Should Hearthstone have Creative Mode

Do y'all think Hearthstone should have a Creative mode in which players could create their own game modes (with certain sets, some card bans, and maybe some Tavern Brawl rules), similar to how it's done in other games such as Overwatch? It could allow people to test out their crazy ideas, it would be tons of fun to play, and it might give the developers some ideas for the game! It could even go a step further and the creator could choose certain cards to buff or nerf (just in stats, like the Boomsday buffs). This would allow for players who want a huge diversity of experience to have a lot of fun during the in-between months while not harming the new player experience! I think this could even feasibly happen, since I don't think it would hurt Blizzard's bottom line and it would actually motivate people to craft more cards to try out more cool decks!

That would be pretty cool having it as a fourth option on the challenge a friend.

In an ideal world with an infinite pool of players it would be great, and would make the game incredibly diverse. In practice the issue is how many people will choose the exact same rules as you at the same time as you? With more choice that number decreases to the point where you may only be in a very small pool of players. As long as you could guarantee there's at least someone else to play against then great, but how would you do that?

This is essentially why having all tavern brawls open at once isn't perfect either.

Having it as an extra option when playing against friends (as suggested above) resolves it, but is only meaningful in the case of fundamental changes to rules (e.g. tavern brawl rules) since you could just agree to ban cards/sets when making the decks.

tl;dr: it is a good idea, but it has logistical problems with a finite player base.

A sandbox mode will be so good, but it also bring up so many different design issues (speaking of how it will be managed and coded into the game) that it will hardly ever be a thing.

While I don't mind the idea, I think it goes against the primary hearthstone design philosophy principle of keeping things simple, so I don't think it very likely that something like this would be implemented.

As others have pointed out, creating essentially infinite custom game modes would reduce the number of players per game mode, resulting in increased loading times. Not only that, supposing some of these modes catch on and gain a dedicated following, there is the risk of balkanising the player base into distinct groups that only play one mode or the other and don't really interact or overlap, which would hurt the game long term by making it much harder for the devs to cater to an increasingly fractured audience.

Didnt read all comments, so maybe, this was suggested above, but this could really work out. Even with limited players in 2 ways.

1) the one that could fail. Make a way to create your rules but then also a button to join a random ruleset someone is creating.

2) let everyone make their own rules. Matchmaking is random and applies one of the 2 rulesets at random.

I know these won't be perfect, but it could fix the problem were there are not enough players for it 

Edit: Now coding this would not be that easy if you want complex rulesets. But if you could ban certain sets, change the number of cards/unique cards in deck and change base health and armor values. That could leave it simple.

PS: when talking about unique cards, I mean in general. Not something like 5 boulderfists ogres ar max but only 1 tusk boar. Just establishing a number for all cards. (Maybe making a second number for legendaries)

Creative mode could work only as a "challenge a friend" option.

It goes against the users are stupid userfriendly philosophy of Blizzard, but it would work.

The main reason it will never be implemented is because it would be a real pain to code for a very little gain.

It seems like the main issue with this idea is the possibility of very few players existing in each ruleset, but I think that there's a way to get around that. What if you could create your own rulesets and play them against friends (and look up other's rulesets), and then Blizzard features a few (maybe 3) Rulesets that they like or that are the most popular every week (or every 2 weeks). This would solve the problem of a fractured user base too since you wouldn't always be able to play one specific ruleset that you enjoy. This could even be incorporated into the Tavern Brawl mode, with it now featuring 4 different modes, 1 made by the developers and 3 from the players.

If you wanna play with certain sets or card bans, you can allready do that to a limited extend. Challenge a friend to a game and then both use decks that only include the cards you want. It's not perfect because of random summons, discovers, etc still giving you a chance to get cards outside of the agreed cardpool, but at least it's something.

Your idea to allow the creator of this alternative mode to buff/nerf cards is never going to happen. It's going to create to much chaos. You're probably thinking it's possible because of the world championship brawl each year, but that's only 1 game mode and the changes are the same for everyone. If creative mode is going to be a thing there will be thousands of these alternative rules modes active all at once and everyone would be nerfing/buffing cards differently. There's going to be too many versions of the same card which most likely will result in the game breaking for many people. Just imagine all the bugs that are in the game after a new set release, but then on steroids. It's not going to be a fun time.

I do think creative mode could have a home in hearthstone, at least a specific section of hearthstone: fireside gatherings. It allready has tavern brawls that are exlusive to fireside gatherings, so I can see it hapening that the host of a fireside gathering could make a custom tavern brawl some time in the future. 

