In a tweet yesterday, Dean asked the community for ideas to add to his list of features to pitch to the team when he returned to work. He followed that up today and showed everyone what his list currently looks like.
None of this is in development. None of it is guaranteed to become a thing in Hearthstone.
Massive
- Tournaments
- Guilds
- Multiplayer Constructed Game Mode (2v2? 4v4? Raids)
- Card Market (Selling/Buying Cards)
Large
- AI on Ladder
- Ranked Arena
- In-Game Surveys
- Player Funnel Investigation & Improvements
- Player Profile
Medium
- Mass Pack Opening
- Single-Player Speedrunning
- IGM Improvements
- Spectate High-Level Games
- List of Popular Decks in Client
Small
- Naxxramas in Classic
- Super-Legend Card Back
More
- Alt Card Art
- Auto Squelch
- Class Ban (Event?)
- Gold Card Redesign
- Sandbox?
- Deck Tracker
- More Uses for Dust
- Reporting Features, Consequences for Bad Behavior
- Best Player Rewards Incentives
- Accessibility (color-blindness)
- Random Hero Skin (from selection of favourites)
- Better rank system for Battlegrounds
- Battlegrounds Weekly Brawl
- Different sliders for each sound type
- Rotating set format
- In-Client Firesides
- Best-of-Three Ladder
Which features on Dean's list would you rank as the most important? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Comments
Rotating set format would be a very nice deck building challenge.
For gold cards, I like the animations but dislike the golden borders, so my ideal would be an option to show the animation in a normal card border.
Spectating GM/tournament games in-client would be great, but they don't even have custom viewers in the studio for their live streams, so I'm not holding my breath.
Playing against AI on ladder doesn't sound very exciting, especially with the Hearthstone AI not being all that great.
Maybe this is just my inexperience, but how could someone cheat in Hearthstone?
I grasp the idea that some people consider it cheating to view your opponent's live stream. I can see how it's an advantage to know what's in their hand, but they did also choose to broadcast it.
To my knowledge, you can't mod this game, so what makes you think your opponent might be cheating?
You probably could mod the client if you want to, but all the important information and decisions are server-side, so you can't change the game state or see things you're not supposed to see. Action games often have to send hidden information to the client in advance so it can be shown immediately when it comes into view, but as a slower game Hearthstone can afford to not send the information until the player is allowed to see it.
Your inexperience must be with online forums, not Hearthstone itself.
There is a very vocal minority of tinfoil hat wearers in the Hearthstone community, and they are convinced that anything that causes them to lose a game MUST be a form of cheating or rigging.
But you are correct -- apart from stream sniping, there's really no way to cheat at Hearthstone.
True! I never read the comments, except here on OOC. Gotta protect my sanity.
A sealed mode with new sets every month or so would be nice, pay to enter and everyone gets the same amount of packs to open to use in building their decks for that month with players getting a set amount of packs from each set in rotation (including adventures).
Also a Sandbox mode where players can use custom cards, classes, rules etc. would be amazing seeing as there's a large community based around all things custom hearthstone.
Oh my god, the ranked BO3 idea is seems so, so good. Love it. I guess the main problem is inaccesibility. The way I see this mode is you pick 3 decks of diffeent classes, and when you get matched up, you see just the classes and pick accordingly. Apart from inaccesibility, I dont think it will be easy to conway that for example the druid deck is not aggro, but anacondra deck. Well, either way I would be glad if any 1 idea makes it to the game.
A Best of 3 event sounds fun. I can see how it would be confusing to mix it with traditional ladder.
Definitely increases the complexity of queueing, both on the user side and on the server side.
Rotating set format - So many ppl like this idea and I'm sure blizzard have stats for this coz there's some Brawl Block Tavern Brawls that have had this exact format in the past, see:
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/tavern-brawls/117-brawl-block-gods-gadgetzan-gurubashi
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/tavern-brawls/123-brawl-block-tinyfin-mode
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/tavern-brawls/135-brawl-block-feeling-adventurous
https://outof.cards/hearthstone/tavern-brawls/112-brawl-block-year-of-the-mammoth
Blizzard's usual excuse is they don't want players to have to re-build their decks every time the sets change. Which I find is a BS answer as it's part of the experience. For eg: we get TGT, MSoG, WotOG and DoD this month, that's awesome! Lets see what new combos or meta decks can be made just with these cards! Entire sets like TGT can finally be used instead of getting virtual dust sitting in the collection.
My favorite idea would be having all the hero card expansions like KotFT, RR, WW, DoD, BDP and FAV all together so we can see which hero cards are the best.
