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Developer Roundup

by - 7 years ago

Following the January 13, 2017 live Q&A session, the Hearthstone development team has continued its whirlwind be-more-open-with-the-community-tour with formal interviews, tweets, and Reddit posts.

  • Starting right after the Q&A, Dean “Iksar” Ayala and Ben Brode took back to Twitter and Reddit to tackle some of the questions that didn’t make it into the stream. Some highlights include:
    Any classic cards moved to Wild could be disenchanted for full dust.  (cite) However, there are currently no plans to make it cheaper or easier to collect Wild-only cards. (cite)
  • Arena will be standard-only as “an experiment” for players to try (editor’s note: he specifically said “it’s” an experiment, not “it would be”). (cite)
  • The team has considered rotating card pools in Arena, but first want to implement Standard and tweak rarity distributions before trying other options. (cite)
  • The team has examined methods of encouraging subthemes and synergies but does not want to give the player too much control, for fear it would destroy the arena experience. (cite)
  • Ben Brode is not sure they have gotten the exact timing of releases correct, but he does believe that there is value in pacing releases far enough apart that there are periods of both unstable and settled metagames. Releasing more frequent small sets might not satisfy more players than the current model. Additionally, mistakes in balancing small sets are amplified. (cite)
  • As Wild gets “spicier” it will get more support from Blizzard. (cite)

On January 16th, VentureBeat published an interview with senior game designer Peter Whalen discussing Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, the upcoming standard format rotation, and Arena mode. The entire interview may be found here, and is summarized as follows:

  • Whalen is happy that Pirates have gotten their chance to shine but admits that the pirate package is more popular than they anticipated. The team is “watching” both Patches and Small-Time Buccaneer.
  • Whalen states that the team will “pull back” on powerful 1-drops going forward, especially those with a tendency to “snowball” games out of control, such as Tunnel Trogg (which is, of course, rotating out of standard when the next set is released).
  • The team now has a better tool for manipulating arena card offerings, which the team is currently exploring the uses of.
  • Initially, Hunter was in the Jade Lotus, and Rogue was in the Grimy Goons, however as the flavor of the gangs was developed the classes were rearranged to the way we know them now.
  • Community involvement and communication is important to the team and has been iterating over time.
  • Whalen is happy with the community’s response to Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, and with the class diversity in the meta.
  • Whalen has been playing a lot of Jade N’Zoth Shaman recently, and he believes “it has a lot of game against basically everything.”

 


Nicholas Weiss

Is a lawyer by day and a cardslinger by night. He's decent at both. He's been playing Hearthstone since open beta and writing about it for a few years now.


0 responses to “Developer Roundup”

  1. Michael S Teufenkjian says:

    Good article. 10/10 would read again.