Dean Ayala’s Hearthstone Community Q&A #24 - Revisiting Balance Next Week, Emote Wheel, Bring Back a Friend, Mass Nerf
First Though, Congratulations, Dean!
Dean hit the 10-year mark at Blizzard last week! Congratulations on the milestone, we can’t wait to see your shield!
For those not in the know, Blizzard has „Service Awards“ that are presented to its employees at certain milestones. 2 Years is a Stein, 5 Years is Sword, 10 is a Shield, 15 is Rings, and 20 is a Helm. It should be noted that some folks have received a medallion recently for 5 year awards. Not sure if the sword is gone for good.
Quote From Dean Ayala
My 10-year anniversary @Blizzard_Ent was last week.
@Warcraft defined a lot of my teenage years and @PlayHearthstone changed my life. Thanks for the memories, looking forward to the next 10 years!
Stormwind
- They will be revisiting balance next week on Tuesday to review data and discuss the meta.
- Rokara’s Quest originally blew up your hand and turned it into a pirate ship that had buttons to press instead of drawing cards.
- The UI cost was too high.
Emote Wheel
- One day there will be a customizable emote wheel.
- The team currently records extra voicelines for heroes, which explains why new heroes still get Sorry emotes.
- The goal in recording these extra voicelines is not for easter eggs but flexibility in the future.
Bring Back a Friend
- This is not a confirmed feature.
- They are in very early discussion on whether or not they want to take on a big social project.
- They’d like to use existing players as tools to bring back older players or new ones.
- Incentives to bring people to the game is a goal of the system.
- This sounds like a Recruit-a-Friend feature but better than simply rewarding a classic pack and eventually a hero skin (Morgl!)
Mass Nerf
- Power creep will always be a decision, though in some ways it will be inevitable.
- They have discussed doing a mass card nerf that could be done at the start of a rotation.
- Goals would be to lower the power of the core set and the three sets from the previous year.
- Dean doesn’t think doing one would be unreasonable nor is it a crazy idea…
- Dean also thinks that as the next year approaches, they will consider it very closely.
New Constructed Formats
- New formats is something Dean sees since Hearthstone will b e around for a „long, long time“.
- There are not current plans for one on the horizon though.
- „Something between Wild and Standard might be nice.“
Rewards Track
- When they add new rewards, they try to add new things instead of more of the old.
- Dean expects any rewards track additions in the future to be something we may not have seen before.
Diamond Cards
- They are „not too far from“ releasing more Diamond cards for current Standard sets that didn’t get any.
- After the next Diamond cards come out for Standard sets, they’ll move on to Wild. No timeline.
Decks
- Broken decks are never intentionally shipped.
- A broken deck is „something in the 25+ population 54-55%+ win rate range. Launch DH, Galakrond Shaman come to mind“
- For new expansions, they try to give every class something they can use at a competitive level.
- A competitive level does not mean a Tier 1 deck but a deck at 47-48+% winrate.
- Once you master that deck, you should be able to push to a 50% winrate.
Cards
- The Shrine cards in Rastakhan’s Rumble did well internally but were too low of a power level to be effective when live.
- The team spent too much time playtesting low power decks to look for fun with the shrines.
- Dean expects most of the nerfed cards to get unnerfed when they rotate to Wild next year.
- Cards that rotate to Wild that would be a target for an unnerf may not receive it if it would make an already „mega-powerful“ deck more powerful.
- Neutral cards that grant class-specific effects should come at a cost to the player.
- Card text is written in the same way if you were to try and describe what a card does to a friend. They try to avoid it reading like a rules book, but clarity is important.
- They still have more ideas for new card tribes. [We will see new minion types next year]
- The Stealer of Souls ban was, possibly, an afterthought. Dean was surprised when the team proposed it.
- They are trying to get better at coordinating between card design and visual effects.
- Important for them to share knowledge about potential problems when players are playing cards that might trigger 10+ effects in a small window.
- The meta can’t be predicted when they initially develop a mini-set so they will do a rebalance of the cards if needed.
- Cards do not get redesigned though as it is too late at that stage.
- The core set is now the solution to reworking classes that need it.
Blizzard IP
- They will continue to find times where they can launch other content alongside new releases in World of Warcraft.
- There have been ideas for some Diablo content, but there are no promises.
- Battlegrounds Heroes is a spot where Dean could see them using cross-IP characters, at least to start.
Mercenaries
- The team is still hard at work on the new mode. It is the main focus.
New Class
- The options for the next new class are Monk, Death Knight, and a class that is Hearthstone-specific (not from WoW).
- Dean thinks Monk is second or third on the new class list.
News in Client
- The team wants to integrate content into the Hearthstone client.
- Dean cites Supercell’s awesome job at integrating video and news content into their games.
- With that said, there are no current plans on the pipeline to add this.
Hearthstone’s Internal Tool
- The developers have an external tool that connects to Hearthstone that lets them spawn anything they want into the game.
- Releasing that to help players test has never been a consideration.
- Apparently, the tool can crash you out through mis-use.
- For patches, the process is expensive in terms of how many people it takes to do it. Better solutions could let them patch more often.