After seeing how implementation of a new class (demon hunter) went throw, any plans on putting another new one in the game, in the nearest future? :)
Purely from a player-metrics perspective, it seems like DH was successful. I say *seems* because there are a lot of variables. Hard to understand if success was because players love having a new class, because there was a higher marketing spend during that time window, etc. (Source)
But overall, our team is positive on it and will probably do it again. It's just not something you want to be doing every year. We've talked about Death Knight, Monk, or even the idea of inventing something new. (Source)
There is no new-class in development today and we work about a year ahead of schedule, so I wouldn't look out for it anytime soon. We set up a lot of the infrastructure for adding a new class the first time around, though, so the turnaround would be a little easier. (Source)
I fully expect to see Pandaria next year though alongside Monks. They're just messing with us right now when they reference it because that's what they're working on and has been approved.
Going through 19812 cards, and counting, manually, to figure out if a card has an out of date image isn't really a thing we can do. Our tech back then lacked some proper tooling and nowadays when we do new patches, we immediately know what cards need to be rendered again so we can kick those off as soon as we validate our renderer works with the new client.
For whatever reason, that card didn't get rendered again or it errored during rendering and wasn't caught. Since no one reported it as a problem, until now, it's been out of date for that whole time. Typically we rely on staff for these on a patch-by-patch basis, but sometimes stuff doesn't get caught.
That's some insight into why this kind of stuff happens though. I appreciate you bringing it up so we can get this image fixed.
Our Mercenaries data isn't perfect right now. There's certain relationships that haven't been made in the data (Mercs data spans many different points in the client) and our process doesn't allow for a manual intervention. I'd love to get some time to give it a look at again, other things are just taking priority.
I think Ben Lee was a bit more of a private person. Sometimes we get people in the higher positions who don't want to constantly be in the spotlight and that's cool. Hearthstone definitely needs figureheads though to talk about the game with the community, it's been a bit refreshing to see community managers actually doing that more. You know... managing the community. Who woulda thought?
Glad you liked that. Nirast came up with the idea and I'm glad we were able to execute it in time to get this article up. Expect stuff like this moving forward when it makes sense, and if you want the other collage profile headers, you can find them in the shop.
And for anyone that buys all the headers before claiming their freebie, you'll be refunded 100 Gold, the price of the header you chose here.
Year of the Toki sounds like a really cool idea! Mixing up different expansions and exploring what it would be like to have Mecha-Jaraxxus as a teacher sounds like time well spent.
It could be really cool to just have a huge battle between a ton of Hearthstone's big characters in a set. It might be a little weird with some of them coming in as Epics and Rares, maybe even Commons. One possible way around that could be them having a representative as they are too busy elsewhere "Ragnaros' Lava Spawn" "The Lich King's Servant". It would be Hearthstone's Battle Royale set, lol.
Oh I agree completely. Murlocs would be a very tough sell to have them be a major expansion component. The entire idea of the tribe would have to be flipped upside down to let them not be only aggressors.
The limiters that exist that you mention, the only standout really is Scargil and it would definitely give us a possible wild problem, but Standard would be okay. Murloc Knight and Underbelly Angler become less consistent with more Murlocs being added which is a huge benefit.
But yeah, as fun as it is to think about having an entire Murloc village expansion and the many directions the Hearthstone team could take it, I'd rather them not.
Yo, real talk, I'd love for them to bring back the Rastakhan characters. With Mercenaries making their appearances multiple times throughout this past year, it shows they know how to bring in that flavor multiple times for the same characters and it really works well. Plus, who doesn't love a good troll dungeon, mon?
I really hope we get to visit Northrend again. Knights of the Frozen Throne was an amazing expansion theme but I feel like they did it too early in Hearthstone's lifespan. It was a damn good idea to hit that when they did because everyone loves The Lich King and those themes, but the tech back then wasn't as good as it is now.
Don't scroll down that far then =). Spoilers are horrible for accessibility of the content and we avoid using them unless absolutely necessary. Your use case sounds niche.
By the way, I will try to ration out my hints a bit from here on, because I do not want the moderators to think that I am singlehandedly spoiling their entire event which is not my intention at all.
Pre-release is considered the initial physical release so yes, we are indeed getting a physical release of cards before digital gets to play with them which is not typically the case. The full launch won't be until the day after digital gets it, but cards will be in the wild a week before that.
At one point I had subscriptions to Netflix, Prime Video (well, that's sorta cheating), Disney+, Crave (Canada service that gets a bunch of HBO content), and Apple TV. Mind you, everything other than Prime Video showed no advertisements so even though it was a steep cost, it was still a thousand times better than cable could ever hope to achieve.
