I want to expand a bit on the first answer (I love twitter, but sometimes 140 just don't cut it).

I think there are 4 major weaknesses to our current ranked system: (1) Top end players have to grind too much to get fun matches each month. (2) Low end players have very little progression: just a few wins and then they get "stuck" at rank 20-17. This is the vast majority of active players. (3) New players who enter ranked get crushed hard (after a pretty good experience in Casual). (4) Doing the same thing over and over again each month feels like a 'grind'.

I think we can do all that (hopefully - this stuff is difficult to predict without live testing). The hardest to hit is number 4, since progression is fun, but the more you have, the more 'grindy' it feels. I actually think that things like a potential Tournament mode could help with that even more than any specific change to ranked.

So, Tournament: I think there are a couple specific 'fantasies' related to playing in a Hearthstone tournament. Put another way: What is fun about tournaments? I think different players have different things that draw them. For me, for example, one of the things I enjoy is going to a venue, meeting my IRL opponent, and sharing a tense battle with him or her. Then I like to go over and check on my buds, to see how we're doing as a group against the crowd. We have a lot of people attending Fireside Gatherings each month (and running tournaments), it'd be nice if we could make that process better in the client.

There's also a strong desire to have the ability to compete for glory against other players from the comfort of your home. Hearthstone is by its nature a competitive 1v1 experience, so Tournaments would need to offer something above and beyond what we're already doing. If you want a "packaged" experience, where at the end you are crowned a winner, Heroic Brawl and Arena actually get part of the way there, although they don't feel like they fit the whole fantasy that people are missing.

There's, I think, two 'obvious' tournament mode implementations that we had considered recently.

(1) Pump a bunch of players into a bracket. Wait for all players to finish, then start the next round. Repeat until there is a winner. Upside: Clear tournament fantasy. Downside: Long waits between rounds. Need to clear a day to play, but you might be out in the first round (really variable time commitment)

(2) If you're familiar with the development of Arena (and if you're not, here's a very old video going through it ), it's basically a story of us trying to solve the problem from the first approach in an 8-player bracket. The result is a competitive, asynchronous event. Heroic Brawl is essentially the version of tournaments that can be done asynchronously online.

Now, I think 1 is only really ok for in-person events, and we already have 2 and for some reason it doesn't feel like it's scratching that "tournament" itch. So we've been exploring some crazier ideas. :)

We've been reading threads about 'tournament mode' here and other places (and in different languages) that range back years, scouring comments and trying to get a full picture of what we think the community (which isn't a single entity, but lots of individuals with different perspectives) will enjoy. I always enjoy reading and discussing what people want from tournaments in Hearthstone, so please keep it up!

An aside: When I make comments like this, detailing our philosophy and confirming what is or is not in our plans, I often read responses like "pr talk" or "says nothing". We do have the option of only doing communication in the form of announcements, but we'd be communicating a lot less, and not here on reddit. I love talking with the community. I think it's healthy to vet our ideas and get feedback on them before we commit to any specific implementation. But I think the expectation needs to be that it's a conversation, and we're explaining where we're at and our thoughts, not announcing specific changes. Looking forward to reading your thoughts!

If you have 64 people in a tournament, and one of the matches goes long, the other 62 people have to wait. If you say, look, the max time is 45 minutes for a best 2-of-3, then players who finish their games in 10 minutes total still have to wait at their computers, wondering when the next round will start. Best, in systems like this, to just have rounds start at consistent times, like "every 45 minutes" or something, so you know how much time you have to go to the bathroom or get food.

Even then, this doesn't address the issue of variable time commitments. If you scrub out in the first round, your total time commitment was 10-45 minutes. If you win the (64 person, single-elim) tournament, your total time commitment was 4.5 hours. 10-270 minutes is huge variance. You have to set aside 270 minutes in case you win, but your play session ending in 10 minutes makes you feel bad for clearing plans on your Saturday to commit to a tournament.

because tournament mode isn't designed for mobile

A lot of people have echoed this sentiment, but I just don't see how that's necessarily true. It's not inherently more challenging to the system to be able to support it. It would presumably depend on the UI requirements, but that's pretty hard to nail down without knowing how the system would work.

Thanks for the thoughts! Your pitches for ranked have some similarities to things we have been pitching internally!

I think that there should be two tournament modes,

I do tend to agree that we need two separate "tournament modes", one for community organizers who are handling their own prize support and just need in-game facilitation for their tournaments, and a mode for players who want to play at any time of day in a competitive constructed mode that 'feels' like a tournament. I think these are two distinct categories of use-case, and the solutions for each of those cases can and maybe should be different.

When we know more about when changes will be ready, we'll make a more official announcement. Official announcements are better than my reddit comments because they contain detailed information, are localized into all the languages the game supports, and have wider reach.

Also, there is uncertainty in software development. There have been times we have targeted a patch for a feature, only to have it slip to the following patch due to an unforeseen issue. We don't give dates until we are certain we can hit them.

Your question is fair, but I was referring to Hearthstone being a game where you compete against your opponent, as opposed to cooperate with them. Put another way, it's PvP, not PvE.

As far as why does Hearthstone have random elements? This is a huge question, I've talked about it a lot in the past, but don't want to tangent this conversation too much. A primer for the discussion is Richard Garfield's talk about Luck in Games. I highly recommend it.

The short version is that you can have both high skill and high luck in games. Poker is a good example of this. Randomness does some good things like create novel scenarios (otherwise there is too much focus on memorization, like in Chess), create fun stories, and create interesting decision points as to how and when to take risks.

Not all implementations of randomness are good. And by signing up for random events in games, sometimes there are moments that just plain suck. But on the whole the game is more fun with some luck involved.

The people who are asking for the tournament mode are the same people who are willing to accept that variance in length and commit to spending up to 4 hours on a weekend playing hearthstone.

You might be right, but what if we could deliver a tournament mode that is really fun, and very accessible? I tend to think we succeeded here in our Arena mode.