Ben Thompson, Hearthstone Creative Director, did a pretty long interview with GamesBeat detailing the issues that Blizzard ran into with the much anticipated Tournament Mode. If you didn’t hear, we got an update from the “In the Works” post that Blizzard did in September. From this post we learned that the in-game Tournament Mode was put “on hold for the forseeable future.” We didn’t get much more information than that, so this interview gives us a more detailed look at why things went awry.
I recommend going and reading the full interview here, but I’m going to pull out some of the more interesting details below.
- The mode is on “indefinite hold”, and they don’t have a timeline for when they’ll be bringing it back online.
- Unity wasn’t holding it back at all.
- Tournament Mode wasn’t stopped because of software bloat or size. It wasn’t a performance issue.
- There was no issues with cross-platform performance.
- It wasn’t due to the people who were working on the engineering team.
- It didn’t have anything to do with the recent departures of Senior Leaders (Ben Brode, Yong Woo, Hamilton Chu).
- At the beginning of the year the team was behind it uniformly.
The following quote from the interview seems to be the catalyst behind what caused the hold on Tournament Mode:
I’ll be honest with you. When we looked at something like tournament mode, we did something with tournament mode for the very first time that we’d never done before in the history of Hearthstone. What that was was to announce a new mode to the game, a new feature to the game, so early that it started to take on a life of its own. As we continued to work on and produce aspects of what we hoped would ultimately become tournament mode, that lead time of the announcement allowed a simultaneous discussion to be taking place with the community. That allowed for a lot of time for the community to form, in its collective head, what they believed tournament mode could be, or should be. The more time that happened, what we did in that case was allow for two paths of thought to be created. You had the devs working on what they believed tournament mode should be comprised of, and the community building up in their own heads what they hoped and thought it would be.
Ultimately, as we approached the end of the year, the delta between those two was so great that we didn’t ultimately believe the resulting tournament mode we had been working on would meet the hopes and expectations of a player base that we only want to ever do right by. As we started to hear the feedback and thoughts from the community as to what they were thinking it would be and where we thought it could be, we thought that the best case scenario for this would be to take a long, hard look at where we’re at and to reassess that and revisit it at a time we would be able to create something much more close to the hopes and expectations of not just our players, but even ourselves as well.
- It was a bunch of “small, tiny, and bigger things” that created the gulf between expectations.
- Esports did not play a role in the decision.
Again, if this interests you be sure to read the full interview!
In hindsight, they probably shouldn’t have mentioned the new mode so early. Releasing it to players’ surprise would allow them to modify it based on their feedback. Player’s expectations are always too ambitious. Better to surprise them and develop on the go instead of letting their minds run wild.
I suggest the Tournament Mode have a 20 minute pause safeguard, for when the tournament is stopped due to electricity / power outages, bad internet connection, etc. Once the players are logged out unintentionally, the 20 minute pause will take into effect and save the existing play field scenario. 2 cents.
that’s fair. i can get behind that.