So I’ve played Hearthstone for a few years now, and I quite enjoy it. I haven’t really read a ton of the forums, but have always had a few simple thoughts on a couple of fairly simple things that Blizzard could do to make Hearthstone quite a bit more interesting, engaging, and fun.
First thing: Custom Game Types.
Enable Player-configured custom game types in hearthstone.
The problem that I would assume the devs would have with gameplay like this is that it doesn’t innately support players spending money on new cards/packs to play in standard and so forth; a lot of the playerbase ends up spending money on packs and stuff to support playing either wild or standard ladder.
But the simple workaround for this, would be to charge gold for matches. Maybe not 100 gold a match, but, say, 10-20-40. Players could set custom game rules, such as; expanded deck sizes, custom cards, custom rules, banned cards, playing with predetermined/displayed decks, etc. I’ve wanted to try hearthstone for ages with slightly larger deck sizes; I’ve often felt like deck sizes of 31-34 cards would make for some crazy decks and even crazier gameplay. You could easily do this in a custom game format, and simply charge players small amounts of gold to play in this mode. If players enjoyed the custom game types, they would spend money and could, perhaps, buy gold to play matches in order to support Blizzard making money off this game type.
Secondly; it would be interesting to have not just custom game types in the normal 1v1 style, but, if anyone has ever played 4 way chess or kung fu chess, it would be really interesting to have 4-way games (custom or standard/wild) where there are 4 players; and you can attack other players randomly, exploit a weakness in another player’s line, etc. You could have 2v2 teams or 4 random players, arranged in a square format (you would see players on the normal north/across the table position and also to your left and right. Likewise, it would be nice to have custom games have the option of playing with no set turn timers in the way they currently are; to effectively have games that resemble the old real time chess games that were so fun several years ago; where you would play chess in realtime but the units had their own turn timers. It would be really fun to be able to play hearthstone in realtime without the restriction of having to wait for other players. If this game mode required paying gold to play; i would pay it.
The chess based example of this style of gameplay would be stuff like this:
Thirdly, It would be really nice to have larger collections; on Blizzard’s backend they likely need VERY little actual data storage capacity to store each deck; you can simplify the deck down to a deck code of a couple dozen characters; that would need to be replicated to more than one datacenter, but obviously per player this would be far less than a megabyte of data for all of their decks. It would be nice to have the option to get a larger collection size; either through a quest or by paying gold or real money. I often end up wanting to customize variants of my decks and save them to keep refining them but with the small number of available deck slots you can’t really have more than 2-3 variants of your deck before you have to start deleting whole other classes’ decks. Which forces you into playing fewer decks and trying out fewer classes overall. I would truly pay real money to have a larger in game collection size.
Anyways, those are my thoughts. Has anyone had similar thoughts on custom game types, or has there been discussion of a custom game mode area in hearthstone already? And what was the Blizzard response? I personally feel this would add a huge new element to the game, and Blizzard could easily still make a ton of money.