Dean Ayala’s Community Q&A #12 - Barrens Balance Meeting on Monday, AI Ladder, Core Set, Heroic Battlegrounds, and More
Forged in the Barrens
- One of the biggest worries with a launch is that old decks won’t change much and the game feels the same.
- They do still see a bit of the old with Pen Flinger and Tickatus.
- „Not sure if we will address either of those cards but if there is going to be a hot topic [post-expansion] you’d rather it not be the same old cards.“
- Mage and Paladin are bit higher power level than expected.
- Deck of Lunacy is not a card they want to be defining the meta. If it ends up being one, it is a „clear target for change“.
- They will be talking about potential card balance in a meeting early next week.
Core Set
- They decided to do the Core Set early last year.
- The next iteration of Core Set will be designed in the next couple of months.
- Eventually, the core set could be a bit crazier.
- Dean could see them „doing a year of highlander focused stuff, weapons in all classes, bringing back dks… maybe even wilder stuff like a full dual-class core set“.
Spell Schools
- Physical Spell School was a consideration but schools are tied to the fantasy of magic.
- Warrior & Hunter having a lack of spell schools can make it cooler when they do get some cards in schools.
- "They’ll be some frosty set at some point and you might see Frost Warrior and it’ll feel like a cool and different way that those classes interact with spell schools rather than it just being the norm. "
AI Ladder
- Dean has wanted to do an AI Ladder but hasn’t been able to get traction.
- Hearthstone’s AI is good enough to pilot a large enough number of decks that they could make a ladder for it.
- If you like collecting cards but don’t like PVP, there isn’t really a place for you in Hearthstone right now.
- Dean remains passionate about this even though he has been „mostly alone“ in thinking about it.
Arena
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On Using Wild Boards in Arena instead of Standard Ones:
- Not sure if they have the tech to display a random subset of boards based on manual choice.
- Could be a nice QoL thing to do, Dean will check Monday if the tech exists already.
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They’ll talk about Mor’shan Watch Post internally early next week.
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Dean doesn’t want them to get into a mindset of banning cards in Arena just because they are good every time a new set comes out.
Battlegrounds
- They’ve had ideas for weapons, a „sidekick“, a second hero power.
- Nothing has been playtested yet. „Likely we’ll try something soon.“
- Doing Tavern Brawls for Battlegrounds is something Dean wants to do. „It’s not as plug and play as you might think it is“.
- A Heroic Battlegrounds Tavern Brawl might be a good start.
Cards
- Mimiron’s Head’s original animation was „flew off the board, out of the game, flew you into the sky, into the clouds, then dive bombed back onto the board“.
Data
Quote From Dean Ayala
Another random and stupid story in early Hearthstone metrics was a time where we had card power but no deck power stats and we were misled into thinking that murloc shaman was super powerful for like 24 hours. (Source)
Turns out the deck was awful (like we thought) we were just pulling mostly data from Neptulon’s murlocs. So effectively we were looking at Neptulon’s play/win rate and thinking it was murloc’s draw/win rate. (Source)
It was very early in data collection and we corrected it within 24 hours, but it made me feel like an idiot for trying to explain to the team that there was a unicorn murloc paladin no one had built yet. (Source)
After that point, we correctly made draw/win rate only apply to cards that are actually drawn, not added to your hand :).
Dean
- His first sets as lead were Kobolds, Witchwood, Boomsday, and Rataskhan’s Rumble.
- Dean wants to push boundaries of power and synergy in his early lead sets - „You can pretty clearly see some of that failure.“
- Future sets were pulled back too hard the following year.
- Dean regrets not putting more emphasis on making the game easy to come back to.
- Corridor Creeper was a failure.
Hier der Link mit den Original Fragen und Antworten: