Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

New Player Experiences - Not as Bad as You Think...Yet?

Hi Everybody,

I've recently had the pleasure of introducing someone to the game of Hearthstone and have gotten them hooked. It was very interesting to watch someone learn the ropes and see what kind of opponents they hit once they started playing other players.

Tutorial

• Tutorial did a great job and is very entertaining
• It seems harder to learn for the first time on the iPad then on a PC, without being able to mouse over things and needing to touch-hold it's harder to see many of the tooltips or tutorial highlights naturally.
• Secrets weren't covered. Was a bit of a shock once playing against them later.

Practice Mode

• New player decided to "main" Mage. Not trying anything else yet.
• I coached through this mode slightly to teach trading and card advantage.
• Basic AI were too easy even for a beginner (friends was upset when they had lethal and the game was over :S)
• Expert AI feel like good practice but since Secrets weren't explained certain matches are near impossible to predict as a beginner.
• Even with the prospect of free gold my friend preferred playing other people because it was more interesting. (and feels like a real win)

Play Mode

• Early opponents were all definitely using Basic Decks or Level 10 custom class decks. Very even playing field.
• After my protege hits about 8 win (without any coaching) I started to see a mix of GvG, Expert and Naxx cards.
• While it's starting to get more difficult, a lack of knowledge of other class cards is their biggest weakness.
• At 8 wins they already hit a control Warrior with Dr Boom, Alex, and Shield Slams, more on this later.

Arena

• The free arena run was nice because of the pack and gold you get out of it but is ultimately too much too soon for a new player.
• New player really disliked not being able to pick a class and there's way to many new cards to learn at the beginning.

Overall Observations

• We as experienced players overstate the importance of good cards starting out.
• Opponent plays War Golem "Holy shit that's huge"
• Three games later opponent plays Dr. Boom poker face trade and clear board (Meanwhile I was freaking out)
• A warrior using Alexstraza was equally dealt with with little fanfare, Polymorph, Fireblast, move along.
• When you don't even recognize which cards are legendary you are only looking at the effects. If you don't recognize the effect or don't know what to do you just ignore it. This isn't that much different from how we deal with threats in the "real" meta.
• My friend isn't focusing on packs or gold and just wants to play as many games as possible.

TL;DR Hearthstone is fun, and new players just have fun playing it while they build up their knowledge of the game. When all cards are new and scary, no cards are really intimidating including the best of the best.

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