Zeriyah, not sure if you're still looking at posts. First of all, I think your responded to my support ticket, and thank you so much for that. I think there were a few issues with Fireside Gatherings that if improved, would make them much better. I have been in two states in major cities in the past two months, and there was one Fireside Gathering on one day in the cities I've been in, and one other. To find them, one was on your site, and the other I had to manually search for on Google. Having a better planning interface would be great to find events on your site. The find nearby players feature was very smooth. I also got my friends to install and play the game at a small gathering.

The main issues I ran into were players just swapping concedes for the card back, especially those using Evolve, which I needed to attain a fraction of my wins. There needs to be a method to actually record played games. It would be great if there were local weekly leagues with participation incentives, but I know that is super far away if even in the plans, but reminiscent of the Pokemon League setup where players would go to their local gameshops and play games, gaining points for wins and losses to achieve badges and promotional cards.

I'd like to do this but not being in a major city I have no idea how to find a gathering. So far the only ones I've seen have been posted to reddit.

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Like the most people (I suspect) I don't live near anywhere that I knew of an event happening, and while I might have enjoyed an event I don't currently own anything other than a desktop, so it'd need to be at an internet café or something. That said I think this was a good initiative, even if I didn't directly benefit (other than that swanky cardback I mean) I think it's definitely a positive influence on the growth of your community, and allowing people to host their own things without needing to go through blizz was the right idea.
I also think rewarding a cardback is a good idea, since now anyone I play will see it, and even if they don't visit forums, they might check online to see what it is and how i got it, and in the process they could become a member of one of the thriving online HS communities, like this subreddit.

If you do something like this in the future i'll probably go out of my way to get whatever is on offer, as will many other avid fans and collectors, so I would keep it up if I were you, your community needs interaction to thrive, Twitch is a huge part of that, so are forums, but nothing beats playing with friends, most fun I've had in this game is when my mate comes round and we do a draft together.

So TL;DR even if you are just doing wonders for evolve's userbase, keep it up :P

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I was one of the people who created several accounts on my devices to get the card back. But i'd have loved to have attended a real gathering. The problem for me was that in the north of England, the closest event was in London. I think that may have been the only majorly advertised UK event to boot, nevermind the closest. Doing some outreach with gaming stores, such as what MTG does with FNM would have been nice.

Honestly for me it was the lack of a tablet device. My friends and I are the kind of people that already have a PC and smart phone so tablets seem excessive so physically getting together is hard. All the LAN cafes in my town have gone out of business as well :( I am VERY excited to see mobile versions but that will be some time I'm sure. As a fan of Friday Night Magic I love the idea of supporting real life meetups/tournaments but I would love to see more incentives to play with the people on your friends list. You have to of course stop any abuse but when I cannot complete dailies playing with friends and there are no rewards like in arena it's just something I want to do but basically never will. Love the game, love the unlockable card backs, thanks a ton!

Evolve was a great social experience combined with Hearthstone

It's a very motivational idea and I have seen some extremely inspiring posts on /r/Hearthstone with pictures of live events with lots of people.

I think the majority (including me), however, got the Card Back using Evolve. While you of course can make new friends by that method, it wasn't very easy communicating and reaching out to interested players in that group. This is, I believe, not what you intended this to become, but still interesting to note. An (even) easier way to meet new people would be preferred. The in-game chat system is brilliant in this way, and I think a few events like this one would be in-line with the current chat systems.

Very successful from your side, I'd gladly do this again. As mentioned, I can't speak for those who went to live Gatherings. Meeting up with others with the same interest is always nice. Participating in a live event would've been quite an experience, I'm sure!

I don't think I'll ever attend a Fireside Gathering, so I don't know if you want feedback from that group, but I'll post anyways.

There is no reason for me to go to a FG. I don't really care about card backs, I guess its ok to play dress up with your cards, but I'm not really looking at the card backs when I play. Even if I was interested, I'd get the backs and then never go again. If I want to play with friends, I can just do that at friends, or at home. If I wanted to play strangers, I'd just go into ranked play. Even if I was just in a group of people playing Hearthstone at a FG, I wouldn't know who I was playing. So why bother leaving home to go play Hearthstone?

Since it looks like this wasnt just a on-time thing for Blizzard, I get the feeling that they hope this is going to turn into some Friday Night Magic for Hearthstone. Well, people go to FNM to compete and get prizes. Prizes require working with venues for prize support, and since HS can only give away cards (currently), once everyone has all the cards the motivation ceases. My advice would be alternate art for each Hero. For one month, people doing something in a FG would win or earn an alt art version of Rexxar, then the next month its Garrosh, etc. Most importantly, you CAN'T allow those to be obtained by themselves, via money or in-game event.

Also, tournament mode or something. I couldn't imagine going somewhere and just randomly queueing for 3 hours. Give some structure to it, make it manageable for people who would want to run some sort of event. Reward people who do well instead of just people needing to reach 3 wins, then tank for everyone else. When you reward a bare minimum effort and thats available for everyone, you encourage only the bare minimum of effort. When you incentivize and make the game worth something, then you start seeing more and more strategy and growth and an actual evolving metagame, instead of the rock paper scissors of ranked ladder.

Maaaybe, if one was like right around the corner. But realistically? Probably not. I'm really just in it for the in-game stuff.

I second the idea of a built in mini tournament mode. Makes it easy for the organizers, and adds benefits for both online and offline play. (Who am I kidding, I love competition..)

My biggest issue is that there are no Fireside Gatherings in my area. I live in a pretty big city in California. I don't understand why there was nothing organized here. To be honest, I would organize one myself if I wasn't so new to the game. I'm still learning things and I would like to know more, that's one of the main reasons I want to join.

I think the idea is cool. How can I rally people up to make this happen?

I want that card back, too.

I have a weekly board game group and had everyone bring their ipads and laptops over last Thursday. We had no problem all getting on my home wifi and earning the card backs, although the players near me function didn't seem to work for us (we were all bnet friends anyway so no biggie).

It was a pretty good time playing hearthstone face to face actually.

Evolve was the easiest way I found to get the card back. Shortly after I had gotten the card back I uninstalled Evolve.

Although there were only ~8-10 active users in the same room/group as I, there were some interesting games. Fighting complete strangers and knowing they were there for the same reason made it a more special game than Play mode. I made no new friends however, just played a few games. The social part made it interesting although for me not very longlasting. Once again, this is my experience.

All of the above.

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I think it's a fun idea with a great in-game reward--a shiny back that actually looks pretty great. I also think it's awesome that Blizzard is even following up with a public questionnaire like this, looking for feedback. It gives me a lot of promise for the future of the Fireside Gatherings, and for Hearthstone itself.

I'd love to see the Gatherings turn into small, local tournaments, maybe with a prize pool--or even better, some official Blizzard Hearthstone swag that goes to the winner. Something small, like a plushie, but enough to keep me coming back to 'em.

I say that as if I've attended one, of course. The big problem with them right now is that there aren't enough for me to be able to find time to one. (I live in SoCal.)

If you ran a Fireside Gathering - What were some of your biggest hurdles?

Making two new accounts to run 3 copies of hearthstone on. Took me at least 10 minutes.

I have tried to use the "Show people near me" option, and while the other person could see me, I could not see them. When the other person tried to challenge me it showed a screen saying I had declined, while in reality I had never even gotten any notification of the challenge. I was playing on a mac and he was on a pc, maybe that caused the issue?