Blizzard's Ben Brode Answers Hearthstone Questions From Twitter

My name is Ben Brode, I'm the game director of Hearthstone

and welcome to Hearthstone Support.

Diederik, does nobody at Blizzard have a better idea

than the coin to balance going second in Hearthstone?

The answer is no, nobody does.

We did have a lot of ideas about

how to balance going second, the first idea

was just the player who goes second gets an extra card,

that's it, and we noticed that with just that one change,

the first turn advantage was 60% vs 40%,

that's like a 20% difference, it's significant right?

And we wanted to get it to about 55%, 45%,

that's about the first turn advantage in chess.

And we tried a couple things, the first was

what if the player who goes second

starts with more life right?

Because what often happens is first player

has an advantage, they put the second player

on the back foot, and they struggle back

but over time that extra card makes a bigger difference,

especially once you get 10 mana

and it starts to even out, and they can come back

so let's give the second player

a little bit more time but it didn't

make the gameplay feel good enough

because they were always on the back foot

so we tried things like what if player two starts

with a 1/1 minion in the battlefield?

What if player two's first minion gets +1/+1,

it's just got a free buff for their first minion?

And these types of changes really started to make

player two feel like they could overcome that advantage

and get back into the game and start fighting it out.

But the thing that made us feel the best was the coin.

It does a couple things, one it's a very active thing,

you get to choose how you use the coin.

It's pretty skill-testing, figuring out

if you want to use it early in the game

or for a big swing turn later on.

It creates a moment where when you play the coin,

your opponent goes uh oh, it's the coin turn,

what are they gonna do?

And that's cool too, and it does significantly

affect the first turn advantage.

We got I think the last time we looked at it

it was like 51% to 49%, it was very close.

It's closer than a lot of other strategy games,

and we think that's great,

the coin's doing a great job for us.

From Spivey of the Ebon Blade,

what are the chances we see cards added to the classic set?

I actually think this is very high.

The classic set is meant to set the baseline fantasy

of Warcraft in the Hearthstone universe.

It's mean to provide players with a baseline of power

so that they can build some satisfying decks.

The classics is one of the most powerful sets

in the game right now, actually kinda become

a problem for us because it doesn't rotate

like the other sets do so if there's a really strong deck

that uses almost entirely classic and basic cards,

the standard around it just won't change,

it'll be the same every year,

I think that's we needed a format that does change

every year, that's why we have the standard format.

So we've been rotating some cards out of classic

and that's been causing some disparities

in the number of cards per class.

Mage has less cards than any other class

in standard right now because of the Hall of Fame.

So I think we have some opportunity

to give Mages a couple more cards,

we'd have to do it carefully because like

if we add too powerful cards to Mage then we have

the same problem we had before the Hall of Fame rotations

where the decks are the same every year,

Mages playing the same cards every year.

So it's okay that they're playing some cards

every year, I think there's a baseline of cards

that's good to have, it's very powerful in those sets,

we did rotate some into the Hall of Fame,

I think we'll bring some back, maybe less powerful ones,

maybe ones that set the class fantasy really strongly

and also give you an idea of what that class identity is

but I'm not sure what those would be just yet.

From Sebastian Quiroga, what led to the decision

to add hero characters like Lord Jaraxxus?

It was a really creative mechanic at the time.

Actually, this is a great story

because we were doing a play test

with one of the engineers from the World of Warcraft team,

Pat Dawson, and this is way back in the early days

of Hearthstone and we were still experimenting

with ways to represent the Alliance and the Horde

as different factions, which we eventually scrapped,

but every class had an Alliance hero and a Horde hero.

And for us, the first Warlock Horde hero was Cho'gall,

and the Alliance, we had trouble coming up

with a satisfying Alliance warlock hero,

so we went with the one that I could remember most,

which was Wilfred Fizzlebang from the Grand Tournament.

And Pat Dawson sits down for the play test

and chooses Wilfred Fizzlebang

and in World of Warcraft, Wilfred Fizzlebang

tries to summon a fearsome Doomguard

for the players to battle, but he accidentally

summons Jaraxxus, eredar lord of the Burning Legion,

who destroys Wilfred Fizzlebang and takes the place

of the Doomguard as the new boss

that the players have to battle.

So Pat Dawson sits down and he selects

Wilfred Fizzlebang and he says Wilfred Fizzlebang,

is there a Jaraxxus card in this deck?

And there wasn't, and I was like oh,

that's a huge mistake, and so I immediately

went back to my desk and I designed Lord Jaraxxus,

who when you summon him, he destroys you

and takes your places as the new boss

and that's how we came up with that whole mechanic.

Alright, from MagicianMoo, if we have nerfs

in the game, how 'bout buffs?

I believe there are cards that would benefit from it.

I agree with that, there's a lot of cards

that would benefit from a buff,

but generally nerfs happen when something is

way out of proportion with the rest of the cards

and we have to bring it in line,

but buffs imply that maybe we want

to get everything in this thin, narrow band,

a power level, and that's actually just not the goal right?

