Below are some extracts from the AMA (for the benefit of those unaware). Enjoy.
Q: Can you tell us about what you are working on to improve mobile performance? Are you working on decreasing the game file size? Are you working on decreasing the time from launch app to play?
A: Improved mobile performance is definitely something we continue to look for opportunities to improve on. Recently we optimized the size of the art files specifically to take up less space while still maintaining the level of quality we would like to maintain. Additionally we are in the middle of looking at sound for future places to optimize, one such idea being; removing the background music for adventures a player doesn’t own and as such will never make use of.
Q: What is the HS team’s opinion on how regions are handled by the Battle/net client?
A: When Hearthstone was built originally the technology for world wide collections didn’t exist so we built our game around that. The vast majority of players play only in one region so this works great for them.
I do feel for the players like you that play in multiple regions though. It is a lot of work to change this so we haven’t prioritized it yet over card sets or current features.
Q: In your “year of the dragon” video you vowed to improve your communication.
Can we have a regular (monthly, not just before expansions) outlet for this?
Things like AMAs, designer insight articles/ videos or even some twitch hangouts or speedpaintings.
A: As the very person saying that in the video, I can honestly say we mean it.
Frequency is the very first thing we can address by looking for opportunities to share more often the things we are working on, as much as possible in a way that will feel timely and relevant. Additionally I would say we want to be even more honest with our players, meaning here sharing not only those things we are excited about but also the things we are concerned about or mistakes we have made and want to address.
I know the Hearthstone team is excited for the opportunity to engage with you and you can expect to see more frequent articles, blog posts, AMA’s, behind the scenes and hearth side chats that will introduce you to a broader range of developers on the team. To your point specifically we have cited our want to do this separate from proximity to expansions.
Q: In the past, pre-expansion additions like Marin the Fox and Volcanosaur made the game more exciting during down periods. Are you planning on doing that again in the future?
A: Absolutely, players really enjoyed having a burst of flavor and change right before an expansion hits. In fact, we’ll be doing it for this expansion!
This time we will gave away the card a week before the expansion comes out so you can use it over the prerelease weekend.
Q: There’s a lot of older players who feel like they have achieved everything in the game and there’s nothing left for them besides the monthly legend grind.
How do you plan to address this issue?
A: One of our goals is to do a better job of creating medium to long-term goals. We’ve talked about doing special rewards for something beyond 500 wins, though I’m curious what players would want to achieve. If you have any specific milestones you think we should celebrate and reward in-game we’d love to hear about them. We could go the route of static achievement like 1000 wins, try to create a continuously rewarding system that doesn’t have a cap like leveling in Overwatch, or do some time-based weekly or monthly progression system. We’ve been talking about all of these individually and will likely release at least one of them.
Also wanted to address something that comes up with every AMA. We spend a lot of time talking about the things we’re working on, but players obviously want to know when the thing is being released. This format isn’t going to be great for that because when we’re ready to announce a thing is happening, we’ll do a video or blog and release it simultaneously to every region on our website. I hope that AMAs can be a place where we can discuss some of the things we’re thinking about so players can both get some insight into what is going on and have the opportunity to give feedback on the general direction we’re thinking about.
Q: What lessons do you all feel that the Year of the Raven has taught you that you can take into the Year of the Dragon?
A: One important lesson was that new expansions should have a big impact on the meta. We want to see the game continue to evolve over the year because that’s what makes it fun. We helped this by changing some Classic cards so that our new expansions will have a bigger impact, but we will continue pushing new cards that have a bigger impact.
Another lesson we took away from Year of the Raven is that having something to do between expansion releases is important. We are hoping to address this in a variety of ways this year and in the future. One way that we already mentioned is Arena changing every 2 months. Another way is releasing the single-player Adventure a month after the expansion. We’re not done with just that though.
To speak to this from a single player perspective, we learned a ton from the past year of solo adventures.
Monster Hunt gave us some great insight into how we can better tell stories in the Dungeon Run format, and the value of bringing in new unique Heroes. It also taught us a lot about Hero Powers, and just how much a new, strong Hero Power can dictate the pacing and style of the game.
