Iksar’s Twitter Q&A – January 13, 2021 – Roundup of All Answers

Yesterday, Hearthstone Game Designer Dean “Iksar” Ayala had a Q&A session on Twitter, with people 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, I went through all of his replies and decided to make a quick summary of the most important talking points.

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

Ask me a question about Hearthstone and I will try my best to answer. More likely I can answer your question if it relates to game design in some way, but can give other questions a shot.

7:30 – 8:30PST pic.twitter.com/aziGyEo7ec

— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) January 14, 2021

Interestingly, he said that he will try to make it a weekly thing – we’ll see how that goes!

And here’s the summary. Of course, I didn’t cover everything. Instead, I tried to focus on the more interesting / important stuff:

• Classic rework is “complicated” and questions about it “will be answered soonish”, but “it’s a good change”.
• Duels update is coming soon. (My guess is that it will be a bigger update adding all the missing HP’s & Signature Treasures, since it’s about time.)
• Duels sets will still contain limited number of Standard & Wild sets, and the available sets will rotate (which honestly is exactly what they’ve said when Duels were announced).
• Malygos & Gadgetzan Auctioneer dodged Hall of Fame / nerfs a few times. They’ve also considered reworking Warlock’s Hero Power (Life Tap) in the early days of HS, but didn’t come up with any good ideas.
• A more recent card that was close to getting nerfed was Animated Broomstick, but they didn’t because it’s an interesting card and it didn’t feel overpowered. They’re still looking into it, though.
• A common misconception is that implementing some small features is “easy” – in reality with a big team working on multiple platforms, a lot of Q&A is required, then an extra approval from Google & Apple, so it all takes much longer than people think.
• Power creep is a natural part of live service games –  if they want to make new, interesting things they need to compete with already existing ones, so they also need to be strong. But they can always go back and adjust something if it turns out to be way out of line. Gameplay is still fun despite power creep, and if it gets out of control, they will do a “big, sweeping nerf”.
• Last balance patch went out just before Chinese Gold Series finals, and Iksar said that it’s unfortunate, but patches sometimes have to be pushed at those weird times, because otherwise they would need to wait too long with them. They have to prioritize the majority of players when it comes to things like balance update timing.
• Cards like Tickatus are released even though they’re polarizing because some people just love this kind of design and plays Hearthstone just for them. But the design team tries to not make them too powerful just because they are frustrating to play against. They only become problematic if they become too popular (e.g. 20% play rate) and players are exposed to them too commonly.
• Iksar would like to see two features getting added – esports directly in the client (to make it more accessible) and game mode where players can just get into without any preparation (like deck building etc.) – something like Battlegrounds, but with actual cards.
• They will try to re-explore what “Shadow Priest” means, which is something that players might like.
• There’s a good chance they will revisit Dual-Class cards in the future. He also wonders if HS would be more fun if it was permanently Dual-Class (but it’s not something they actually plan to do).
• They will keep adding more “old” stuff to the shop – right now they’re doing card backs, but they might add old hero portraits too eventually.
• Design-wise, they want to push Demon Hunter both in Aggro and Control direction, so their toolkit needs to be pretty wide. Ideally, Control Hunter is meant to be good with weapon-based removal and big minions, while it should struggle with hard single target / big AoE removal.
• Team 5 will try to create less “annoying” or “very difficult” achievements that give XP, such as “Oh My Yogg!” (killing opponent with Oh My Yogg!).
• One of the mechanics Iksar would like to see, but it’s hard to implement is graveyard / interacting with things that have died. There’s a lot of design space, the extra UI changes and complexity might not be worth it. It would have to make the game more fun in order to be considered.
• There are still no plans to add auto-squelch option, because they don’t want to “add more buttons to the game”, and it’s something only a small portion of players asks for, so they never felt like it was necessary.
• Current mindset behind nerfs is that they don’t want them to destroy the deck, just make it slightly weaker. As in you can still queue exactly the same deck and it will work, just won’t be as powerful. Most of core players are already used to card changes, so they can do them more commonly.
• They don’t buff cards commonly as opposed to nerfs, because buffs have a much smaller impact on the meta. Nerfing the best deck in the game affects the entire meta – buffing a low tier deck might be impactful only for people who play that deck. Buffs might happen, but they won’t be used as the main meta balance tool.
• “Random Hero Portrait” option like we do have with card backs is a “maybe”.
• Tournament mode was scrapped because after trying it out they didn’t feel like quality was there and it would take way too much resources to try to fix it as opposed to exploring other ideas at the time.
• Card generation has gotten a little wider than they would like, but it’s not a forever thing. E.g. in a hindsight, they would probably replace Draconic Lackey with something else. But next year we should see less of that, rotation should help.