Hearthstone Designer, Dean "Iksar" Ayala, answered a bunch of community questions on Reddit this past weekend and gave us some interesting insight into the current Achievement System and what will come in the future.
In the same thread, he hinted at some possible balance changes coming in the near future, but for this topic, we'll still have to wait and see!
In particular, he talked about the following topics:
- Iksar likes the idea of introducing specific rewards based on your achievement points - in particular, he talked about card backs;
- There will probably be more convenient ways to claim achievements in the future;
- Story mode not getting achievements is a bug that will be fixed in a future patch;
- We're going to get achievements for old adventures too: they'll get retroactively assigned to those who have already completed them;
- Bugs are something that happens: there are various reasons, but you can't completely avoid them;
- They worked a lot before the holidays to make sure nothing game-breaking would happen in the meantime;
- Changes will be made to achievement notification timing. Getting spoiled every time sucks!
On a side note, a couple of Reddit users adopted rough ways to ask questions and to give feedback to the developers. While not everyone can be happy about the current state of the game, there's no reason to be rude or disrespectful. If you want more communication, then you should act in a way that feels you deserve an answer.
If you want to read the actual posts, we quoted them here below.
Quote From Iksar Have you guys considered making some sort of player flair or cardback for amassing a certain level of achievements? Like 10-15k points or something?
I think it's pretty reasonable to have a card back for some high watermark of achievement points….. I like it :).
Quote From Iksar Any chance we can get a disenchant all button type thing for claiming these achievements en masse?
Been talking about more convenient ways to claim. Likely it will change in the future, but this isn't as high a priority as getting in older achievements atm. Achievements in general will be something we improve over time.
Quote From Iksar Some past achievements from before the new system aren’t recognized, but others are. For instance, completing story modes or achieving legend, but not getting the achievement.
Story mode not getting achievement are bugs, we plan on introducing achievements for completing old adventures at some point and those should be retroactive. We just didn't have time for the initial launch of the system.
Quote From Iksar Why are there many bugs in the recent patches? (Note for the editor: this was not the question asked, but the guy was just straight up rude, so I changed it to match the answer)
It's actually a pretty big hassle to go back and fix things, hotfix, pull people off their tasks […]. Recently, bugs have stayed in the client longer to give our team a holiday break to hang with their families. Not only has nothing been worked on for a couple weeks, but we were tentative to check anything in just before break so those fixes didn't trigger anything game-breaking that would cause people to have to come back from holiday to fix. That said, there will always be issues that slip through to live and we'll fix them as they come up. If you are looking for a promise that bugs will stop reaching the live client then that is never going to be something any dev can give you. For what it's worth, a lot of these back-end systems are brand new. Brand new systems mean a higher likelihood of bugs because there is a lot of unknown. I remember working on HS after we released Naxxramas and… wow… that was a bad time for bugs. Later adventures benefitted from a lot of that pain and I'm sure later achievement, reward, and quest updates will benefit from the bugs that slipped through now.
Bugs happen. Sometimes due to dev miss, sometimes QA miss, sometimes because of some difference in the testing environment and release environment we didn't account for. Unfortunately in this circumstance the fix requires a client patch so we weren't able to get it in right away.
Quote From Iksar Every time I get an achievement I'm actually disappointed because that means I'm about to lose my next Battlegrounds round. Similarly, before revealing any of the cards I've earned in a new pack I'll see achievements indicating if I got a legendary and for which class. Is anyone at Blizzard even talking about these issues?
In any case, the timing of when the server understands you do something is different than when you visually see it. Specifically for BG the fact you see an achievement pop knowing the game ended is pretty crappy. We are fixing that. There are a lot of edge cases I'm less sure about like whether we should suppress a gameplay achievement until the end of turn or end of game. Knowing exactly when animation timings happen on the client and triggering an achievement on the server is pretty tricky. Opening packs is also something we'll look at. These are less bugs and more just things we couldn't fit in on time but didn't want to delay the whole system because of it.
Normally we have what we'd call 'soak time' for these systems where we play with them for a few weeks or months before they release but in this circumstance we felt like what we had was better to push live than to soak it for another couple months and not release until the next expansion. More bugs than we would have liked because of that decision but I am glad it was a call we made.
Comments
Regarding bugs, every software developer knows that every (non-trivial) software has at least one bug :-) I do not recal the SW development book I've seen this statement in, but it is true :-)
The problem starts when bugs cost users a lot of money or kill them :-) In this regard, Hearthstone is not a "mission-critical" or "life-critical" system I guess.
My wish would be for a 'mark all achievement notifications read' button. I'm really not interested in all that scrolling and clicking foreach and every one.
Especially when you have to scroll down to click it.
I think that being able to go directly to the completed achievement instead of looking for it would be a nice QoL improvement.
But yeah, the "mark all" kind of solves the problem.
Why does it say that I haven't completed achievements for getting the entire Classic set, BRM set and LOE set just because I dusted some of the cards from those sets AFTER I got all of them?
Probably because they only started tracking your collection after you DE them.
That’s so stupid. Shouldn’t they have it recorded somewhere? Because I got 100 gold for having the entire Classic set. I don’t know if you remember but that was the reward for it back in a day (pretty lame, right?)
I've seen one achievement that push players to reach lv.50 in 10 different reward track, which can only mean that achievement score will not get reset every expansion. And I really hope that they can start distributing those XP bonus to the whole achievement system instead on giving most of it in Duels Achievement.
~10K XP only for playing Duels, and I didn't play Duels at all.
You can only get the Duels xp during Darkmoon, I think they've said the xp goes away with the next expansion's reward track. Unless they figure out more achievements for the format, there shouldn't be any xp there anymore.
The other upcoming new game mode, however, could get some.
even with the next 35 cards in miniset? I know it's not that much, but I would like to get every bit of XP to help buy packs, especially when they keep releasing mini set everytime from now.
I can only hope they can give us a few helper along the way (gold or packs) when each miniset hit.
I was going to say they might add a couple of new constructed ones with the new set, but then again, when showing us their rewards track calculations, they used the current max achievement xp in those which makes me think no new xp-rewarding achievements until Expansion 1 of 2021. The current ones will stay until that, but lose the xp rewards afterwards (as far as I understand).
It wouldnt make sense, if achievement score got reset.
I'm glad they're fixing the premature notification issue. It's really not a big deal, but can definitely frustrate you at the end of a hard-fought Battlegrounds run.
or the classes' collection achievement before the pack is even opened ... kinda kills it
Thanks for the news, Flux!
I wonder who will eat the shoe this time :D
So sorry Avalon, I had to do it! ♡
So the meme is born.
I don't like this
I don't want to be a heel. and it is meant tongue in cheek, but it is the sole wish of much of the membership.
Hope I didn't put my foot in it.
You just need some ketchup.
I remeber the Polkeltgate but what was the bet this time?