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"If Everything is Broken, Nothing is broken" is Wrong

Hey all, J_Alexander_HS back again today to talk about a bit of design/balance philosophy regarding “broken” and broken cards. It’s an important matter to understand if you want to appreciate how Blizzard is designing Hearthstone cards, as this is part of their explicit plan (at least to the extent we are made aware of their plans). Understanding this gives insight into why the game looks as it did and as it will in the future.

In a recent interview, Iksar shared the following tidbit of design insight:

I like Nozdormu and Deathwing for different reasons. One thing that’s fun is the reaction that you hear when people see a new card. Sometimes someone will look at a card and say, “I don’t think you should do this.” And that’s kind of the reaction that we’re looking for. You shouldn’t look at a set of cards and say, “Wow, this is the most well-balanced set of cards we’ve ever seen.” You want to feel like there’s cool stuff that’s going on that feels broken

The takeaway message is that the team appears to want to make cards with big, flashy, and powerful effects because those interest players more than a deliberately-balanced set. There are several pros and cons to consider to this flavor of design

The first big pro is that powerful effects help make sets not flop. An under-powered set is basically a set that doesn’t exist because players want to win and will only tend to use the cards that help them do that. If cards in a set don’t help players win, relative to what is currently on offer, they won’t be used. This doesn’t move packs and it doesn’t add variety to the player experience. Without power, cards are non-existent to boring.

Another pro is that these big effects can create new meta experiences and decks, rather than simply slotting into existing strategies and lists. Building on the previous point, a set that has cards which do see play (because they’re good) but don’t really change the meta (because they only fit into existing decks) also risks boring your players. They’ve already been playing with those decks for 4 months (or longer), and the process of simply refining decks doesn’t provide them much value to mine from the new set. Their gains from the new cards won’t feel impactful.

Control Warrior, for instance, got a big boost from Boomsday, but ever since then the play patterns of the deck haven’t really been changing in what feel like meaningful ways to me. While the deck got a bit better or worse over time, it didn’t fundamentally change the way it played or was built (for example, changing Commander for Mummy doesn’t help the deck feel “new” in the same way something like a more aggressive build of the deck might).

While there are pros to this idea of powerful effects, there are cons to this design philosophy as well. The first is the clear power-creep problem: if you’re making cards which huge effects, your next set will need to include even huger effects to get people to pay attention to it (or at least huge in different domains). This has the downside of making previous cards less useful or interesting, reducing the effective size of the card pool (because if the old cards are too weak now, it’s like they don’t even exist), while also risking changing how games play out (a point we’ll return to shortly). The real risk, however, is in breaking the game.

There are cards with big powerful-looking effects, but they end up just being powerful in theory. Maybe those cards inspire you to try and break them, but there are practical limitations that hold them back. These are the “broken” cards. The new Nozdormu might be an example of that: ramping both players to 10-mana as early as turn 3 can really change the landscape of games, but perhaps it’s simply too much of a downside to give your opponent that mana first for whatever reason. This is the ideal case for these kinds of cards: they look more powerful than they end up being. In other words, they’re “broken”. This inspired interest but doesn’t ruin the gameplay experience.

Then there is the case where they actually do break the game. When you try to make a bunch of “broken” effects, it’s likely that one or more will be broken. They don’t just look powerful; they are powerful in a way that very few other things (if any) can challenge them. These broken cards warp the meta around themselves, severely limiting what people can explore, play, and have fun with because – again – people tend to derive pleasure from winning. If there’s only one real way to win the game, the period of exploration after a new set releases rapidly declines and the meta gets stagnant and stale.

This brings us to the main point I wanted to highlight today; something that people say which isn’t entirely true.

If EVERYTHING is broken, NOTHING is broken

I’m sure you’ve heard that before; some of you might have even said it. The idea is that if all classes have access to legitimately broken mechanics, maybe we can have our cake and eat it too. We get our interest-inspiring cards that are powerful and beg to be explored – generating player interest – but because they’re all powerful, the meta doesn’t’ stagnate on a single deck and players have more room to play the game the way they want.

