Iksar’s Twitter Q&A #38 Summary – Microsoft Acquisition, Tournament Mode, Arena Future, Naxx in Classic, Dust Incident And More!

Dean “Iksar” Ayala is a Lead Designer on the Hearthstone team, and he’s been doing weekly Q&A sessions on Twitter for a long time. Right now they happen more rarely, on different days and at different times, since Iksar is still on paternity leave. 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.

Check out previous Q&A’s here!

If you want to read the full Q&A – all the questions and answers – here’s the Tweet you should go to:

Hearthstone AMA #38

4:00PM – 5:00PM PST

Ask me a question about Hearthstone!

Or Design! (or anime…) pic.twitter.com/z1a2ByLGtp

— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) January 21, 2022

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 happy about the Microsoft acquisition, but there’s still a lot of uncertainties – mostly about the studios/leadership – whether they will continue working under the same management, give studios more independence etc. Right now it’s all played out at the highest level and all the regular employees work normally. They will all find out more in a year or so, but he’s optimistic.
• Tournament mode is still on the table, but Dean is not sure whether it would be connected to the official esports system or just be “for fun”.
• Arena is a cool mode, but it suffers from high entry barrier – both in terms of knowledge and gold fee. A potential solution would be removing the entry fee and remaking the rewards structure so it better fits a F2P format. The problem is that people who currently play a lot of Arena and are good at it most likely wouldn’t be happy, because they are going infinite in terms of gold (earn the same amount of more than they spend on tickets). But if the population will remain small, the mode will always receive a small amount of support.
• The idea that only Tian Ding worked on Arena was overblown, what he meant in his last Q&A is that he was the only person responsible for microadjustments system and that they simply have to figure out how to approach the balancing from now on (assign someone else or rethink the system).
• Dean wasn’t involved with the Dust accident that happened a few days ago, but he was talking with people who were. Obviously it sucks that it happened, he understands why people are unhappy. But it wasn’t intended, and with how many code changes they make all the time, bugs will happen. In the end many players got Dust worth a large sum of money (those who managed to craft multiple cards with it) and the community overall is still angry at them, so it’s a lose-lose.
• No plans for any Wild buffs right now.
• More about some devs wanting to make Demon Hunter temporary instead of permanent (from the last Q&A): Introducing new class only makes sense if they can make it unique enough compared to other classes. It’s easy in the short term, but some devs weren’t sure whether it would be impossible to keep Demon Hunter distinct in a long run, with mechanics that make it stand out. But making it temporary would mean much less excitement because a lot of people wouldn’t want to learn or engage with something that’s only temporary (like, people wouldn’t want to make Demon Hutner their main class if they knew it’s going to be in the game only for a year).
• Dean already talked about the “multiverse” kind of thing in Hearthstone (adding characters from different IPs) and with Microsoft acquisition, the possibilities grew significantly.
• Buying entire expansions for a fixed price has almost zero chance of happening. But they are concerned with entry cost and want to give players some cheaper ways to get the first few days after they start playing.
• The idea for a “global server” with a single collection is very unlikely at this point. It would just require so many changes to how the game works that it’s not worth the time, it’s a bit like having to rewrite the game all over on a different engine.
• They’re considering the changes to Classic format – they will probably first introduce Naxx and leave it that way for a while, then add the next thing. Dean thinks about adding one expansion per year, for example.
• No plans to remake a Coin, there are no huge problems with going second right now.
• If they were ever to remake all Hero Powers, Dean thought about a system that put “Heroes” on the Battlefield, all with 1 Attack and different effects (but they wouldn’t be affected by things like board clears). He likes the fantasy and there’s another card game where something similar works very well.
• Designers can “create” most of the cards themselves for an expansion, since their internal card editor is already very robust after so many expansions. But some cards, probably around 10-12 per expansion, require extra help from engineers to make them work, add completely new mechanics etc.
• Rotating cards early (like Baku the Mooneater and Genn Greymane) can happen if necessary, but they never plan for cards to rotate out early when they design them.
• Win rates of the best Wild decks in history are actually lower than win rates of best Standard decks in history, because Wild has access to many more potential counter cards if a deck would ever take off to an extreme level (it doesn’t mean that there were no overpowered decks in Wild, just that they never dominated as much as the strongest Standard ones). But overall, SN1P-SN4P Warlock was the highest WR deck in the Wild. Darkglare Warlock was also high up there, but unlike SN1P Warlock, it had some real competition.
• They might add a way for players to display their own MMR, but the formula to calculate it is quite complicated so it wouldn’t really tell much to most of the players.
• The team wants to get Tirion back into Battlegrounds, just not sure whether they will remake him or not.