Ben Brode Answers Your Hearthstone Questions and More!
WIRED asked Ben Brode user questions from Twitter in their Tech Support series of videos. Ben had quite a bit to say so we've recapped it in an easy to digest format. You should watch the video though, it's worth it!
Here are the quick takeaways.
- Lord Jaraxxus exists thanks to Horde and Alliance heroes in Hearthstone's early days and a WoW Engineer's burning question.
- They may consider adding Wild back to shop in the future, they certainly hear the feedback from players.
- Old card backs will come back one day, they just need to find the right balance on how players can obtain them.
- The hero level game system feels satisfying and extending it in the future would be great. Not sure how to do that just yet though.
Video Recap
Here is absolutely everything. Some answers included here may already be known but have been included as newer players are likely not familiar with them.
- The Coin was not the only idea the team had for balancing going second.
- Allowing the second player to only draw a card lead to a 60/40 win ratio, favouring player 1.
- Giving the second player extra life didn't feel good, they were still playing from behind.
- Starting with a 1/1 minion in the battlefield or giving their first minion +1/+1 made it feel like the second player could overcome the turn 1 advantage.
- They ended up with The Coin and like it due to it taking an active role. You choose when to use it. 51/49 win ratio, still favouring player 1 but not as bad as other options.
- They have to be careful about adding additional cards to the Classic set to replace holes left by the Hall of Fame because they don't want to create the same problem they had before where decks weren't changing enough due to Classic having too strong of cards.
- Some cards may be brought back out of Wild and into Classic that set class fantasy strongly and tell you what each class is about.
- Lord Jaraxxus was added to the game thanks to a relic of Hearthstone's past.
- Originally, there was a Horde and an Alliance hero for each class.
- The original Warlock hero for Horde was Cho'Gall and Alliance's was Wilfred Fizzlebang.
- They had a tough time finding a satisfying Alliance hero for Warlock.
- Wilfred Fizzlebang is famous for summoning Lord Jaraxxus, EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION, in The Argent Tournament raid in World of Warcraft.
- Pat Dawson, an engineer of the WoW team, was playtesting Hearthstone with Wilfred Fizzlebang and was curious if the gnome had a Lord Jaraxxus card in his deck.
- Ben Brode immediately designed Lord Jaraxxus to destroy your current hero, Wilfred, and come into play.
- Ben agrees there's a lot of cards that could use a buff, but the goal isn't to get every card to a similar power level. Some cards are intentionally bad. They also like to make challenges for players.
- Some weak cards today may not be weak in the future due to new additions.
- No plans for Wild cards in the in-game shop; They want to keep it simple. Lot's of people asking for it though and it's something they may consider.
- Tournament Mode will be basic to start. Conquest, Last Hero Standing, choosing the number of decks for the tournament. Feedback will help shape the mode in the future.
- There are indeed female Kobolds, "Hard to tell, maybe."
- Inspire could come back one day but they have fun ideas they want to get into the game that aren't Inspire, and they want new sets to be new and exciting.
- There will eventually be a way to get old card backs again. They still don't know the best way to accomplish this goal though, people who earned them in the past like feeling unique. There needs to be some difficulty in obtaining them.
- Ben's favourite golden card is Crushing Walls.
- Decks with 60 cards were experimented with in the past. It makes it harder to build a more cohesive deck.
- Having an increased deck size could make for an interesting Tavern Brawl, but not the core game mode.
- No plans for spectating random players, watch Twitch streams instead.
- Ben likes the hero level system and how it can be satisfying. Making it last longer then it does now would be nice, but they don't have any ideas right now.
- Molten Giant was nerfed to keep Standard different, not for balancing, as they wanted to change up decks that relied on it. With the rotation to Hall of Fame, they are changing it back since it won't disturb Standard.
- Changing cards back to their original state prior to any changes will be made on a case by case basis if cards end up moving to Wild.
The Video
And now, for an epic classic from the past. YOU FACE JARAXXUS!
Ben Brode Gets Personal
A reddit thread was inspired by the above video and prompted some more personal questions for our favourite game director.
Quote from Ben Brodethe idea that this belongs on the HS Subreddit is dubious, but i will reply anyway, because I cannot abide /u/mdonais being the top comment
1) What is your favorite non-Blizzard game?
You have to go pretty deep because War3, SC2 and World of Warcraft are WAY up there for me. But outside of that, Tron 2.0.
2) What is your favorite place to grab a quick bite to eat?
Carl's Jr. It's important to note that the abbreviation here is not "CJ's", as Bob Fitch would have you believe. It's "C's J". It's Carl's Jr, not Carl Jr's. This is important. Also, C's J used to have great chili burgers and I'm really sad that they don't any more. Their Santa Fe Chicken Sandwich is still pretty good.
If you want a more exciting answer, I really love Le Diplomat in Irvine, even though it's not as close by as C's J. Get the Chicken Dijon. I love it so much i created an animated gif of me eating it.
3) Are there any inter-department competitions that we should be aware of?
I used to play a ton of basketball - it's really fun exercise, and I get to cheat by virtue of being tall and heavy and thereby unmovable once I set up in the key. (6'4", 280lbs) I also enjoyed getting to meet and hang out with folks from all over the company. But I wouldn't say it's very competitive.
4) When you became Hearthstone Game Director, were you prepared for how many videos you would be doing?
I have actually done less videos since then, mostly because I'm less involved in actual day-to-day design (the design team is 20 people, now!), and my kids are older and sleeping less. :) We're democratizing videos more and I think that's awesome. (Dean Ayala's video went live last week.)
5) Where is your favorite place that you have traveled to?
Korea! My wife is Korean, so we have family there. This was one of the home-cooked meals we had. drool emoji
Mike Donais Swoops In
Mike Donais saw the aforementioned reddit thread before Ben and decided to answer up.
