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Blizzcon Interview with Mike Donais, Senior Designer for Hearthstone
Background
Fellow mod /u/deviouskat89 and I were able to interview Mike Donais at Blizzcon. For some background, he’s a Senior Game Designer on Hearthstone. He has previous experience working on Marvel Heroes, Warcraft TCG, and Magic: The Gathering. Thank you to Mike Donais for taking time out of his Blizzcon schedule to talk to us, and also thanks to Blizzard PR manager for Hearthstone Lyndsi Achucarro for helping put everything together.
http://hearthstone.wikia.com/wiki/Mike_Donais
http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mike_Donais
Questions
Q: Some of the things our users have been asking us – maybe you’ve seen in the last week or two – have been focused around balance. Usually it revolves around specific cards that the Reddit community feels are overpowered. One example I’d throw out is Dr. Boom. When you are deciding what cards to change and when, how are you looking at the data for that?
A: We look at it from a lot of different angles. We look at how powerful the card is by our data and we have a lot of data. Winrates, when you draw it, when you play it. And we have a lot more data than that. We also look at how common it is – is it in every deck, is it in some decks. We look at how good it is at it’s mana cost. But I think more important than the data is how a card feels to people. Warsong commander was changed because a lot of people were complaining about how they were at full health, and then they’re dead. It’s sort of a bad feeling.
With Dr. Boom it’s different because you don’t have him until turn seven, and then it takes your whole turn. Then it puts a minion there, and it has no immediate board effect, no immediate kill. So it feels a lot closer to a good gameplay experience. So even if we don’t like if a card shows up in every deck, like Sylvanas did a lot when she was at 5 mana. We increased her mana cost to 6, and now she’s played less. She’s still played a lot, she still is a very strong card but she’s not in every deck. So it’s more like that, but it’s not an unhealthy game experience. So we’re not really looking to change him.
Q: So when you do decide to change a card, and Sylvanas was one of the ones actually I was going to bring up as an example of a card that you guys changed really well just by making a subtle change. A lot of people thought with Warsong Commander it was almost like you unmade the card. That a 3 mana 2/3 with +1 to charge is not going to be played. Sort of – is there a conscious decision to remove a card or is there ever any thought to adding 1/1 to the stats or maybe making it a 2 mana card?
A: Yeah exactly. For some cards that were pushing in an unhealthy direction, we need to make sure that they don’t keep being a problem in the future. So we had a couple of cards that let you draw a whole bunch of cards for zero mana. Gadgetzan Auctioneer, Buzzard… Both would let you suddenly fill your hand, see your whole deck. Things like that that weren’t good gameplay experiences. So we made them, we put them in what we think is a safe place where we don’t expect them to get a lot of play in the future.
Other cards, like Sylvanas, it’s very strong, and it’s even got mind control which is a little bit dangerous. But at 6 mana, she gets played sometimes, and there’s some gameplay around her. Like figuring out exactly what’s on the board. That’s actually a good interaction. Maybe making some 1/1’s or 2/1’s or things like that. So there’s a lot of gameplay there and we like that, so she didn’t get nerfed as much. Warsong commander is one of those sort of unhealthy directions. If we still let it give minions in the future charge, then there’s a lot of designs that we can’t do. A good example is the warlock – the new demon Dreadsteed. It was neutral at one point when we were balancing Naxxramus. And because of this minion, we couldn’t print it because it would come out and kill the whole board and then stay there for future use. So we ended up moving it to Warlock, but there were other cards like that too that we haven’t printed yet because this card exists in Warsong Commander. So we changed Warsong commander in this fundamental way so it wouldn’t be giving minions charge in the future.
Q: When you’re looking at changing old cards and creating new ones, what are the most important statistics you look at? You mentioned ‘how often a card is played.’ What are some of the behind the scenes stats that you find the most valuable?
A: There’s a lot. For Warsong Commander it was really interesting because it only had a 49% winrate at the highest skill levels. And it had a 46% winrate at average and low skill levels. So it wasn’t a “good” card, and that made us hesitate to change it. Ant that sort of shows that we can’t always go by data, we have to go by feel. A lot of people were complaining about it, it was super unfun. People had this idea that it was everywhere. Because everyone was talking about it, everyone else was playing it. Even though it wasn’t really the right choice to play, it was “a” choice to play. And they kept playing it. So I think that data can be unreliable.
Q: So community feedback weighs pretty heavily with you guys as opposed to just the raw data?
A: Yes – we look a lot at feedback, we look a lot at tournaments and user experience. Undertaker was a good example where we could look and it helped us. Undertaker hunter was, I think, the highest winrate deck ever in the history of Hearthstone. So that one was sort of an easy one for us to go “ok….”. We put out some cards that we thought would be specifically good against it/deathrattle, and the weren’t enough. So it was a good combination of data and feedback. It also had kind of an unfun gameplay experience because it would get really big really fast and you’re just sitting there trying to catch up. SO that was a really easy one for us to nerf once our set releases didn’t come.