The issues with that are as follows:

Everything is never broken

Much as there’s a difference between “broken” and broken, there’s also “everything” and everything. If every class had two broken strategies, that would be pretty good variety. Let’s say Warrior had Control and Aggro decks that were broken. So, if you want to play Warrior, you can pick deck A or B and be successful. That’s fine and all, but if those two strategies mean you cannot effectively explore anything but A and B with even a decent measure of success (say, Midrange, Combo, Bomb, etc) because those other things aren’t broken, that can leave players feeling too constrained and frustrated at times. That’s not much of a problem if, say, every class had two successful decks that were in a constant state of flux each expansion (so next release, instead of Control and Aggro the two broken decks were Bomb and Combo). However, it’s easy to miss on power level on a practical level and fail to achieve that goal. Maybe some classes only have 1 broken deck; maybe they have none and so don’t get to see play; maybe they have one or two broken strategies, but they remain static from expansion to expansion because the new strategies aren’t competing; maybe things are bad for three classes while the other six have a variety of broken strategies.

If lots of things are broken, then, you may have dug yourself into a design hole where you can’t effectively balance things between or within classes. For instance, right now, Shaman is broken. It’s THE broken thing. When there’s a single front runner in the balance department, it can effectively be targeted for nerfs because you only need to change IT. But what if 10 things are broken? Now you can’t address just one of them because knocking that one out just leaves you with a meta of 9 broken things instead. All that change would accomplish would be a decrease in variety while not giving players room to explore other, new ideas that are still oppressed by the other 9 broken things.

Indeed, that was the situation we ended up in after Knights of the Frozen Throne and Kobolds and Catacombs. The cards of the time were so massively broken (like Skull, Keleseth, Deathknights, Cube, and so on) that the next year of releases almost didn’t impact the game at all. As the newer cards were relatively weaker, there wasn’t a point in exploring new ideas and the meta stagnated badly. However, the balance team wasn’t about to jump in and nerf something like 20-30 cards – many of which were legendary – to give these new expansions room to breathe. There were simply too many problems to address, so none got addressed.

Everything can’t be broken each expansion as a matter of practice. Instead, “everything” can be broken (read: a bunch of stuff), but that’s not great either because…

Even if everything was broken, it’s still broken

Decks aren’t broken: specific interactions and cards within them are. Let’s take the old Cubelock as an example: Skull was one of the most broken cards in the deck because of how it interacted with Voidlords and Doomguards, which then interacted with Cubes, Gul’dan, and the like. Cheating out tons of stats with no downside wins games.

So what happens in the mirror match? In theory, both decks are broken so nothing is broken there…except when one deck does the broken thing while the other deck doesn’t. That is, if one Warlock has Skull in the opening hand with demons while the other Warlock has the demons but bottom-decked the skull, the former player is going to be a massive favorite. One player does the broken thing while the other doesn’t, and that turns games into non-games. The same could be said about a match where one deck played Keleseth one turn 1 while the other didn’t do that broken thing and lost without much say in the matter.

That’s the major issue with the philosophy that if everything is broken, nothing is. That might be a statement about averages, but averages can hide bad game experiences. A meta can be balanced on the surface (every class/deck averages a 50% win rate) while also being highly polarized within matches such that almost no game involves meaningful choices. An extreme rock-paper-scissors meta. It’s balanced, but it’s not fun.

As games tend to be at their best when resources matter, a meta where everything is broken isn’t necessarily one where the game is better. It might not even be one where the game is good.

So, in theory, the “if everything is broken nothing is” philosophy works, provided (a) all classes have broken things, (b) what things are broken regularly changes, and (c) within games, access to these broken tools even out instead of creating deep polarization. In practice it’s easy to miss on one or more of them, as we have seen happen time and again. That might be an OK world to live in, provided balance adjustments were frequent and numerous enough to iron out these issues, but when “everything” is broken the problems may become too widespread to be worth the effort to fix.

While solutions to the matter are no doubt tricky (balance enough but not too much, make cards powerful but not too powerful, find ways to ensure a shifting meta, etc), they are worth being mindful of to both understand the design of cards and complain about them properly.

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