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 #34
7:30PM – 8:30PM PST
Ask me a question about Hearthstone!
Or Design! (or anime…) pic.twitter.com/B7tyq6pD0i
— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) October 23, 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 is taking the next 2 months off to spend some time with family (his son is 4 months old now and is starting daycare soon). He will still do AMAs during his time off, but every 3-4 weeks instead of weekly.
- The intention of the Mysterious Stranger nerf in Mercenaries was to stop players from having to farm the same low level content over and over again to play optimally. But the Mercs Lead Designer (Paul) and Game Director (Ben) will go through the feedback of the changes over the weekend. (Feedback so far is horrible, and no wonder – I think about writing a separate article about it.)
- Mercenaries team is currently digesting all the post-release feedback and setting future plans in stone. They’ll share it with the community once they have a cleared picture in mind.
- One of the biggest surprsies from the first 1.5 weeks of Mercenaries is a very positive hardcore competitive community reception of the mode. He didn’t think that they will embrace the competitive side of Mercenaries so quickly.
- Still too early for Mercenaries balance update – meta changes, popular PvP comps right now are vastly different than the ones right after game mode released. They first want the same meta to persist for some time before doing any changes.
- The question has already been answered in the past, but a new class is definitely coming to the game, they aren’t ready to talk about it yet, though. Three most common considerations seem to be Monk, Death Knight and a class completely out of the WoW.
- Gallon: “No spoilers” for the future balance changes, but they can look at Pursuit of Justice again (since someone asked about this card in particular).
- He’d like to try out a system where players can ban one class on the ladder they don’t want to face. It would have huge meta implications, but it could make the game more fun overall, which is a good thing.
- They will eventually rotate out Battlegrounds minion types like they rotate out Heroes (and then bring them back, sometimes remade) if we get too many, it just didn’t feel necessary yet.
- Ninjas are underrepresented in the game compared to Pirates, because Pirates are simply much more common in Warcraft universe. The first Game Director (Eric Dodds) wanted to do a Ninjas vs Pirates expansion, but Dean isn’t sure whether he was serious or not. We’ll definitely get more Ninjas once they explore Pandaria (because Shado-Pan is the closest we have to ninjas in Warcraft).
- No major redesign for Priest is planned – we just lived through two very different and powerful Priest decks in Barrens and Stormwind, and more will definitely come in the future, even though the class is on the bottom right now.
- Because the games have very different consumers, designing system for them is very difficult. It’s hard to have a system (e.g. rewards system) that’s working well both for casual players (so they can still enjoy the game) and someone who plays 8 hours per day (so they feel that the time they spent is rewarding).
- Dean doesn’t sound like he’s very happy with datamining, but it’s “reality of our industry” so they need to embrace it rather than fight it.
- Bots are very hard to fight with – they ban a lot of them, but their designers keep coming up with bots that are harder and harder to detect. From the sounds of it, bots are a pretty major problem in Chinese community.
I would ban Paladin class. It is always very annoying. Secrets, taunts, divine shields, healing. Plus boring powerful legendaries.
Does a deck that exists for a fraction of an expansion count as having lived through it? We lived through shadow priest before the mass nerfs made the meta bad for the deck? I think a deck has to make it through an entire half expansion before it can be said we lived through it.
And btw, sorry for the long post Stonekeep. I don’t really wanna post this long, but know that I had trust issues with them.
So I still stand with my point, that it was a ‘Nerf’ rather than ‘Rebalance’. Just like the guy said above.
Either they don’t have enough people, or they are lazy (again).
Call me a whiner, but bots are very easy to detect, if we’re talking about bots in Ranked Hearthstone. Not in other modes. Bots are particularly the same in their behavior, utilizing hero power every turn. (especially odd warrior in wild).
You can always filter out players who used HP every single turn except turn 1, and add a counter every 30 turns. Because bots will always use HP in that 30 turns. add another filter for players who plays 40 seconds every turn. This filter will effectively destroy 95% bots and it won’t be that big of problems anymore.
Like I said, they either don’t have enough people, or lazy. I’m positive it’s the latter.
And please don’t get me started on other points, because I still think the majority of what he said is literal BS.
And OMG, what’s the problem with players trying to farm with MS, the grind itself was already taking a toll on them, not to mention the rewards. Can’t you see that people are enjoying themselves? Are you blind to the fact that people spent more time playing the game?
But sure, decide to cut that off even faster than you fix other problems that people literally asked for months. They probably gonna ignore Mercenary even more. And probably too late too when the alternatives arrives months from now.
Nice move Blizz.