Che Chou is the Global Franchise Lead for Hearthstone Esports at Blizzard. Skiffington got a chance to sit down with him at the HCT Summer Championships and discussed Hearthstone esports and the HCT scene.

One of the super popular topics lately is the struggles with the Legend system when it comes to HCT stuff in particular. Outside of that, it’s whatever, but particularly for the pro players who are actually trying to get HCT points on the ladder month after month, I just wanted to know what you had to say about that area.

I mean, you know, look. The feedback is loud and clear and we obviously hear it. Besides the fact that it’s unacceptable as an esport to have that, we’re working with Team 5 on that. There’s not much I can say in terms of how it occurred and why it occurred. I’m not super involved with the game development part of it, but I know on our end that Team 5 is obviously hyper-aware of it.

It will be resolved actually. They already have plans in place to normalize it ASAP.

Obviously, on the esports side, we’re monitoring it and we’ve engaged with them on this stuff, but beyond that, on the esports side, we don’t really have any other comments.

Kind of along that line what do you think the HCT esports team can do better as a whole?

Any number of things. *laughs*

We’re all humbled students of esports. We haven’t cracked the formula. Especially for an esports program as grassroots focused and as vast as the HCT is terms of how many different avenues in which you can come up and go to a playoff or championship. That system demands a bunch of rigor and process and we’re still perfecting those. For instance, managing the challengers and managing all the Tavern Heroes qualifiers or the online cups. Like you said, tracking all of the Legend players and their points. Basically tracking the progress of tens of thousands, I mean, lots and lots of competitive players. I’m not even just talking about Hearthstone players. Just focused on HCT there are many, many, many players and just tracking that, we’re still perfecting the art, internally, of how to do that. We’re developing internal tools to make sure that it’s less of a pain for my own staff to track, etc. Those are all things we know we could get better at.

One thing I will talk to is I think we could have a much better website. This week we saw the very beginnings of that relaunch. So we have a new website now that is going to continue to see iteration and improvement throughout the year. If there’s one thing I could say that I’d like to do better at a very surface level is making sure that we’re able to articulate and make sure that people know how to follow Hearthstone esports and follow HCT in a meaningful way. Because there are so many tour stops, because there are so many players, and because any given day you could have an unknown player come through and now you suddenly have a new story. We need to do a better job to make sure we’re showcasing those things and make sure our audience can follow them clearly.

There are different ways we’re trying to tackle that. For instance, in trying to clarify storytelling we created a couple of things. One is Talkstone which I’m sure you’ve seen. It’s the HCT talent [podcast which is published] every other week talking about the current meta, what happened in the last tour stop, what’s going to happen in the next tour stop, and what’s coming up at the championship. It’s just like any other sport. You want color commentary, you want a cadenced way for people to follow and join in the conversation and curate that conversation. We’re excited about that. I think it’s only going to have more character, more depth, and more personality going forward. It’s going to have the HCT brand of humor and lightheartedness going into it – it’s the same casters – so that’s pretty exciting. We’re going to use that to showcase a lot of storylines that may not be obvious if you just watch the Twitch streams and the tournaments.

We also have a documentary series called The Tour that we debuted last week. It’s focused more on the human interest side of Hearthstone esports and telling stories about people and players and about how Hearthstone and esports have changed their lives. Both of those we’re really excited about. Hopefully, we’ll provide more storytelling guidelines and guideposts for audiences to follow along.

The whole team system is still pretty new to the scene. The HCT season has only been going on for a few months.

Yep, in fact, this is our first season with pro team standings.

How do you think that’s been going so far? I know it’s relatively early.

I would say it’s going okay. It’s not going badly. It’s going okay in that it’s a great first step for us. Out of the gate, we had 50-something teams sign up globally so that’s good. They’re all kind of vying for points. I’m curious to see who ends up in the top ten, top eight, and we are discussing plans – obviously besides celebrating their success, but also I’m trying to see what we can do to do more stuff like “Hey, top eight teams, let’s do a team invitational. Let’s get you guys out there to really showcase that team Hearthstone is here.” Nothing to announce today, but those are things I would like to do.

So you definitely see it evolving a little bit more to be more than just supporting organizations backing players?

Yeah, I mean this is really the first step towards recognizing that teams and organizations have been investing in Hearthstone and have been helping our players over the years. With this sort of foundation, we can only do more.

Another big thing this year was the addition of tour stops. Rather than the seasonal championships traveling around, it’s the tour stops around the world with most of the seasonals here in Burbank. How do you think the whole tour stop system has been going overall?

