by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Well met, readers! This is your BlizzPro Hearthstone Site Manager, Stephen Stewart, here. Starting today and continuing forward on Sundays, I’d like to take a moment to analyze things specific to Hearthstone. This will transpire more in an editorial/opinion style format, where I’ll go into detail about something within the community that is bugging me or seems to be missing or is being overlooked. I’ve got a few cool ideas about how to present these missives to you and hope to keep the format fresh, interesting, and entertaining. Now, introductions aside, let’s jump into our first topic up for discussion.

Observation Mode

I know that I have been steadily beating this drum essentially since I joined BlizzPro back in December of last year, but as someone who watches a fair amount of eSports, I really can’t express how important I believe that Observation Mode will be to the future of competitive Hearthstone. You can call it what you will – Observation Mode, Spectator Mode, Replay Mode, whatever. What is expected out of the functionality is pretty distinct no matter what you want to call the feature:

• Sight – Obviously, we want to be able to see what’s going on. This means that we should have all of the information available to us at all times. We need to be able to quickly discern who is holding what cards, what minions are on the board, the classes, the life totals, and the score of the series. Those are the essential points of information that will help someone who has been watching from the beginning or someone who is joining in midway have a solid foundation to watch from.

• Sound – This is of lesser importance, but in terms of entertainment, we want to be able to hear the familiar call of the minions and the heftiness of being slapped in the face by a big attack. It makes the world come alive and adds to the audience’s entertainment value. Music may be distracting to the commentary, but it may also add a nice ambient soundtrack if done right. It can serve to take over as the casters find the next point of information to relay. This would also help to cut down on some of the incessant fodder when casters seem to just be spewing words for the sake of filling the silence rather than letting the audience have a chance to absorb the plays and determine what could happen next.

Those are your main tenants of what I believe Observation Mode needs to have in order to be successful, but there is honestly so much more that could be done with it. Here are some examples of what has been happening at recent tournaments.

TeSPA’s overlay for PAX

TeSPA’s Hearthstone Collegiate Open 

I was in attendance at PAX East, where TeSPA held the final rounds of their Hearthstone Collegiate Open. What struck me at this event was that, despite being in physical attendance, the need for Observation Mode was just as important in person. A sizable group of people can’t huddle around the two players on their laptops playing these games, and quite frankly it just wouldn’t look or feel right for a serious tournament. This means that the primary method of absorbing the games will always be through screens and projections that will need to utilize observation tools for the best possible production. Above, you can see that TeSPA created their own layout, which did a great job of relaying information.

• It’s clear whose turn it is due to the current player’s tag appearing on-screen.
• You can see both players’ faces for their reactions to the plays, which enhances the entertainment value for the audience.
• They created space to list out their sponsors, the overall score of the series, and even some extra flavor.

What’s missing here, unfortunately, is the ability to see both players’ hands. Often times, you’ll hear casters say, “So and so has X in his hand and I can’t quite remember if the opponent has Y as a counter, but we’ll have to see when we flip back to their side.” Maybe that adds a little more excitement as we lose track of who has what, but I am always a fan of having everything laid out so that there’s no guesswork involved. I think the ability to see both players’ hands at all times would have to be a necessary part of a robust Observation Mode. TeSPA’s overlay shows that some means of customization would also go a long way to help with ancillary duties such as promotion of tournament sponsors or adding some flavorful touches to make each tournament stand out from one another.

Dreamhack Bucharest 2014

At Dreamhack Bucharest 2014, which wrapped up a mere several hours ago, we ran into an issue on the first day where the organizers wanted to be sure to cast all of the seeded players’ games on stream. The very first problem with this is that currently, in order for a tournament to be produced, it needs to be streamed on both players’ sides. What this means is that if you personally don’t stream (or can’t), the chances of getting invited to a tournament are slim to none. Streaming has been a bar to entry for many of the past tournaments that occur online.

In the offline format, such as Bucharest, the streaming duties fall to the organizers, but a new issue arose this time around where, due to time constraints, games of the seeded players had to be played simultaneously on computers that weren’t part of the stream setup. Once the streamed games concluded, there was an awkward moment where the casters wanted to get into the other seeded players’ games, but because they had already started their series on the non-streaming computers, it wasn’t possible. My next proposal for Observation Mode is to make it so that any game can be jumped into, whether it hasn’t started yet or is about to conclude its very last moves. Being able to jump into games allows some leeway for a tournament to play out multiple parts of its brackets while still only having one stream set up, rather than having to maintain multiple A, B, C streams to catch all of the action. While it’s not ideal to find a game already in progress, it’s better to provide something over nothing, and with all of the features noted previously, viewers should be able to easily discern what has transpired and where things currently stand.

Starcraft II Spectator Mode (Courtesy of nunbul.blogspot.com)

What We Can Learn From Others

Above is a stock picture of Starcraft II’s Spectator Mode (as viewed via replay). What do we see? Constant updates via the Production tab of what’s being built by each player, information on their resources, army size, the game time, an unobstructed view of the mini-map, and on and on. This obviously contains a lot of entries specific to real-time strategy (RTS) games, but Hearthstone can certainly copy the ethos of it. The Production tab is something I want to particularly pick on. This can also be switched over to the Army tab so that we see what both players currently possess for units. I would almost parallel this to the deck list each player is running in Hearthstone. If we know what cards they can potentially draw into, this helps us, the viewers, feel like we can prognosticate some of the future drama and also helps us feel like we have a one-up on the players. This is important to increasing the entertainment value from games because we’re all humans and we love emotional reactions. We want to be able to say, “Oh, God, he has a 1 in 5 chance to topdeck Fireball and win. It could happen… It could happen… OH MY GOD, IT’S HAPPENING!” and then watch the reactions on screen from the smiles to the exasperated sighs. That’s just good TV.

We want to make sure, of course, not to clutter the interface to the point where it’s too busy and viewers don’t know where to look, but I have faith and confidence that Blizzard could implement most of the functions we have discussed in an elegant way. There’s so much potential for Observation Mode and I only see upsides. It would be a boon for tournament organizers, casters, and viewers. Everybody wins when this feature releases and I think it will go a long way to cement Hearthstone’s foothold in the eSports scene as a game that will have competitive staying power, create revenue for sponsors, and be enjoyable to watch. The only downside is that it’s development time for a small team where they may have to back-burner other projects in the meantime. I think Observation Mode is simply too important, though, to not register as a high priority worthy of dealing with that circumstance.

Did I miss anything? Things you disagree with or would implement differently? Feel free to tell me how right or wrong I am in the Comments section below!