Mercenaries would have been a fantastic opportunity to run a Hearthstone Public Test Realm. Keep everything separate from the main game so people understand they're going to lose any progression when it goes live.
It would have let people give proper feedback and then we'd better understand the value.
Players are always going to have lots of reasons to complain, they should do so though while being constructive. If you want to say something sucks, go for it, but tell people WHY it sucks. The why part of it matters so much to moving conversations forward. The devs don't want to talk to people who are just being negative and as the negativity compounds within the community, everything just feels like shit.
Yeah, its a shame that there isn't a linear relationship between the number of members of the team and the amount of content going out. The larger it gets, the harder it is to get anything done. That's why its important to very slowly add people and make them productive members of the team instead of mass hiring, which they have definitely done in the past. Damn, Hearthstone was so messy in the start!
I'm excited to see the next 6 months of Hearthstone now that Mercenaries is going to be coming out. It'll really tell us what the next zodiac year is going to be like as far as content drops go. I'd love if they could give us a dive into what the team is prioritizing post-mercenaries. Like, is someone already starting to look at what new kind of brawls we could see or should we expect new heroes in Duels? It'll be a good question for the next Dean AMA.
Mercenaries was definitely more than they could chew though with their team size. Its so crazy how much content Hearthstone pumps out now. If you asked me 3 years ago if anything we've seen in the past couple was possible, I would have laughed. The game has come such a long way - I honestly wanted to give up on it before "Hearthstone 2.0" hit because I was just drained with nothing new and exciting happening.
If you know me, you know I'm an advocate for more introducing Constructed Formats, not Modes, into Hearthstone.
Yeah, I'd love nothing more than extra ways to play with our cards. I really don't know why they won't just add in an extra rotating format where they can constantly change which expansions are in it. Imagine a meta that would be tough to solve completely due to sets being rotated every month or two. Keep the newest 3 expansions in the format so they remain valuable.
Quote From Author
If we go down the path of balancing Wild, choices and changes should be made with the intention of being impactful and encouraging a healthy meta that changes as much as the Standard meta does when new cards are released. It would be a disservice to balance the Format just for the top decks to still dominate the meta.
For sure! A properly balanced Wild, although difficult, is going to need so many buffs as well. There are so damn many old cards that should be allowed to have a chance at seeing light but when they were originally printed, they weren't even good. I think that would help with bringing forward new decks quite a bit, more so than a round of nerfs on current content.
You could do special events/patches where they focus on certain parts of the game to dish those buffs out to. Rise of Mechs was a neat event, what if they did something similar where the mech-focused sets would get retuned so that they became more viable.
Haha! It takes about 15 minutes, less time if you are lucky with card draws.
That is, if you have a second monitor so you can quickly go between the game and the tool. Tabbing out and back in might add some extra time to that. I don't even want to think about how bad it would be on mobile...
I think the AH would be more of a spend your gold and dust. It would make any real-money related stuff much harder to do since it then involves account trading. Also, if it isn't direct player to player trading and done through an AH with anonymous purchases, you just pay the lowest price for a card that is currently on the market, its not like someone could sell you a card in real life by putting it up for an absurd amount of gold, letting that player buy the card out and then returning their gold by doing the same thing with a crappy common. World of Warcraft switched to a commodities auction house which was such an incredible change when buying goods, it would work well for a card game.
One thing that I thought would always be a good idea, though it would be way too complicated for players and the interface would be to have it so cards you get for free through gameplay are trade restricted but ones you get with real money packs would be freely tradeable. Or free ones require equivalent trades.
Some form of obtaining cards from your draft would be an amazing addition to the mode. It would be very tricky to figure out the economy of it, but damn, it would be so much more thrilling to play it if you didn't have much of a collection.
She'll still end up getting vacation, its just that some folks take an extended vacation instead.
I know it can be very rewarding to get to work on something out of passion, so much so that it can in itself feel like a vacation. I try to carve out some time every week to work one something passion related instead of necessity for this very reason.
Of course, I'd also like her to not feel like she must go and work on it and to take that time off if its needed.
I have like 18 tickets on the US server atm, lol. I spent one the other day to check out a thing in Heroic duels and I'm glad I can do that from a content perspective whenever I want.
I'd love to see more use cases for them though. Maybe improvements to Arena will get me interested in the mode again.
Yeah that was such a great use of the tech when the entire Ashes of Outland expansion launch felt like such a bad experience with the crazy strength Demon Hunters had. I know they've said they learned a lot from that new class launch so whenever we get Death Knights or Monks it'll hopefully go a bit smoother.
I completely forgot that packs were originally listed as a launch celebration, damn, why time gotta full Sonic and go so fast?
