Hearthstone Tavern Talk: Bringing Back Heroes, Balance Frequency, Community Card Art

Hearthstone Tavern Talk: Bringing Back Heroes, Balance Frequency, Community Card Art

The Tavern Talk series continues!

  • They still hope to bring back some old heroes you can't get anymore. Very fluffy answer here.
  • There are disadvantages to changing cards too often.
  • They want you to play decks you enjoy and make you feel that your cards are still going to be there tomorrow.
  • The art team accepts portfolios if you think your art matches the Hearthstone theme.

Quote from Jesse Hill

Ever wondered what’s goes on behind the closed doors of the tavern? Ava and the crew’s antics aside, the Hearthstone development team works hard on a myriad of tasks to bring you the game you know and love so well. More than that, we also make the time to read about the different issues and questions the community brings to light each day. 

Welcome to Hearthstone Tavern Talk, where we’ll share with you answers to some of the questions we see in our community!

What is the Hearthstone’s team stance on adding more or bringing back past Heroes?

We want to keep adding more cosmetic Heroes to the game. Along with card backs, they give players more visual options on how they want to play. We’re also hoping to bring back some of the ones we’ve featured in the past to give a wider audience a chance to get them. We’ve always got something in the works, but for various reasons it does take time to get them out into the game. Meanwhile we’re hard at work ensuring more valiant (and diverse) Heroes can join you on your Hearthstone adventures!

Why doesn’t Team 5 do more frequent balance changes?

Balance changes do some great things for Hearthstone. They reinvigorate the whole meta: people start experimenting with all kinds of decks and trying to find out which ones are strong or fun for them. In addition, there usually are a lot more decks and classes that people can play after balance changes, and this provides a lot more freedom to players to do what they like best. 
However there are some disadvantages to frequently changing cards. 

  • Some people enjoy a meta that has settled down so that they can build a deck to counter the meta. When people are all experimenting with different classes, it is a lot harder to build a deck to counter the meta.
  • Frequent changes make your collection feel less solid. This makes it harder to get excited about a specific card or deck you have.
  • If things changed every week, players will not have enough time to explore all the nuances of a certain card.
  • People grow accustomed to a favorite deck and when that deck is frequently changed up due to balance changes, the player often feels less inclined to trust the game as a whole.

Would you ever be open to receiving card art submissions from players or the community?

We love admiring community artwork for Hearthstone or the Warcraft universe in general. Many of the images you see in the game have been created by artists directly employed by Blizzard, but many more are created by our external art partners. We have reached out to artists like Monica Langlois and received permission from her to publish her Fen Creeper art in the game. We also discovered artists like Wei Wang and Tooth via fanart submissions.

If you feel your art style matches Hearthstone’s, we encourage you to submit your portfolio to the Hearthstone team at artsubmissions@blizzard.com. Remember to have “Hearthstone Art Submission” in the email title!

See you at the next edition of Hearthstone Tavern Talk!

Cheers!

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