Hearthstone's second single-player adventure, Blackrock Mountain, has been out in its entirety for nearly two weeks now. We spoke to Team 5's Senior Producer Yong Woo and Senior Game Designer Mike Donais about the launch, the unstoppable rise of Grim Patron, recent lag issues, Arena rewards, the state of Shaman, the Druid combo and, of course, Dr. Balanced.
PC Gamer: So you recently announced on Twitter that Hearthstone had 30 million players. How many of those are active in a typical month?
Yong Woo — Senior Producer
Yong Woo: We don’t really talk about those type of specific numbers unfortunately, but we’re really excited about a lot of new players that were coming in from the release on mobile and a lot of returning players as well, so it’s been really exciting.
So is that number just registered accounts then? What does that number mean?
YW: Those are 30 million players that have played Hearthstone.
There’s obviously been a huge influx of new people with the phone versions rolling out. What's been the feedback in terms of people using the user interface? I think you’ve done a great job of cramming it onto phone screens, but I did notice a Hunter who Quick Shot-ed his own face last night who I think was probably on phone. I mean he had it coming obviously...
Mike Donais — Senior Game Designer
Mike Donais: That was a karma thing. We have that built into the game.
YW: The feedback has been really great. I think a lot of people just pick it up and are like “wow, at first I didn't even notice a difference because everything just felt right,” but then you look at it side-by-side with the PC version and it’s dramatically different in some regards. I’m very proud of our UI team in making it natural and easy to use on phone, but at the same time maintaining that same look and feel and that physical charm.
Since the phone version came out there have been days where there seemed to be severe lag, even on desktop. Is that something related to the phone version, and are you confident it’s fixed now?
YW: We’re continuing to invest in our infrastructure. We did have some hiccups, but our team has been working really hard. At this point, all the known issues that we’re aware of are off the plate. Obviously, if any new issues pop up we’re going to continue to take care of them as well.
[Since our interview Blizzard has given two free packs to EU players to compensate for the spotty connection. Nonetheless, there has been more EU downtime this week - Ed]
So the big theme of Blackrock Mountain was the Dragons. How do you think those cards have bedded in versus the Mechs of Goblins vs Gnomes? Because I feel like they haven’t quite taken off in the same way.
MD: Goblins vs Gnomes was a big set, so there was a lot more different Mechs to work with. Actually the most popular deck at first was the Paladin control deck, but within the first month people did experiment with Mechs in a lot of different classes, like Druids and Warriors. All kinds. Now we've finally got all the Dragon cards, people are starting to experiment with different Dragon decks. We've seen Dragon Warrior, Dragon Paladin, Dragon Priest... even Dragon Warlock. People are learning about which one works and which doesn't. Some people need to see a Dragon deck show up in a tournament before they’re comfortable running it, because they’re not confident deck builders themselves. but I've seen a lot of experimentation and every day there’s a new version or new tweaks. Within a month or so people will have a bit more of an understanding of what’s out there and how good it is.
I tried to get Dragon Druid to work last night but I think it might be bad.
MD: Yeah, Druids don’t have any specific Dragons, but they have the mana to play expensive cards so I think with Innervate and Wild Growth they could turn out to be a good Dragon deck.
I talked myself into thinking Blackwing Corrupter might be the card Druid needs because it gives you removal and a body, but…
MD: Yeah, Corrupter sounds fantastic in Druid.
As long as people are excited about trying new things, and they’re not quite sure what the best version of something is, it’s really good for us because that’s one of the most fun parts of Hearthstone.
It’s a work in progress. Now that we’re a bit further away from Goblins vs Gnomes, have you got any plans to change the way Arena rewards work so that players can choose to get Classic packs or Goblins vs Gnomes?
YW: You know, we've been getting a lot of feedback on that. Feedback is really important to us, so we've been discussing that a lot. We don’t have anything to announce, but we do intend to look into that.
Another piece of feedback that’s been quite prevalent in the community recently is the discussion of the way ladder works. I’ve seen a few threads on the Hearthstone subreddit andNoxious and Kripp both did videos about how they felt ladder was intrinsically unrewarding. Do you have any plans to rework ladder so that there are more tiers of rewards between rank 20 and Legend, or perhaps extending the season?
