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 HillEver 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!
Even the smallest changes to cards make huge differences. The main tools to change are mana cost, health, and attack and a change of one of those, even for high cost cards, such a change can turn it from one of the best cards in the game to not present in any top decks (see Call of the Wild and Spiteful Summoner), If it is a low cost card it is even worse.
I get their idea about certain subjects. But the arguments for not balancing more frequently should not be taken seriously. 3 of those arguments are assumptions without any data or evidence. The argument about changing things weekly, is false. The interviewer said “more frequent”, not weekly. Jesse just twisted the question into a a false argument , which does not even support his answer to the question.
It is fine and all, but give the data or the numbers. But making assumptions without data or facts, is not benefiting the game or its players. Just give hard data, from their you can judge. Because, these are the things that result in miscommunication.
Is it so hard to make the heroes purchasable? I want Memsy so much but i don't want to hack the system or the time to set or go to gathering or whatever is called.... It's like they are drowning in a spoon of water when the solution is so easy. Make the bloody thing free for those to want to participate in the events and let the rest buy it if they want to. Jeez...
I also want Nemsy. The fact there is not an option for purchasing her is ridiculous. :(
But Nemsy is free?
There is some confusion here between fast nerfs and frequent nerfs.
The talk is focused on frequency, and their argumentation seems pretty fair to me: nerfs are meant to fix the meta, not to refresh it.
If you want a fresh meta more often, you need more cards mini releases, not more nerfs.
They are arguably slow in reaction, but that's not the subject of the talk.
I'm not sure that that isn't the subject of the talk. Look at how often people on here confuse the two terms. I see the complaints, at least on this site, about how deck such and such has been on the top of the meta for a month or two straight and how that deck or card should be nerfed because of it.
Now I don't carry that same attitude, but they are out there and I think T5 addressing why they don't do frequent nerfs is appropriately directed at some of the players.
Yeah but some people in the comments below were addressing to t5 slow reaction against allegedly obvious nerfs, that would occur too late. That is not frequency.
They have a very natural time to implement changes - once, every month, when the season ends and a new begins. It would be a reasonable length between changes, and, importantly, you would know what game version you are playing at all times!!! I am losing interest in arena because I play a moderat amount and cant keep up with whats happening.
It would also make leaderboard better. It is strange to change format in the middle of a season...would be very natural for standard and wild as well, when it comes to changes of cards.
The big flaw I see with the argumentation against balance changes is that Team 5 seems to only see balance changes as completely nuking cards. If cards and decks are only changed very slightly, then there won't be any huge and rapid meta shifts, which is what their entire argumentation seems to be based on. Maybe, just maybe, it is their balancing philosophy that is fundamentally flawed and is causing these issues. If your balancing philosophy prevents you from balancing the game when it's clearly necessary, then I'd say it's time to rethink your strategy.
You think the nerfs to Call To Arms, Spiteful Summoner, and Possessed Lackey were nukes?
I'm still very surprised there hasn't been a new purchaseable hero in forever. I know that Medivh, Magni, and Alleria were all around since before I temporarily quit the game (around when TGT came out). It would be an easy revenue stream for them.
Regarding balance changes, sometimes I think they do wait a bit long. The cubelock changes should have happened a lot earlier, for example. Aside from that, I think everything has actually been changed in good time. Another example where they waited too long though, was with Razakus priest. They should have obviously known that the Shadowreaper Anduin power costing 0 would be extremely frustrating to play against haha. Not saying it's unbeatable, but they should have seen that coming, and nerfed Raza at the same time as when DK Anduin came out.
I do like these Tavern Talk articles though. It was a long time coming, but it's nice to have real questions answered. Don't know why it took this long to introduce this though lol.
I think that they just want to receive more money from packs. And if they keep soaking money from both heroes and packs, people will be more negative. Thats why they start at least providing heroes for free.
Since Karazhan Blizzard releases 1 nerf per expansion and after a balance patch the meta is more or less OK (except Karazhan, that was a miserable experience throughout the whole expansion). The problem with Blizzard is that they release a nerf 6 weeks later, than they should. They should be preparing nerfs along with expansion releases, so when shit hits the fan, they will be ready to nerf that small-time buccaneer or a corridor creeper quickly.
I hate how they "look at numbers" for 2 month every time.
The concerns related to frequent balance changes seem like strawman arguments:
1) Nobody is asking for unannounced balance changes. In fact, no game does unannounced balance changes. So there is no fear of "craft today gone tomorrow". There is no danger of trusting the game if you publish a schedule and stick to it.
2) Nobody is asking for weekly changes. But one revision per set (4 months) is kind of ridiculous. To compare, Shadowverse has a major client release about once a month and includes balance changes there; that seems reasonable so every season feels different from the season before.
Cant believe actual communication from Blizzard directly to the players Pogchamp