Nice to meet you, Hearthstone community.
Nathan Lyons-Smith here, following on from last week’s promise to give you more visibility into our Hearthstone strategy.
As someone who has played Hearthstone since the beta days, I’m passionate about making sure that the game we all love continues to thrive. As an executive producer, it’s also my job to look after the health of the game, our amazing team, and our equally amazing community.
We’re doing significant research and development into the future of Hearthstone to ensure Tavern will be your home for another decade and beyond. Although we are not yet ready to share any information about this work – and will not be for For a while“I want you to know that we’re committed to Hearthstone as we know it today, and that this work is happening alongside what I’ll detail below.”
We’ve made some changes over the past 18 months that weren’t what you’ve come to expect from Hearthstone. We didn’t do a good job communicating our strategy around these changes. I am sorry about that. Going forward, my goal is to be more open. We need to proactively share the changes we’re making with our community, along with the context around why we’re making those changes. I’ll get to it now.
Fun, focused and fearless
Our Hearthstone strategy is based on three words: Fun, Focus and Fearless.
Hearthstone delivers a special kind of fun; the aha moments and puzzle-like combat, along with the game’s unique look and feel. Every day, we strive to provide tools that inspire you to experience the game your way, so Hearthstone can offer you your own brand of fun.
Constructed, Battlegrounds and Arena are the modes our community plays the most and where you see us make the biggest updates – as you saw with Battlegrounds Duos earlier this year. Focusing on these modes allows us to make more significant improvements in areas that affect the majority of our community.
We want to be fearless in the pursuit of discovering more fun experiences, and we strive to move beyond the status quo to do so. We saw one such opportunity in Arena. Over the past eight months, the Arena community has been energized by some small but impactful design changes. Early access to expansion cards, new rules drafts, and curated card sets have had a profound impact on the game mode. It’s worked out great – Arena’s popularity has skyrocketed, so we want to do more. We are now working on a major and very cool update for Arena and aim to release it early next year.
Taking bold and purposeful steps are the kinds of decisions our team is committed to. We appreciate your passion for Hearthstone, and we won’t always be perfect, but our promise is that we’ll listen and respond as quickly as possible. We’ll keep track of what isn’t working as well as we’d like, while doubling down and pushing even harder when we find something great.
Freeing up space for personalization innovation
When we decided not to make a board for Perils in Paradise, we should have let you know earlier. Moving forward, we’ll make sure you get early visibility into changes like this and instead give you more information about what we’re working on.
We still plan to release one new board per year, but we also have some ambitious ideas that we know will be a significant undertaking. Moving away from three static game boards per year to one allows us to start working on the coolest dynamic stuff possible – like a system for choosing your favorite boards and Pets (!). We’ve also heard so much positive feedback about C’Thun, so we’re working on some really innovative new hero skins. It’s TOO SOON to go into more detail about what’s to come, but we’ll be expediting putting all existing Hearthstone boards into the Standard format board rotation.
We also polled a large group of you to ask which cosmetics you would be most interested in. The responses were mostly around further customization of the play space, and this feedback reinforced our desire to innovate and challenge what we’ve always done.
Thank you for your feedback
Hearthstone is here to stay. Although it has evolved and adapted over the past 10 years, one thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that it has an amazing team behind it, with as much passion and energy as ever. We have a fantastic upcoming set of maps and themes exploring new stories that can be told within Azeroth and beyond, as well as events and features that we hope will surprise and delight you all.
Many team members (myself included) lurk in the Hearthstone communities because we’re big fans of the game AND because we want your feedback. We have a shared passion and love for this game and we want it to be the best it can be so we can enjoy it together. As a team, we often talk about what we see and hear from you, and we need to make it more of a two-way conversation. With this in mind, I commit to contacting you again before the end of the year to inform you of any further changes in strategy.
Until then, we hope you’re enjoying Perils in Paradise and exploring new fun with tourists. See you at the Tavern!
– Nathan
