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Development Cycle, Seasons, and the Ladder System

Edit: After more than a day on the frontpage my post got gold by a very kind stranger, thank you so much! It's my first gold ever and I appreciate it! I hope my post inspired the right people and all of you, this is the cherry on the cake! I want to take this moment to let you all know that I would love to see more of these kind of posts on the subreddit. It's dominated by memes and negativity the last weeks and it doesn't help anyone. I was sad to notice that my post only got 500 upvotes after a day while meme posts get 500 upvotes in their first 3 hours. Do you really want to see more one-liner posts and image-memes that you upvote these like crazy?

 

Greetings everyone!

 

Last night I had a vision; a vision that kept me awake and that I had to turn into a concept for all of you to see. I’m strongly inspired by Ben Brode’s comment in the meta balance Reddit thread, quoting:

Information flow is faster. It's a different world now and perhaps that means we need to rethink how we are doing things.

Finally, a bit of hope! The complains about Hearthstone and the digital format, balance, ladder grinds all got me thinking and I thought of a concept that involves the development timeline, seasons and a change of the ladder system. You might not like the complete idea, but please consider parts of it that you might like! Of course it isn't a complete idea about the future of Hearthstone and it doesn't solve all problems, but I just hope it gives the right people some new ideas on how to improve the game we all want to love!  

A short summary and all images used can be found here

 

-- Hearthstone Development Cycle --

 

The current Hearthstone development cycle starts with the rotation of older sets at the first expansion of the year, followed by an adventure mid-year and another expansion later that year, after which the first expansion of the next year brings the next rotation again. In other words, there is about a 4-month period between releases.

 

This can be easily shown by this image of the current Hearthstone cycle

 

Now, I don’t want to change this particular cycle, because I do not know a lot about game development and I have no idea whether or not it’s possible to increase the release of cards while maintaining the quality. Instead, I propose a second part of the cycle, which is particularly for balance. In between the set releases, so every two months, there will be a patch with balance changes. This is meant to shake up the meta and keep things fresh between content releases. If this happens on fixed moments during the year, it also means that the confusion will be kept to a minimum. Of course it doesn’t have to be twenty cards every balance patch, the less the better, but it’s time that problematic cards will no longer be ignored for half a year. Even two or three balance changes might be enough, it’s just that they will happen on fixed moments during the content cycle. Each content patch might also include a few balance changes and tweaks, the developers should not be scared to change a card two times if it didn’t work out during one particular balance patch!

 

Here is an image of the proposed Hearthstone cycle

 

-- Aligning the Seasons --

 

One of the most positive effects of the proposed cycle is that every two months, the meta will be different due to either new cards, balance changes, or both. One of the most heard critiques on the current season system is that many seasons feel the same, taking away from the ‘seasonal’ aspect. By aligning the seasons to the balance and content patches, Blizzard can ensure that every season feels fresh and most of all different than the one before. More often than not, the meta will be quite stable a month after new cards are released or balance changes are implemented, giving Blizzard a good indication of the most problematic cards left in the current playset. Blizzard then has another month, the second half of the season, to come up with possible balance tweaks, playtest them and then implement them at the proposed balance patches to start of the new season.

 

Here is an image of the new seasons of Hearthstone in relation to the proposed content and balance cycle

 

-- A change to the ladder system --

 

Now on to the second major part of my post, a change to the ladder system. Aligning the seasons to the development cycle means that seasons will be twice as long as before. With the current ladder ranking system this means that people will have double the time to climb the ladder. If there will be no changes to the ranks, this will probably lead to a lot more people at the higher ranks and especially at legend. To counter this, the ranking system will have to change as well.

 

An overview with text description of my complete ladder plan can be found here If you prefer to read it below, an overview of the new ladder system without the text description can be found here!

 

The new Hearthstone ladder will consist of three parts; A beginner, normal and veteran ladder, ending up at Legend rank. The ranks used are based on the very old alpha/beta ladder system and current Arena keys to keep consistency within Hearthstone!