I think it’s been going well overall. Here’s what I’ll say that I’ve noticed. I haven’t been to a handful of them, but community sentiment, player sentiment, on-site at these things on social media has generally been really positive. People are pretty engaged with them.

I’ve also heard the feedback that there are too many tour stops or, “Hey we can’t travel to all of them or we need more online to offline qualifiers, etc.” And I think that those are valid but at the same time, when we designed the tour stop system – we have 25 this year – we knew that 25 was the number we wanted to hit because at the end of the day if you take away online cups as a way to get points, to grind for points, we knew that we had to replace it with something.

For one, if we knew that we had the point cutoff, the point threshold to make playoffs – we need to give people enough opportunities to get 45 points. It can’t just be the ladder and then online cups. So there was that requirement.

We also knew that if we had these tour stops there was going to be this feeling of, “Well I have to travel and it’s harder.” We designed it so that with 25 you don’t have to go to all of them.

That’s why we try to distribute tour stops regionally in a balanced way so that if Asia-Pacific has five than America has five. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to travel to all of them. You could potentially just go to the tour stops in your region, get your 45 points to qualify for playoffs and focus on playoffs.

It’s a good problem to have and something we’re learning from which is we introduced a system and instantly every player wants to go to all of them or at least feels the pressure to go to all of them even though they may not have to just to make 45 points. It changed player behavior and is valid and we’re looking at that. The comment of too many tour stops, too much travel is fair. Even though you don’t have to go to all of them. The fact that players feel compelled to go to all of them or feel like there’s an arms race to go to all of them, we’ll take that into consideration.

How do you currently balance the tour stops? Does each region have the exact same number each season or each year?

Yeah, each season, but maybe to the tune of plus or minus one. We try to keep it pretty balanced. Really the idea is you should be able to just go to the tour stops in your region, get your 45 points, go to the playoffs.

That’s good because one of our writers was commenting on how, for example, this season there were four in each region but the online qualifiers were a little different where three of the online qualifiers were Asia where Europe only had one so technically Asia had a slight advantage.

Sure. That said, we also opened tour stops to be globally available. For instance, in the Tokyo tour stop, we actually reserved groups for global groups. “Okay, we’re going to reserve a group for Japan because this is the Tokyo tour stop, but we also make it available – limited spots, but available – for global players as well.”

We also have the good problem of demand outstripping supply so we’re looking at that too. But right now my current hypothesis is that adding more tour stops is probably not the answer. So we’re trying to understand what is the right approach.

As you said there are more tour stops to make up to not having so many cups. So now there are more in person but that leads to a different type of burn out. When it was just online, players would seclude themselves away so at least now they’re going to different places but now there’s a different type of burnout because they’re now traveling [constantly. And since that requires] more funds, there’s more at risk there. Is that one of the factors behind your motivation to maybe shift things around a little bit?

Keep in mind that the original intent was that you didn’t have to go to all the tour stops and that you only need to go the tour stops to get 45 points. When we theorycrafted this last year we didn’t think that it was going to be a burnout situation. My hypothesis is that they may be burning out because they’re going to all of the tour stops or they feel the need to go to all of the tour stops and they do. So that’s their prerogative and if they’re doing it – first of all I fully appreciate that they’re doing it, it’s incredible how much passion and devotion they’re putting into this thing. Again, we’re still evaluating and monitoring how it goes. Obviously, we can’t take drastic measures in the middle of the season, but with that said we’re always going to keep doing the right thing. It’s something we’re keeping an eye on.

Just a quick touch on the Masters system. When it was first announced it seemed like a huge, huge deal. There was a lot of hype around it at first, but it’s kind of fizzled out a little bit. What are your thoughts? It’s obviously more of a long-term thing than a short-term thing, but is it meeting expectations?

I think we expected it to have the lifecycle that it’s having right now. When it’s announced people get excited and right now it’s kind of quiet because no one is a Master. We anticipated that it would take about 12 months to hit the steady state of the Masters. By that, I mean having representative populations of 1-, 2-, 3-star Masters. I am pretty excited that in the coming season we will see our first 1-star Master players. Obviously, you can just look at the points rankings and see who they are, but once we start hitting on 2-stars I think we’ll start to see, hopefully, a different kind of view of the Masters system. We’ll also do our part at Blizzard to showcase those storylines as well. I think we have to do our part to make sure that Masters players themselves are celebrated. So we will be making a much bigger deal out of them once we actually get our first Masters.