For those of you that don’t know about Warcraft III, there was a custom games option. It allowed people to create custom games that I believe were based in the coding of Warcraft III but could be completely different. In my opinion the custom games were better than the actual game. (Dota was created originally as a custom game in WC3.)
Now how does this apply to Hearthstone? Well they could scrap the entire tavern brawl tbh and replace it with custom games, I believe they would both get better content and they wouldn’t have to spend any man hours on doing it. As someone whos been playing hearthstone pretty much since it came out there are several cards that I miss and or think shouldn’t be in the game, so it would allow games to be created that wouldn’t work in the current meta. Or potentially create a no aggro where you start at 5 mana. Infinite versions that could attract anyone. And no actual effort spent by blizzard.
As much as such an option would be wonderful, especially allowing content creators to host tournaments with custom rules, I think you highly underestimate the huge workload this would represent. I would definitely love seeing it happening though.
Hearthstone has especially been known in the past for having huge UI issues. They basically had to redevelopp the entire home screen when they had to change the menu to introduce new modes. They also had to redevelopp a huge part of the collection manager to allow sorting decks, just because of how the original game was designed.
Allowing players to change a lot of options to create a custom rule is much harder than hard-codding that rule yourself as a developper. You would need to be able to identify all criterias that could be modified, create a complex mechanism that would allow any modifications to live together depending on the complexity of what you are allowing.
You then need a UI given to players to be able to create their custom settings and save them.
Then youn need a lobby that people would be able to create and join
Doesn’t take too long of looking at the history of the friend list and the current shop to understand that devs are not really brilliant at developping menus that don’t fit in a single screen
Next you need a collection management that allows your own collection to understand what you are able to include in your deck while you are creating a deck for a specific lobby. I bet you that in the current state of the game, each collection filter is hard-codded even for tavern brawls. So an adaptative collection filter is also to be developped.
Still not finished, you also need a way to challenge people inside of your lobby. A 2 players lobby would be highly restricted as only 2 players at a time would play a mode. So you need bigger lobbies, especially for tournaments, where people can challenge eachother. A workaround would be the possibility to share custom settings via codes. Not elegant but manageable.
In both cases, they also need the server capacity to host all these lobbies. FYI, League of Legends had to delay their tournament mode by 2 years (partially) because they underestimated the server maintenance it would cost them (I’m not explaining it really well). Hearthstone tried a tournament mode in the past and ran into the same type of issues if I’m not wrong. I don’t know if the mode has been heavily delayed or cancelled.
And finally ! Well you need that thing to work in the end and that may be the hardest part of it all.
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This is why you’ll never have a vibrant custom games option in a Blizzard game ever again. Blizzard is extremely sore over the Dota brand being created under their noses for their system and being worth millions, but not making any profits for their own shareholders. They will never allow another Dota to happen again, under any circumstances. Either there won’t be a custom games option, or the legalese will make it absolutely clear that anything you make is just as much Bobby’s as the Tesla in his garage, which will understandably have a chilling effect on third party development.
What you want is the rough equivalent of having nostalgia for Napster. It’s not going to happen again. Sorry.
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