MD: We definitely talked about both of those options—the idea of changing how the reward structure works, or extending the seasons—and they’re both reasonable options. We’re trying to find out which we think is best, and maybe there’s something else that hasn't been mentioned yet. One of the things we care a lot about is intrinsic rewards versus extrinsic rewards. So, like, are you playing a game for fun and you don’t feel like “oh I have to play, and now that I played and hit so-and-so number and got X reward, I’m done playing.” A lot of people just play Hearthstone because they enjoy playing Hearthstone, not because they need any reward. That mindset is the kind of mindset we’d like to maintain, whatever changes we do make.
Do you think one option might be to have players shed fewer ranks [at reset]? Because you plunge right back down, and then there’s that mad rush at the start of the season where everyone’s playing Zoo and Face Hunter to climb as quickly as they can.
MD: It’s very possible that the amount of stars that you keep versus how many you lose is not quite right yet. It’s something we’ve also discussed. At the same time, though, we do see a surge of activity both at the end of seasons and the beginning, so that points to the reset having some value for players because they feel more inclined to play at the end or at the start. So we have to keep an eye on that. That’s a vote in favor of keeping the short seasons.
Post-Blackrock Mountain I’m definitely seeing a lot of different classes and decks represented, but before the release there were a couple months in which Face Hunter and Mech Mage were really dominant. The biggest complaint from players was that unless you teched against those decks, you didn't really stand a chance. Do you think it’s just a case that there will always be aggro decks and people will always moan about them, or do you get concerned about how fast and aggressive the meta can be?
MD: Yeah, we definitely keep an eye on that. One of the things is the cheaper decks are often aggressive, so you’ll see a higher percentage of them even if they’re not more powerful. Also, obviously, they get quick games in, so that’s another reason you see a lot of people leaning towards them. But, like you said, the meta is fairly healthy. You see a lot of different classes, and even in those classes sometimes you’ll see two or three different decks, so that’s been really cool for us. We want to keep maintaining the variety of classes and the variety of decks within each class. The other thing that’s important is just giving people room to experiment. As long as people are excited about trying new things, and they’re not quite sure what the best version of something is, it’s really good for us because that’s one of the most fun parts of Hearthstone. Just trying out new deck ideas and seeing how they do and feeling like you own that version of the deck.
[There’s an interesting article here on Liquid Hearth which argues aggro decks are actually important to the health of the game - Ed]
On the next page: Casual not being casual, and whether Grim Patron or Dr. Boom needs a nerf.
What is the best place for players to experiment, though? Because it’s definitely not on the ladder. Even fairly low down people are netdecking very powerful decks that you’ll struggle against with something experimental, and if you go into Casual you’ll find people playing the exact same decks to do daily quests. Have you thought about creating a more friendly mode where there’s nothing to be won or lost, and people will be more inclined to try off-the-wall decks?
MD: Yeah, that’s a really good point. It’s something we have talked about. Like you said, if there were no rewards for playing in one of the formats, then people would be playing it purely for fun and to try stuff out instead of to complete their daily quests. We’ll keep talking about that and see if we can find a good place to encourage experimentation.
How do you assess the success of a new set of cards? Do you base it on the number which get into regular rotation? It feels to me like Naxx had a particularly high take up of its new cards, whereas of the Blackrock set only Grim Patron has spawned a top tier deck that didn't exist before. Other cards like Emperor Thaurissan, Quick Shot and Flamewaker offer upgrades to existing archetypes. Do you have an internal review where you look back and decide whether a set was successful?
MD: For me, my main goal is not actually to get cards into decks permanently, but to have people experiment with new ideas a lot, which is slightly different. So, for example, Flamewaker caused people to try out decks with tons of spells in them. And some people had some success with that, but more importantly they experimented with it. So even if the Dragon decks, after a month of experimentation, don’t end up being the best decks—as long as people have had a lot of fun trying things out, then we've succeeded in one of our main goals. Grim Patron has shown up in a couple classes even though we expected it to be mainly Warrior or mainly Mage, and that’s pretty awesome too.
We’re still learning about Hearthstone, we’re learning about expansion releases and trying things out.
I saw Savjz getting wrecked by a Grim Patron Priest with Wild Pyromancers on stream. On the subject of Grim Patron, isn't that combo a bit dangerously close to the old Warrior one-turn-kill?I find it infuriating because I feel like I've been punished for having any dudes with lower than 3 attack on the board, but I also get punished when I don’t play dudes.
Yeah, that’s actually something we test a lot, and we think about and talk about a lot. The idea that there’s certain kinds of simple decks—like Druid decks where you play creatures, and you attack with them, and you play removal spells—but we also want our game to have some depth and richness. So, Gadgetzan Auctioneer went in a totally different direction, where you [rely on drawing into] some kind of combo. We want there to be a variety of deck types that feel very different, and make the game feel like it has a lot of depth.
