Iksar Community Q&A Issue 37: Hand Pit Cards/Arena Balance/Core Series/Team Regroup

Hearthstone's main designer Dean Ayala, after the End of the New Year's holiday, held a community Q&A column again on January 11, actively responding to various questions from players on Twitter. In this QA session, Iksar answers the questions about hand pit cards, arena balance, core series, and team regrouping, so let's take a look at what Issue 37 talks about.

Game design

- This question is for lion model value 9 fee silt model value 6 fee. Designers don't have a clear formula to balance the cards, and the balance values basically rely on game testing and previous knowledge. High-intensity cards almost always come from the combination of other cards, not the single card itself is strong. Of course, they have also thought about whether the cost of XX is low.

- They didn't make fees or numerical changes to the cards because of the discovery mechanism. Because the discussion found that the discovery mechanism can make more cards have the opportunity to play.

- They talked for a long time about the 11th class, hearthstone will definitely have a new class, the key is which class to do.

-Iksar's last involved in the card design was the Death Mine Mini Bag, where he designed the first parrot card and then inspired the birth of other parrot cards.

- Iksar thinks it's easy to design distraction cards, and they can easily design a lot of distraction cards, but the question is which distraction cards are worth actually putting in the game.

- Players have mentioned their own turn retention fee, triggering the design of the hand pit in the enemy round. Iksar believes that this design brings a new dimension of interaction, and players have more to consider. The player must always be on the defensive, whether I want to play this card or not, whether it will trigger the so-and-so card of the opponent's hand. In the current Hearthstone mechanics, players have complete control over their turn, and variables such as triggering traps and spotting cards are controllable. If Hearthstone is really going to roll out cards that the enemy responds to, the interaction has to be fun and a mechanic that appears on many cards, not just one or two.

- The new core series changes a lot, but doesn't drastically change the gameplay of the game. The goal of the core series is to provide some interesting cards and then help new players better get into standard mode. Many of the cards in the core series are simple, even low-intensity, and their role is to teach the player the knowledge of the game, which will then be replaced by the player.

- The core series changes every year, which can be regarded as a blank card template, the player will definitely have this card template, but the content inside will be updated once a year, and the old content will not be retained.

The current state of the game

- The balance fine-tuning of the arena was done by Ding Tian himself, who came up with a solution based on mathematics and programming, but still needed manual adjustments, so after Ding Tian resigned, they were still looking for new ways.

- Ding Tian's plan has some disadvantages, on the one hand, this work was not a function managed by the development team before, and once the maintenance person has other priorities, it will cause the work to be delayed. On the other hand, manual adjustments are somewhat complicated, and if they want to fine-tune, they need to be coordinated by people in different departments.

- They currently have two options, leaving the development team in charge of the feature, or trying to find a simpler and more automated way to balance it. Overall, Team5 wanted to find a solution that was easy to execute over the long term to make the arena's career balance more timely.

- Since the Hearthstone team has been restructured, there is now someone in charge of the Arena mode, so this problem should not be difficult to solve.

- Iksar wants to create a random coin or a random hero skin function, which he prioritizes very highly, but is not sure when it will be released.

- They deliberately make the mercenary mode PVE's pass experience bonus slightly lower than the ladder mode, but it should be similar to the Tavern Wargame and Arena mode, so there is no plan to increase experience points.

- Hearthstone's marketplace system has now launched a personalized marketplace feature, with different product recommendations based on the player's situation.

- Hearthstone's team reorganization has brought a lot of benefits, reducing a lot of the approval process, each team makes its own decisions, and then puts the content into the game.

-After the hearthstone team reorganization, we can expect more small functions to appear, which previously required the collaboration of multiple departments and took a lot of time to do a small function.

Other content

- If Hearthstone launches expansion packs for other IP, it will prioritize internal IP such as Diablo, Overwatch, and StarCraft before it can be extended to external IPs such as Marvel, Naruto, etc.

- If you don't understand the mechanics of the system, even new employees will be confused when they check their MMR.

- The game's opening mechanism has not been changed, or accumulated progress. The longer you don't issue an orange card, the more likely you are to issue an orange card.

- Iksar recommended that ridiculousHat, the creator of the service content, create a "Make Hearthstone" podcast for developers to talk about the details and memories of making Hearthstone. He could help find a candidate, and other Team5 members supported the idea below and agreed to participate in the recording, but Iksar wasn't sure if he could convince some of the elders.

- Iksar wanted to have a mode similar to Overwatch's "Workshop" for players to try to make some new content, but the production cost of this mode is too high, and now Hearthstone's internal clients often crash when trying to add new things, so there is currently no way to open it to players. Moreover, this model also requires the help of the production and UI team.

- Mercenary mode was originally conceived as a "World of Warcraft player leveling experience", giving rise to the idea of assembling a team of heroes. In the screenshot of the January 12, 2020 email shared by Iksar, we can see that the three classes of tank, output and healing were determined at that time.

- Iksar doesn't know if he'll get Celestalon's new puzzle in this expansion pack, because he doesn't know about it either, and it's usually Celestalon who crams it into the game before he finds out.

Personal thoughts

- If he could add a dueling hero to duel mode, he would like to choose Saurok the Lizardman because of the race's resemblance to Iksar in Endless Quest, which is where his ID comes from.

- Iksar himself has returned to his normal full-time job, completely immersed in Hearthstone' work, and he has recently attended all the meetings, given some internal presentations, guided Hearthstone's new team restructuring, and he may not be available until February to make something new.

- When players ask if there will be "Nashtal" themed expansion packs, Iksar's answer is "very interesting".

- Kerryl Roma was Iksar's first mercenary to get excited, and he initially set his name as Siobhan, but later changed his pronunciation when he thought it might be difficult.

- Iksar made the toughest decision in his career to make Demon Hunter a temporary or permanent class, and their plan was to only let this class exist in the environment for one year, and then rotate it. They're not sure if the right decision has been made at the moment, as many designers want Demon Hunter to be a temporary career.

-Iksar's goal this year is to improve existing features, rather than adding more new things to Hearthstone.