In tonight's Hearthstone Community Q&A, Dean Ayala let us know about a possible upcoming feature that the team has been talking about - Crafting Hero Portraits.
- The team has been brainstorming UI and the engineering to let players craft Hero Portraits.
- Heroes would probably need to have an exclusivity window before they become craftable.
- There are a lot of previous heroes, which would give people lots of stuff to spend their currency on.
- Card backs were also mentioned.
While nothing confirms that we will be getting this into the future, and you should never use this information to say that Blizzard breaks promises - Dean has been wonderful lately giving us great insight into development - we do wonder what you think. Would you like to obtain older hero portraits through crafting? We don't know if this would be something that would use Arcane Dust or Gold, so feel free to tell us about your opinions on that too!
Quote From Dean Ayala The Jaina card and Sylvanas portrait from the Anduin Book of Heroes have amazing art, any chance we ever see them or some of the other solo adventure portraits as purchasable alt heroes?
we've been doing some brainstorming around what UI and Engineering cost would be to make craftable hero portraits a thing (Source)
there would probably be some exclusivity window to what they are a part of then they'd become craftable. This is tbd for now but I think players would like it and I'm all for finding ways for players to spend their currency. (Source)
If a player is hoarding currency is generally means the decision around buying something is too difficult or there is nothing compelling to buy. Both make me :( (Source)
So more things to use your stuff on can be upside there, we have lots of cardbacks and portraits so sounded like a good thing to explore (Source)
Comments
Let me spend my achievement points on hero skins.
I wonder if they would make another currency for portraits. Possibly one that you can get only by DEing other portraits or spending real world money. If they do use the same arcane dust, I'm guessing a portrait will cost more than a legendary. There could be different "rarities" too.
Been playing consistently since Naxx & have saved up >100k dust over the years. I'd absolutely craft cool card backs & hero portraits! Fantastic idea.
Same here! I don´t like to craft many cards, it sucks, that you can´t use your dust for anything else, f.e. card backs, heroes, coins, or even exchange it for some amount of gold. I´d definitely like to have more options.
If yhey make the exclusive prepurchase skins craftable it may affect their income - why to buy a big pack if I can buy packs with gold and craft the skin later on.
Question: are there games where ‘exclusive’ skins become after some time easily obtainable?
Well, more options is always good, even if I would almost never spend my gold/dust to craft hero portraits.
Then again, at some point I might be tempted to get Khadgar if only because I need another mage portrait that's not Jaina.
Um... what?!?!
First part: Too difficult to decide what to spend my hoarded currency on?! No. I've already decided. I'm spending it on the next expansion!
Statement overall: Makes me feel like Dean is trying to say we should not be hoarding gold and dust, but just spending it recklessly. And if we don't do that we are making him feel sad. He may as well have just come out and said "Don't save your gold or dust! Just spend real money to get cards!" I know they need to make real money, and believe me I am usually one of the people giving it to them 3x a year, but this statement just irks me a bit. As if they either don't get how or why people would budget their gold, or they are trying to guilt people into not hoarding resources and just blowing it all.
I don't think you are interpreting him correctly. He's not upset that players are hoarding gold for the next expansion, because when the next expansion comes that gold gets spent. That's expressly saving up for something, not just hoarding it because you don't know what to do with it.
What he's more bothered by is gold/dust that just never gets spent and keeps rising over time. Take @forcemajeure's comment above as an example: that's >100k dust that they (presumably) don't spend because there is nothing compelling enough for them to craft. If they never spend it, then that dust might as well not even be there.
There are various reasons why players might accumulate these resources and never use them up, but Dean's point is that they could do better at giving players something to use their growing reserves on.
I’m sure you’re right, and I get it. I also get that he’s responding quickly on Twitter, but his words without more context just irked me and came off wrong. Maybe I interpreted it differently than intended because he’s already said stuff like giving players packs as rewards instead of gold is better because (paraphrasing) “it takes one complicated layer of decision making away”. So I came into the comment already feeling belittled as a dumb player that can’t decide how to spend my gold...
I really like the art from the PVE content but this just sounds like an excuse, now i don't know alot about all the internal makings of a game but it's a PNG that you already have in the game... what is the cost that i aint looking at
That one was not about the portrait itself, but rather about the tech behind it. They have to modify the collection to allow players to craft the portrait, which could be difficult since the collection Manager was never made for crafting portraits.They have to find solutions to questions like:
Can you DE skins? And if yes, where do you put the DE button, because the flavor text and "set favorite" part already takes a large part of the UI. It also raises the question how you differentiate craftable and uncraftable Portraits in the collection and if it's okay to keep the current View with only 6 heroes at a time if you plan to add more skins even more frequently.
The problems are definetely not just tied to "how to implement an png".
I mean, they haven't figured out how to make more than 18 deck slots, so it is probably quite tricky for them.
;p
Why stop at 18 when you can just make it 255 slots? At some point, design needs to take precedence and say, "Hold the F up. We cant just keep incrementing a number. We gotta put some design into this bad boy and make it look and feel good."
I know it's a meme with the 18 slots but some people genuinely dont get it and really think they should just bump the number up.
TWENTY SEVEN HERE WE COME!!!
the 18 deckslots is prolly due how game was prignaly made/designed and like the backpack in WoW its a giant hassle that effects evrything to be able to change it. Due being old code and and just alot of spaghettii code
That was unexpected - but I like this news