Q: That’s really interesting. So based on that, what is the highest win rate right now?
A: So right now, the decks are actually really close. There isn’t one where it’s like “oh – he has a significant advantage over the others. In fact when I go to look… People complain about the Paladin decks so we go and look. Midrange Paladin is good, and secret Paladin is also pretty good. Druid is good, and Warlock is good. So because they’re all kind of close, and I looked closer at secret Paladin because that where the [complaints were.] And it’s like “well this deck has a very good winrate against it, and this deck has a good winrate against it, and this deck has a very good win rate against it. So people have found solutions already and that knowledge just needs to disseminate. I think what was happening was that people were focusing a lot on Grim Patron, and counters to get Grim Patron, and decks that were good against Grim Patron, and now they don’t have to do that anymore. So I think they will start building decks that are good against Secret Paladin, and they’ll start playing the decks that they figure out are good against secret Paladin. I think once that happens secret Paladin will feel more like average.
Q: So do you think that’s more like specific tech like Flare or…
A: Flare is certainly an obvious choice, and for example I saw Pyromancers in a dragon Priest deck recently that made top ten. And that’s interesting because it’s one card that you can add and make your matchup a little bit better. It kills a lot of 1/1’s. Pyromancer’s always been a good card, its just a bit better than it used to be. So that’s really nice to see. Freeze Mage is a deck that Thijs is playing this weekend at World Championships and he’s doing well with. And it shows that – he played it because it’s good against secret Paladin. It’s one of the many examples of decks that have been evolved to beat secret Paladin. We look at World Championships because they are an example to the community, and we can learn from it. There aren’t many secret Paladins there. I think that knowledge will get passed along and people will see what decks did well and they’ll try out those decks and that will cause some evolution.
Q: Touching on that with Flare and Mysterious Challenger, do you feel that every class should have a toolkit and an answer to every kind of deck type, or do you worry about homogenization. For example - Hunters and Mages kind of have the answers to spells and secrets, but warlock doesn’t.
A: I think each class should have its own identity, so you’re right that we shouldn’t do homogenization. I also think that answers don’t really work. It’s good for people to see “I keep losing to this specific deck. Let me look through my collection to see what I should do.“ So if they have that feeling in their heart they can go and find something and put it in their deck and at least they’ll win that matchup. But I don’t actually think that’s the solution to problems. I think what’s better is “make a good deck.” If secret Paladin is good, make a good dragon deck or make a good murloc or whatever it is just make good decks. That’s the better solution.
Q: We touched a little bit on tournaments. How important are e-sports and the highest level of play to your design decisions?
A: Ideally our designs work for every level of play, like we consider each and try to give some cards to each. E-sports in may ways is just a tiny percentage of our audience. So In that respect we don’t want to put too much focus on them. But at the same time, a lot of people watch e-sports, like millions of people. So we want them to have a good experience too. We want them to have a good viewing experience. We want them to feel that it was fair, that it was fair to the players, that it was a fair environment and formats. So we still want to improve that, as much for the viewing audience as for the actual players themselves.
Q: One of the things that was discussed at the panel was the new user experience. We see users that from time to time that will try to bring their friends into the game and the friends will play for a while and they’ll like the game, but they seem almost like “there’s too many cards that I’d have to acquire to have a collection that’s competitive” Are they’re any plans or anything you can tell us about the future about ways to combat the “wall of new cards” that a new person would have to get after 3 sets and 3 expansions?
A: As I’m sure you guys saw Ben Brode did a video on this. It’s something we’re talking about. We actually have some specific ideas now after reading the responses to that video and talking to a lot of players in our community about the problem and discussing it with the other departments and looking at other games and what they did. We have some ideas now and we’re not ready to announce them yet but we’re working on it really hard.
Q: Are you worried about player retention – either new players shying away from being intimidated or veteran players kind of being frustrated like this past week or two. The Paladin deck especially. How are you guys looking to keep the player base interested besides just new card sets?
A: I think that the World Champion will help because people are playing “not secret Paladin”. I think just the metagame – whenever a nerf happens the metagame evolves. And it’s been not very long. And of course the expansion. But the expansion doesn’t have “oh here’s the card that will kill all secret decks. It just has other good decks that will exist. And I think “other good decks” is a healthier way to approach it.
Q: My personal favorite new feature request: Do you guys have any plans to do an achievement system? It’s something I’ve seen in other Blizzard games that I really love and to me adds a ton of replayability as people will go in and say “I need to do this extra thing, I need these achievement points in my life” for whatever reason.