Quote From CursedParrot

Do y'all think Hearthstone should have a Creative mode in which players could create their own game modes (with certain sets, some card bans, and maybe some Tavern Brawl rules), similar to how it's done in other games such as Overwatch? It could allow people to test out their crazy ideas, it would be tons of fun to play, and it might give the developers some ideas for the game! It could even go a step further and the creator could choose certain cards to buff or nerf (just in stats, like the Boomsday buffs). This would allow for players who want a huge diversity of experience to have a lot of fun during the in-between months while not harming the new player experience! I think this could even feasibly happen, since I don't think it would hurt Blizzard's bottom line and it would actually motivate people to craft more cards to try out more cool decks!

First off, let's call it "Custom Games" because that is a more realistic, and more importantly, an ACHIEVABLE approach. The idea of buffing and nerfing cards in client is honestly asking for trouble even if it's a Custom Game between friends, so scrap that as an idea because it simply can't happen.

That's one thing that's always bugged me about HS is that we can't make our own rules in client without have to DM our friends to set it up. Or have a mode, like I don't know, BRAWL BLOCK, that changes monthly and could put these rules in. Like, how would have KFT looked without DK's?

This would be super cool

Quote From griffior

Quote From CursedParrot

First off, let's call it "Custom Games" because that is a more realistic, and more importantly, an ACHIEVABLE approach. The idea of buffing and nerfing cards in client is honestly asking for trouble even if it's a Custom Game between friends, so scrap that as an idea because it simply can't happen.

That's one thing that's always bugged me about HS is that we can't make our own rules in client without have to DM our friends to set it up. Or have a mode, like I don't know, BRAWL BLOCK, that changes monthly and could put these rules in. Like, how would have KFT looked without DK's?

Firstly, as far as 'custom games' 'asking for trouble' even if it's between friends: as a person who supports the concept of a 'custom' mode between clans/guilds (note I also support us having clans/guilds) I am deeply curious as to what makes such a concept a bad one.  

If it's something that's unfeasable or impossible coding wise, that's a developer issue and something that should be determined and voiced by Blizzard.  Our job here is to figure out whether it's something that we would want to happen IF it's feasable to develop.  Unless you have some insight to how it is on the developer side. 

I mean you might, which is why I'm asking.

Point is, what do you mean by it's 'asking for trouble' and it 'simply can't happen'?

Secondly as far as 'brawl block' I believe the Brawls help demonstrate the problem with it.  We have weekly brawls that make different rules in how we play, sometime in ways you cannot recreate naturally, such as removing the RNG from the card draw or limiting a deck to just 4 cards, or just crazy stuff in general.  We generally get bored of it by the end of the week with the meta 'solved' long before then.  A month of any of them would be either ignored or raged at.  

I'm hoping that the set blocks they've done have shown better numbers. I enjoyed them and so much want a mode of that, but I'm sure Blizzard is keeping a heavy record of how the playerbase is truly handling these events.  Thing is, if it IS proven to be good enough for a full mode, we won't know about it for at least  a few months if not a full year while they develop it (Tournament mode SHOULD've taught them not to talk about anything that isn't ready).  If it's proven to be something we think we want but don't, we won't know until a year or two later when they answer an AMA question and say "we looked into it and found it diddn't really work out.  

In any case, at least as far as the set blocks is concerned, we'll get it if we REALLY showed we want it.

I think what could first be done is a design editor where you can design a card. You must use existing mechanics, but otherwise you are free to spec a card to your liking, give it a name, store it in your private card collection, upload a nice image for it etc.

So in this way you can "design" new cards to play with.

Then, in order to be able to play with other people using your (and their!) newly designed cards, you need a way to be able to "share" your new designs with other players.

And then you can start building decks with it and play "challenge a friend" using your new cards.

I think this could work, you only loose the cool animations which normal cards have, and their "golden" effect etc.

You can probably extend this also to new classes as well.

From a player's point of view this is awesome of course. But from Blizzard point of view not so much, they want to have an active player base who feel the need to also sometimes buy stuff, instead of designing their own cool collections. So somehow Blizzard should also profit from this.

Quote From jwbrain

That would be pretty cool having it as a fourth option on the challenge a friend.

I mean, isn't it already an option with friends? You just agree to do it.

I think that this would be fairly easy to code and bug-free if Blizzard went the simplified route and only allowed users to choose one already existing Tavern Brawl ruleset to their new gamemode (and any combination of sets and bans) and only allowed people to change the mana cost, health, and attack of cards they wanted to change. I don't see how changing a card's Mana Cost would introduce a bug that wasn't their previously, since it still functions the exact same way. If Blizzard went a step further and let people design their own cards (using already existing mechanics and keywords), then it would be possible for bugs to pop up. My solution to the fractured player base idea is that you can only play your own custom game mode against a friend and Blizzard chooses a couple to feature each week that everyone can then play. This would limit the mode a lot, but it would fix the problem of it getting too complex.

