I'll begin by saying that I appreciate any information/communication between the developers and the community. Thanks to Tian Ding for the written article and hope that we see more in the near future.
That being said, this article spent a lot of words to tell us...not much. Mostly importantly, it does not address the questions that people want answered...this article only answers the basic question of "how do we balance the Arena" and then goes through a lot of the factors we already know. The main questions we want answered fall within the "WHY" Blizzard chooses to do things a certain way...why they ban X and not Z, why they keep archaic systems in place when we have the bucket system, etc.
Look at the differences between this Developer Insight and the update blogs/posts/updates by the team at Overwatch. Jeff Kaplan and his team always try to explain WHY they do/don't think certain changes are needed. Whether or not I agree with changes such as changing Scatter for Hanzo or buffing Sombra's invisibility, I see their train of thought and I can properly respond...I also respect the transparency. I hope we see more of this type of insight in the future.
The post was directed at explaining how things are done. If you have any questions as to why something is or isn't done, I can answer them here. You can also always just hit me up privately. The team I work on has recently taken over most of the arena tasks, so hopefully we can answer any questions you might have.
This post essentially summarizes the Designer Insights and arena related news blog posts since the new arena system was announced and goes through the general process of how cards are "balanced". Anyone that closely followed the system probably did not learn anything new.
I think one main thing that the arena community deserves to know is "Who is in charge of arena?" as in the person that okays and signs off on arena decisions based on tasks performed by any data scientists, engineers, or technical analysts (technical aspect) or oversees the people that discuss initial card bucketing or arena balancing (design aspect).
I have no experience in game design and don't follow OW or any other Blizzard game so only have Hearthstone as a reference.
From what I can tell, the community tends to group any employee as a "dev" when we probably have no clue on the extent of most people's roles. For example some Blizzard Community Managers that post on the main Hearthstone sub or the Blizzard forums are referred to as "devs" like Mike Donais or Dean Ayala (Iksar) when they are more likely part of PR or advertising/marketing departments.
Jared Noel (DeraJN on Twitter/Twitch), as per his Linkedin has worked at Blizzard since Mar. '18 as a Hearthstone Analyst - Business and Gameplay Insights. I very briefly interacted with him while he streamed ranked constructed. He said there is no analytics team/group/department that focuses mainly on arena.
Tian handles a lot of the backend computations for balance. Kris was most recently charged with handling most of the arena decision making, but as with most design, it was a group effort. Nowadays, the final design (game balance) team handles most all arena design decisions. This has happened in the last month or so. Also for clarity, Mike is the lead game designer on Hearthstone, and Iksar (me) is also a game designer.
Thank you for your reply and confirmation! Additionally, is this the same final design team that Chakki is part of or is there a distinct or more likely subset that works on arena and other non Standard constructed modes?
Yes. Final Design is Realz (Ryan Masterson), Puffin (Stephen Chang), Chakki (Keaton Gill), and myself.
May we please have some of the removed cards returned to the Arena pool? I'm thinking of cards like Windspeaker, Snipe, Rampage and Soul of the Forest. They were removed in an early attempt to balance , but the bucket system has made their absence obsolete. Properly bucketed, there wouldn't seem to be any reason not to get them back.
When we were looking through the current system, we also thought returning those cards made sense. Cards that will still be left out are negative community reception or gameplay cards like Fledgling, or cards that make less sense in a draft environment like Quests and C'Thun cards. We'll return most of the cards in the category you listed in a future update.
C'Thun cards were never draftable in arena and would have actually helped a lot of classes at the time simply as on curve drops. The same can be said for odd/even mechanic cards.
I believe the majority of the arena community would be ok with C'Thun itself as well as Genn/Baku not being draftable, but their mechanic/synergy cards not being draftable never really "made sense".
I think from a practical standpoint, the existence of a 4/2 Divine Shield for (4) is a totally reasonable arena card. It's just a little strange to see build-around cards you can never realistically build-around. More of a confusing messaging thing than anything else. If we thought those cards meaningfully contributed to varied and interesting arena games we would have to weigh the benefit of that vs the strangeness of having cards that say words on them that are never realistically relevant. Because those cards are mostly just vanillas, we felt it was more upside to leave them out.
I don't think it's unreasonable to leave them out, and I didn't mind at the time, but I would reverse your final sentence- having them be mostly vanillas is a good reason to leave them in. Arena is where we like and appreciate the solid, on-curve drops that Constructed tends to ignore.
Sure. My point was only to say that there was a downside of a confusing message we're sending by citing build-arounds that are impossible to achieve and there wasn't a huge upside. There is nothing wrong with adding vanilla minions to the pool, it's just as with almost all design decisions we weight the potential upsides and downsides and make a call.
I'm sure its somewhere, but as someone that plays Hearthstone in bursts, it would be really nice if there was updates on banned cards/offer rates. I didnt even know Snipe for instance wasnt even offered in Arena. Knowing this now I realized I've played a very large amount of turns playing around Snipe without the possibility of Snipe.
Pretty reasonable. We have some scattered blogs talking about how arena works and what cards are in and not in, but not a great official source for all things arena. We used to have a sticky on our site that gave the general rules along with banned cards and offer rates but it's a little outdated now. We'll see about getting it updated.
So, is this a new system?
Or the same system we've been under since April?
Also, does this post imply that Blizzard will hit the balance button on Arena more frequently from now on, rather than Boomsday history of "wait 2 months after expansion release to do the first balancing"? If so, how frequently?
It's all a math problem according to the article right? Should be easy to hit the sciencey "balance" button every week or so.
Any information we didn't already know would be appreciated. The post reads like a good summary if what Blizzard has been doing for the past 6 months, which is nice... but Arena hasn't exactly had class balance for the last 6 months.