Thanks for sharing the story about Greenskin, I can only imagine how awesome it must feel to complete the original classic set since I sure haven't been able to yet =D. Its always great to hear when people have good experiences!
Yeah its insane to me that people will complain about absolutely everything. Don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of complaining in gaming over the years, and still do grumble about World of Warcraft at times, but it is so important that people realize you aren't the target audience for everything that goes into a game.
I think the most laughable is thinking that every player would enjoy every class. If you don't like the way Druid plays, don't play it, there are NINE other options out there with different playstyles. Like look at Duels, that was not meant to be a mode for every single player, yet, complaint city! We know there are still a ton of Duels players out there though with how much traffic some of our articles get for the mode so its great that Blizzard provided some players an avenue to continue to enjoy Hearthstone.
Mercenaries, and even Battlegrounds, is exactly that. A way to keep enjoying our favourite characters in a card game format.
Yeah I'm always a huge fan of the constructed brawls, though that definitely doesn't mean random can be fun, I'd just love to not see it back-to-back-to-back lol. It would be cool to do a set of balance changes inside of brawl. I bet they'd have enough people messing around in it to get some really good data. I also know that they can buff or nerf cards server-side (the numbers show up green on the cards) so if they can also push out tech to only due that in Tavern Brawl, they wouldn't even need to patch the client to do a test like that.
I really liked the AMA where Dean talked about class bans on ladder. It would be really neat to see a Hearthstone-wide systems change for a couple of weeks just to see what improvements could potentially come to the game.
Really though, I think Hearthstone needs to get a Public Test Realm going. There are certainly potential issues with a PTR, depending on how they would handle it, but it would be a less disruptive way of testing stuff out. I too felt like Tavern Brawl was a great testing bed for stuff, its a shame they stopped using it that way and resorting more to just RANDOM ALL THE THINGS. Like we needed more random in Hearthstone, right?
Did you miss the part about the different teams thing?
Wow.
Most of the folks creating Art for Hearthstone are contracted to do so, they aren't even a part of the development team. There's a lead Artist type person that deals with all of them and makes sure stuff has that "Hearthstone" look and what they overall expected out of some art.
Yeah, a company is going to make money. Its actually embarrassing at how long it took Blizzard to step up the hero skin game when you look at how players for all those years were literally asking them to make more skins so they could buy them.
Saying Bliz$$ard is the same as the kids who used to say Micro$oft.
If you truly think the company is that greedy, why are you still playing their products? I honestly want to know.
Mercenaries would have been a fantastic opportunity to run a Hearthstone Public Test Realm. Keep everything separate from the main game so people understand they're going to lose any progression when it goes live.
It would have let people give proper feedback and then we'd better understand the value.
Players are always going to have lots of reasons to complain, they should do so though while being constructive. If you want to say something sucks, go for it, but tell people WHY it sucks. The why part of it matters so much to moving conversations forward. The devs don't want to talk to people who are just being negative and as the negativity compounds within the community, everything just feels like shit.
Yeah, its a shame that there isn't a linear relationship between the number of members of the team and the amount of content going out. The larger it gets, the harder it is to get anything done. That's why its important to very slowly add people and make them productive members of the team instead of mass hiring, which they have definitely done in the past. Damn, Hearthstone was so messy in the start!
I'm excited to see the next 6 months of Hearthstone now that Mercenaries is going to be coming out. It'll really tell us what the next zodiac year is going to be like as far as content drops go. I'd love if they could give us a dive into what the team is prioritizing post-mercenaries. Like, is someone already starting to look at what new kind of brawls we could see or should we expect new heroes in Duels? It'll be a good question for the next Dean AMA.
Mercenaries was definitely more than they could chew though with their team size. Its so crazy how much content Hearthstone pumps out now. If you asked me 3 years ago if anything we've seen in the past couple was possible, I would have laughed. The game has come such a long way - I honestly wanted to give up on it before "Hearthstone 2.0" hit because I was just drained with nothing new and exciting happening.
Yeah, I'd love nothing more than extra ways to play with our cards. I really don't know why they won't just add in an extra rotating format where they can constantly change which expansions are in it. Imagine a meta that would be tough to solve completely due to sets being rotated every month or two. Keep the newest 3 expansions in the format so they remain valuable.
For sure! A properly balanced Wild, although difficult, is going to need so many buffs as well. There are so damn many old cards that should be allowed to have a chance at seeing light but when they were originally printed, they weren't even good. I think that would help with bringing forward new decks quite a bit, more so than a round of nerfs on current content.
You could do special events/patches where they focus on certain parts of the game to dish those buffs out to. Rise of Mechs was a neat event, what if they did something similar where the mech-focused sets would get retuned so that they became more viable.
