Hearthstone Q&A Panel

by Aaron "BLU3" - 4 years ago

Get in here with the Hearthstone team and gather ’round for a developer Q&A session. Ask about your favorite card, class, or whatever else is on your mind.

Q: Are there any plans for more coop content?

A:Yes it is something we are exploring. Play against a friend quest for gold is being explored.

Q:Is there plans to change arenas? What kind of time frame?

A:Arena is being tuned. Individual cards are being tuned how often they show up. Crazy pick ideas are being explored(Murlock deck picks).

Q:(CM Rob Wing)Yong how do you get so handsome everyday?

A:We don’t have the right person here to answer.

Q:Do you plan to expand the lore to short stories or other media?

A:Short stories are being explored. Gadgetzan is a great example of a fun wow thing that has been expanded to fully explore.

Q:How do you decide when to apply new keyword mechanics like battlecry?

A:Each Expansion new mechanics are tested and the best are kept and if needed a keyword is made.

Q:Will you be adding a hero class like Deathwing or Monk?

A:That is talked about a lot. We are happy with the 9 classes. We don’t want to create a new class that steals from other classes. There are no plans to add more at this time.

Q:Is there any chance to allow players to earn previous card backs? Are there plans to adjust the ranking system to prevent dropping from 5 to 18 the next season?

A:We are actively talking about ways to get previous backs. Nothing concrete to announce here.

Rank mode we want it to be easy to understand. Right now you gain 1 star for every rank, maybe that is not so important to understand and it could be 1.5 engineers are working on this idea.

Q:What are the chances of a Hearthstone API?

A:6 1/2% No specific plans to release a Hearstone API in the near future.

Q:Year of the Kraken is about over are you happy with 2 expansion and 1 adventures if not will you be adding more to the evergreen set?

A:We are actively exploring how to distribute new cards. Currently we are happy with the 2 expansions and 1 adventure format. Now plans to change right up but actively exploring new and wacky ideas. They are open to change from feedback

Q:When are we going to see some changes(Arena)?

A:We are building up infrastructure to build up the tool chain. It is not good to go live now. Work is in progress no timeline to announce.

Q:Triclass cards are they worked from the bottom up top down how do you balance while maintain flavor? If possible are we going to see other kinds of grouping in the future?

A:Balance is important. We wanted to encompass these three families. druids are part of Jade Lotus. The triclass cards were perfect to join these classes under a family. We wanted you to feel you are playing as part of the Jade Lotus.

Q:Have you landed on a direction for Priest direction?

A:We have focused on what kinds of archetypes to make with priests. What cards are fun to play, what cards make it not fun to play against priest. Focus on 3 archetypes. Dragon deck, No Duplicate Deck, and Tricky Priest with tons of spells are being explored and focused on improving.

Q:Are Adventures reaching a point in the wild format where it is or will be impossible to balance heroic bosses?

A:With 2 levels of difficulty we can make it very hard, and it is okay that it took you 10 times to beat it on heroic. We do the best we can and except that people with wide collections may be able to beat it sooner.

Q:With arena is anything done about the inflated power(appeared) since they are appearing more frequent?

A:With new sets the cards appear nearly double previous cards. With Karazhan now being dropped to normal status we felt players had played enough with that set. With new tools we can balance in different exciting ways in the future.

Q:Why and how did midrange shaman become so powerful?

A:We designed new cards and looked at power levels. Shaman was down here(low) We design far in advance we don’t know were there power will be in 8 months. We knew people wanted shaman cards. Time passes and it doesn’t rise so we add new cards working far in advance. You are now seeing spikes from this process. It has become Popular even though it is running around 55-57% Mean streets of Gadgetzan may change this. Ask me again in 3 months.

Q:Variance is key in trading card games, with Mean Streets of Gadgetzan is that actively being designed away from variance in cards themself?

A:Variance is critical, we want each game to feel different. We want players to feel they have a chance. Part of being a good player is the ability to play around randomness. We want each set to feel different so this expansion is specifically moving away from that to set it apart. Discover is a key mechanic to allow the use of skill to allow what card the player wants. with 132 cards in the set we have only seen a handful of them you may be surprised what is still out there.

Q:How does the art team cooperate with the design team, which comes first?

A:It is a lot of collaboration. Sometimes concepts come first three families lead to whose their boss.

Q:Are you going to add a system for tournaments that shows when you log in one is starting soon?

A:Tournament mode has different aspects, I want to get together with 7 friends and run one, I want to join a random 128 player and spend all day seeing how high I can climb, I want my wins and loses to really matter high intensity. We are exploring different avenues and fantasies. We want to continue communicating with the public to find out what they want.

Q:(Heroic Brawl) When is it coming out? after all the work I can’t believe you would throw it out what is it leading to?

A:One of the great things with brawls is we can get it out there and see how the community reacts how it really feels once it is in the hands of the players. We haven’t announced when it will launch we are very excited to release it soon. Feedback will help inform us what we will do with it next.

Q:Are there plans for new future achievements and if so what are you guys thinking of as ideas for that? Platinum Hero?

A:One option is on the stage to our right is the World Championship. What can we do for our most invested players how can we create additional things for you to achieve and accomplish. But realistic if you are on that top level competing in those heroic brawls or trying to get into the world championship are excellent goals for now. Yes it(Platinum) is something we have talked about. But no best idea has been figured out yet. We do want to celebrate those level of players.