Grim Patron
The Grim Patron does that. It shows our game has some depth, and you can do some crazy stuff, but at the same time we don’t want players to not have any defence. If there’s nothing you can do against a Grim Patron deck, and it kills you in one turn for example, that’s a problem. So we watch that stuff really closely. We always try to add a little bit of craziness to the game and let people discover it. When we put Grim Patron in we didn't know exactly how good it was going to be. We had a good idea, because we played it a lot. We knew there was going to be some variance once people figured out what the best version was, and what the meta was going to be. I think we’re going to keep making some crazy cards in every set that are dangerous and hopefully going to work out.
Does that mean Grim Patron is on the watch list as a card that could be problematic?
MD: We’re always watching the meta game and Reddit and the forums, but it looks totally fine to me right now. It’s pretty healthy, it’s powerful, it’s a new deck type, it’s fun. One week it’s like “wow, Grim Patron decks are the strongest this week”, but the next week it’s like “Oh… a totally different deck is really strong right now.” So I think there’s enough variety right now that it’s not actively something we’re thinking about.
YW: I think it took some time for Grim Patron to actually be taken seriously. When it first came out, it was like “Oh hey, it’s this funny thing you can do”, and then it took time for people to learn how to play it very well. And now it’s taking the community time to understand how to play against it. I think the dust is still settling, we’re taking a look at it, but the fun thing is people are experimenting, trying new things, and then countering those new things in new ways. That’s exciting to us.
I know you won’t be nerfing Patron anytime soon Yong, I’ve seen you climbing pretty fast with it.
YW: You know the hilarious thing about that is that I try to only play decks that I don’t think others are playing, so if a deck gets popular I feel like I can’t play it anymore.
[You can find a guide to Yong Woo’s own Grim Patron Warrior deck here - Ed]
The other card that’s been discussed a lot in terms of balance is Dr. Boom. I actually think he’s fine, and defended him on this site, but when so many of the pros at tournaments are joking and calling him 'Dr. Turn 7', 'Dr. Balanced' and 'Dr. GG', it’s almost become an accepted thing that he’s unbalanced. How do you feel about him?
MD: We’re keeping an eye on him, but I’m pretty happy with the fact people are playing a 7-drop even in the rush decks. There hasn’t been a 7-cost minion that’s been playable for a long time, maybe ever. So I’m totally fine with people playing Dr. Boom. I would like to see more variety in the 7-drops, like if he was a class card and other classes had different 7-drop minions I’d slightly prefer that, but that comes with time and new cards being released. He’s very strong, though. He’s an awesome card.
If he was a class card, I’m pretty sure everyone would be playing that class. You’ve done two adventures now and the expansion—are you still looking for alternative methods of distributing cards? I would be really keen to see a card of the week or card of the month, so people got that regular influx of experimentation you were talking about earlier.
MD: The idea of changing the meta more often is a cool idea. We don’t have any plans to do that right now, but who knows in the future. We’re still learning about Hearthstone, we’re learning about expansion releases and trying things out. So in the future we could do something like that, but we don’t have any plans yet.
On the next page: the state of Shaman, helping new players, and future expansions.
Shaman is widely regarded as being towards the bottom of the classes and Lava Shock doesn’t seemed to have fixed the issues with the old Overload cards being underpowered. Are there any plans to revisit the way Overload works?
MD: One of the cool things about Overload is it’s specific to Shaman, so it gives us room to make Shaman decks that are different from other Shaman Decks. In the future we could make a Shaman deck that has a lot of Overload cards, and “Overload matters” cards. Lava Shock is a step in that direction. Like you said, people don’t play a lot of the Overload cards because the individual cards are not powerful enough, but with new set releases that could change. We could just push some Overload cards and suddenly Lava Shock’s value goes up and people have a version of the Shaman deck that includes Overload. Shaman, though, has performed very highly with a new Mech deck, even though GvG has been out for months. People have been having a lot of success with it. Sajvz recently played it and reminded people about it, but a lot of people have been using it at very high ranks and doing very well.
As someone who plays a lot of Druid, I know how much my opponents dislike losing to the Force of Nature-Savage Roar combo. Personally, I think it’s balanced fine, but the combo creates an issue in that all the new Druid cards you design have to be balanced with it in mind so as to not make it feel degeneratively powerful. Isn't that a bit suffocating from a design point of view? Because if you look at the Druid cards that have come out since vanilla Hearthstone, none of them see regular use.