I so hope they seriously consider auto squelch. Auto squelch adds so much more than it takes away. I find emotes to be more tilting than fun, and any idea that emotes are more genuine than not makes me feel like we're simply not interacting with the same players.
Is it the sound that troubles you? Or the visual emote? Or both?
If audio: the suggestion to have separate sliders for each type of game sound would be a better, broader fix.
I have only Squelched an opponent a handful of times - and maybe a few more by accident when checking how many cards are in their hand. But I usually play with the sound off, so am interested to know more.
Why are people so resistant to just giving auto-squelchers what they want? Why come up with all these half-measures and compromises?
If someone says they don't like emotes, take them at their word. There's no need to pick it apart. Just make it easier to squelch. If someone hates emotes, they are going to squelch anyway. Why not just save people a click?
To answer the question: I think most squelchers aren't bothered by the sound OR the visual. They are bothered by the intent behind the emote, whether real or imagined. They just don't care for trash talk, and there's no way to program around that.
Important things here to me:
- Rotating wild/set - Have been asking for this since even before duels was a thing.
- Sandbox - If it lets us test all the cards in hearthstone this is just an instant pick for me. There's plenty of times we'd want to test interactions, or just plain want to test certain decks without having to spend all our dust into a few cards.
- Alt card art - Cosmetics can get some additional income, or just straight up as a reward for achievements, or somewhere to spend all those achievement points in. Fact is, this is a greater reward, I'd argue, over the un-dustable golden cards we keep getting from the rewards track, or indeed the honor track.
Doubtful stuff
- Guilds - Hearthstone is a largely single player game. What will guilds really accomplish here anyway?
- Card market - Would probably never work as we think it would. Better chances it would turn hearthstone into a virtual casino for some. I mean we've seen something like this happening in games like csgo, or just about most sport video games. I'd rather not tune into reddit to hear how some family gets ruined because their children decided to go ham on mom's credit cards.
- AI on ladder - I would be more optimistic had it not been for that new tavern brawl that utterly showed us how backwards the AI in hearthstone is. Just play ranked at the wee hours in the morning and get easy wins because the AI sucks. Or we'd start accusing the AI of cheating, because how'd anyone know if the AI can actually read your cards in hand, or the exact secret you've played.
- Reporting features - Just more work for little gain. We dont know if 99% of the games we're facing aren't just cheating scrubs. But we do know 99% of the time this button would be pressed if the opponent emotes once too many times.
- Class Ban - If there's one OP class in the game, it'll face its counters 90% of the time. And then another OP class would emerge where the first stood for everyone else.
It is crazy to me that Dean still wants class bans despite everything that has been said about them. Maybe he just has not seen what others have said?
I think I want alt art, super legend carback, player profiles, and anything that would add a new meta outside of standard and wild. I feel like tournament mode is too broad of a feature. If it is anything like the tournament mode in PTCGO, I do not want it.
Rotating set format for me is an important one...but also one I gave up on expecting to see any time soon. The fact that meta's get so stagnant in both standard and wild though would really make this a welcome place to go to for a change that also allowed old collections to be used without having to bend to the absurdity of the wild meta quite as much.
Hearthstone needs a rotating set format so bad. I would love to see a format where the sets rotated every month and you could buy into it. Maybe you spend $5 or $10, with gold also being an option (or no buy-in if you own the cards/are happy with the cards you do own from the current sets). It would give you access to all the cards that were present in that mode at the time and your pass for it would last the month, with a price reduction halfway through the month. Bans would likely be needed in such a format as well, just to get rid of a couple of those really crazy cards.
It would be such a great sell and let people experiences these older cards without a huge investment.
We'd likely not see access to the most current expansion within that pool, but that's okay.
#FluxDreamLand
Edit: Updated for clarity.
By buying into it do you mean that you have to pay in order to play it? I'm not sure I'd agree with that. I can see a world where you pay to get the cards like you said but I would want to allow players who already have those cards to use them without needing to pay. I've never dusted a card that I didn't hate the game play design for and I'd like to be rewarded for keeping my collection if I could.
I do mean that, though I should have more clearly stated that the buy-in would not be necessary if you already owned those cards or were happy with the cards that you did own for the format. It's just frustrating to see how hard some of these formats can be to enter for a newer player when the content that is used is otherwise pointless outside of wild. Like, we may have GvG in Duels right now, and so if someone went and bought a chunk of those packs, in a few months time they might not get to really play with them again for a year. The more formats they open up, the worse it'll get. It's not even like they properly acknowledge in-game which sets are in which formats very well.
Obviously, that is not what Flux means. Besides, it would not align with the way owning cards that can be used in multiple formats works right now.
Also, what is the point of discussing the triviality of such an idea? It isn't as though it is going to be added just because Flux wants it be.