We have cards that are intentionally bad,

maybe because the play experience they create

isn't as fun or we want to create a challenge

for players who really like to win with bad cards

or the segment of our audience

that prefers beating you with cards

you think are bad, it makes their wins feel better,

so we don't necessarily want every card

to be in that thin range, and also we like

putting cards that in the future will

make other cards better, right?

A lot of the Paladin secrets were pretty weak,

but that meant that we could create cards,

like Mysterious Challenger that made Paladin secrets

much better, and all of a sudden,

with just a few cards, we could really change

the meta and maybe we did too good of a job

with Mysterious Challenger, but it lets us

use those cards in the future

to have a big impact when new cards are released.

From GreenTheAssassin, with three more sets

becoming wild and possibly more wild players

due to the current events and the rotation,

are there plans to make wild sets

purchasable with in-game gold?

And actually, a lot of people don't know

that you can actually buy wild sets

and adventures on our websites

through the Battle.net shop, you can also

if you've ever bought like a piece of an old adventure

while it was still in rotation,

you can actually completely finish out

the wings that you haven't bought yet with gold

but we are trying to keep the in-game shop very clean

and very simple, we don't sell a lot

of different products there, just the recent expansions.

And so we've tried to keep that on the websites

and out of the game client where possible,

that said there's a lot of people

asking for this, and it's something that

we would consider going forward.

This is from Joshua the Unpaid Intern,

you should fight for a higher wage, sir.

Will dungeon run be updated to go with the new expansion?

Well, we just announced the newest expansion

of Hearthstone recently, and we have some exciting

single player content there, it does follow along

with the theme of dungeon runs, the way that plays,

but it's got a different take where we're exploring

kind of a more monstrous side and doing

some monster hunting, so it'll play a lot like dungeon runs,

but it's got some fun twists I think players will enjoy.

Here's a question from Andrew is taking candle,

which shame on you Andrew.

Which college degree do you think

would help most with becoming a Hearthstone world champion?

I mean this is controversial, I don't know,

I would just say forget college, just play Hearthstone,

there's no class on how to become

a great Hearthstone player.

Find other Hearthstone players that are quite good,

ask them for advice, put together a play group

and play a bunch of Hearthstone,

but don't let your parents see that answer, alright?

Kristen, I haven't played Hearthstone in over a year, what?

Oh, but I wanna get back into it,

are there any resources that can help me?

Yes, certainly, I mean there are lots of people

online talking about Hearthstone

on the Hearthstone subreddit or our forums,

there are a lot of people streaming Hearthstone

all the time, that's a great way to get back

into Hearthstone, you'll see a lot of the popular decks

or some of the new cards that have been released

without having to go in and play on your own,

but also you can just come in

and play Hearthstone, we won't bite.

From NegativeRainbow, is tournament mode

going to have sideboard support?

Sideboards in Hearthstone would be so nice.

It's not, but I will say that tournament mode

is kind of a misnomer with our in-game tournaments

that we're working on right now.

It's a specific implementation

of competitive support for Hearthstone,

specifically meant for you and your friends

or for small communities or fireside gatherings

to get together and have a competitive experience together.

Now we're gonna start out pretty simple,

we're gonna have things like conquest

and last hero standing, you'll be able to choose

a number of decks built into the tournament,

but we wanna really listen to players,

figure out how we can make that better over time

and continue to add features and support going forward.

Often our tournaments only play with a single deck one time,

if you win with this deck, you've won or if you lose

with the deck, it's out of the tournament in case

of last hero standing, and so you actually

don't have a lot of opportunities to go in and out

of the sideboard which is essentially

a separate group of cards that you can sub

in and out of your deck, so the current formats

we're using wouldn't make great use out of it,

but we'll talk about those kind of things

going forward, I can't wait to get feedback from players

about how we can make tournaments better.

From fcchan, why aren't there female kobolds?

There are, hard to tell maybe.

From Mike, where did the inspire mechanic go?

RIP.

Well, you know, we could bring it back some day,

we don't have any plans that we've announced,

but I really like when we come up with new mechanics

that really explore new space, right?

Inspire was a lot of fun for us to design around,

we created a lot of cards in the Grand Tournament

that really cared about interacting

with your hero power in new ways.

We explored a lot of the space

that we were interested to explore.

Obviously there's more space there to explore,

I think we might go back there some day,

but we have a lot of really fun ideas

and we do want new sets to be exciting

and groundbreaking and (laughs) inspiring,

so we'll explore some new spaces for now,

but who knows, we might go back

and check out inspire in the future.

Austral, Ben, when are we gonna see Pepe in Hearthstone?

At least a card back, we love that

little bird, less than three.

Um I y'know we haven't talked about it,

we had a pepe meeting that we were gonna

try to figure out where to get him in,

and it got canceled, somebody had a conflict

so I'll get that back on the books and we'll chat about it.

From Cindercide, will there be ways to get old card backs?

Yes, there will be ways to get old card backs,

we've had actually a lot of conversations

about what the best way to do this is.

I think there's an interesting thing here, right?

