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.
Fellows, please look at my attempt on explanation of unreachable PvP game balance paradox. For me it looks like it is our human perception and gaming interests which is the deal.
If you know the game - it never looks balanced.
If you think that game is smartly balanced and all options are even - you just don't know the game.
And if you know the game - then you must know which option is at least few % stronger than another.
And here is the thing: those who know the game are matched vs others who know the game - and this group of players will always be limiting themselves with only the pick of the strongest options.
Bigger diversity - looks less balanced.
Now the bigger the diversity - the less balanced game looks from the strong player's perspective.
Say we have now actual top 3 decks and maybe only 6 reasonably playable. When we have 9 classes and could imagine like 30 archetypes.
So the game looks like only 10-20% balanced right ? Which seems quite bad.
What if we had 3 classes and only 6 archetypes, where all 6 are close in power ? Here we go - the game is now balanced.
It is player/consumer who defines constantly same outcome.
Would you ever main more like 3 archetypes out of any number of existing 30, 100 ? Not really. Well maybe 5 best case.
Because you are always either preferring 3-5 best power options (for the win) or 3-5 best design options (visually or mechanically for the fun).
Design options are defined by personal preferences so the player choices here can be as different as hairstyle or t-shirt prints. But the power options are defined by win rate - they are always the same for any set of players (in equal skill range).
Say if we have power level of decks defined by winrate percentage if super ultra balanced game like this:
D1: 51% W/L
D2: 50.8% W/L
D3: 50.6% W/L
...
D10: 49.2% W/L
Look it is whole 10 decks having 49-51% winrate which looks super ultra balanced. The difference is only 0.2%.
Now.
How do you climb ladder with D6 50% W/L ? Why do you even play D7 with less than 50% W/L.
Why don't you just play D1, D2, D3 especially if they are designed like rock-paper-scissors.
That's it.
I call hs balanced when i can interact with all opponents decks and when all cards stick to "design rules". This two factors highly affect winrate and pisses people off. Why?
In first case you can count on luck that they will have a bad start or their combo piece stuck on bottom of the deck, becouse what could you do vs face hunter, face shaman, pirate warrior, quest rogue, freeze mag and few/many more. Alternativly you could try to tech yourself (if the tech card to that deck exist) with weak tech cards which cause you to lose vs other decks and not necessarily win vs those which you are teching for.. People don't want theirs game result depends only on opponent draw.
In second case you have cards like Tomb Spider and Kabal Courier then you have Drakonid Operative. It obviously is too good. "Priest was weak so its ok". No its not, you are developers you could help priest and stick to general rules, but printing op cards its just laziness. You see that and simply feel cheated. You have to play balanced cards, but your opponent can play op ones. Yeah then lets play dragon priest too and see who can pull more drakonids... I will not even start with glyphs and plague..
Hey blizz, did you know most of meta is aggro decks ? ooh I forgot you guys dont know what are doing. Besides I agree Un'goro was really best expansion than Frozen Throne (that has 3 or 4 legendary playable on meta).
"ltimately, Raza+Anduin is really hard to play and Mike thinks the power level of the deck is pretty good."
Draw cards, play Kazakus on 4, raza on 5, anduin on 8.
So hard.
I also forgot to mention that all the cards priest doesn't need stay at the bottom of his deck :)
On turn 3 you play the Shadow Vision to make sure you have a Dragonfire potion for 6.
How about returning the HOF cards that go so well with standard cards that they have to retire. Man I really want conceal back. But there are reason why it's wild =(
Making cards over powered and thinking cards are okay because they will eventually rotate out is a poor design choice. Listening to these interviews makes me feel like these people either don't understand card games and synergy or they are just intentionally trying to piss people off.
Nerfing cards should always be a last resort and to have them nonchalantly release an expansion without properly testing is sad. The developers should be able to pick up 90% of the problem cards before they are released. It should not be the players who make an OP deck and the developers come in behind and nerf as a reactionary thing.
I'm very concerned about the state of the game if this is their reasoning behind some of the choices they've made.
Very high skill combo. turn 5 - raza turn 8 - Anduin. Infinite value... I know, deck is not pirate warrior or something like that, but it's not high skill deck it's sometimes medium skill deck, sometimes it's curve deck and OTK with Velen.
About cerds and problems with them, i think, Barnes really fun breaking card and pirate package too. And reason - only 6 months before rotate out is not legit.
Maybe they're talking about the overall skill of the deck.
You have only one SW: Death, is it worthy to use it on a 5/5? And is this board big enough to Dragonfire it?
The deck has a lot of micro management, and it's not even close to OP, and anyone saying this is basically crying for no reason.
Go play Tempo Rogue and be done with it.
I've been playing since beta days and I really don't like how this is all heading.
Ever since they introduced annual rotations recent designs have been completely off the charts regarding balance. Maybe it's due to "oh it will rotate soon enough anyways"-mentality, or just laziness. This is a really unintelligent approach, it's clear the playerbase really don't enjoy putting up with months or years of getting shafted by specific, deliberately broken cards. This seasons cards like Patches are dominating, next season when the previous King of OP rotates there will be something else. It's really not fun having to put up with this. Playing wild doesn't help either because of how it has literally turned into a simple garbage heap of broken designs.
Recent designs are just way too polarized. Either it's completely nuts, or just pure trash.
this kind of thinking hurts me.
Kilber fans alert LUL
Yup, I facepalmed very hard after seeing this.
i agree on multiple points they brought up, however, I don't think that they should nerf Raza or Anduin as the combo will be rotating out to wild soon and it is not impossible to beat a shadowreaper. You know that his deck only contains single cards so you can't really afford to play around them, plus, if you start to count cards against them, you'll know when to have your big swing turn and when to wait.
As they clearly pointed out, "Razakus" priest is a pretty tough deck to play and no, they never have all the answers they need when playing against them, that is literally just your assumption as you played into yet another possible clear turn for them.
So, good on them for not nerfing priest. It finally sees some play and all the players freak out about how broken it is. Geez, adapt to the meta.
Everyone knew the Drakonid Operative was broken, xD