Summary of Year of the Dragon AMA with Devs – More Communication, Mobile Performance, Promo Card Before Expansion, Solo Content, Arena and more!

A few hours ago, Hearthstone devs (August Dean Ayala, Mike Donais, Giovanni Scarpati and Ben Thomspon) held an AMA over at reddit and answered lots of questions. Most of them were related to the upcoming Year of the Dragon, but some other questions were answered too.

You can see the entire thread here, but if you want a summary, just continue reading!

General

• We should see a lot more communication this year, and according to the AMA, this time they really mean it. They want to communicate more often, share things they’re working on, and being more honest with the players (which includes talking about their own mistakes). We should see more blog posts, AMAs, behind the scenes and hearthside chat videos etc.
• The new deck building tool is mainly aimed at players who a) want to build a competitive deck but don’t have all of the cards available (because it will replace those with the second or third best choices, based on your collection) or players who know that they want to play around with a few cards (e.g. some combo) but don’t know what other cards should go into the deck. The tool looks at the cards you’ve put into your deck, the cards you own, and tries to fill the rest of the deck with most powerful choices. If there’s no real archetype it can build, it will just try to give you a solid mana curve with best cards.
• Improved mobile performance is something they look at. Recently they’ve optimized size of art files. They are also looking to optimize sound files, one idea is to remove sounds from adventures you don’t own (thus never hear).
• Legendary weapons from Kobolds & Catacombs were fun, but there are no plans to bring weapons to non-weapon classes again (for now). They like some classes to have access to something others don’t, that’s part of their identity.
• They’re looking for a good way to let players obtain the old card backs.
• They want more decks to rely on cards from two Standard years, so the decks change when the rotation happens. If the entire shell of a deck is built on a cards from a single Standard year, the rotation either doesn’t change it enough or straight up removes it from Standard.
• When Hearthstone was created, the “technology wasn’t there” to share collections between different servers. And now, since vast majority of players only play on a single server and it would be a lot of work to change it, it wasn’t very high on their priority list.

Year of the Dragon

• All three expansions will be tied in many ways. They will continue telling the same story (with many twists and turns), largely through the single player portion. Some characters will make multiple appearances. Multiple Tavern Brawls and Events should also be linked to the story.
• There are no new game modes planned for this year, their main plan is to make sure that the currently available ones are fresh and exciting (hence introduction of Arena seasons). They talk about alternative modes (such as 2v2) and did some testing already, but they’re not working on them right now. They also plan to make “unique events” throughout expansions to shake up the meta, but we don’t know yet what those might be.
• There’s no alternative Hero portrait for Year of the Dragon (like Maiev for Year of the Mammoth or Lunara for Year of the Raven), but we’d be shocked if they didn’t have more awesome heroes lined up (the word shocked might be a hint).

Upcoming Expansion

• Players will get a new “promo” card for free a week before the expansion, similarly to Marin the Fox before Kobolds & Catacombs.
• They’ve given out four words as hints for the upcoming new keyword: two, twins, double down and spell. Or maybe they imply that we will get two different keywords? If you have any ideas what those hints might mean, let us know in the comments!
• New Murloc card called “Sludge Slurper” will be released (not sure if in this expansion or another one) – maybe we’ll see more Murloc synergies after Rockpool Hunter and Gentle Megasaur rotate out!

Solo Content

• For unlocking all 5 Wings, players will get a Golden version of Zayle Legendary – a sort of a new version of Whizbang the Wonderful. But the regular version will be craftable with Arcane Dust.
• They like the idea of more achievements, and the upcoming solo content will sort of have them. Your progress will be tracked, you will unlock more starting decks and alternative Hero Powers etc. They hope to do more of this in the future.
• They’ve learned a lot from the past year of solo contents, and we should see a lot of that influence the upcoming single player experience.

Arena

• Cards that were banned for being too strong (e.g. Faceless Summoner) will be draftable again in the new format. Other cards (such as C’thun-related cards or annoying/RNG swing cards like Mind Control Tech) will still be banned.
• Arena drafts will still be done in buckets. Since older cards were never bucketed (the system wasn’t in place then), they will do it manually at first and then update it based on live data shortly after the expansion releases.
• While bucket system isn’t perfect (for example, the highest buckets have a very few cards, leading to players making the same choices over and over again), they have no better alternative right now.
• For the first season, every card will be offered at its base rate. They aren’t sure what they will do in the future, e.g. balancing through changes to buckets or micro-adjustments.
• Arena season will last 2 months, and a new one should be announced roughly 2-4 weeks in advance (we’ll get to know what expansions will be playable next).
• The current plan for leaderboards is to do one every season, so every 2 months. It will still require at least 30 Arena runs played throughout the season, but it should be easier to achieve than 30 runs in a month (since players will have twice as much time).
• There are still plans to do Arena-related event such as Dual Class Arena, but Arena events won’t become more common, since the format will rotate out anyway to keep things interesting.
• Since Hall of Fame is treated as a separate set, it’s possible that at one point they will bring it to Arena as one of the available sets, but there are no plans to do it yet.
• Discover and random card generation will only pull cards from the available sets and will no longer pull out banned cards (e.g. you could previously discover Death Knight cards).
• Arena decks will get retired at the start of every season, and players will get a free Arena ticket as a compensation.