Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
[Iksar tweet] I’m not a high legend player, but I did used to play 2-3 hours each day and now I play 1 hour a week tops.
So I’m not a big personality in Hearthstone like Dog and I only reached legend a couple of times before; but Hearthstone is the game I’ve probably played the most in my life so I thought I’d share my two cents on why I stopped playing as much as I did.
The cost of the game: I know, I know Blizzard is a company first and making money will always be the priority; but as a semi-budget player it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get invested in the game when I’m limited to one or two decks each expansion. I used to preorder and buy a batch of 15 packs each cycle. But I realized that with that same amount of money I could buy a PS4 or Switch game with full content. I mean I know it’s a different kind of game, but Super Smash Bros isn’t really going to charge me more money for deciding to play Luigi instead of Pac-Man, so at least for me it became super difficult to justify paying more than what Smash Bros costed for like a third of a Hearthstone expansion.
The game focuses too much on the Standard ladder. So the Standard ladder is pretty cool, I like it specially after a new expansion drops, it’s where (if you’re able to afford it) you can make a lot of experimentation and be surprised by crazy combos before they become the norm. However if you’re not playing Standard ladder, it can sometimes feel like you’re not really playing Hearthstone. There’s really no incentive to play most of the single player content (personally I don’t care for cardbacks), Tavern Brawls are super repetitive (how many times must we play the everything is Random one?), Arena feels bad to play if you go 0-3 because of the entrance fee (which I’m sure makes a lot of players stay away from it) and Wild feels like it’s always the same meta. Playing only standard ladder all the time makes metas be solved extremely quickly and stale the game in a couple of weeks. As others have mentioned it would be nice to have a “separate Wild” where you can play sets that change each month. Combos that feature only Naxx, LoE and Boomsday cards would be so fun and would actually encourage people to get older cards. And having them rotate would be fresh. Tournament mode would be awesome too and would give players the fantasy of living the e-sport life. Even rotating monthly achievements for casual mode would be great. “Win 50 games in casual mode where you play Mulhouse Manastorm and get 15 packs”. More ways to play the game will always be welcome.
Developer communication. I like balance changes. They usually work pretty good, however sometimes they feel like they come out of nowhere. Unless a new expansion is coming, we don’t usually hear a lot from the developers. It would be nice to know what they think of the meta or about certain cards once a week or once every two weeks. Sometimes it feels like Hearthstone has no clear direction and that is so frustrating to a lot of people.
Game Balance: the game is pretty balanced in terms of classes, but it still feels like Infinite Value cards díctate the flow of a lot of games. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this point because you all know which cards are problematic. You all know how we feel about the “Core set”.
And those are my two cents as an average Hearthstone player. Just wanted to really give my opinion on the matter and I hope they listen to it.
Iksar
This does seem like a popular narrative, I'm not sure why. We have some ideas for what the future of Hearthstone might look like, and reaching out for feedback is a good way to determine how aligned we are with what the most engaged audience wants from the game. Sometimes that means we'll feel totally aligned and gain confidence in the things we're working on, or sometimes it means we'll read all the ensuing discussion and feel like we should pivot in some minor or major way. Sometimes it means we'll read some feedback on an idea we haven't put much thought into, and it will spawn some conversation among development to see if there is more there.
The question comes from an honest desire to want to work on the things that our players want, and to stay in tune with what our most engaged audience is thinking. I don't think Reddit or Twitter are ever going to be the place to make promises on the kinds of features we're planning on delivering, but it can be a good place to have a discussion on the things that are working and the things that aren't. If you are a developer and aren't regularly seeking out this kind of feedback you are bound to create content at some point that is going to have a disconnect with what your players are looking for.
One of the challenging things about working on a game as successful as Hearthstone is that there are a super wide variety of player types. No matter what goes in the game, it's likely to be very appealing to some players and not appealing at all to others. From a development perspective, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The goal is that no matter what type of player you are, there is at least a couple things that are awesome for you. That said, when we reach out to Twitter or Reddit we know the kind of feedback we're getting is generally from the most engaged players. It's true that that audience isn't necessarily representative or the entire playerbase, though we still want to make content that is great for those players. Reaching out for feedback on what that might be helps us get there.