Q:How do you deal with when there is a lot of negative community feedback that isn’t really accurate or isn’t really representative of what you guys actually do and what is the general strategy for dealing with the community?

A:Alot of that community feedback comes from a place of passion. People don’t talk about hearthstone because they don’t care about it? They talk about it because they love it, they play lots of games and feel really good about it. We get lots of great feedback, it helps us prioritize what we want to work on. If our community cares about a certain thing those are the things we want to focus on.

Q:Are there any plans to bring back the autofill tool?

A:tavern brawls is one of the places we let you explore that. There are easier tools to help you build sudo random decks. We have no plans to bring back the worst deck builder tool. we feel it is important that new players have the deck templates and assistant to help construct their deck. It will help them more and build them a reasonable deck that they can play games and enjoy.

Q:Is it in the works to allow more tools ways to export your decks to use 3rd party sites to help?

A:We are working on ways to easily export your decks and send them to your friends

Q:Going into the next year are you guys planning to go into doing more tournaments yourself officially?

A:Diversity of tournaments is important to hearthstone, we plan to continue to support 3rd party tournaments. Our tournaments are to expose and support more diversity.

Q:Are you into the tempo based state of Hearthstone? With little ways to come back games and are you willing to add more tempo swing cards or efficient aoe to have a more dynamic game

A:Efficient aoe are important to swing games, they are a lot of fun. We have showcased already some new aoe coming with the new expansion. Tempo swings are important and hopefully we will do more of that in the future.

Q:Do you think the amount of power the class cards forms the way players think about the different power levels and classes? for example Do you think they expect that every class will have its own top tier deck? Do they bring over this feeling that everything will be balanced? Anything you would change to change that perspective.

A:Having that ebbs and flows of what deck is strong is really important. We are seeing a lot of that, right now Paladins are one of the weaker classes their is, or people perceive that it is weaker classes. Last year Paladin was one of the most complained about classes. So you get some kind of ebb and flow. It is also important to have multiple classes close together, so long as different classes have their time to shine. More importantly that different play styles have their time to shine.

Q:Are the 3 families are your answer to having a neutral spell cards?

A:Our goal for the triclass cards was to make it feel like you are playing that family.

Q:Any plans for sideboarding?

A:Sideboards are a cool idea. It is something we are use to having from other card games. Maybe it is something we could try out in a tavern brawl. People bring multiple decks so that acts as a sideboard in a way.

Q:Maybe a way to build a custom deck for the AI, so if you run into a certain kind of deck that you are struggling to beat you can kind of practice and see weakness’s in your deck to work through it.

A:That is a pretty cool idea, having a way to play against a specific deck. I certainly have simulated that sometimes by saying hey Matt can you build this deck so I can try against it and we will play a bunch of games, but matt is better then the AI so its hard. Maybe find someone to play against post it on reddit and say you want to play agains a real good handlock and play games. We have no plans to add that in now, but if it is something a lot of people ask for it, I am sure it is something we could do.

Q: Is it possible to adjust the AI to read want kind of cards are in the deck and figure out the playstyle of that deck?

A: I think our AI system is something in general we can potentially invest more time in. It is something we do talk about.

Q:Engineering interacting with complexity is that a challenge to you and how do you overcome it?

A:It is both a challenge and an opportunity. Personally I feel if we go to that first engineer meeting and show them the cards and they don’t freak out we haven’t done our job. Engineering has never really limited our design space it is very rare we go to engineering and we want to make this card and they say we can’t do that. Our engineers are excellent, and they have done a fantastic job every time of coming up with a way to do it. Every once in a great while the card will get pushed back be even that is incredibly rare.

Q:Tyrande have you guys figured out how to release the skin in other places of the world and also going into future skins when are say druid or warlock getting their own alternate skin

A:We are very interested in getting each class it’s own alternate skin, that is something we are going to do. We make these heroes available in different ways one time we will do it one way and sometimes we will do it other ways to, to make them available to a different subset of the population. Medivh is a very good example, Medivh is available in the store, but we also did a thing when you get the Warcraft movie dvd there is a promotion included with that, and that is another way you can obtain that hero. We are thinking of a lot of creative ways to get these heroes out. We are working on a way to get Tyrande in China.

Q:Is there any way to group or favorite some of the cards so as we are making new deck we can pick from our favorites?

A:Funny I literally had that conversation with someone a week or two ago. It would be real nice to reorganize your cards not only to build decks but to find your favorites. So it would be nice to find ways reshuffle the card organizer to make it easier access and a bit better for that purpose. No plans right now, but collection organizer and ways to make that better is something we are very passionate about.

Q:Do you guys have any ideas or plans for the new player experience at fireside gatherings or just new player experience in general?

A:New player experience is something we care about a lot. For those tavern brawl scenarios we are very excited to make it better. That is a case we are actively looking at right now.

Q:Is it possible to have more 2v1 3v1 like brawls have one player be a tank, a healer, a range class, or multi class against one big boss?

A:I love that idea, The one brawl we did showed a lot of interest. We will keep experimenting in that direction. Probably small steps. See what we can do.

Q:With the growing push in 2017 in the competitive scene what are you guys thing to do if possible if anything for more physical events, are you looking to do more in person events and push the esports and the community aspect in general.

A:There is a lot of plans to leverage the Tavern brawl model to kind of have these local Fireside gathering feed into the HTC. We did some of that in 2016, and we are going to do even more of that in 2017. So we want these Fireside gatherings to be these local mini Blizzcons for your local community, and that is an angle we will push very hard.