Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
After 5 years and a staggering rate of ~0.5 Billion/year in revenue, the tournament is more distant than ever. Hearthstone has failed.
For all collectable card games, the most vital and memorable experiences are joining a tournaments and competing against your friends.
As a result, while we want to revisit In-Game Tournaments at a later date, the feature is on hold for the foreseeable future.
The Hearthstone team has had time and money. At this point, there is simply no excuse for Hearthstone to have already come out with it's "best interpretation" of a tournament mode. Even if the development and design team feels like they need to re-invent the wheel to make this tournament mode happen, our patience has already been spent.
As we've seen with existing tournaments like HCT and dreamhack, the tournament process has been imagined and executed in it's entirety by players, fans, and organizers, with no support from the game. We see talented graphic designers do their best to hack together multiple spectate screens, tournament casters do their best to analyze the situation while missing vital information (such as cards in deck remaining and zombeast picks). The community has shown it's ability to work with what it's given.
Why is it that the developers and designers feel the need to package and capture this holistic experience in it's entirety? If you can't do it in half a decade and billions of dollars, what makes you think that you'll be able to do it now? Why is there no trust from developers and designers to ship a minimum viable product?
As a community we are really feeling the absence of the game director position.
Mike Donais
Yes, he jumps to a lot of incorrect conclusions just by looking at positions open on the web. We have over 40 engineers, so us hiring does not indicate that we don't already have someone in that position.