Quote from Mike DonaisI am not sure where Ben is so I will answer in the mean time.
1) Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. One thing I love about card games and DCSS is how every time you play you are in new situations with slightly different resources to deal with them. You are constantly discovering new things and that keeps it fun for a long time.
2) I like Sushi. There is a place with really good Alaskan rolls called Octopus or Tomikawa that I go to when I am choosing.
3) We do a lot of Teambuilding things, but that is pretty much the opposite of competitive. We share design knowledge, we loan devs, we play in the same WoW guilds, etc. We even had 9 teams in the last DCSS tournament.
4) I feel like Ben was born for that stuff.
5) I love Spain and Europe in general. The vibe is great and the people are great. I especially like the less populated areas (not major cities). I also like old architecture and castles which you really can't find in the US.
I will also let Ben know about this thread, although I suspect he will see it either way :)
You can hace a system where you hace to check a checkbox of some kind to enable the in-game wild shop. That way people who don't care about wild never activate it and it would also eliminate the confusion problem
The questions you need to answer to address the buffs argument are: how do you decide what to buff? What criteria do you use? What triggers a buff discussion? And what is the point of buffing cards?
Nerfs make sense because they prevent a negative experience. But buffs do not create a comparable increase in positive experiences. At best, a buff has a neutral effect on the feel of the game. At worst, it exacerbates existing negative experiences, or introduce brand new negative experiences.
Hearthstone already has a more interesting strategy for redistributing card power: they buff and nerf cards simply by printing new sets.
Random card back for every game!
I hate that I can only give you +1. I want to give +1,000,000.
"Forget College, just play Hearthstone !"
Ben Brode 2018
Nice bits of info here. always good to see how and why things are the way they are and what's going on behind the scenes.
The only annoying part was: "No plans for Wild cards in the in-game shop; They want to keep it simple.".
All they have to do is add a tab to the shop window that says "Wild" or "Wild Packs". Then maybe a little warning the first time you open it saying "These cards are only usable in the wild format". It can't get much simpler than that.
But when do we get an opportunity to buy\obtain hero skins?
I want to play with Tyrande portrait
Wow that was really informative, way more then Jeffu Kappu’s Overmeme video.
Gotta love that he sidestepped the Wild cash shop question. Wild sets need to return to the gold shop, for its gonna get to the point where there are more people playing Wild then Standard. Not to mention, the prices they’re asking for is absurd. Why can’t Wild cards get a price cut in packs and dust? Wild cards should cost half of their original dust value. (Commons: 20 dust. Rares: 50 dust. Epics: 200 dust. Legendaries: 800 dust.)
And it seems Dungeon Run is gonna be dead once the new set comes out as they’re gonna be more focused on that new Monster Hunt mode. Hearthstone players are gonna get a big taste of WoW’s feature creeping, in which Blizzard abandons new features and replace them with identical features with slight tweaks.
And once again, they give a BS answer to why they don’t buff cards. (Ignoring the fact they Shadowbuffed Naga Sea Witch last year.)
I completely agree about so-called “bad” cards. Nothing is more satisfying than wasting three turns of a Face Hunter’s time by resurrecting by turn 3 Alarm-o-Bot.
I’d like to give a rebuttal: Bad cards don’t need to exist. Remember what happened when Purify came out?
I remember Purify. People pitched a fit over the card being bad when it came out initially, then it became a fixture in meta silence lists when Humongous Razorleaf came out. Actually, Purify is a case in point for why bad cards should exist. On its own it's a pretty terrible card, but it filled a niche that let them print interesting interactions that greatly increased its powerlevel in a different meta. Maybe pick a card that doesn't prove the opposite of your point.
Further, both a sense of progression and learning are crucial to having a good card game experience, as well as satisfying people who might not want to play with top cards all the time. I might like going to town with the latest Control Warlock build, but someone else is having a hell of a fun time getting King Togwaggle to work in one in fifty games. It's good that those options exist for both of us. Besides, bad cards are inevitable. If you assembled a cohesive card set consisting of only the best cards in the game, about the same ratio would end up being used as are currently. Can't remember where it was, but they actually tried something like that in Magic with pro players and ultimately it proved that the reality was that there will always be cards that are bad in the cardpool. The only thing that changes is what level bad rests at. So bad cards both serve a gameplay purpose and are the product of inevitability.
Yeah. People said “Ner er thers cerd sercks.” Then they actually tried building a deck with it and found that they had discovered something fun, and, while not cancerously good, at least playable. Besides, “bad” cards have the advantage that people know they’re “bad” and underestimate them. Alarm-o-Bot is bad, but only because it’s easy to remove. If it comes up in any circumstance where it cannot be immediately removed, it’s usually frighteningly powerful. Purify is bad when you’re playing with minions whose effects you want to keep. When playing with minions whose effects hamper them, it’s powerful. And so on. Hell, Carnivorous Cube was thought to be meme-tier for the first month of K&C. Never underestimate the power of “bad” cards.
They should buff Illidan <3
They should un nerf yogg when he leaves standard
I agree. He never should have been nerf. Blizzard being so inept of how to handle tournaments has ruined what was once such a fun card. While third parties ban cards, Blizzard still refuses to ban cards.
Even if he was unnerfed for tavern brawls i would be happy but i guess it would be to confusing for new players...
Dear god no. Having close games boil down to Yogg RNG crap was fun for the first few months but it got old really fast. Especially when comps were decided by what is essentially a coin-flip.
I'd rather see a new 20 mana card that reads, "Cost (1) less for each spell you've cast this game. Flip a coin. If you win the toss, you win the game. if you lose the toss, you loss the game." It would be just as fun.
If he get un nerfed, then he should be only playable outside of ranked mode.