Quote From Dakarian

Quote From griffior

Quote From CursedParrot

First off, let's call it "Custom Games" because that is a more realistic, and more importantly, an ACHIEVABLE approach. The idea of buffing and nerfing cards in client is honestly asking for trouble even if it's a Custom Game between friends, so scrap that as an idea because it simply can't happen.

That's one thing that's always bugged me about HS is that we can't make our own rules in client without have to DM our friends to set it up. Or have a mode, like I don't know, BRAWL BLOCK, that changes monthly and could put these rules in. Like, how would have KFT looked without DK's?

Firstly, as far as 'custom games' 'asking for trouble' even if it's between friends: as a person who supports the concept of a 'custom' mode between clans/guilds (note I also support us having clans/guilds) I am deeply curious as to what makes such a concept a bad one.  

If it's something that's unfeasable or impossible coding wise, that's a developer issue and something that should be determined and voiced by Blizzard.  Our job here is to figure out whether it's something that we would want to happen IF it's feasable to develop.  Unless you have some insight to how it is on the developer side. 

I mean you might, which is why I'm asking.

Point is, what do you mean by it's 'asking for trouble' and it 'simply can't happen'?

 

Secondly as far as 'brawl block' I believe the Brawls help demonstrate the problem with it.  We have weekly brawls that make different rules in how we play, sometime in ways you cannot recreate naturally, such as removing the RNG from the card draw or limiting a deck to just 4 cards, or just crazy stuff in general.  We generally get bored of it by the end of the week with the meta 'solved' long before then.  A month of any of them would be either ignored or raged at.  

I'm hoping that the set blocks they've done have shown better numbers. I enjoyed them and so much want a mode of that, but I'm sure Blizzard is keeping a heavy record of how the playerbase is truly handling these events.  Thing is, if it IS proven to be good enough for a full mode, we won't know about it for at least  a few months if not a full year while they develop it (Tournament mode SHOULD've taught them not to talk about anything that isn't ready).  If it's proven to be something we think we want but don't, we won't know until a year or two later when they answer an AMA question and say "we looked into it and found it diddn't really work out.  

In any case, at least as far as the set blocks is concerned, we'll get it if we REALLY showed we want it.

The reason I say it's asking for trouble is because if this featuree were implemented, the HS forums on every site would be filled with "change the state line/cost of this minion to make it more playable". Which I get but let's be real here, the devs enjoy watching the meta evolve naturally without getting involved too much, hence the HoF once a year. Obviously this expansion cycle is a bad example for me because they did the "Rise of the Mech" event.

Making a setting in order for custom stats to exists just sounds like a coding hassle, which I doubt Team 5 will ever make the time to make. There're two ways I see why they aren't going to even try to make it. 1: Because I'm fairly confident that only a small player base would actually use the tool in client to have their own custom statted cards. 2: They don't gain anything monetarily out of it. That's the reason Tournament Mode never came to fruition, they either couldn't get it to work to their/the community's standard, or they couldn't find a way to make a great profit from it. (Even though personally I see no reason why they can't charge an entry fee to some kind of in client tournament mode but hey, I play a little bit of Devil's Advocate)

The reason it "simply can't happen" is because Big Daddy Blizzard had that huge layoff 3(?) months back where ~200 people lost their jobs. If I were a HS developer I would be thinking "Let's spend our time making content we KNOW players will spend their money on instead of working on additions to the game that could possibly be hit or miss". I don't blame them for that, I want more but I can see why they would want to play it safe. I mean hell, BB promised tournament mode last year before he left the company and it's still just a meme. (Also, I can't find where he said it but I know for a fact it was said before he announced that he was leaving Blizzard)

I agree that I don't enjoy most brawls, I honestly don't play more than one game just so I get the pack. And you're right, the Brawls have rules that we can't augment and that's probably for a reason, that good ol' spaghetti code. From an outside point of view I don't know how long it took to write those rules, some of those brawls could have been in development for months before they were put on the live game, I don't know how long it would even take to give a player that power over the rules without making it arbitrary and convoluted.

As for Brawl Block itself, for me it means a lot more. Standard is Standard, the meta get's solved (Except for Witchwood) and the game becomes stale. If someone wants to play Wild they have to run a broken deck if they want to play on ladder, which who doesn't? We're all trying to get our golden heroes. And that leaves hardly any room for experimentation. Whereas Brawl Block scratches that itch of being able to use what a player has in their collection without the daunting task of taking down Big Priest, Odd Paladin, or that Warlock deck that shuffles its hand back into it's deck.

My last point is your last sentence (people have formatted replies better than I have because I haven't figured it out quite yet so forgive me) I think ALOT of the set back with tournament mode was that there was an obvious disconnect between what players wanted and what could be realistically made by the devs, there's even an article about it: https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/09/18/blizzard-halts-development-on-hearthstones-tournament-mode I think they realized they couldn't satisfy a lot of people and that's why they dropped it because we haven't heard about it for almost a year.