To have such little success in life that they only thing you can do successfully is be miserable. Truly incredible.
Haha! It takes about 15 minutes, less time if you are lucky with card draws.
That is, if you have a second monitor so you can quickly go between the game and the tool. Tabbing out and back in might add some extra time to that. I don't even want to think about how bad it would be on mobile...
Haha, yeah, its takes a little bit even with a tool to assist.
I think the AH would be more of a spend your gold and dust. It would make any real-money related stuff much harder to do since it then involves account trading. Also, if it isn't direct player to player trading and done through an AH with anonymous purchases, you just pay the lowest price for a card that is currently on the market, its not like someone could sell you a card in real life by putting it up for an absurd amount of gold, letting that player buy the card out and then returning their gold by doing the same thing with a crappy common. World of Warcraft switched to a commodities auction house which was such an incredible change when buying goods, it would work well for a card game.
One thing that I thought would always be a good idea, though it would be way too complicated for players and the interface would be to have it so cards you get for free through gameplay are trade restricted but ones you get with real money packs would be freely tradeable. Or free ones require equivalent trades.
Some form of obtaining cards from your draft would be an amazing addition to the mode. It would be very tricky to figure out the economy of it, but damn, it would be so much more thrilling to play it if you didn't have much of a collection.
She'll still end up getting vacation, its just that some folks take an extended vacation instead.
I know it can be very rewarding to get to work on something out of passion, so much so that it can in itself feel like a vacation. I try to carve out some time every week to work one something passion related instead of necessity for this very reason.
Of course, I'd also like her to not feel like she must go and work on it and to take that time off if its needed.
I have like 18 tickets on the US server atm, lol. I spent one the other day to check out a thing in Heroic duels and I'm glad I can do that from a content perspective whenever I want.
I'd love to see more use cases for them though. Maybe improvements to Arena will get me interested in the mode again.
Mayyyyyyybe.
Yeah that was such a great use of the tech when the entire Ashes of Outland expansion launch felt like such a bad experience with the crazy strength Demon Hunters had. I know they've said they learned a lot from that new class launch so whenever we get Death Knights or Monks it'll hopefully go a bit smoother.
I completely forgot that packs were originally listed as a launch celebration, damn, why time gotta full Sonic and go so fast?
Thanks for sharing the story about Greenskin, I can only imagine how awesome it must feel to complete the original classic set since I sure haven't been able to yet =D. Its always great to hear when people have good experiences!
Preach!
Yeah its insane to me that people will complain about absolutely everything. Don't get me wrong, I've done my fair share of complaining in gaming over the years, and still do grumble about World of Warcraft at times, but it is so important that people realize you aren't the target audience for everything that goes into a game.
I think the most laughable is thinking that every player would enjoy every class. If you don't like the way Druid plays, don't play it, there are NINE other options out there with different playstyles. Like look at Duels, that was not meant to be a mode for every single player, yet, complaint city! We know there are still a ton of Duels players out there though with how much traffic some of our articles get for the mode so its great that Blizzard provided some players an avenue to continue to enjoy Hearthstone.
Mercenaries, and even Battlegrounds, is exactly that. A way to keep enjoying our favourite characters in a card game format.
Yeah I'm always a huge fan of the constructed brawls, though that definitely doesn't mean random can be fun, I'd just love to not see it back-to-back-to-back lol. It would be cool to do a set of balance changes inside of brawl. I bet they'd have enough people messing around in it to get some really good data. I also know that they can buff or nerf cards server-side (the numbers show up green on the cards) so if they can also push out tech to only due that in Tavern Brawl, they wouldn't even need to patch the client to do a test like that.
Haha, oops. After proofreading 5 times you would think a huge mistake like that would have been caught - fixing it, thank you.
I really liked the AMA where Dean talked about class bans on ladder. It would be really neat to see a Hearthstone-wide systems change for a couple of weeks just to see what improvements could potentially come to the game.
Really though, I think Hearthstone needs to get a Public Test Realm going. There are certainly potential issues with a PTR, depending on how they would handle it, but it would be a less disruptive way of testing stuff out. I too felt like Tavern Brawl was a great testing bed for stuff, its a shame they stopped using it that way and resorting more to just RANDOM ALL THE THINGS. Like we needed more random in Hearthstone, right?
Did you miss the part about the different teams thing?
Wow.
Most of the folks creating Art for Hearthstone are contracted to do so, they aren't even a part of the development team. There's a lead Artist type person that deals with all of them and makes sure stuff has that "Hearthstone" look and what they overall expected out of some art.
Yeah, a company is going to make money. Its actually embarrassing at how long it took Blizzard to step up the hero skin game when you look at how players for all those years were literally asking them to make more skins so they could buy them.