I also have been a YouTube Premium member since it first came available because it's so much nicer to be able to support creators through that and never have to see an ad - though the people with 2 ads baked into their videos now for the Skillshares and whatever have you is a bit much.
Netflix & Crave are my currently services, with Billions being my craving of choice which interestingly is sort of how my life is with game launchers since I normally only use two at the same time (currently being Steam + Battle.net, haven't touched Game Pass in a bit) with PUBG, Sun Haven, and World of Warcraft on my now playing list.
I don't know where I was going with any of that but yeah, monopolies in general are bad and I'm glad we've got some new choices. I think I could live with a triopoly if everything came down to Steam + Epic + Xbox since I don't really have an issue with any of the companies and I could never see them all working together like telecom does in Canada (our Duopoly here is notorious for screwing everyone over at the same time, at the very least you could wine and dine me before you **** me).
Yeah, they've really dropped the ball on just "news" when it comes to Hearthstone. WoW has some good updates though they aren't as plentiful as they could be and I suppose they assume the remaining players just use Wowhead anyway which has a great feed.
Hearthstone though... Hearthstone's playerbase is mostly on mobile and they have no good way of showing them content so they just don't bother. It's pathetic for a AAA company to not properly leverage media. Oh but wait, they posted that meme on Twitter.
Not to mention that they don't put everything in their patch notes so key feature additions or bug fixes have to be tweeted about or discovered by players. =/
I genuinely feel bad for the developer side of Hearthstone because people have put in so much work over the years but their community team and marketing sucks at their job. Which.. is confusing because they have some great people. I can only imagine it's red tape that keeps them from doing anything worthwhile.
I love the design of the Battle.net launcher. The social features used to be cool but honestly, with Discord being the primary player in gaming communication now, I never really use anything chat on any other platform so the Battle.net launcher just became exactly that - a launcher.
It has a great design though as I said and I'd love if they could make elements work on the Xbox app. Xbox app needs some serious love, and bug fixing.
Friends list would probably become Xbox friends, or maybe they keep Battle.net around for friends too, having a "you can use Xbox or Battle.net". I think the Call of Duty folks on the Activision side wouldn't care as much if they were to lose Battle.net friends, but I could see that being a pain point for the "Blizzard gamer" who has had the same friends list for over a decade.
I'm quite glad that we're not getting Monk, which is perfectly inline with what Dean had said last year in a Q&A.
I fully expect to see Pandaria next year though alongside Monks. They're just messing with us right now when they reference it because that's what they're working on and has been approved.
I grabbed it from Twitter and put it on ours
Going through 19812 cards, and counting, manually, to figure out if a card has an out of date image isn't really a thing we can do. Our tech back then lacked some proper tooling and nowadays when we do new patches, we immediately know what cards need to be rendered again so we can kick those off as soon as we validate our renderer works with the new client.
For whatever reason, that card didn't get rendered again or it errored during rendering and wasn't caught. Since no one reported it as a problem, until now, it's been out of date for that whole time. Typically we rely on staff for these on a patch-by-patch basis, but sometimes stuff doesn't get caught.
That's some insight into why this kind of stuff happens though. I appreciate you bringing it up so we can get this image fixed.
Guarantee you the patch isn't ready for tomorrow and the announcement requires a patch going live on the same day.
Update: He did do a Q&A!
Our Mercenaries data isn't perfect right now. There's certain relationships that haven't been made in the data (Mercs data spans many different points in the client) and our process doesn't allow for a manual intervention. I'd love to get some time to give it a look at again, other things are just taking priority.
He might be doing a Q&A tomorrow.
I think Ben Lee was a bit more of a private person. Sometimes we get people in the higher positions who don't want to constantly be in the spotlight and that's cool. Hearthstone definitely needs figureheads though to talk about the game with the community, it's been a bit refreshing to see community managers actually doing that more. You know... managing the community. Who woulda thought?
I'm looking forward to the FMA and HxH expansions. Year of the Weeb hype
Glad you liked that. Nirast came up with the idea and I'm glad we were able to execute it in time to get this article up. Expect stuff like this moving forward when it makes sense, and if you want the other collage profile headers, you can find them in the shop.
And for anyone that buys all the headers before claiming their freebie, you'll be refunded 100 Gold, the price of the header you chose here.
I played in the closed beta a bit, it's okay. Nothing crazy and I think they have a bunch of issues they are now working on before releasing it.
