In tonight's community Q&A with Dean Ayala, he was out in full force answering community questions, and in some cases, surprising detail. One of the big highlights from tonight was an answer concerning player profiles which would contain more statistics than we have now.
Dean really wants to make it obvious here that this is exploratory and not confirmed to going live. With that said, let's jump into our recap on the matter and his series of tweets.
- They are exploring in-client statistics on player profiles.
- Dean is not sure how far they would want to expand it.
- He likes how Battlegrounds does stats, it feels "visual [and] Hearthstone".
- First step is to figure out what players what to know and how to represent it in a fun way.
I don't play as much as I'd like to, don't hurt me!
This may never end up coming to the game, so take it all with a grain of salt, but it does make us ask the question - What statistics would you like to see in-game? How would you like to seem them represented other than just large numbers of... numbers.
Quote From Dean Ayala Will you ever implement “in-client” statistics like the ones Chines player have? Or will the end of the month stats ever be back? Speacking of China: how is going the Tournament mode? Is there a chance we will set in the rest of the world?
we are in 'exploration' stages of player profile right now. It's something worth expanding upon but unclear to me how far. We don't want it to end up feeling like a place you go to see a mass of tiny numbers but I think the battlegrounds page does a good job. (Source)
It feels visual, it feels 'hearthstone', at least to me. First step is noting all the things that would be cool for players to know and finding a way to represent that in a fun and whimsical way. (Source)
ALERT ALERT I did say exploratory. Many things in exploratory never end up seeing the light of day, but it is something that is making it out of our heads into actual exploration. So that's a step! (Source)
No plans for tournament mode. We'd like to do more 'esport' like things in the client vs out of client but no update on that. Not because I'm being cryptic but just because there is nothing to say. (Source)
Comments
No interest in this at all, and I'd rather see the team spend its time on something else.
most of the stats are useless, and 2 of them are even visible wihtout the "perks", you just pay for 2 extra heroes in the selection, crappy emotes, playing new heroes 3 or 4 weeks arealier than the rest for some reason that still scapes my understanding and the chance to get a screenshot in your crazy boards after games, thing than you can still do during the match anyway
The fact that I have to "pay" to see my statistics in Battlegrounds already bugs me.
The fact that the statistics are so bare-bone bugs me even more.
Why can I only see the top 5 heroes for most played and most wins?
I want to see these stats for all the available heroes!
There always seems to be such a focus on competitiveness. It is a game. It is meant to be fun.
First of all, I would focus on other parts of the game than cosmetic statistics.
If I had to focus on stats, I would go with personal things. Such as: most used card (number of times played in a deck), most played card.
But, things like more deck construction functionality would be higher priority. 3 simple examples:
These things would make the player experience much better than some aggressive stats that a lot of (potential) players don't give a stuff about. And, to swing back to stats, things like the quick-swap pool could have stats.
These are great points. If the team had a Rehab Month, in which they set all else to the side and put everyone at work on quality of life improvements, taking Hearthstone into the new year, other PR garbage, that would be very, very welcome.
That said, playing other card games like Mythgard or Faeria helps me appreciate Hearthstone's collection manager. It's not terribly functional, no, but it is smooth and easy to use. Building decks in most other card games is a frustrating experience. Laggy lists, huge lists, odd menus, no search functionality, separate crafting and deckbuilding pages, et cetera.
You can already do that. Just go to the part where you set you favorite Hero/card back when editing a deck.
Ha ha!
They should make that a bit more obvious :)
It's a bit difficult for me to comment on because I always knew it was there, so of course it was obvious to me, but surely you must have noticed the tabs stick around when building a deck and were thinking 'I wish I could choose a hero for this deck'?
No judgement here, I'm just curious.
Hearthstone does not have an intuitive interface. The whole thing is a bit weird. When I first started, there were all sorts of things that I expected to find that aren't there. Or maybe they are! After a while I just gave up. So, to me, it is not surprising that there are things I missed.
Here's another one. I don't really keep that careful track of my card collection. Sometimes I see a deck and what I want to do is grab the deck code into Hearthstone, and when it shows me that I'm missing lots of expensive cards, I just want to delete it. But I can't. I have click 'done', accept that I don't want to auto-complete it, then click delete and confirm. Did I miss something there too?
