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Mill decks are EVIL. (and fun, you know, if you are milling them)
It's pretty unlikely we'll ever intentionally make milling people a powerful strategy, it's just one of those things that's not very fun if it's the prevailing deck in the game. As a meta counter to really greedy, card hoarding, control decks..... sure.
Fun fact: Jeff and Geoff from Overwatch are big Hearthstone fans and give us awesome feedback all the time. Also, Overwatch is awesome.
It's possible, lol. I think most people view this change through the lens of 100% interesting decisions vs 100% obvious choices. It's going to be somewhere in between there, which I think is a good place.
No picks by rarity.
And great, I hope you enjoy the swap :o.
I knew this would be a divided topic, but it's good to get it out in the open so it doesn't come as a huge surprise later. There are a bunch of benefits to having no buckets. We don't have to do a rebucket patch, so the initial balance patch should come out a week after the patch rather than 2+ weeks. Decks should feel more different from one another because there are no small buckets that made some groupings of cards appear more often than they would otherwise. As another result of getting rid of small buckets, the cards that appear the most often should be seen around 0.9-1 times on average, which is quite a bit less often than the cards that appear most in the current system (1.5ish). There, of course, is also some downside. This is true with every design decision. We already have buckets completed for 15.4 if we wanted to use them. It's not a question of doing the work, it's done. It's just a question of which system feels better. After spending so much time with the bucket system, my personal opinion is that buckets make drafting a little more interesting, but sacrifice the gameplay experience by making decks feel more similar than they would otherwise. Which is more important is subjective, but I think it's healthy to try different things.
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Arena in the original format just had way less cards which was mostly the reason individuals showed up more often. In the bucket system, cards that appear the most often show up around 1.5 times per draft. In a system with no buckets, that number is reduced to around 0.9.
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I show up in lots of threads. Comment history is just a click away.
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For balance, everyone has the thing they want changed or not changed. Communities like Reddit are much more hardcore on average, meaning they consume the content faster and at a higher level. Those communities are generally ready for change faster than others. I think when players engage with the same community for so long they start to believe that is the only community that exists. The average Hearthstone player isn't even rank 15. We have to find some cadence of change that works for the large population, which means it's never going to be right for everyone.
For what it's worth, we generally have a faster balance cadence because over time Hearthstone just has more experienced players. When you start a game, everyone is new and you have to have goals associated with having a game filled with new players. That obviously changes over the years, so it should be reflected in the design choices we make.
As for 'venomous' posts, I don't think genuinely caring and not receiving the thing that you personally desire is a free ticket to be hateful. I would say most people are reasonable even without understanding all the details of game development. Especially in person at places like Blizzcon or Firesides. Any time I've ever met a player of Hearthstone in person it's always been a great experience.
If an improvement is truly basic and it's been 'literal years' it usually means there is just a disagreement on whether or not said thing is an upside or downside to include in the game. In any case, it wasn't meant as commentary on players or developers being wrong about how long something should take, just as commentary on how people generally give feedback.
I know it doesn't play into the narrative, but I've been at Blizzard 8.5 years and have only ever had positive interactions with people from company level or Activision level leadership. As it turns out, they are just people, usually very talented and passionate people.
Pretty good. My team is crazy talented and I get to go to work every day and think about card design in my favorite game. Public facing wise? People can be a little overzealous on the internet, but I think that's just the nature of the internet anonymity. Reddit can be a useful place for direct feedback, even if it can be a little exhausting to sift through at times. Ultimately it's not the responsibility of the consumer to be inquisitive on the reasons behind a design decision or development process. People just want the things they want, like right now! I can sympathize with that, so back to work we go.
Also having fun watching masters tour seoul. I love reno hunter and it's been performing well. Fun deck!
I do like to meme, yeah. Not as much as Chakki, but a little more than Realz. Not nearly as much as Mike Donais.
Rania's hero card would be even more powerful than Dr. Boom.
Hey. I think your post is cool and you clearly put a lot of effort into it. I like the idea of adding Rush to the base set at some point. We've been very happy with the gameplay of that mechanic and there is a lot of design space with it.
The goals of the basic and classic set now vs the goals we had at launch are quite a bit different. I think our goals now can afford to be a little more narrow. Mechanically, we want to teach players the base level interactions of the game and give each class a core identity and toolkit of stuff to help them realize that identity expansion to expansion. Power level aside, I think Rogue is a good example of a class that does this pretty well. Regardless of what cards exist in an expansion, Rogue gameplay still tends to feel unique on the back of a simple mechanic (combo) and some core toolkit cards that aren't win conditions on their own (Backstab, Evis, SI, Etc). Some of our other classes could do better at having a core toolkit, so it's something we want to address.
Microadjustment balance changes are based on a formula that takes into account the current bucket information, which is why they don't happen until at least a few days after bucket adjustments. I believe we sent over the public bucket information a few days ago to our community team but it's possible it didn't get to the right folks. I'll doublecheck Monday.
For 15.4, we're going to try doing an arena patch without buckets and have all cards be part of one giant pool. This is similar to how the early days of arena worked. Theoretically, buckets made individual arena decisions a little more interesting and put more weight behind how a card works in the deck you are drafting vs its power level in a vacuum. While I think there is some truth to this, I don't think it's been a well received change overall. For players new or inexperienced with Hearthstone, the idea of having 'obvious' choices is a win. For hardcore players, if the change to buckets is not a clear upside (which has been most of the feedback we've received here) then it's probably just not worth doing. One positive part of not doing buckets is that the micro-adjustment patches should happen faster in the future because there does not need to be a preliminary bucket adjustment patch to set the stage.
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