MD: Yeah that’s actually true for a few different classes. Warlock has a very strong hero power, and some very strong cards, so it doesn't gain as much from new expansions because it’s tough for us to improve that. Same with Face Hunter. You’ll notice that Face Hunter has only gotten one card basically in the last year or two. So we have to be really careful to design cards that push it in another direction. So, for example, with Druid maybe we could make Token Druid better, or we could make Beast Druid better. But it’s because of things like Ancient of Lore and Innervate and Wild Growth and Keeper [of the Grove]—all these very strong core Druid cards that could go in any deck—we do have that problem you described. And we talk about how to solve that, and hopefully we’ll have some solutions in the future.
I think that Hearthstone doesn’t want to be tied just to the World of Warcraft MMO. We want to be tied to the whole Warcraft world.
It feels like with both Druid and Shaman, there’s just a staple set of cards you have to include. I wonder, long-term, how you’re going to battle that versus power creep.
MD: The main thing is by building alternate versions, like Dragon Druid or Token Druid or Beast Druid. If we can push a new direction, that’s our best design goal for stuff like that, and that’s why we tried to make Mech Mage and Dragon Paladin.
Are there some cards which are fun and flavorful which don’t see play because they were nerfed in the past, but might be less problematic now? I’m thinking of Novice Engineer, Nat Pagle and stuff like that.
Unstable Portal
MD: If there’s a card that we like the design for, we try to figure out what part of the design we like, and then make new cards that capture that idea really well. Like Unstable Portal is one of the cards that many people have said is their favorite card. We find out what we like about Unstable Portal and make more cards that capture that particular aspect in different ways in the future. Novice Engineer is not a card I like. I don’t like card draw in Neutral cards like that. It’s too easy to put in your deck, and it’s just like you’re playing a 28-card deck. So I don’t see that as a direction I’m going to push in, but there are a bunch of other ideas in the same vein that I do like. We are going to keep adding new cards that capture the goodness of it.
Are you going to do anything to help new players coming in? How about selling pre-built decks that wouldn't include all the flashy cards, but would get you a rudimentary version of, say, token Druid?
YW: Taking care of new players is absolutely a priority for us, and we have a designer who spends most of her time and effort thinking about it. We've already started pushing a little bit into that area, like we've introduced a new quest where you can play practice games and get rewarded with a pack early. The thing I’ve learned—again it’s a social experience thing—but I think those type of quests can really help new players. Watching their friends, and learning from that, provides ready access to something that’s very valuable: a Classic pack. And then, obviously, you mentioned some other cool ideas as well, but yes—we’re definitely already starting to push in that direction, and we’ll continue to do so.
PCG: And in terms of future expansions, are adventure modes a format you feel still work and are still going to be something the community enjoys?
MD: Yeah, people really responded well to [Blackrock Mountain]. It did really well. It lets you think about Hearthstone in different ways. It actually helps new players get more comfortable with deck building because of the narrow challenges. They’re like: “Oh wow, one of my minions is getting thrown into play every turn, I should play really big minions.” And they go and edit their decks, and they win, and go “wow, deckbuilding is easy, I can do this!” And they get more comfortable with it.
Nefarian
I thought it was nice that a lot of the battles quite subtly taught you about Hearthstone fundamentals like tempo.
MD: Yeah, there was a lot of different stuff going on, and it was also kind of flavorful and it had a good story. Hearthstone doesn't have a lot of that, so it’s nice to introduce that once in a while.
YW: Sorry [laugh] I was just smiling and had to stop. I was thinking about the last mission when you fight Nefarian again and I don’t know, he cracks me up every time. “Four fireballs, just kidding! Ten fireballs!”
Do you think you’ll still look at vanilla WoW raids for future adventures?
MD: I think that Hearthstone doesn't want to be tied just to the World of Warcraft MMO. We want to be tied to the whole Warcraft world, and I think we can do that by going in different directions, and I think that you’ll see more of that in the future. Just discovering our own things. Goblins vs Gnomes isn't like a big thing in World of Warcraft, but it’s still captured in the lore completely, so it was cool to do some things that aren't part of the lore and maybe get introduced in the future to World of Warcraft because they’re so cool and loved in Hearthstone.
Pirates vs Ninjas is what reddit says, and everyone knows Reddit is always right.
YW: My god there was a leak! [laughs]
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