The Puzzle Lab was a departure from standard gameplay, but it paved the way for doing things in Hearthstone that aren’t traditional, while still feeling like Hearthstone. You’ll see some of this idea in the upcoming solo adventure!
Rhastakhan’s Rumble taught us about how big we can go with combat, and the value of player choice and tracking. I’m super glad we were able to react so quickly to community feedback on this.
Q: Given the evolution of Hearthstone since beta and launch, and how we’ve seen other online TCG and CCGs handle daily quests and rewards, will we ever see a change to how things are currently handled to better reflect the new economy?
A: I mentioned this in a different post, but something we want to work on is providing players with more rewarding mid and long-term goals. Daily quests do a good job of creating daily rewards, but we don’t have very engaging systems for players who want to be working towards something over the course of a week/month/year, etc.
One approach we’re discussed is to consolidate the current reward systems so that players can feel more rewarded playing the game the way they want, whether that’s single-player, the ladder, Arena, Tavern Brawls, and so on.
Our rewards are spread out across a ton of places right now, and I think when that happens it makes a lot of the individual pieces like 10G per 3W feel unrewarding. It has always been our goal to provide players with enough rewards to make it easy to craft a deck they enjoy. Everyone benefits if that’s true. We want you to be able to craft fun decks, because players who are having fun stick around long-term. If creating fun decks is a painful process, players will leave and we know that.
Bundles with cards like Zayle will help players get in and play, and we have some events and rewards coming in the mid-expansion timelines of 2019 as well. In the long-term, the goals are what I mentioned above. Consolidate some of our existing systems so you can play the way you want to play, and give players more mid and long term goals that are appropriately rewarding.
Q: Are there any plans for new game modes like co-op?
A: We have a bunch of plans for this year that aren’t new game modes. Our focus right now is making sure existing game modes feel like they’re fresh and exciting, like our recent update to Arena. The honest answer is that we haven’t figured out what the next Hearthstone game mode will be. We talk pretty in-depth about common suggestions like 2v2; we’ve even spent some time in design and engineering prototyping what that mode might translate to in Hearthstone. That said, it’s not something we’re working on today. We have some ambitious ideas for game modes in mind, but they’re still very early on in the design process.
As far as new stuff goes, in 2019 we’re really focusing on improving some of our existing systems while also doing some unique events throughout the expansion timeline to shake up the meta in fun ways. We’ll share more information about these events as they get closer to release.
Q: Could we get a better achievement system, with more complicated, hard to do quests that perhaps reward cards/cosmetics that aren’t otherwise obtainable?
A: We all like the idea of more achievements and tracking of progress. We were able to add a bunch of this in the new Single Player adventure that is coming out after the first Expansion of the year. We will let you unlock hero powers and starting decks through play and we will track which hero powers and starting decks that you have won with. Hopefully in the future we can do more of this. Each time we do a new feature like this we learn more about it and expand on the technology as we go.
Q: Will there be an exclusive hero for the Year of the Dragon, like Maiev Shadowsong?
A: This year there’s not a Hero tied to the Year of the Dragon rotation, but I’d be shocked if we didn’t have some awesome Heroes lined up over the course of the year!
Q: I must ask why you prefer to make mechanics that work for only one expansion when you could stretch the idea out to work all year in three? I liked how Treant Druid was spread out and wouldn’t have minded that for Freeze Shaman as an attempt.
A: We do a mix of this. Sometimes a mechanic like Rush and Lifesteal and Discover is kept for years. Sometimes we do it for one expansion. Freeze is a good example because it isn’t very fun to have your minions frozen a lot so making that into a Tier 1 deck is pretty dangerous. We have seen this in mage already.
When we have a build-around like treants or elementals or dragons we can launch it and see how it goes, then slowly add cards to increase the power level over the next few years. Dragon Priest is a great example of this because it has been a reasonable deck for years and it changes each year as some of the strong cards leave, and new strong cards show up.
In the future we want to have more decks that rely on cards in two different years so that when rotation happens the deck changes, with some cards leaving and new cards entering the decks.