A: Yeah, an achievement system seems like something that a natural for a game like this so hopefully we can do one one day. A lot of features are being requested right now. We want to do them all. We want to do better tavern brawls. We want to make deck slots. We want to make a solution to the new player problem. All those things are important to us. So we would like to work on it eventually but we aren’t yet.
Q: With so many requested features, it seems like you may be spread a bit thin working on so many things. Where are your resources primarily focused right now? What are your biggest priorities?
A: So one of the things we work on that has a very specific timeline is the release of new expansions. So the vast majority of our resources go into making cards and adventures and expansions. After that, we have to choose carefully on what we spend the remaining resources on. So we released the phone, we released spectator mode, we released the tablet, the tavern brawls. All those things were releases that we made and that was a lot of resources. And as we do each one, we can move our team to the next one. And like the things we discussed today – How are we going to make better content? How are we going to make better tavern brawls? How are we going to solve the problem with the new players? Things like that.
Q: I’ve seen a lot of, especially now in arena, overlays that will do everything from scanning the cards to giving you recommendations. Or old ones [deck trackers] that would show what you had already played or what your opponent had already played and give you percentages of cards that might appear in your next draw. What’s you guys’ stance on these – do you see them as helpful, do you see them as a threat to the user experience?
A: I don’t think we’ve made any kinds of decisions on that stuff. I think it’s more like “hey – let’s watch this stuff and think about it and talk about it and listen to community feedback about it. And maybe it’s something that is right to add to Hearthstone maybe it’s not. In general, my first opinion about ever adding stuff is, “whoa, lets not add stuff.” It’s not going to be a good user experience to put a bunch more stuff on the screen. But whenever we do make new features we iterate a lot to try to get to a better user experience.
Q: So there’s not any thought that they are harmful in any way or talks of preventing anyone from adding them?
A: Like I said, we haven’t figured out what our final answer is yet. I think it’s more of an open discussion still.
Q: Bring it back to the new content a bit, where do you guys get your seed for your new card ideas. Specifically, is it cards to counter the meta, cards for a specific flavor like TGT?
A: With TGT, Ben made this story of “Here’s some adventures. Here’s a list of things that might appear, sort of flavor stuff when he pitched the idea of The Grand Tournament.” So that helped us. Let’s make some knights, what does the monkey champion look like, what does the murloc champion look like, and so on. And that was kind of cool, it really helps us get an idea of the cards. At the same time, we wanted to approach it from a mechanical angle. Like what would be for the Joust mechanic, what would be fun for the Inspire mechanic. So we go at it from all kinds of different directions.
Q: So the art team and the design team all kind of comes together?
A: Yes, sometimes we’ll ask “hey, what’s your interpretation of this?” either for the trailer, or for the title screen. And now we have the time to do a bunch of paintings for the card art. And that’ll influence our card art for the entire set, and that’s really interesting to me.
Q: We had a couple of rapid fire questions on how some new cards work, can we ask those?
A: Sure!
[These answers are going to be paraphrased]
Brann Bronzebeard interactions with:
Vol’Jin? He believes he swaps health, then swaps back.
Void Terror – Would consume minions twice. Was kind of buggy the last time he played him so still being worked on.
If you have Naga Sea Witch and Aviana on board, which cost mechanic applies? - Last played.
Tunnel Trogg – gains attack from overload. Is that from the current turn, the previous turn? - It’s the number on the card that you play.
Reno Jones [Edit - we meant Elise Starseeker, but Mike picked up on what we meant]– the legendaries you receive – completely random? Can you have duplicate legendaries? Completely random – you can have duplicates.
Does the healing effect count your cards remaining or your deck at the start of the game? - Cards remaining. If you have no cards it triggers successfully.
Q: We get a lot of posts where someone has added someone after a game and gone on some sort of nasty rant about the person’s mother or this thing or that and immediately defriended them. It doesn’t seem like there’s a report system for dealing with trolls that add people and curse them out. What is the correct way to report them, or is there better way to do it?
A: You can email to customer service. But that’s a good idea. I’ll make sure to talk to the guys.
Q: Sort of like a World of Warcraft in game ticket?
A: Yeah, use [email protected].
Q: Whose decision was the Thursday release? Sort of like “surprise, it’s released right now!”
A: It was a team decision. We don’t know what the right decision to release things is, so we’ll experiment with different things. It seems cool to do something this soon, instead of Blizzard Soon.
Q: You guys must have had it ready to release if the World Championships weren’t this weekend earlier? Was there a conscious decision to hold it for now?
A: No, it was kind of ready now. It wasn’t ready a while ago.
Mike Donais
We are working on them right now.
Mike Donais
My pleasure.
Mike Donais
I figured you meant Elise Starseeker since she is the only card that gives you legendaries. So I answered as though you meant Elise. We didn't have that much time since I was doing back to back interviews all day almost. I enjoyed the interview and hope it helped some people.