Nathan Lyons-Smith, Hearthstone's Executive Producer, has issued a statement after the Hearthstone community was disappointed in a lack of a new board with the launch of Perils in Paradise. The statement, which was promised last week, talks about the future of Hearthstone and what Blizzard is building towards. Hearthstone has been out for 10 years now, and he discusses getting it ready for another 10 years.

The post, which can be found below, was a great read for anyone who is enthusiastic about Hearthstone, but it can be boiled down:

  • They are not ready to make any detailed announcements today.
  • Over the past year and a half they understand they have not been good at communicating changes. This will change going forward.
    • "We will ensure that you get early visibility on changes like this and give you more information on what we’re working on instead."
  • Arena's popularity has increased with them supporting the mode more.
    • Currently, a "very cool update" is due for the start of next year for Arena.
  • We should expect a single game board to release every year.
  • They are working on a system to allow you to favourite game boards.
  • Pets confirmed for a way to customize what you have on the game board.
  • C'Thun's legendary hero skin was well received so they're working on more amazing skins.

These are all great points from the Hearthstone team and it'll be interesting to see how long it takes to deliver on them. With a "very cool" Arena update not being ready for another 5 months at least, hopefully they take some of that time to actually provide the promised transparency to give us a look at the development process and have players comment on the changes; It's not like they haven't promised that before. If they wait too long, they could mess with the core of the mode. But, speaking of Arena, does anyone else find it odd to bring it up?

Arena getting more players recently isn't a surprise. Duels died for Arena. Blizzard removed Duels from Hearthstone in April of this year, never coming out of beta, which lead players of the mode nowhere to go. If we go back a few months to January, Arena received a bunch of Duels treasures for the season before the Year of the Pegasus began. Announcing that it would be happening alongside the announcement of Duels being retired, it makes sense why the mode would receive a boost in popularity. This wasn't Arena itself just getting better, it was the death of a beloved niche part of the game.

Blizzard can try and drive the public narrative however they want, but every time we've seen "we'll be more open" typically results in a short-boost of developers talking about things, typically right before an expansion is announced, and then a we're back to silence. And that's not to discredit the efforts of people at Blizzard like RidiculousHat who have joined the Hearthstone team more recently and has been a champion of sharing as much as possible, but why doesn't Blizzard share things in a more public way (the official site) instead of on a personal Twitter account? They've claimed in the past that if you post officially, now you need to localize it into every language they maintain for Hearthstone, but thats a cop out; Everyone ends up translating everything anyway in the community, with the main English site being relied on by everyone, maybe not China. You're driving people to personal accounts for communication out of the laziness of actually hiring people to do more localization of communication.

All that to say it's tough to trust a development team when for 10 years, although there have been improvements, there is much to be desired from the Hearthstone team. It's really easy to improve yourself by a factor of 5 when you started at 0.1.

Here's the full quote from Nathan on what we can expect from the future. Let us know in the comments your thoughts.

Quote From Nathan Lyons-Smith

Well met, Hearthstone community.

Nathan Lyons-Smith here, following up on last week’s promise to give you more visibility on our strategy for Hearthstone.

As someone who’s been playing Hearthstone since the Beta days, I’m passionate about making sure this game we all love keeps thriving. As the Executive Producer, it’s also my job to look after the game’s health, our incredible team, and our equally incredible community.

We are doing meaningful research and development for the future of Hearthstone to ensure that the Tavern will be a home for you for another decade and beyond. While we are not ready to share any information about this work yet—and will not be for a while—I want you to know that we are committed to Hearthstone as we know it today, and that this work is happening alongside what I will detail below.

We made some changes over the past 18 months that were not what you’ve come to expect from Hearthstone. We didn’t do a good job communicating our strategy around those changes. I apologize for that. Going forward, it is my goal to be more open. We should proactively share changes we are making with our community, alongside context around why we’re making these changes. I will start addressing that now.

Fun, Focus, and Fearless

Our strategy for Hearthstone is based around three words: Fun, Focus, and Fearless.

Hearthstone delivers a special kind of fun; the ah-ha moments and the puzzle-y combat, alongside the game’s unique look and feel.  We strive every day to provide tools that inspire you to experience the game your way, so that Hearthstone can offer you your own brand of fun.

Constructed, Battlegrounds, and Arena are the modes that our community plays the most, and where you see us making the largest updates—like you saw with Battlegrounds Duos earlier this year. Focusing on these modes allows us to make more meaningful improvements to areas that impact the vast majority of our community.

We want to be fearless in the pursuit of discovering more fun experiences and strive to move beyond the status quo to do so. We saw one such opportunity in Arena. Over the last eight months, the Arena community has been energized by some small-yet-impactful design changes. Early access to expansion cards, new draft rules, and curated card pools have had a profound impact on the game mode. This has worked out great – the popularity of Arena has shot way up, and so we want to do more. We are now working on a substantial and very cool update for Arena, and we are aiming to release it at the beginning of next year.

Taking bold and focused steps are the kinds of decisions our team are committed to. We appreciate your passion for Hearthstone, and we won't always be perfect, but our promise is that we will listen and react as quickly as possible. We will keep an eye on what isn’t working as well as we would like, while also doubling down and pushing further when we find something great.

Making space for innovation in personalization

When we decided not to make a board for Perils in Paradise, we should have let you know earlier. Moving forward, we will ensure that you get early visibility on changes like this and give you more information on what we’re working on instead.

We are still planning to release one new board per year, but we also have some ambitious ideas that we know will be a significant undertaking. Pulling back from three static game boards per year to one allows us to begin work  on the coolest possible dynamic stuff - like a system to choose your favorite boards, and pets(!). We’ve also heard so much positive feedback about C’Thun and so are working on some truly groundbreaking new hero skins. It’s TOO SOON to go into more detail about what’s coming, but we will fast-track putting all existing Hearthstone boards into the Standard format board rotation.

We also surveyed a large group of you to ask what cosmetics would be most interesting. The responses were predominantly around further personalization of the playspace, and this feedback reinforced our desire to innovate and challenge what we have always done.

Thank you for the feedback

Hearthstone is here to stay. While it has evolved and adapted over the past 10 years, one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that there is an amazing team behind it, with as much passion and energy as ever. We have a fantastic upcoming slate of cards and themes, exploring new stories that can be told within Azeroth and beyond, as well as events and features that we hope will surprise and delight you all.

Many members of the team (myself included) lurk in the Hearthstone communities because we’re huge fans of the game AND because we want your feedback. We have a shared passion and love for this game and want it to be the best it can be so we can enjoy it together. As a team, we frequently talk about what we are seeing and hearing from you, and we need to make this more of a two-way conversation. With that in mind, I commit to checking in here with you again before the end of the year to keep you updated with any further strategy changes.

Until then, we hope you’re enjoying Perils in Paradise and exploring new fun with the Tourists. We’ll see you in the Tavern!

-Nathan