by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Every Friday, we will be sharing with you our Blue Post Round-up – the “can’t miss”, quirkiest, or most insightful blue posts from the previous week.

This week, we finally got the patch with the big Leeroy Jenkins and Starving Buzzard nerf. If you’ve been following Hearthstone news or playing the game at all, this was practically impossible to miss. So I’m gonna just go ahead and skip it for this week’s Blue Post Round-up.

Community Manager Zeriyah however posted a very insightful comment on the official forums that provides some insight into how Blizzard looks at and evaluates community feedback. Perhaps surprisingly to some, suggestions and constructive feedback do not end up in a black hole. The post below combines two fairly long blue posts, but it’s very much worth a read.

You’re going to see a wide variety of discussions on the forums, but you’ll ultimately see some common topics arise as well. More often than not, forum discussions are going to follow a particular trend, no matter what forum you visit. I’ll touch on one in particular here that everyone has seen at least once.

“This thing is overpowered/unbalanced”.

Discussions of this type will usually stem from a player’s frustration or personal experiences with or against said experience. It’s good for all of us on the Hearthstone team to understand where frustrations lie, even if they’re not producing data that is cause for concern. These threads are usually very emotionally charged, since it tends to be an emotional reaction that spurred the creation of the initial topic. It can be difficult to post on the forums because of an emotional reaction, then reply without having those emotions influence your future discussions. The internet in itself isn’t very conducive to having a conversation spurred from emotion – text doesn’t convey feelings well, and anonymity provides yet another degree of indifferent separation.

We see a lot of things within Hearthstone trigger an emotional reaction. Is it because an effect of the card didn’t fall in your favor? Did playing this card have an immediate, impactful effect on gameplay that you felt caused you to lose? Did you feel like you had a chance to win, even if things were not going well, and those chances were diminished once this card was played? There are a lot of experiences that can spur threads regarding balance, not just an emotional reaction, but those are some common ones.

There’s not much we as Blues can comment on in regards to balance threads. There’s only so many times we can say that a card is working as intended, or that there may be strategies available to work around a particular card that may be causing frustration. We don’t want to unintentionally insult someone’s intelligence if they can’t overcome their frustration by suggesting a new strategy – we’re here to help. What we do try to do is make sure those resources are available, whether it’s through blogs, highlighting tips or guides that can help players understand those pain points, or simply change your perceptions on common misconceptions so players replace frustration with understanding.

We can also be rather impartial, and that can rub people the wrong way as well. Good communication between the devs and the players relies on some degree of separation between a heated emotional response and cold analytical data, and finding a balance between the two. If there are discussions you’d like to see us involved in more, let us know. If you want to see more guides, let us know that too. We’d rather take a “teach a person to fish” approach to things.
We do take into account and report on the emotional effect of cards to the developers, but it’s also very important to differentiate between something that may actually be unbalanced versus someone that may be having a rough beat or two.

Lengthy text aside, change in the forums begins and ends with the individual. Some people feel better by expressing their emotions in a public manner, and find satisfaction when they find others having a shared experience. It also makes their reaction feel justified. This tends to spin into dangerous fallacious territory, which can also be hard to turn back into something more constructive.

So how do I do it right? How do I fish?

First off, posting videos of your experiences in Hearthstone are great. These allow other players to comment on where you may have gone wrong during the game, and can be very enlightening. Share a video on Youtube, or even start streaming and post in the Community Discussion forums!

Share your decklist! The more information you can provide, the more others can help you. There are a lot of experienced deck-builders out there, and keep in mind there’s never going to be one deck that is the best against everything.

Be dynamic. The key to understanding is experience. Get to know the cards, and try out many different classes. If you’re facing a Druid and you don’t know that Swipe is coming when you have a bunch of low Health minions on the board, you may get frustrated. If you see it coming, you can adapt and improve.

Try new things and don’t be afraid to lose. Losing isn’t a bad thing by any means. Innovation drives the game; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s ok! Maybe you couldn’t pull off that weird combo that game, but it’s great fun when it works.

Change begins at an individual level, whether it through innovation or looking at challenges in a different light.

To be fair, people don’t believe us even when we do provide data. As an example of this, discussions about the Coin. It is still slightly more advantageous to go first rather than go second, but it feels better to go second. The emotional response of that perceived benefit is strong.

“Needs a nerf” falls directly into what I just discussed in that rather lengthy post. “I feel this needs a nerf because I have formulated an opinion around it based on my personal experiences.” Fact of the matter is, there are a lot of experiences players have in Hearthstone, and they’re not all the same for everyone.

Our posts are not intended to be patronizing. We don’t benefit in any way from that stance. What we do try to do is take an impartial stance on things, and that can rub people the wrong way. We don’t side completely one way or another – we tell things as they are. Sometimes personal pride needs to be set aside for the sake of learning something you may not have known before. It can be humbling, but it can also help players become better in the long run. It’s the nature of human experience.

Giving away too many stats can be devastating to any game. Our data allows us to make the game better for our players, and should not be a guideline for players on how to play the game. We shouldn’t be defining the meta – you should.

Our stance on making adjustments to cards remains firm: We will only make adjustments to cards only when we feel they are completely necessary. We constantly monitor many aspects of the game in order to make it a fun experience for everyone. If we’re not making changes, then it’s probably not completely necessary for a reason. (Source)