Hi. I play hearthstone almost exclusively on mobile and over and over I feel like the game experience on mobile leaves much to be desired.
I don’t want this just to be a complaining post. There’s plenty enough complaining already. But I do want to highlight the way that repeatedly the game has real issues for mobile players that need to be addressed at the development level. Please, team 5, take some time to test your game on mobile devices as well as on PC. If you did this, then I am sure that these issues would not persist in the client.
The sorts of things I am talking about:
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When playing traditional hearthstone or Arena or Duels on mobile, it is almost impossible to see your opponent’s class while on the mulligan screen. If you queued, then looked away for some reason, and then came back to find the “starting hand” interface, you can see your opponent’s username but other aspects on the UI obscure the hero portrait and hero power. Adding a text prompt under the opponent username to show the class they are playing is a small thing, but that is all that would be needed. It’s really annoying trying to squint through the “Starting Hand” banner to try and decipher which hero power symbol is under there.
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Whenever there is a major new client-side content patch, these patches are routinely available to PC as much as 3-5 hours before the patch makes it to Google Play or the Apple Store for mobile device users. While I can understand that these app stores are outside of blizzard’s control to some extent, the delay is regular and consistent enough that I have to ask why something cannot be done to reduce the time delay. This is not a one-off. Every time there is a patch, there are dozens of posts on the Hearthstone reddit sub from mobile users asking how long until the patch will be available. It feels bad for players to see other users able to enjoy the content and posting screenshots of new content while being locked out because Blizzard couldn’t negotiate with Apple and Google about the timing of the availability of the software patch. At this point it should be well known how long the back-end app store processes take and so it can be anticipated and built-in to the patch release process and if there is a good reason it cannot be I would love to hear it.
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tooltips that are readable on PC often get clipped out by the screen on Mobile. The latest example of this is in Mercenaries. When you are selecting heroes from your hand, selecting them and holding them down brings up the text and rank of their abilities as well as any treasure they have equipped. This is great and useful feature, except that the treasure usually gets clipped off as it doesn’t fit on the screen. I feel sure that if your devs tested the game mode on Mobile they would be aware of this issue. And this isn’t the first time it has happened. With the Barrens single player Mystery challenge, to win the year of the Phoenix cardback reward, the fourth challenge (hunter) involved “trading” goods to complete “quests” offered by various characters. The trades on offer and and quest objectives were only visible by hovering over the character with the mouse pointer on PC. If you did this on Mobile, you were not able to view all the information. This challenge is literally not able to be completed on mobile unless you follow a guide which completely removes the joy of being able to problem solve it and also cheapens the effort of the developers who spent the time and effort to create the puzzle.
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how difficult it can be to parse the collection. You can filter, but if you are looking for a 9- or 10- cost card that you can’t remember the name of for the life of you, then you are doomed to scrolling through pages and pages of cards in the “7+” mana category, at best. And in a recent top 2 Tavern Brawl, the filter was actually bugged and could not be used. To play with Yogg Saron I had to scroll from 1 mana all the way through to the end. It was a painful experience that could have been easily addressed by having a “skip X pages” or “goto page X” function in the collection. Being able to view your collection as a list might also help. Often I do rely on the art to remember cards but again I see no good reason why your collection cannot be viewed in some sort of list format; your deck shows cards as a list and that works just fine. The interface for selecting hero portraits was recently improved (thank you) but that was also previously very painful to parse if you wanted to get to heroes near the back of the collection.
Anyway as I said, I don’t want this just to be a big complaint post. I am asking that you spend some time thinking about how to improve the game experience for mobile users in these areas in particular: making patch release timing closer to the time when the patches are released for PC; ensuring that the UI showing game information is as complete and readable in all game modes on mobile as it is on PC; and giving more options for parsing the collection quickly. I think these things would make be warmly welcomed by mobile users and would make many aspects of the game experience on mobile less frustrating for us. Thanks.