14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has expressed its desire to keep from flooding Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, its free-to-play online card game, with new items, in order to allow players to still wrap their heads around the many different combinations that are possible inside the multiplayer experience.
Hearthstone rolled out some time ago under the closed beta stage and has since gained a lot of loyal users due to its pretty well balanced card collection as well as the many different combinations that are possible using unlocked cards, protagonists, and much more.
A few weeks ago, the first full-fledged expansion for the game, Curse of Naxxramas, was released, bringing not just new adventures against different AI-controlled adversaries, but also a lot of fresh cards that can be used in player decks.
According to Blizzard's Production Director, Jason Chayes, who talked with GamesIndustry, the studio doesn't want to keep on cranking out new cards as balance must be found inside the actual experiences.
"What is the right pacing of content?" he asked. "And Naxxramas was actually deliberately designed with that in mind because we wanted to make sure that for existing players that are really engaged in the game that we're going to change the metagame but we didn't want to introduce all that many new cards because we wanted to make sure that we're not flooding the environment. It's an ever-evolving discussion that we're having internally about the pace of content."
Chayes confirms that Blizzard's Hearthstone team has a lot of tools at its disposal to see what cards are popular, how they feel when they're used by players and what reactions they elicit in those who receive their actual attacks. That emotional response, according to the developer, is quite important, in order to prevent people from getting frustrated.
"We have internal metrics but on the other hand it's extremely important to us that these cards feel good emotionally. Like when someone plays a card on you, is it super frustrating, outside of the realm of the absolute balance of that card?"
"That's critical from the community to communicate that to us and we pay as much if not more attention to that as we do to the absolute win percentage number of this card. And we've made a number of changes in the past based on that emotional feedback. It's very very important to us and it's huge - the community has done all kind of great things for us."
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has just received the full Naxxramas expansion and it's a safe bet that the studio is working on more new things for the popular card game.
