Developer Insights: Livestream Q&A (Recap)

Introduction

Yesterday, Game Director Ben Brode and Game Designer Dean Ayala held a live Q&A stream. They’ve answered questions from viewers – about the ladder, new player’s experience, Arena and more.

If you want to watch the full Q&A stream (it’s about 60 minutes long), here’s the VoD. Hearthstone YouTuber ZeroMana has created a short version, cutting the fluff talk, repeats, break between questions etc. You can watch it here (10:27).

If you don’t have time to watch it or prefer the text version, I’ll make a quick summary of the points they’ve made. I’ll bold the key points & most important information we’ve got from the stream.

P.S. The points are paraphrased, if you want to hear exactly what the devs said, I recommend the summary video above.

Livestream Q&A Recap

New Players Experience

• New players rarely start by getting into the ranked right away, they usually play against AI a lot, sometimes hit casual mode.
• They’ve been improving the early matchmaking multiple times. The goal is so the new players only get matched against other new players, playing on a similar skill level and with similar cards. Matchmaking usually keeps new players around 50% win rate.
• There is still a lot of room for improvement, especially ranked experience of new players. Moving more experienced players away from rank 20 might help that – right now as soon as new players hit rank 20, they’re often matched against experienced players with meta decks.

Ranked Ladder

• They like how clear the pre-Legend ladder is (ranks, stars etc.). You know exactly where you are and how much you still have to go – e.g. when you’re at rank 13 with 2 stars, it tells you more than if you had a number like 1247 MMR.
• Monthly seasons are good (they don’t plan to change the length of seasons), but since it resets so often, the experience is too grindy.
• They want to improve the ladder and there are two “phases” First is trying to keep the same system and introduce a few fixes – second one is making more dramatic changes and trying something new. They’re going to try the first option, but if it fails, they might proceed to phase 2.
• Those fixes to make the ranked feel better include: giving players more bonus stars for a longer win streaks, not resetting them so far away from when they were when season starts (e.g. Legend players get all the way back to rank 16 now), adding more “break points” after which you can’t lose ranks (just like it is now at rank 20, they might add a few more – e.g. at 15, 10 and 5).
• They have a meeting soon to talk specifically about issues with ranked ladder.

Arena

• They’re thinking about making Arena Standard.
• They want to decrease the number of commons you get, so each deck would have more Rares/Epics – this would make each deck feel more unique and you wouldn’t see the same cards all the time. Especially decrease the number of Basic/Classic Neutral Commons, because they’re very boring – cards like River Crocolisk don’t really bring anything interesting to the table and feel too “vanilla”.
• They’d also like the decks to feel more synergistic (Standard instead of Wild might accomplish that better) and have more spells. They don’t like that picking Arena deck is often just picking a minion that’s best on the curve times 30.
• Starting early February, they’re going to release an Arena top 100 leaderboard (highest average over a minimum 30 runs).

Formats

• They don’t plan reversing nerfs and rotating the cards to Wild instead. They’ve nerfed cards like Molten Giant or Blade Flurry to open more design space in all formats, not only Standard, so even if they rotate them into Wild, they don’t plan on changing them back.
• They want each Standard rotation to feel more unique, so they might – instead of nerfing “problematic” Classic cards (probably the ones that are used way too much) – move them to the Wild as they are. Now, players could still enjoy them in the Wild, but they won’t impact the Standard mode so much. But it’s just an option – they aren’t sure yet what to do.
• Wild format isn’t dead – Standard is about twice more popular than Wild is, but a lot of people still play Wild. (Note: My guess is that we think that Wild is dead, because its mostly casual/mobile players who play Wild, and online Hearthstone community is very competitive) It should get more popular next rotation, because now, instead of having 2 Wild-only expansions, we will have 5 of them and it should feel even more different than Standard.
• They’d like to have more Wild events (right now every tournament is Standard), if next rotation won’t help, Blizzard should start some Wild events to “promote” them and the format.
• Reprinting cards is something they don’t want to do right now, because the game is still new. They might do it in the future, but it’s a matter of picking the right moment – they want reprinted cards to feel different (with the addition of new cards) than they felt before – no reason to reprint a card that would just be exactly the same as it was. Plus there is a problem of “reprints” now being available in Wild too, which makes someone able to play e.g. 4 copies of a certain cards (Note: I don’t see a reason why it’s a problem – just make restrictions on the reprints, so they can’t be played in the same deck as the old versions).

