Dean “Iksar” Ayala is a Lead Designer on the Hearthstone team, and he’s been doing weekly Q&A sessions on Twitter for a while now. They usually happen on Wednesdays, afternoon-evening Pacific Time (but he moves them to a different time slot or day occasionally, such as around big releases). People have been asking lots of questions about the game’s balance, design, specific cards, mechanics, and so on. Sadly, Twitter is kind of a mess when it comes to such things. Messages are short, you have to create long threads if you want to talk about something in detail, lots of comments get hidden, and it just doesn’t flow right. To make it a bit easier for all of you, just like during the previous weeks, I went through all of his replies and decided to make a summary of his most important talking points.
If you want to read the full Q&A – all the questions and answers – here’s the Tweet you should go to:
Hearthstone AMA #26
5:00PM – 6:00PM PST
Ask me a question about Hearthstone!
Or Design! (or anime…)
I’ll go through each question and answer all I can in a few hours. See you then! pic.twitter.com/a30bNAxyoq
— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) August 20, 2021
Below, you will find my summary. It’s still pretty long, but Iksar tends to answer the questions thoroughly and includes a lot of details. I try to ignore “fluff” answers and not repeat points that have been already discussed in his recent Q&A’s, so if you want to learn more, go back to them. And if you want to read his full replies on all topics, check out the Tweet above. Things in parentheses are my own notes/comments and not Dean’s words. Let’s start:
- The team is talking about adding titles/avatars into the game, we might see something next year.
- They most likely won’t add official deck tracking to the game. Most of players don’t need it and those who do need it already have tool available.
- No plans to update the Dust system. If they want to make the game cheaper, there are better ways than incentivizing players to destroy their cards.
- Wild is “hidden” from new players for a reason – it’s a much more complex format. But they thought about adding an option to purchase entire older sets at much lower cost than through packs. They would have to get around players just buying it to disenchant everything, though.
- Wild balance philosophy won’t likely change going forward – it’s not their intention for it to become Standard 2.0. They only want to address the biggest outliers (either power level or how they feel playing against). Currently, Warlock is still an outlier, so they will likely hit it with some more minor adjustments.
- Iksar thinks that they already have too many evergreen keywords, so it’s unlikely that Tradeable becomes one – but if anything, it will probably replace one of the currently existing ones.
- New cards aren’t designed with them being added to Battlegrounds at a later date in mind. Constructed & BG designs are completely separate.
- Dean could see them bringing back Magnetic for the right expansion (talking about the right expansion, another Mech-related set would be nice, it’s been 3 years since Boomsday Project!)
- No plans to add leaderboards for achievement points.
- Battlegrounds will get more “out of game systems” (so things that aren’t part of the gameplay – we didn’t get any examples, but he means stuff like Quest system or reward track) next year.
- When it come to the biggest design challenges, power creep is one. The game gets faster and more swingy because of it, but in order to prevent it, they would need to release an expansion with pretty much no impact. Another design challenge is that new/returning players always feel behind, even if they start/come back at the time of rotation because there are 3 sets from last year in Standard.
- All of the Book of Heroes skins will be purchasable with gold at one point, but they want to keep a longer period of exclusivity for people who purchased them with real money.
- They considered buffing other Mage cards to compensate for the Flow nerf, but didn’t feel like it was necessary.
