Hearthstone’s Game Designer Iksar has been pretty active on reddit recently, commenting on multiple matters. Things have been quite before that because devs were still on their holiday break. But now that they’re back to work, things should hopefully speed up.
You can find Iksar’s reddit profile and check his full comments here, but we’ve prepared a quick summary of what he’s been talking about below:
- Some bugs have stayed longer in the game because devs were on holiday break and didn’t want to rush a fix before that (because it could break even more things than it fixes).
- Devs will look at the game balance once they come back to the office (which was yesterday) – it suggests that if they decide to release a patch, it’s going to happen pretty soon.
- Lots of talk about achievements. Players report issues with claiming achievements, and Iksar said that they will introduce a more convenient way to do it. Story mode not having achievements will get fixed + we’ll get achievements for old adventures too (they will be retroactive, so if you finished them already, you will get achievements). Achievements getting displayed too early should also get fixed – e.g. if you unpack a Legendary card, you might get an achievement before you can even flip the cards or you might get a spoiler on the outcome of Battlegrounds match right when it starts. They’re also considering adding some rewards for higher achievement point numbers, with card back being one of the ideas.
- Yes, mini-set is still coming, but it’s a bit too early for an announcement. We’ll get the usual date announcement & card reveals shared in advance (so it won’t come out of nowhere).
That’s it for now, we’ll give you another update if Iksar posts more comments. I’m really happy that he decided to go back on reddit to answer some questions – even though there are lots of toxic voices there, in general it’s a really cool Hearthstone community. If you have any questions to Iksar (or any other HS dev), you should probably try asking them on reddit or Twitter (tagging the devs you have a question for).
There’s 2 bugs that are game-breaking though, plus the annoying one that makes me see “Your Opponent” every game.
Battlegrounds abruptly ending early and robbing players of first-place finish.
This bug should never be able to happen: When I’m using deck tracker, it can tell when the opponent draws a C’thun piece. The game is somehow giving this information when it shouldn’t. Doesn’t show in the game interface though. This bug is so bad.
And then the achievements.
So I guess nobody cares that Blizzard has enabled wall hacks in HS. Some dork at Blizzard probably did it on purpose knowing it wouldn’t be fixed until next year. They release a patch that breaks the game and makes battlegrounds unplayable and then promptly take their December vacation.
A tangential: The achievement scrolling is iffy for me. If I pull the slider down, first nothing happens, then it jumps to the bottom of all achievements. Pulling it up again results in jumping back to the top, or jumpy scrolling. This way finding the one achievment you are looking for is very fiddly. It seems that the achievements not seen at first are streamed when you start scrolling, and then they don’t stream fast enough.
Does anyone else see this behaviour?
yup, also happens for me. I’m not sure if it’s always been that way, I seem to remember it working correct some weeks ago.
Yes, it also happens to me, it looks like more achievements are slowly loading and when I try to scroll while they’re still loading it gets all choppy. I just wait a bit before starting to scroll and it works fine then. But I hope that it gets fixed soon.