Year of the Toki sounds like a really cool idea! Mixing up different expansions and exploring what it would be like to have Mecha-Jaraxxus as a teacher sounds like time well spent.
It could be really cool to just have a huge battle between a ton of Hearthstone's big characters in a set. It might be a little weird with some of them coming in as Epics and Rares, maybe even Commons. One possible way around that could be them having a representative as they are too busy elsewhere "Ragnaros' Lava Spawn" "The Lich King's Servant". It would be Hearthstone's Battle Royale set, lol.
Oh I agree completely. Murlocs would be a very tough sell to have them be a major expansion component. The entire idea of the tribe would have to be flipped upside down to let them not be only aggressors.
The limiters that exist that you mention, the only standout really is Scargil and it would definitely give us a possible wild problem, but Standard would be okay. Murloc Knight and Underbelly Angler become less consistent with more Murlocs being added which is a huge benefit.
But yeah, as fun as it is to think about having an entire Murloc village expansion and the many directions the Hearthstone team could take it, I'd rather them not.
Yo, real talk, I'd love for them to bring back the Rastakhan characters. With Mercenaries making their appearances multiple times throughout this past year, it shows they know how to bring in that flavor multiple times for the same characters and it really works well. Plus, who doesn't love a good troll dungeon, mon?
I really hope we get to visit Northrend again. Knights of the Frozen Throne was an amazing expansion theme but I feel like they did it too early in Hearthstone's lifespan. It was a damn good idea to hit that when they did because everyone loves The Lich King and those themes, but the tech back then wasn't as good as it is now.
Undead tribe pls.
Don't scroll down that far then =). Spoilers are horrible for accessibility of the content and we avoid using them unless absolutely necessary. Your use case sounds niche.
I think you're solid =
Pre-release is considered the initial physical release so yes, we are indeed getting a physical release of cards before digital gets to play with them which is not typically the case. The full launch won't be until the day after digital gets it, but cards will be in the wild a week before that.
I miss when it was just Netflix, lol.
At one point I had subscriptions to Netflix, Prime Video (well, that's sorta cheating), Disney+, Crave (Canada service that gets a bunch of HBO content), and Apple TV. Mind you, everything other than Prime Video showed no advertisements so even though it was a steep cost, it was still a thousand times better than cable could ever hope to achieve.
I also have been a YouTube Premium member since it first came available because it's so much nicer to be able to support creators through that and never have to see an ad - though the people with 2 ads baked into their videos now for the Skillshares and whatever have you is a bit much.
Netflix & Crave are my currently services, with Billions being my craving of choice which interestingly is sort of how my life is with game launchers since I normally only use two at the same time (currently being Steam + Battle.net, haven't touched Game Pass in a bit) with PUBG, Sun Haven, and World of Warcraft on my now playing list.
I don't know where I was going with any of that but yeah, monopolies in general are bad and I'm glad we've got some new choices. I think I could live with a triopoly if everything came down to Steam + Epic + Xbox since I don't really have an issue with any of the companies and I could never see them all working together like telecom does in Canada (our Duopoly here is notorious for screwing everyone over at the same time, at the very least you could wine and dine me before you **** me).
Yeah, they've really dropped the ball on just "news" when it comes to Hearthstone. WoW has some good updates though they aren't as plentiful as they could be and I suppose they assume the remaining players just use Wowhead anyway which has a great feed.
Hearthstone though... Hearthstone's playerbase is mostly on mobile and they have no good way of showing them content so they just don't bother. It's pathetic for a AAA company to not properly leverage media. Oh but wait, they posted that meme on Twitter.
Not to mention that they don't put everything in their patch notes so key feature additions or bug fixes have to be tweeted about or discovered by players. =/
I genuinely feel bad for the developer side of Hearthstone because people have put in so much work over the years but their community team and marketing sucks at their job. Which.. is confusing because they have some great people. I can only imagine it's red tape that keeps them from doing anything worthwhile.
I love the design of the Battle.net launcher. The social features used to be cool but honestly, with Discord being the primary player in gaming communication now, I never really use anything chat on any other platform so the Battle.net launcher just became exactly that - a launcher.
It has a great design though as I said and I'd love if they could make elements work on the Xbox app. Xbox app needs some serious love, and bug fixing.
Friends list would probably become Xbox friends, or maybe they keep Battle.net around for friends too, having a "you can use Xbox or Battle.net". I think the Call of Duty folks on the Activision side wouldn't care as much if they were to lose Battle.net friends, but I could see that being a pain point for the "Blizzard gamer" who has had the same friends list for over a decade.