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.
Donais as usual also ignores arena meta, which could be in the worst state it has ever been thanks to Death Knights.
How do Death Knights make the arena meta so bad, you wouldn't have more than, what, one DK per 100 arena drafts or so?
My guldan warlock hasn't lost a single game to rogue (rank 5 oct season so far -- 3 days of play this season, plus legend rank in Sept for however long Keleseth Rogue was a thing then), and it has had a large presence on the ladder. I honestly think the most popular warlock decks aren't the best, but that there are much better ways of building the deck.
You're delusional if you think it was "Druidstone" from day one. The first two weeks were all over the map.
"40 days of hell" I believe you said. Yeah, that sounds really awful: to occasionally go up against a deck marginally more powerful than yours? My God, you're right, it's completely "unforgivable." Your only recourse is to quit the game - otherwise, you'd be a HUGE hypocrite just whining in the comments...
I'm disappointed with this coming from Mike Donais. Mike was a former MTG developer, and as such, should know the danger of last-minute changing things. For those who play MTG, the reason Umezawa's Jitte is the card it is is because they needed to fill a hole last-minute and came up with a card last-minute without balancing it or testing it at all, and then pushed it to production to meet a deadline. Skullclamp was a similar story, used to be +2+0 but had to get "nerfed" at the last minute with minimal testing and got changed to +1-1, and look what happened. So he of all people should be well-versed in why it is not good to tweak a card last-minute, but here he is championing the practice.
SMH
With a "final design team" of only 4 people, even a month's worth of testing is not statistically significant enough to produce results that are actionable or representative. A minute or a month, when your sample size is that small, they're basically the same.
Because fuck wild! Thanks!
I agree with Mike - Big priest is the problem deck, not razakus Priest, and it has nothing to do with winrates. Playing against a priest cheating out huge minions just to revive them sucks. Playing against a priest who fails to draw his 'cheat' cards, plays nothing till turn 7 and dies sucks just as much. It's horrible game design. I'm surprised they didn't spot this one in QA. Big priest is an abomination. Neither player has any fun when Big priest is involved.
People enjoyed playing Barnes/Y'Shaarj rogue, and that basically had a 50/50 chance of just straight up losing.
I understand how Big priest works, wasted words in explaining it to me. You are entitled to your opinion on what you like and don't like, you aren't entitled to mine however. More over, your opinion on what type of games I must like is of no consequence as you aren't an authority on literally anything. You are a random faceless internet being who seems to be upset because someone pointed out that their opinion isn't the same as someone else's. Honestly your reply speaks volumes. But I'll at least try to reply with a serious answer.
Yes the scenario's you pointed out happen. However just as often, for me as a priest player (all archtypes as I am a priest main) when I play Big Priest MOST times I don't get barnes. That doesn't mean I draw "squat". Most times it's me having to play smart, use my removal intelligently, choosing correctly when and where not to clear, sussing out when I can use certain spells and what spells I should save for bigger threats down the line vs what threats are on board now and just surviving. That puzzle is fun for me. Yes somtimes I'll draw all my 8-9-10 mana bombs and I just die, sometimes I'll draw barnes early and rng into Y'sharrj and win out right. That isn't the norm, it's not even 20% of how my games go. Most times it's a survival game until I can get some power on the board and that is fun. You don't have to think so, but don't act like your opinion has any more weight beyond your own lips, it doesn't.