Because if you just give them say hey everyone,

here's all the old card backs,

I think a lot of people would be pretty upset, right?

We worked pretty hard to get those card backs,

it makes us feel special that we have

card backs other people don't have,

so I think we have to make the friction

to achieve an old card back pretty high.

With that said, if we make the friction too high,

and make it feel kinda too expensive,

I think that also could make people feel upset

so we have to figure out the right balance there

and the right way to deliver those old card backs

that feels like it has enough friction

but we're still working on that.

From Sam Spires, is cubelock a concern slash on your radar?

Yes, it is on our radar, and I think it could be a concern,

it's kind of interesting, it's a very skill-testing deck

which is generally very good for Hearthstone, right?

To have these decks that are in the hands

of a player who hasn't played 100 games of it,

pretty low win rate, in the hands of a player

who's played over 100 games, a very high win rate.

That's good, that means there's a lot

of interesting decisions to make and you play it differently

against different decks so I like that and overall have

to figure out is the power level too good?

There are decks that are more powerful than it

so that's not the only metric,

but it's something to think about.

Is the next set gonna have an impact on its performance?

That's another thing that we have to figure out as well,

there's also another component which is just

harder to use data to get at,

which is how does this deck feel?

How does it feel to play?

Which I think actually pretty good,

and how does it feel to lose to?

Which I think we're still getting data on,

some people really don't like losing to it

and some people have found ways

to interact with it in a more interesting way.

But we are looking at it, I don't think

that we're totally unconcerned with cubelock or warlock,

but I don't think we also wanna be too knee-jerky

about how we respond to potential imbalances,

especially with a new set on the horizon.

From Jthreau, hey bdbrode, what's your favorite golden card?

I want to craft it in your honor.

Please don't say Milhouse.

I actually saw this tweet and already tweeted at him,

I actually went through every card

in the collection and looked for my favorite golden card

and I saw Crushing Walls and I was like

wow that's an incredible golden animation,

the walls are literally crushing the people in the picture

and so I mentioned that and he crafted it, so good on you.

From Darling in the FRANXX, with so many expansions

out now and more to come soon, have you ever

given any more thought to increasing deck sizes?

Or perhaps making 60 card deck variants

which uses its own separate game mode?

Actually we literally have tried this exact idea.

Every game should feel different,

it's fun when you have a different experience each time.

And that could be because players are coming at you

with different decks or because the way

that your deck plays out is slightly different each time.

And the more cards you have in your deck,

in the smaller the limit on the number

of duplicates you can have in your deck,

the more different each game will play out.

So we actually tried a mode where you

had to have 60 cards and they literally

all had to be different and that created

this really interesting experience

where the games were very different over time.

It also has an effect that it's harder

to build a cohesive deck, so I think

it's the kinda thing that might be fun

for a tavern brawl or something to play with for a while,

but maybe not core mode for the game, at least right now.

From Mark Fanta, when are you going to add

a spectate random match button to the menu?

I love watching people play, but don't have many friends,

oh, I'm sorry Mark, I think it's because I'm a slytherin,

hashtag spectate hashtag Hearthstone.

Well we don't have a plan for that right now

but you can go on Twitch and just select

a random stream and just start watching somebody.

It's a great way to both see the game that's playing

and hear their thoughts, which I think

is a really fun part of the spectating experience,

it's a lot harder to do through the in-game spectating.

From Nick period question mark exclamation point,

will you ever add an award for fully leveling up your hero?

Well right now we have golden cards

that, as you level up your hero,

you get more and more golden cards,

you earn your class cards first

and then the elusive basic neutral minions,

and so you do get rewards all the way up to level 60.

I think it's one of our more satisfying

progression systems because you get experience points

whether you win or lose and it makes you feel better

about losing if you get something, like some XP,

so I'd like to extend that system in the future,

we don't have any specific plans about how to do that,

but I think it would be nice if that system lasted

a little bit longer than it currently does.

Thomas Zdancewicz, with the reverse nerf

on molten giant, does that mean that team five

is looking at reverse other nerfed cards

in the future when they rotate to wild,

like spirit claws or the caverns below?

Why reverse the giants nerf and not other cards?

Molten giant has a following, I would say,

really when we nerfed a bunch of cards

going into the standard rotation,

one of the biggest reasons behind some of those nerfs

was to make sure that the standard environment

had the ability to change over time.

Molten giant was specifically nerfed for that reason

because there was a bunch of archetypes of decks

that were specifically enabled by molten giant,

so once we came up with the idea of the Hall of Fame,

we really came up with that idea

because of the community response

to the molten giant nerf, then we could move cards

out of the standard environment and into

the wild format, which is great for playing

the cards that you love in that format.

We felt like molten giant was the perfect card

to move into that format, it's not too powerful

there hopefully, and you get to play those loved decks

in that format, but there are other cards

that maybe are just too powerful,

they're not enabling certain deck archetypes

that I don't think are as good of a candidate

to move to wild, but we're gonna analyze those

on a case-by-case basis going forward.

Thanks for watching, I hope I answered your questions.

This has been Hearthstone Support with Wired.