You may have seen last week that Hearthstone's Game Director, Ben Lee, left the team and moved on to another project at Blizzard. This was quite a surprise announcement, being brought to us all via the Coin Concede podcast of all places, but that left a bit of an open-ended question - who was Hearthstone's next Game Director? There must always be a Lich King...
It was stated that there wasn't a new Game Director yet but Nathan Lyons-Smith, Executive Producer, would be assisting as they transitioned the role. Nathan took on the role of Executive Producer, a bump from Production Director, back in February of this year according to his LinkedIn profile. Maybe there's been some other activity - we've certainly seen plenty of promotions recently.
Yup! At the same time, a very familiar face will be a part of this transition as well as Dean "Hearthstone Dad" Ayala, also known as Iksar, has been moved into the Interim Game Director position last month according to an update on his LinkedIn profile.
Dean has worked on Hearthstone for quite some time!
We're not sure what this means for Dean's future on the team -
- What role will he take after the game finds a new Game Director?
- Could Dean make the transition to full Game Director?
What we do know though is that we're happy to see him at the helm, even temporarily, because he's given us plenty of community involvement in the past through his series of Community Q&As which have indicated he has great ideas for the game and has been a part of pushing Hearthstone in the right direction. Enjoy the promotion, Dean, we're glad to have you as Game Director, even temporarily, and hope you've still got plenty of years to go on Team 5.
If you were the Game Director of Hearthstone, what path would you lead the game on? What large-scale changes would you try to make to steer the ship? Let us know in the comments below.
Comments
time to show what you can do danny
Please, please, pleeeeeeease can we have the brawl block mode now Dean? Not just a tavern brawl, but an actual permanent mode with rotating sets every month
Arena has it, now we just need constructed to have it too
Congrats Dean!
The question would now be whos going to be the face of hearthstone now that Dean has been promoted to game director. Let's be honest here, Ben Lee hasn't exactly been making his presence known to the public, though assuredly he's working hard in the background. So Dean taking his role means no more usual Q&As from him now?
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?
Update: He did do a Q&A!
Excactly, remember Ben Brode was also very chatty all the time. I don't think it will decrease Dean's presence in his new role.
What about give us 2 standard mode: Fast (same as now, no change) and Control, this one for player who doesn't care play a 20-30 minutes game, where heroes have 30 more HP and some cards are banned (to prevent infinite dmg in one turn like shaman otk ecc.)
A permanent mini Nozdormu would be great. Just flip the fast mode switch. If both players flipped it then the turn timer is shorter than usual.
Aggro decks are important for the meta. They punish greedy combo players. Control decks are already built to beat aggro, so a mode with no aggro decks would just be combo spam.
Probably more fitting as a tavern brawl to be honest.
Even if they implement something like this, there's a high likelihood of a chance that all you'll be facing is that same control class, because control or not, there's always one class that does it better than everyone else. Take control priest for example, what odds are the chances it, or any other class, ever beating warrior in an attrition based control game, who can generate 2 health every turn and is not bound by the health cap.
And really, if such a mode exist, there's a fair chance it wont even be about control because I'll just be queuing deathrattle decks or the greediest decks available, which as we have seen in barrens meta, counters control easily. So control gets sidelined in the very mode its created for.
So essentially this solves nothing, brings in more complains, and is unlikely to ever be popular enough so even the queue timer would be 10 minutes long on average.
'Dean' huh? Hmmm, I guess it's close enough to 'Ben'. I would still feel better if he changes his name.
oh christ alive anyone but the guy on the team thats been pushing secret mage for years.
I miss Secret Mage. It required thinking to decide which secret to play, and which card to play to trigger the mage's secret. There was a skill floor to perform well with it and against it that isn't present in Pirate Warrior or any other wild aggro deck.
For years? The last time mage got secret deck support was during the Darkmoon faire expansion, and the last time before that was even more years ago. You are also heavily overestimating how much impact a single dev has.
great, now the next expansion will be naruto themed
I'm looking forward to the FMA and HxH expansions. Year of the Weeb hype