 

-- A separate Beginner Ladder --

 

The first part will be specifically designed for new players. Instead of the current rank 25-20 with 10 total stars, it will now have three ranks, each with 10 stars, giving new players a longer time to get used to the game before meeting more experienced players. At bronze no stars can be lost (same amount of stars as current rank 25-20). The Beginner ladder will have bonus stars for win streaks to award new players that are either already more experienced or have a natural talent for the game.

 

-- No more win streaks, but your climb is secured! --

 

The second part of the ladder is the normal ladder, which you can reach by completing the Beginner ladder once. This ladder consists of four ranks; Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Each rank has 10 stars again. The major difference between the normal ladder and beginner ladder is that win streaks are removed, but ‘Rank Securing’ is introduced. Because seasons now last two months, people have more time to climb the ladder, which is the reason I have chosen for the removal of win streaks. This is replaced by rank securing, which means that if you made it past a rank once, you cannot fall back BELOW that rank anymore.

 

Example: If you made it to the Gold rank, Silver rank is secured because you completed it by reaching all stars. This means that once you go on a losing streak at Gold, you can fall back to Silver again, but not all the way back to Bronze! The removal of win streaks ensures that people can no longer climb with a sub-50% win rate, but Rank Securing makes sure that you plateau on the rank you ‘belong’ and are matched as equally as possible, even if you decide to queue up a meme deck halfway through the season!

 

The third part is the Veteran ladder, which is a continuation of the normal ladder, but is separated from it by the ladder reset. Once you made it to Master rank and beyond, you do not fall back below Diamond anymore at the end of the season. This means that you will always have some kind of equal matches, even at the start of seasons. However, if you made it to Diamond at the end of the season, you will fall back to Bronze, to prevent people from reaching Diamond at the last day of the season and staying there for the rest of the seasons.

 

There should be a complete ladder reset each calendar year, so that a Standard rotation also hard-resets the ladder (but never back to Beginner ladder!) This ensures that people that return after a long period of time who left at Master will have to do some climbing again. Once a year should be perfectly fine for the balance of the ladder system.

 

I didn’t fully develop an idea for Legend rank yet, but it will continue to be based on ELO. I think points should not be awarded by your rank at the end of the season, but instead be based on the average of the complete season. I don’t know how to achieve this at the moment to make it fair for everyone, but I think many people agree that a larger part of the season should matter for Legend players. You might be able to opt in and out of Legend rank, so that If you prefer to play a fun deck, you can opt out of Legend and play at Grandmaster rank and not lose your current position on the Legend ranking.

 

Main points of the ladder system:

• Seasons will follow the Hearthstone development timeline and therefore be 2-months long

• Seperate beginner ladder which keeps new players seperated from the rest of the playerbase for a longer period of time

• No more winstreaks at the Normal and Veteran ladder due to longer seasons, instead Rank Securing to keep players at their supposed playing level.

• Rank reset at the end of the season to the start of your current ladder (except for Diamond which goes back to Bronze)

• Hard-reset of the Normal and Veteran ladder each Standard Rotation

• Legend points no longer awarded by rank at the end of the season, the journey should matter

• Fun fact: The complete new ladder will now have 100 stars compared to the 95 stars of the current ladder

 

Thank you for reading my post and hopefully it gives Blizzard some nice ideas about how content and balance patches could give structure to the game's seasons and how the ladder experience could change alongside it! Let your own ideas and opinions be heard, you do not have to agree with everything, I'm just joining the think-tank on how to work on a better Hearthstone!

 

TL;DR Blizzard should implement a new development cycle, which incorporates balance patches on top of the current content releases with new cards. The seasons could be aligned to the new cycle, ensuring that every season feels unique and problematic cards or decks won't affect multiple seasons in a row. A new ladder system could make the new player experience better and give players a more equal playing field after a season reset and during the season itself due to Rank Securing! Once again, all images used in this thread can be found here

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