Ben Brode has been doing quite a bit of interacting with the community lately. He discussed the Standard Rotation, and will be doing a live developer’s insights and answering questions live on Twitch tomorrow.
He took to Reddit last night to discuss the topic of Hearthstone starter decks on Reddit:
Those decks (and I believe you’re talking about the ones players unlock when they first unlock a class – we call them ‘Basic Decks’ internally) have some specific goals.
- The decks should include the basic cards that you unlocked when you unlocked the class. There are 5 of these so 10 cards in each deck are class cards. This is a little light, and with any less a deck could just feel like a deck of all neutral basic minions. There aren’t any swaps to make besides neutral minions because players don’t own any other class cards yet.
- The power level should start fairly low. We quickly give players new basic cards and classic packs. The feeling of earning new cards and making your deck better makes the early part of Hearthstone a lot more fun. Starting at a higher power level means less opportunity for progression.
- Building a deck is one of the biggest hurdles for new players. A year ago, you had to start from scratch, and we made a change which gave new players editable decks (instead of empty slots) so that their first deck building experience would be taking out Magma Rager and putting in Frost Bolt. (Or something similar). The Innkeeper gets up in your face to recommend you add it to your deck and we glow buttons to guide you to the right place. This flow (we think) is better than starting from scratch in a world where some players may not understand the concept of a mana curve yet. Putting a couple obviously bad cards in the decks makes this first edit hopefully a little easier. To give you some context, new players who used our old auto-deckbuilder (which we’ve since improved, it was essentially random except for a basic mana curve before) were much more likely to win games than those who built their own decks. The addition of deck recipes (especially the ‘classic’ ones) was also intended to help with this problem.
- Giving new players powerful decks only helps if they are playing against players who aren’t also new (because otherwise they are both using low power decks, which is fine). In Casual, we only pit new players against other brand new players for a period of time, unless a player’s collection passes some internal metric that makes them unsuitable to continue playing in that matchmaking pool. Even outside of that, player win percentages in Casual are close enough to 50% that we aren’t seeing major detriment from lower power decks. Note that this definitely wasn’t always the case. We’ve been making big improvements to the new player Casual Matchmaker experience since many of you may have started playing, and this is a continuing area of focus for us. Ranked is another story. Because we match on stars (and not MMR, except for Legend), we don’t currently differentiate between new players and those that just haven’t played in long enough to drop to rank 25. This is either a failing of the ladder system or the fact that we let new players screw themselves by unlocking Ranked too early.
I do think there is a lot of room for improvement in our new player experience. I just wanted to help give some context for where some of our goals are (or have been in the past).
[Source]
Any game that is F2P, but has in game purchases, will always put the F2P players at a disadvantage. Even if you couldn’t use real money in HS, there’s players who can’t play as much due to job/family/other commitments such as myself compared to those who will play the game 20+ hours a day, such as it is with any other game.
Deck recipes in game were pointless when a top meta deck is just one Google search away. All they do for new players is to illustrate how many cards they’re missing.
The biggest help to new players was the introduction of Wild and Standard. When a players first starts the game, they don’t have this insane collection of cards to start from scratch with new cards added every few months. They can just focus on standard.
The worst aspect for F2P players is the adventures costing 700 gold per wing, or having to buy them in order rather than buying the wings they need for specific cards.
Money, money, money!
That’s it.
They’ll never talk about how unfair is the crafting system, and how it hurts the income of new players. All that speech about “the new players experience” is only a way of evade the real problem of hearthstone: Blizzard’s greed.
I’d say I don’t agree with you. I feel the crafting system is incredibly fair, its not meant so u can make a golden legendary from a couple commons, its 1/4 of the cost to make it when you DE it, the only exception is commons which is 5 dust. The only issue I have is that I wish there was something we could do with our duplicate cards without DEing them. Maybe trading them or something. But I dont feel the crafting system is unfair.
Is unfair, 1/4 is too much. We’re talking about a card game. Card games are expensive, but when you pay for it, you pay for a collectible item that gets value over time, and a collective item that can be traded or sold when you get bored, or when you need the money. Instead, when you pay for Hearthstone, your money dies.
(OK… you pay for a fun game experience, but that nice experience doesn’t worth it THAT much)
Hearthstone is a game that pushes you to spend money on it, because if you want to be good in the F2P way, you need to spend a LOT of time to be good with the daily quest system.
If you take the next step, and spend a bit of money on it, you only get slightly better than a F2P player, and when you reach a good level, BAM!! new expansion, new meta, and your expensive old gods get no value, and only worth 1/4 of that new legendary that doesn’t show up in your packs.
To be good or to have the chance of experiment with new competitive strategies (taking the next level if you’re a “netdecker”), or to have a good deck for every class, you need to pay to win. I’m not against paying for this awesome game, I’m saying that what they want for it is TOO MUCH, too much for a game that doesn’t need a lot of resources as Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, or Overwatch, as an example, games whose cost is equivalent to 60 packs OR 3 adventures.
And… that’s why I think that the 1/4 value is unfair. Very unfair.
It’s similar to how Brode was saying that they don’t want legend to be extremely easy to reach, Legendaries are meant to be an HOOOOO SHIIIIIIIT BOIIIII moment and have you get super hyped. Then the moment a golden legendary shows up in that pack you get from the brawl, even if its so trash legendary, you still get a full legendary of your choice from it. Its not meant for you to craft a card, realize you don’t like it, and DE it and make the next one. Its meant to be risk and reward and people that are better at the game than us and spend way more cash on it to get a lot of these cards help us with seeing how cool these cards can be without spending the dust. Its meant to be a “Should I do this, will I get it in another pack, what if it’s bad”. And while yes I get it and getting dailies done is important, it ends up being a very rewarding when you get them. The absolute worst thing for me is that DEing a dupe legendary is the only thing you can do with it, I wish there is something else to do with them to get cards as well. But I do not think the 1/4 system is meant to be something that doesnt require risk and I don’t feel it needs a change
Really? Yes, it’s a F2P game that includes elements that generate revenue. Either they get revenue this way (making the experience largely free for many people) or they require everyone to P2P by charging for expansions (see Waterdeep, Agricola, Star Realms, etc.). You are complaining because the company has chosen to allow you to play without paying them anything when they could require you to pay before you can play at all. Either way, someone has to pay because Blizzard is not a charity.
As for the costs associated with their IAP, I don’t understand why this is an issue, either. You pay $1 for a guaranteed Rare. You pay more than that for physical CCGs. Yes, you get a physical card then (blah, blah, blah), but you also end up with a huge box of worthless cards that become coasters because they are duplicates, crappy cards, and/or commons that nobody wants. The crafting system is brilliant, and something they can only provide with a digital game.
Please, stop the moaning about Blizzard being a company that wants revenue. If they were only about money then the player experience would suffer and nobody would be playing the game. If YOU don’t like it then go play MtG or something like that. I’m certain the other game companies must be the charitable institutions you seem to think Blizzard should be to be successful.
Again:
“I’m not against paying for this awesome game, I’m saying that what they want for it is TOO MUCH, too much for a game that doesn’t need a lot of resources as Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, or Overwatch, as an example, games whose cost is equivalent to 60 packs OR 3 adventures.”