“ When people talk about, "I want to have a tournament experience in the game," it can mean a lot of different things. I think a lot of these ideas get manifested in different systems, sometimes in systems we don't even call a tournament. Even in things like Arena, there's a competitive Swiss style aspect to it.

Bring it on!

“ I sometimes talk about playing World of Warcraft and going on raids together, I think we can get that kind of feel and experience if we get this right.

I think for a lot of ideas we end up executing in the game, it takes a while for it to coalesce. We've been talking about what kind of tournament fantasies exist. When people talk about, "I want to have a tournament experience in the game," it can mean a lot of different things. I think a lot of these ideas get manifested in different systems, sometimes in systems we don't even call a tournament. Even in things like Arena, there's a competitive Swiss style aspect to it. We just released Brawliseum, and now there is an aspect a constructed asynchronous Swiss style competition happening. Those are all different ways where we think about when people say they want to have this tournament experience, how can we manifest it?I think we're watching carefully for instance, with what's happening with Brawliseum… here is a way where players can bring what they think is their best Wild deck and then basically play a Swiss format tournament. You win as many games as you can before you lose three, which in a Swiss lingo, is you've dropped out from winning. So that's really cool.The other fantasy that we want to fulfil is - we look at Hearthstone Championship Tour. At the highest level of Hearthstone, players make a line-up of decks and maybe it's Last Man Standing, maybe it's Conquest, and I get to play this multi-deck match against another player. That looks really cool when I see players do it when we watch esports. Now using the in-game tournament feature, players will be able to experience that.We like to think over the years we've been continuing to push in different directions to fulfil different aspects of this tournament fantasy. Here is a mode where I think it's hitting it more square on in terms of, "Me and my friends casually, we want to play a tournament together.” Or “Hey, I'm IGN. We have a great community. I'm going to host a 120 person IGN weekend cup or something. Oh, gosh. It's too much work. I'm not going to do it anymore." I think hitting those two fantasies square on and then calling that in-game tournament support, we're very excited to do that this year.Yeah. And this is not the end. I think we have plenty more aspects of this tournament fantasy we want to continue to explore. We're neck deep in working on this right now. Later in the year, we're going to start rolling this out in a beta basis. We really want the community to know that what we're going to ship is really what we think is core, and then as we get feedback, we look forward to improving it.Frankly, a lot of the specifics of that detail is still being worked out, because we're in the middle of development. We do a lot of play testing, and as we develop it, we change courses. I think for some of those types of details, it might be worth chatting again as we come further along. Maybe we'll even do a video. It's like, "This is what's happening with the in-game tournament feature."I do think we can talk about what our overall goals are. We definitely want to support a very intimate get together. As small as maybe two to eight. We also want to support somewhere in the range of a hundred to two hundred. I think that's definitely a use case. That's where our head's at. In terms of the complexity if we were to scale up to something like 100 and 200 and try to do a bracket type of situation, I think there can be some challenges there. At least for now, we're focusing more in the direction of a Swiss type of format, but that's our current thinking. I think a lot of this can change as we continue to build this out and test it.Yeah. At the core, the things we want to resolve is - these people are playing and they need to all start playing their game at this hour, and then after X amount of time we need to move on to the next game. Maybe we even allow players to accelerate that process if everybody is done playing their games. If there needs to be a time constraint, how do we deal with that? All the players being able to easily pick what decks they want to lock in and then not having to worry about, "Is the other guy cheesing me out and teching cards in the middle of the tournament?" Those are the things that we want to take care of. We're going to definitely take care of in initial roll out. The deck validation and locking into place, the multi-deck format, and this coordinated time matching and dealing with the edge case of matches taking too long. Those are the things we're going to take care of.I think that's definitely starting to get into the territory of where we will evolve towards. Frankly, I think when we launch this, especially in beta and maybe the early stage post-beta, I think organisers, especially for organising a very large scale tournament, that they'll likely want to still use additional messaging tools outside of client to coordinate this stuff, like RSVP-ing, forums if it's 120 people talking to each other about the tournament and making an announcement to all those 120 people. I think at least during the initial phase, tournament organisers for that scale will probably want to continue to use whatever mechanism they're still using, like Facebook or Discord or whatever it may be.I wouldn't consider class bans to be a must-ship v1 of this, if we were to beta it, but definitely something we’d love to do. I'm sure we'll get feedback to get it in.I think that kind of timeline is hard for us to predict. It really depends on the kind of feedback we get from our players. We learn so much once we release something. A specific timeline for when we would switch over to this, or even if we ultimately decide using this exclusively is the right way to go for HCT, I think that's something that's up for debate that we look forward to having through 2018.Honestly, for someone like me, the most exciting thing about the in-game tournament feature is more the social scenario. It's me and my office buddies, me and a few of my friends, we want to get together Friday night, we want to get together Saturday and play Hearthstone all day together. To support that, I think providing more customisation in the future would be really exciting, because of this notion that you can play Hearthstone in this social way, even online.My wishlist would be me and a bunch of my friends getting together every Saturday after my kid goes to bed and four of us, eight of us have a great time together, and we have this activity we can do together like that. My friends in New York and some of my friends in Korea, we all get together every Saturday night and we play. That sounds awesome. That's definitely a use case that I want to be working towards. I think that's really powerful. This is one of the reasons why we like Fireside Gatherings, and that's more in person, but this social way to enjoy Hearthstone, we really think is the best way to enjoy Hearthstone. Extending that out and being able to easily put together something in person or online where you can play with your friends, that's really exciting to me.Again, I think this system can have two core targets. That's the half I'm really excited about down the road, and then the other side of the equation that is also very significant, is yeah, you're IGN or you have an awesome Hearthstone podcast, and you have a medium size or even large size community. Maybe the Reddit guys want to get together and have a tournament. We want that to be easy as well, because again, that's another way to foster this awesome Hearthstone community we have and make it easy for people to have a great time playing with each other.Yeah. Again, we're doing this because I think it has a bright future. I think it'll be really exciting when it comes out. I think it's got a lot of room to grow. Please, we’d love to get feedback about it through 2018 and we'll see in what direction it grows. We're committed to this feature and we expect to continue to work and grow it.