before it got popular and it was doing well.
- Mike thinks one of the Death Knights is probably the best pure value card in the game.
- Without the Death Knights, Tirion Fordring was probably the best value card.
- Barnes causes big swings and high variance in an unfun way. It will eventually rotate out though. (Next year!)
- Raza the Chained and Shadowreaper Anduin were potential targets for nerfs.
- Ultimately, Raza+Anduin is really hard to play and Mike thinks the power level of the deck is pretty good.
- Drakonid Operative was a card they intentionally made overpowered so Dragon Priest could see the light.
- Innervate made Ultimate Infestation a more reasonable card.
Transparency
Quote from Mike DonaisDo you think that sometimes less can be more in terms of how you describe the reasons for nerfing things?
I'm a big fan of transparency and just telling our players what we actually are thinking and what we mean. Most of the players can understand where we're coming from and I think it helps them to know. If I just tell you why I nerfed it, I think someone like you will be like "Well okay, at least I understand your reasoning. I might not agree with it, but I like to hear it." So that's my goal.
Because we can have a friendly conversation about cards and enjoy it, but on the internet it's a slightly different case. I'm astonished by how aggressive and at times abusive that conversation can get. How do you personally cope with that kind of thing?
One of the things I learned over the years is that the people who are trying to learn from the blog posts, will learn from the blog posts. And the ones that don't want to, won't—they'll just make up their own interpretations. So I write for those guys who want to read it and want to learn from it and understand where we're coming from. Those are the guys that I write for.
Most surprising to me is that only FOUR people test pre-release cards. I'd imagine Blizzard would have no problem hiring a stable of at least a dozen gamers for $30-40k/yr or so to do nothing but play Hearthstone 8-10 hours a day. Numerous multi-legend players should be able to "figure out" Spreading Plague, Ultimate Infestation, hell even Patches, much better than four actual designers.
Maybe I'm overestimating Blizzard's revenues and resources, but I don't think so. And I can't imagine how fast people on this website would pounce on a job posting like that!
Four players is easily enough. The problem is that they're not good players.
Seriously, look at the deck recipes. There are legends, epcs, they're clearly meant to be the aim for new players, meant to be meta decks. Now try playing that freeze shaman literally anywhere.
Seriously, blizzard is missing a trick here. Get a bunch of pros to test the cards. You think Amnesiac wouldn't jump at the opportunity to see the cards in advance, get preparation for that tournament scene? Get them all to sign non-disclosure agreements and you have a much better testing environment than anything internal could ever be.
I really enjoyed this interview for some reason, maybe because a lot of the questions resonated with what I wondered about personally. Maybe the answers seemed less vague and boring than usual. Maybe I am just having a good day.
* "If a card isn't that great, they'll tweak it, even last minute."
Say hello to 60% of KFT cards.
* "Raza+Anduin is really hard to play"
Yes, but "hard to play" doesn't mean that it is allowed to dominate all other decks. And with your logic then Miracle Rogue and Mill Warrior should be Tier S also.
* "Mike thinks the power level of the deck is pretty good"
No, Mike. Dominating the meta for 2 months and leave other decks unmatched is not ok.
* "Drakonid Operative was a card they intentionally made overpowered so Dragon Priest could see the light."
Literally wtf?
* "Innervate made Ultimate Infestation a more reasonable card."
Pfft, BWAHAHAHAHAHA (imitating Ben's laugh)
That'd be a pretty good point if 50%+ of the meta was priest, or if the deck had nothing but favorable matchups. Seeing as that's not the case, I don't know what you think you're complaining about.
20% of the meta isn't dominating. It's a lot, but its held in check by the other meta decks, namely Kelly Rogue and Midrange Hunter.
Just because it doesn't feel great to lose against doesn't make it unfair. And I'll take it above a pirate meta any day.
Reading the comments on this article, his answer to the last question seems very on-point.
Statements like this partially infuriate me.
The final design process is more or less just a short-notice experimenting team which has a too small sample size and not enough time to test changes after they were made.
At least that is what their description of the final team sounds like..
Translation:
FeelsBadMan
I get people are hating on highlander ... and when you play against a highlander and they raza on five and anduin on 8 it sucks. but I have played against many priest decks and they have a huge disadvantage in playing one of's and find unless you are playing someone that knows what they are doing you can steam roll this deck.
I think the hate is mostly against that there's no real counter strategy against the machinegun. Yes, it's inconsistency can hurt itself, one of is having a disadvantage, but that is not something that the opposition does, it's a game strategy that you can achieve against it. Hero powers are untouchable for the opponent. And you neither counter the opponent for playing cards to burst you down, because discarding the opponent does not really exist and making you opponent's cards cost more or restrict the amount that can be played has not really seen anything viable except Loatheb. Yes, all of this has some exception, like Mindbreaker and Dirty rat (and that 3 card 9 mana combo for warlock), but these are not enough to be taken seriously as a solution.
Remember that regardless of being a high-skill cap deck, patron was nerfed due a similar reason with the 70+ tournament OTK combos. IMO highlander priest is fun and absolutely needs no nerfs, maybe a semi-playable countercard (battlecry, making both player's hero power cost 1 more or something like that), but... Gadgetzan is out soon, and they intendedly pushed this.
Aggro decks can have bad draws, even Kele rogue has a lot of high cost cards. and sometimes forced to dagger up on 2. And sometimes just need a Vilespine or lost the game.
But in general, I agree with you, every long-term strategy can be disrupted by rushing down. But, that's like catapulting down a whole style of play for one problematic one. I would rather have things like an useful hero power counter than being forced into aggro or counter-aggro and letting other semi-viable long-term strategies exist without having to tweak thethird of their deck against just one type.
And now we understand why some unbalanced cards, combos and/or synergies can make their way into HS. They have groupthink coupled with a very small and ad hoc testing function.
Yeah, coming from the dude who is just too much of an egomaniac to admit that Jade Idol was a mistake. Donais concepts are really something I don't like