No, you haven't missed anything on the deck deletion front. That's always been clunky, and I have been frustrated by it many times myself.
I don't understand why they're so apathetic towards a tournament mode. It's the obvious first step towards getting the casual player excited about competitive Hearthstone, which is a goal they've often shown interest in. They've already implemented two new modes this Hearthstone year, and that has to be more difficult than slapping a new shell over ranked play!
Profile statistics, though . . . it'd be neat to see how much damage you've dealt with a minion over time. And display it! Imagine being matched against someone whose entry text displays that they've dealt 3000 damage with Angry Chicken. The horror! What other ideas do y'all have?
These two things are generally mutually exclusive. By definition casual players don't generally want to play competitively. Yes, occasionally someone gets better, gets more vested in the game, or wants to improve and they become competitive but making this analogy is like saying:
"This is the first obvious step towards getting WC3 Custom Map players excited about Tournament WC3 mode."
Generally speaking people who play custom wc3 maps want nothing to do with ladder/tournament mode. Please don't cite the oddball example.
To put it yet ANOTHER way...
Spikes generally don't want to compete against Timmy, and Timmy doesn't want to compete against Spikes. They are fundamentally at odds with their goals in the game.
I don't necessarily agree with you. I've gotten five folks to pick up this game in the last few years. Among those, all of them turned to YouTube and Twitch for deckbuilding ideas and amusing content. They wanted to see what sort of decks and ideas professional players and content creators had, because there's a brain-smotheringly large amount of deck-building options out there.
Granted, those five were more interested in Legend play than they were in out-of-client happenings like tournaments. However, I believe that's because tournaments weren't on their radar. After all, tournament play isn't so different from high-rank Legend play - hype, professionals, cool decks, et cetera. One is shown in-client and one isn't - that's the difference. If tournaments were showcased on the front page of their experience, players would search in that realm for cool ideas, personalities, and decks as well.
If you want a real-world example of this, take Shadowverse, which often holds in-client casual tournaments for cosmetic rewards. They have ranked matchmaking for them and devs keep track of successful decks, showcasing the best or most interesting in-client at the end of each month. Most players participate in those, and if one of the decks showcased is a bit silly or memey, you know you'll inevitably see a fair amount of it on ladder as well. Casual players can enjoy tournaments.
Honestly, I'm pretty happy with what we have right now. One page displaying class level and total wins serves me fine.
If anything, I'd love to see Griffior's idea of Full Art cards implemented, which is somewhat related to player's profiles (quick example: deal lethal with Leeroy Jenkins 1.000 times to unlock his full art which will be used in game (only) for you). Griffior is the most creative guy I know in this area and this my favorite idea of his :)
One issue with all of this kind of stuff is avoiding to disappoint the longterm players. They either have to implement stuff based on data they're collecting anyway (which we don't know about, but certainly limits the possibilities) or focus on recent stuff like they did with achievements. Quite a challenge I think.
I would be fine if they showed totals
I can't understand who's decision it was to take them away
people who play arena that have 10k+ wins all of a sudden can only see the last highest win, like wtf, ofc it's gonna be 12
it was such a dumb decision imo
Total number of wins and total number of losses. That is the one thing that you'll either be bragging about or cowering in extreme fear from.
Or maybe a win rate percentage per season? Not sure if they could retroactively give us stats on every single win/loss since the beginning of time. I'd also be scared to know what those numbers are, coz I've been on quite a few losing streaks in the past x_x
More profile statistics like this would be really cool to see.
One thing I hope that they don't add to this is a total game record telling me the total number of losses I have. I absolutely hate it when games actively tell me how many losses I have because it horribly discourages me from actually playing the game as I don't want to add losses to my record.
I can't be bothered to look it up but if memory serves correct, I believe Ben Brode back in the day had said they really don't want to show you losses ever for exactly that reason. If it was him that said it, I hope its the one thing the team keeps from his vision.
I love win loss ratio, and I can easily track that with Hearthstone Deck Tracker so I don't need it in-game, but it definitely would not be good for most players for exactly the reason you described. Positive statistics, and fun ones like how many Murlocs you've played or how many times you killed someone in a single turn, are way better to see. Though one could certainly argue how positive or healthy OTK is, it is a fact of life for card games =D