[deleted]

Where are the veggies?

I like these videos, but I wish they were 1) more frequent and 2) a little more present-based. By that I mean, all of your videos have been fascinating to watch as a player, but they tend to come after things have happened, like the Warsong change. I wish you'd communicate more leading up to changes, even if it's to say "I'm not sure what we're going to do." I understand that you don't want to commit to anything and then be held to it by the community, that's always a worry for devs, and I've seen it blow up in their faces many times.

However...

For example, let's take the Patron nerf. Let's say 2 or 3 months before the Patron nerf happened, you guys knew you were going to nerf something. Based on your video about iterations on nerfing the deck, I feel like you did know far in advance that something had to be done. You weren't sure how you were going to do it, but you recognized that the deck was overpowered and something had to be done. Why couldn't you just express that? A tweet would suffice to put everyone at ease: "Hey guys, we're in agreement that Patron is overpowered. We're working on a solution. No promises as to when but it's coming." Sure, some people would still complain, but you're always going to have that. But most of the community would have been happy with that tweet, because the deck was just stupidly powerful and felt bad to play against.

Instead, we get cryptic messages like "We have no plans at this time to nerf the deck" (even when you were probably iterating on said nerfs), or "We're watching it" (dev speak for "we're probably maybe kinda sorta going to nerf this?"). We were just in the dark, and had no real sign as to what was going on with the deck, which made many people nervous about the future of the game. Like, well hell, if the devs will let this overpowered monstrosity be able to win a stupid amount, how are things going to be in the future?

I'm not a game dev, and certainly not a game dev working for a huge game developer / publisher like Activision/Blizzard, so I obviously don't know what kind of contracts you all are under. Maybe you're simply not allowed to discuss things in advance like that. If that's the case, maybe a simple statement to that effect would make players understand your position more. If that ISN'T the case, I really think being more open about potential nerfs / power rebalancing would go a very, very long way. (Hint: we're all bloody sick of going up against Dr. 6, is he going to be changed?)

Thanks for the videos, please keep making them.

edit: I'd really like a response, because I'm interested in how you feel about this, so, just to double up: paging /u/bbrode :D

edit #2: Spend time writing out a thoughtful comment, get downvoted. Ah, reddit.

If I understand this correctly, because the development time is so incredibly long to get it exactly as you want, it is virtually impossible to act on community requests?

We thought Tavern Brawl was a reaction to anything, but apparently it took 2 years. The deck slots probably really have been in development already for a while, but it's not up to your standards yet.

But the main point I take from this: Blizzard is too slow to really take the community request into account in the short and perhaps even medium term.

bbrode, what about bad design decisions? It's ok to happen, every software project has problems. But how to address them?

You guys thought Lock and Load would be a blast... nobody uses it. You guys didn't think MC would be something, and it is a mess.

So, that's it? Deal with?

This is great. The only problem is there isn't enough of it.

Sometimes negative perceptions go unaddressed for so long that it can feel to players like Brode and the Hearthstone team are aloof, arrogant, all sorts of other negative adjectives.

Even when we disagree with a decision, it makes a world of difference if someone from the team drops by and can either explain the rationale behind it, or even simply offer an apology with a promise to try to improve in the future.

I understand that it might be hard to film a video so often, but even an increased engagement with the community in written form would make things feel much better.

I'm curious about this as well, as a developer myself I know certain development practices that focus on frequent iterations, and it seems that the hearthstone team utilize iterative development heavily. I'd love to hear how that works.

yes. I would literally watch you talk about eating a sandwich.

feels like you're just defending yourselves for 10 minutes. It's fair enough in part because I think a lot of the community is pretty reactionary and quick to get mad about stuff (other times, like deckslots I think it's somewhat more justified due to the amount of time involved) - but (for me at least), it's not very interesting. I'd rather hear about things that are more behind the scenes (rather than just saying that there is stuff behind the scenes)

This is cool. Can you mention any of the keywords you guys threw out back in alpha/beta? That part of the article is interesting to me.

Why did you wait so many months to release this video?

I find that they're often "Here's the problem I see -> this is the reaction from the community -> this is why the problem is harder than it seems" which is helpful but it just ends up feeling like a bunch of excuses to me

Brode Fanboys I humbly accept your downvote

Definitely!

Whenever i'm really digging something i wanna know all about the "behind the scenes" stuff and what is going on in development. I would really love a video in which you guys show us some kind of "road" that a card goes down, from general concept up until release.

Do you guys accept carbohydrate-based applicants?

Asking for a friend.

I remember watching it some time ago. I am glad you bring this up, because while I enjoyed the vid, I would like to address the only concern I had after watching the video. It seems to me that the emphasis on the UI and its phone port is so important to a point where it would actually restrict and limit design space. I understand it is a challenge to make the game consistent in all of its ports and it is also very important for the user experience. But it seems like it will impede the development of future features (like activated abilities on minions that are not passive or inspired) or out-of-game stuff like adavanced stats tracking system for your constructed decks and so on.

So my question is: how do you plan to address this concern of minimalistic designing for the sake of the UI?

It's not the lack of content, but what the order says about priorities.

There have been multiple content releases since they finally agreed with the community that more deck slots were needed.

It's seeing how far down the list of priorities the most dedicated players of the game are that hurts the most.

While having this developer interaction is better than not having it, I feel like Brode tends to construct a straw man and it ends up coming off condescending.

He says the team has been working to get deck slots right and has done multiple iterations. Since this is something everyone has really clamored for...well...forever, it would be nice if they did a postmortem on that design process similar to the other one he mentioned for the collection manager.

Here's the video I talked about by Derek Sakamoto: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022036/Hearthstone-How-to-Create-an

Definitely worth checking out!

Developing quality software takes a loooot of time, I accept that. And it's really awesome what they are releasing.

The question is, could they spend more money to make it faster? Hire more people for the developer team? There was a report a few months back that Hearthstone has an insane revenue ($20 million a month).