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. Right now they mostly happen on Fridays, 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 #33
5:00PM – 6:00PM PST
Ask me a question about Hearthstone!
Or Design! (or anime…) pic.twitter.com/NoFgRC9zaL
— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) October 15, 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:
- Now that Mercenaries are out, the next focus will some work on Battlegrounds – new cosmetics, adding light progression, new “modes” for Battlegrounds are also in the prototype stages. They’d also like to make Battlegrounds tournaments available in-game, and hopefully translate it to other game modes too. Other than that, general client improvements and focusing on new expansions.
- On top of that, one medium-sized project is in the works. The next “big thing” is only in the planning stage.
- Dual-class Arena coming later, more details soon. (Most likely in Patch 19.6 coming in a couple of weeks, we should get an actual Hallow’s End event then.)
- Mini-set also coming, but Dean can’t share any more details right now. (Again, it HAS to be in 2-3 weeks, unless they delay December expansion.)
- They will consider removing BG perks from pre-purchase bundles and focus on Constructed things in there, while BG perks/cosmetics will be its separate business model.
- The only expansion the team has discussed revisiting (like Saviors of Uldum sort of revisits League of Explorers) is Naxx, since it’s one of the most iconic and it’s old enough to warrant it.
- Quests will be better adjusted to line up with Mercenaries – you will be able to finish more of your Dailies when playing Mercs.
- The team has prototyped a graveyard system recently, and not for the first time. However, in order to actually implement it, it would need to open up a lot of new gameplay, but they haven’t gotten there yet
- Adding a “sandbox mode” where you can test card interactions, set up game states etc. is unlikely. If they had infinite resources, they could do something like this, but it’s so low on the priority list that he doesn’t believe they would choose to work on it over something else.
- They have an internal team called “game and market intelligence” that gathers data on what happens in the industry and gives presentations on that (for the inspiration etc.) Plus the entire Hearthstone team consists of gamers, so they naturally get inspired by other games when doing their work.
- Unlikely that Bloodbloom will get its nerf reverted or buffed to 3 mana, because the card is dangerous.
- If they ever changed the leveling system in regular Hearthstone, they would probably make it so you can progress with levels infinitely and get some rewards instead of just increasing a cap.
- Hearthstone team is really big right now, they have 150+ people. Before the pandemic, they used to celebrate things like expansion releases, but since the team got so big they can’t all meet together, so it’s mostly sub-teams organizing together.
“Bloodbloom is dangerous”
*prints Stealer of Souls*
I’m pretty sure they don’t really take Wild into consideration when printing new cards. And as the practice shows, you can always ban them if something goes wrong, haha.
I also think that Bloodbloom was much more dangerous than Stealer – some broken Bloodbloom combos could happen as early as Turn 1 with Coin, or T2 without. Stealer decks at least gave some more time for the opponent to react.