Meta/Decks

• Pirate decks were a huge problem right after Gadgetzan, but it nearly sorted out itself – at this point the decks with Pirate package still have a slightly higher representation than they’re comfortable with. If their popularity won’t fall a little bit more, or if it will increase, they might step up and do something about it.
• But they like the fact that the meta usually sorts itself – if something is too strong and played too much, people generally find the ways to counter it (e.g. teching cards like Doomsayer and Acidic Swamp Ooze against Pirates).
• They think that even though Paladin and Hunter haven’t been seeing a lot of play recently, they have a bright future – this meta is just not great for them, but things should sort out with the next expansion when the meta slows down. And if Pirates will remain very, very popular, which will still keep Hunter and Paladin from being played, they’ll probably do something about it.
• In general, they’re happy with the meta – win percentages between the decks aren’t that far off from each other. Strongest deck (~52% win rate) and 11th deck (~49% win rate) aren’t that far off from each other in terms of win rate, which makes for a pretty diverse meta with a lot of viable decks
• They want to have both easy and hard to play decks in the meta. When a certain class is too easy in general and has no hard options, they might add some cards like that – e.g. they did that with Hunter, which was mostly played in the low ranks as a straightforward “kill your opponent without thinking” deck back in the day.
• Healthy meta is often measured by how the meta “feels like”. Everyone at Team 5 plays a lot of Hearthstone and they know how it feels like to play in each of the metas/on different ranks. In a healthy meta, no deck should have too high win rate (they feel like 55% is the absolute breaking point), but even more importantly, they don’t want everyone to play the same deck – if a certain deck has 25-30%+ representation on the ladder over a long period of time, it’s too much. E.g. pre-nerf Undertaker had around 40% of the representation on the ladder over few months, so they had to nerf it.
• They feel like having “fun cards” that aren’t competitive is okay. Some cards are designed and released even though they know exactly that they aren’t strong cards. But if they can activate some strategies that weren’t available before, or maybe have some niche effects that work once in awhile, those cards are also important. Not every card has to be strong – a lot of players like to play with fun cards instead of the strong cards.
• The Paladin’s class identity is mainly healing/surviving and small minions/tokens. They like Paladin to have two types of decks – one is this slow, Control deck that wants to outheal the opponent, survive until the late game and drop big bombs. And another one is the one that floods the board with small minions, plays the cards that synergize with them (e.g. cards that synergize with Silver Hand Recruits), buff them etc. They feel like once Reno rotates out, Paladin will be the best “healing” choice of them all – which might make it more popular again.

Other

• Team 5 is now around 70 people and they feel like it will grow even further over the next few years.
• The usual day for Brode is mostly… meetings. He talks with a lot of people and tries to discuss what’s okay, what’s not okay, the team’s goals for this/next week etc. Dean, as a game designer, mostly works on the cards, tries to listen to the feedback and improve them, playtests stuff etc.
• Most surprising thing about Mean Streets of  Gadgetzan (from the devs point of view): That the Pirates turned out to be so strong and popular. They knew that it will be strong in Warrior, but it was a surprise that Rogue and Shaman also started playing them with a great success.
• They’re concerned by the card inconsistencies (both effect-wise and wording-wise) and they’re dedicating a lot of time to make the cards look and behave the way they should and be consistent with the past cards. Sometimes they don’t make card texts consistent on purpose, because let’s say wording the effect in a same way that the effect is worded on a different card might not read too well.

Closing

That’s all folks. If you’ve watched the whole thing live and I’ve missed something, please let me know (I’ve watched it yesterday and only watched the short version today, so I might have forgot about one or two points). Sorry for writing it so late, I was supposed to get it out yesterday, but I fell asleep 🙁

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Good luck on the ladder and until next time!

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