Hello everyone, today I wanted to show you a concept that introduces Guilds and Tournament Mode into Hearthstone. The community has asked for Tournament Mode for years and with it not actively being developed I decided to improving on my last attempt at a Tournament Mode.
I made the Guild concept because Hearthstone is a lonely game, there truly isn't much interaction besides emoting. The game is set in a lively tavern yet the only way to tell if anyone else is actually playing is seeing what they're doing on your friends list. Occasionally you'll get notifications when they open a Legendary Card, start/finish an Arena run, reach a certain rank on Ladder, but there's really no feeling of community.
Starting the game will bring you to the home screen with it's new addition, the Guild button, it's appearance changes depending on what your Guild Leader wants it to look like. Clicking it will take you to the guild home page.
I wanted to make a UI that was completely independent from what's already in the game, I just couldn't make a design that was appealing.
I also wanted to make a way to browse for guilds, but there's only so much I can do in GIMP without it looking like trash.
So this is the Guild home screen, nothing spectacular. Just a description and your Guild's banner. If you join a Guild and want to invite one of your friends to join there should be a "recommend a friend" button within the friends list so your Leader can decide to invite them or not.
If you want to play around with making the banners here's a link for you.
On the next screen you'll be given player highlights, it's pretty much who's climbed the highest of the current month. These can be changed depending if the Guild is more Arena focused or if they play nothing but Battlegrounds. Things like "Most 1st place finishes", "Most games played", or "Most 12-0 Arena Runs" come to mind on the spotlight section.
For the icons that go into the squares, the Battle.net profile pictures should suffice unless there's a way to incorporate Hearthstone only images for this page.
On the last page of the Guild tab are all the guild ratings in their respective modes. A member can choose whether or not to represent their Guild when they play, the reason for that will be further down the thread.
And there are rewards based on these numbers at the end of an Expansion Cycle. We'll get to that later.
An addition I made to the Profile pages is the Tournament Decks page. This is where you select your deck lineup when you go into Tournament Mode. Clicking "inspect" will give you a brief run down of a deck, I have an example of it below. Clicking "Select" will take you to the collection manager where you can either make an entirely deck or pick one you've been running.
I tried everything I could, I just could not get the colors right. It was either brown as hell or orange.
This is the new Modes screen with the addition of The Tournaments button. Those of you who have played the game for a while can probably accurately guess where the shield came from.
So here we have The Tournaments mode screen. It gives you a brief description, your rating, and your Guild's rating. Upon clicking "Play" you'll be asked if you want to represent yourself or your Guild. Pretty self explanatory.
For this concept we're using the Conquest Tournament Format, I don't know how everyone would feel if it rotated between Conquest, Specialist, and other Tournament formats. That's for you all to decide.
Upon matching up with an opponent, you'll be presented with this screen and thus starts the ban phase. Here you can see their Guild banner and you can hover over it to get a few more details but that could waste you some time! When the ban phase starts, you have 300 seconds (5 minutes) to inspect your opponents decks and come up with a game plan on how you want to approach a match up, but remember, your opponent is also doing the same thing against you!
Upon inspecting an opponent's deck, you are presented with this screen. It gives you the deck list, mana curve, key cards that you can drag over and highlight so you don't forget about them if you click out and back in when trying to decide on which deck to ban. Once you've decided "Yep, f*** Priest" you click the ban button and wait for your opponent to finish their ban phase.
Once BOTH players have banned a deck, the red X's plop down onto a portrait, and the player's choose a deck and head into their first game. They won't be able to see which deck the other is choosing so this prevents counter queueing. They head in, complete a best of three in the respective Format, and that ends it. The player who wins increases either their own or their Guild's rating, which means more challenging opponents are to come.
Now for the rewards.
A new reward I've created is the Portrait Token, it is used to unlock Hero Portraits of past pre-purchase bundles.
Based on ALL of the ratings your guild has at the end of an Expansion Cycle, your Guild will automatically distribute these out to members who performed at high levels depending on their respective mode.
Thank you all for reading, if you have any questions, suggestions, or improvements, leave a comment down below so I can use them to improve my next concept.
Cut Content
I started this project with the idea of Raids being alongside the Guild system since they would be a perfect fit, I couldn't create an appealing UI nor could I make it easily convey what it was trying to do without being too confusing. The plan was for a Raid to last the duration of an Expansion Cycle, release a boss every 2-3 weeks (totaling 5) that Guildies could challenge. Rewards would be tied for defeating a boss as each class for an award that the whole Guild could work together on. The rewards would be cards like Auto-Pecker 4000 or a meme card that really won't affect the meta, but is fun to have.
There were Guild achievements but I mean those are easy to come up with so I focused my time on other parts of the concept instead.
I wanted to also include a shared collection within the guild that everyone donated to. Whenever a player would go to disenchant a card they would have the option to donate nothing, or up to 5% of that dust to the Guild's dust collection.
On top of that with the Guild's collection, players could apply to rent cards for X amount of games to give it a try for a meme deck or try to get an achievement without actually having to craft said card.
