by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

Ever since Hearthstone was released, its competitive scene has grown steadily. But when Blizzard first came with the Online Card Game concept, I highly doubt they had such a vibrant scene in their expectations. Unlike a title like Starcraft, the Hearthstone game client hasn’t seen a lot of development directed towards competitive play. I mean, Hearthstone didn’t really have an observer mode until December 2014, that’s almost a full year after the start of open beta.  The whole competitive scene started as an spark from the streamer-led community, and it has carried on despite what you could describe as minimal support from the developers.

Just look at Goblins vs. Gnomes, the first full expansion for Hearthstone. Goblins vs. Gnomes brought a lot of high variance cards, with random effects being hugely prevalent. Blizzard released a set filled with cards that were probably very fun for casual players, cards that made the game fluid, diverse, and dynamic. But those same cards were a big headache for those who were trying to take the game seriously and compete at the highest level, since a lot of those cards can reward luck over skill.

Or maybe we should take a look at the Grand Tournament, Hearthstone’s second full expansion. The Grand Tournament had the perfect theme for Blizzard to introduce a Tournament Game Mode; instead, the development time was probably allocated on creating Tavern Brawl, a fun little mode that was released a few months earlier. You can argue that Tavern Brawl was a fun addition to the game, and you are most certainly correct. But its also correct that it did nothing to help out the competitive scene.

Tavern Brawl is fun, but no tournament mode.

This year, Blizzard made huge adjustments to its Hearthstone World Championship. Things are looking up, as the new Hearthstone World Championship Tour is much better structured than last year’s version of Hearthstone’s most important competition. Blizzard seems to be investing some resources into the competitive scene, and that can be observed on a better tournament structure, better live events, better broadcasts, and growing prize pools. But there is one aspect of the game that needs to play catch-up, and it’s a very important one, a core system, the actual Hearthstone game client.

Observer Mode bugs have been plaguing Hearthstone for a long time now, but that’s not even the worst offender. Hearthstone’s observer mode doesn’t have an option for integrated delay. This means that anyone that has access to the game, has valuable information about the player’s hands. Valuable information that can be unlawfully transmitted to opposing players so they can get an unfair advantage. This mean that for every streamed online tournament, there’s at the very least 1 person that could theoretically help players cheat by revealing the contents of their opponent’s hands. And often is more than just one player, as I doubt a lot of the weekly streaming Tournaments have the resources or staff to have a single person spectating the games live and transmitting them on delay to the casters and a secondary streamer. Usually, a few people will have access to a live feed, and all it takes is one crooked individual to abuse this power and compromise the integrity of the competition. This could easily happen in tournaments that are giving HCT points, and is that really acceptable? This is probably one of the reason that season preliminaries are being played in live locations, to remove that possibility.

And speaking about online Tournaments that have HCT points on the line. Hearthstone tournaments employ competitive formats that are not supported by the client, which leaves a lot of open space for people to bend the rules. Players usually have to select their classes, but you can’t really police the exact decklists of 200+ players in an open tournament. Players are usually instructed to provide screenshots that they only have a single deck of each class they are playing, this way they don’t use different versions of a deck to tech out against their opponents, but those screenshots are very easy to forge if you know anything about Photoshop or other similar programs. Plus, there’s nothing really stopping you from editing your deck after each series to tech against your next round opponent. That’s particularly troublesome for tournaments where not all matches get streamed, so the players that are featured in the broadcast have a distinct disadvantage.

Fun to lose a tourney because my opponent got to scout me on the stream and put 2x kezan in his decks. Neat

— Joe (@hamboy12_HS) February 28, 2016

Blizzard has actually put a lot of thought into this years championship from the logistic departments, but we need them to put work on their game client. Saying that the prize pool is the biggest ever makes for a nice press headline, the same can be said about season preliminaries being played in live locations, or the fact that players can’t be simply invited to major point-giving tournaments anymore. But that doesn’t mean that you can neglect key issues such as the game client, which is the core of the whole Hearthstone experience.

I’m hopeful that some of the things that we need are already in the works, but it doesn’t hurt to put my wishlist out there.

Client Support for “Best of X” Formats

It would be awesome if when you challenge an opponent to a Hearthstone duel, the client actually gave you the option to enter a best-of-5 series under Conquest Format. Imagine if the game client could take care of you picking the right amount of decks and even doing bans when necessary. Hopefully this system was flexible enough so you could choose between the length of the series and different formats such as Conquest, Last Hero Standing, and why not introduce new formats for players to try out and see what the community thinks is the fairest.

In-Game Tournaments

Recenly, Starcraft introduced in-game tournaments, and Hearthstone would benefit a lot from them. I’ve talked at length on how the current ladder system is highly inappropriate for competitive play. Having actual tournaments supported by the client would go a long way towards ensuring that the most deserving players make it to the seasonal qualifiers. Having the client involved means that you could easily lock decklists for an entire tournament, and would prevent the sadly common cases of players misreporting results, and even those occurrences of tournament administrators playing favorites.

Blizzard has long relied on community organized tournaments to bring the scene forward, its time that they give those tournament organizers a bit of software help.

Optional Delay for the Spectator Mode

In order to keep the game as fair as possible, the Hearthstone clients need to restrict the access to the live matches to just the players involved. Any observers, casters, and tournament administrators should be watching the happenings on delay. This would also allow the casters to be in a rather live interaction with Twitch Chat, which would be a welcome addition for smaller tournament streams, and would certainly help community building.

It would be great if we could finally clean up the Spectator Mode bugs while we are at it.

A New Ladder System for Legend Level Players

No need to elaborate in the subject, I’ve already said a lot about it. Still, the competitive players deserve a ladder system that mitigates the propensity for randomness of this game, and than is a little more deep than “grind as hard as you can the last few days of the month and hope you hit your lucky streaks at the right moment”.

At least to me, those are the most pressing matters, but a lot more could be done with the Hearthstone Client. What would YOU like to see added? Let me know using the comment section below, or simply send me a tweet @DannieRay23.