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 #25
6:00PM – 7:00PM PST
Ask me a question about Hearthstone!
Or Design! (or anime…) pic.twitter.com/UrSA5lKWU4
— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) August 14, 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:
- Dean would like to try a format where you can ban one class and you won’t face it on the ladder for a limited time. However, it has some serious meta impact, as some decks would run out of control if not for the few counters they have. It’s also a big undertaking in terms of UI and matchmaking system.
- To make Battlegrounds games slower, they thought about introducing a damage cap of 15 before one of the players dies. Once lobby goes down to 7, the cap would be removed. It’s to prevent some early high rolls that might kill off players very quickly.
- All the decisions (design, balance) are made purely based on players’ sentiment – the game is made for players, so everything they do, they do to make the audience as a whole happier. However, gauging players’ sentiment doesn’t boil down to reading comments on social media. Looking at statistics of what decks are most commonly played, for example, tells them much more about what players’ actual experience is than online comments. If there was a forum that every single Hearthstone user posted on regularly, that would be a great metric and they would make decisions around it. But that’s not reality – social media or reddit tend to be echo chambers and do not represent majority of the players. Info from those places is still useful, but they don’t make decisions based solely on it.
- The original setting for United in Stormwind was in Westfall, but they thought that it’s going to be too close to Barrens fantasy-wise. Westfall also doesn’t have the same diversity of characters and monsters, so they settled on Stormwind.
- The design team tries to no longer make filler cards like Worgen Greaser. Each card right now has some purpose and isn’t meant to be unplayable from the get-go. Even if the card is bad (e.g. Desert Obelisk), it still has some niche audience.
- That said, Core Set still includes such cards (e.g. River Crocolisk, Chillwind Yeti), because it has different design goals than expansion sets. One of the goals is to teach players about the game as they unlock new cards, so they have to start with the simple ones. This way new players can focus on basic game mechanics and don’t need to worry about more complex minion effects.
- If they were to create another Constructed format, it probably wouldn’t be one that invalidates your decks on a regular cadence (so not a rotating format).
- Battlegrounds perks are here to stay – cosmetics are a good way of monetization, but relatively low-adoption (not many players will buy them). BG team gives the format a lot of support, he thinks that a price tag behind perks is justifiable.
- Battlegrounds will most likely stay with MMR rating instead of ranks like in Constructed, but he’d like to make them prettier (e.g. you get new borders as you get more MMR – like 3k for Bronze, 4k for Silver and so on) and show up in friends list.
- On a scale of 1-10, Dean rates his satisfaction with the latest expansion as “8.75”. He also notes that Rush Warrior is really good but it’s shockingly underplayed.
- Introducing a rule that cards can’t be reduced below (1) mana is worth real thought, but he doesn’t think that’s the right solution. There were many cases in which reducing something to (0) was totally fine, and when it’s not it’s usually a fault of card’s design (e.g. being able to play it any number of times) than the cost reduction itself. (We just had an article about this topic)
- If Death Knight class was ever released, Arthas would most likely be its basic hero. They would need a really good reason to not use him.
- According to Dean, combo decks aren’t the problem, the problem is that they’re pulling off their combos a bit too fast. The current strong reaction of the community is pretty normal, players are always unhappy when the deck style they like is not in power.
- They designed everything around the game (including the options menu) with simplicity in mind, because CCG genre wasn’t really that popular when HS was first in development and they wanted to draw a wider audience. Now that most of their players are long-term players and returning players, they’re open to more complexity. That’s why e.g. extended options menu is something they consider doing now vs in the past.
- The Dev team monitors mobile performance and is working on fixes all the time, but the truth is that it’s difficult to keep the game running smoothly on all devices – especially an 8 years old game that keeps building upon itself.
- If Dean had unlimited budget and time, but he could only change one thing in the game, he would want to try either making cards tradeable (not as in Tradeable keyword, but tradeable between players) or a huge art direction overhaul where characters on cards become 3D models (Yu-Gi-Oh vibes?). But more realistically, he’d focus on social features like more ways for players to play together and organize (guilds).
- Dean is one of the longest-tenured members of Team 5 – only 4 people still on the team are working on Hearthstone longer than he is.
- Unlike other Questline reward minions, Druid’s reward is 8/8, because “Guff is buff” and they wanted to reflect that in the statline.
- They had to give up making many cards because the card text on them would turn out to be too long.
