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Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Blizzard: We want card changes to be intuitive and easy to understand. Also Blizzard: We changed how Naga works and didn't tell you!

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  • Ben Brode
    Posted 8 years, 3 months ago (Source)

    OK, yeah, that makes sense. But I have to ask, if it's a minor point, why bring it up instead of going a bit deeper on the balance team's internal discussions?

    The reason I ask is because the only people reading this kind of thing are the people that already know what these cards do, and are invested into the game. New players aren't looking at Fiery War Axe and thinking that it's OP, despite that it was. They don't know how good or bad a coin is compared to an Innervate.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't understand why you bring up the intuitive/new player points when talking to experienced players who already know a lot of the edge cases.

    I often feel like it's useful to discuss game design - discussing philosophy and design helps us all level up our discussion, even if we're wrong about our philosophy. Especially if we're wrong, actually - because it can help start discussions where we can learn and become better designers.

    Maybe this blog post wasn't the right spot for that kind of philosophy, though.

  • Ben Brode
    Posted 8 years, 3 months ago (Source)

    I just posted about this here, but the TL;DR is: yeah, this was a mistake.

    But also, even though I think it's nice if things are intuitive when we change a card, the major concern is ongoing balance. We obviously have made unintuitive changes to cards and will continue to do so if it's the right change for the game. The 'intuitve' remark was a minor point when deciding between a couple reasonable options, not the reason for the change. I posted a bit more about it here.

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