The system isn't new, but we are trying to do a better job about having a consistent cadence.
Our current plan is rebucket anything we got wrong about 2 weeks after the expansion launches. We collect data for a week, determine if any cards should have their buckets changed, then coordinate with our live service team to find the soonest reasonable time to send out a server patch. After the new buckets are live (if any changes were made, there probably will be) we collect data for another week or two then do a balance change like Tian mentioned in the blog. The exact times are a little loose right now because of the holiday season, but this should be generally accurate.
Around halfway through the expansion we plan on doing another bucket and balance evaluation to determine if anything has changed enough to warrant a second round of server hotfixes.
Is it not worth it to have the model learn with new examples over time? This way the system is always balancing as it goes? Or do designers still step in and finalize every decision the model makes?
Data determines what cards should change buckets and what cards should have their rates adjusted. Generally we trust the model to achieve balance but go over each of the individual bucket changes to make sure they make sense.
I'm personally really disappointed by this news. With 6 expansions in the mix, the current number of cards means that we don't get to play much with the new cards when the expansion releases. I understand that a big offering bonus could cause balance issues, but I think it could very well be worth it to break a few things for a fresh experience on launch day.
It's mostly that offering bonuses in the past have resulted in individual cards appearing too often. We generally like to keep the cards that appear the most to a <1.5 per draft rate. One of the things core to arena is that each deck feels different than the last, and with large set bonuses this is less true. I do agree that ideally when a new set releases, arena feels fresh and different. We are currently exploring some ideas for this, but they aren't far enough along to dig into quite yet.
Decks not feeling different at all is a big problem for months now (since the introduction of buckets)! Arena nowadays feels like a constructed light where you can actually predict a lot of cards in your opponent's hand instead of seeing new decks every game. Games feel very similar and one dimensional when Fungalmancer and Wurm are in ~33%!!! of all decks (powerful cards feel very oppressive, and boring, when they appear in almost all games) it destroys the replayability of Arena for a lot of people.
Also please remove MCT, it's unfun and a bad designed card (for arena, it's fine in constructed) whereas a lot of cards that were removed were less problematic.
Been thinking about MCT. As painful as it is to continuously add special rules to cards available and not available, it might still be the right call to remove MCT as we have with cards like DKs and Fledgling.
Would love to hear feedback from other arena players on this.
Do this changes require a client update? If not, how will you communicate them considering server hot fixes don't come with a patch note?
That's up to our community team, but if I remember correctly, hotfixes we want to communicate usually come with an associated twitter/facebook posts that link to a sticky topic on the official forums. Once that happens, someone from reddit almost always posts the changes here as well.
If you have any questions as to why something is or isn't done, I can answer them here. You can also always just hit me up privately.
Don't take it the wrong way, but is this really the best way to communicate changes in the system? To single people? Or here inside a reddit only very few people read? Shouldn't those informations be inside of patch notes so everyone who cares about it gets informed?
Ideally there is public communication as well. I don't think every reddit response is worthy of a public blast from an official channel with a million followers (like this one for example). Reddit isn't the place for announcements, but I'd like to think it can still be a place for discussion. For example, we'll add some of the cards that were previously removed from arena in a future update. I'm not sure exactly what server branch it will be in, but when we are sure, we'll make a public announcement with patch notes for all cards that have been re-released into the pool. Here on the arena reddit, I think it's pretty appropriate to talk a little about what the future might hold and collect feedback from the most engaged arena community before stating what the we're going to do to the whole population.
I guess I would argue that having a new expansion launch and not feeling much of an impact from new cards is worse than having individual cards appear too often. And if it is a big problem then the offering bonus could be dialed down fairly quickly?
Somewhat related: If anything, the bucket system has resulted in decks feeling more and more similar these days. The warrior decks of the most recent meta are sometimes painfully similar (take every warpath, super collider, and all taunts). It was a successful strategy, but not necessarily the most fun to play or play against. If one of the core things about arena is that each deck should feel different than the last then I wonder if some modifications need to be made to the bucket system. Anyhow, I appreciate you taking the time to reply in this thread iksar and I just wanted to share some of my concerns!
Warrior tends to be so poor in arena that when their background balance happens they get very high weights for their good cards. I think this results in Warrior decks feeling more the same than some of the other classes, though we do get the positive of Warrior having a win rate high enough that it doesn't feel like a bad class to pick.
As far as the expansion bonus goes, it sounds like most of the feedback I hear anecdotally and from here is that some adjustment would be welcome. We'll talk some today about it and I'll refresh my memory on all the feedback that caused us to remove the bonus in the first place. We'll talk about it today.
Thanks for fielding questions here and to Tian for the article. I’m concerned about how warping the high power level cards are to the pursuit of 50% win rates. Basically classes with strong cards in them either end up with great or bad decks, while other classes frequently end up with average decks. Is the variance this creates in the classes with the best cards a desired outcome? Have you ever thought about removing these outlier cards in an attempt to level the playing field for any deck in any class?
While I understand as well as anybody it's perception that matters, I would challenge actually how true this is. There is rarely a situation where a class has such extreme high power level cards that all decks with them are 'great' and all decks without them are 'bad'. The deck you draft should have some impact on how your run goes, but not so much to the effect that it is the only thing that dictates your performance.
Thanks for responding so quickly. In addition to the questions that /u/adwcta asked in a reply, I'd like to ask:
1) We saw one instance where the exact offering rates were given to us (August 1 post by Kris Zierhut). Do you guys have plans to do this more often?
2) We've seen multiple times, through HSReplay, where a class will jump in winrate and certain cards appear a lot more often. These all point to instances where appearance rates have been adjusted, but we receive no notification from blizzard and no explanation. I think I speak for all of the Arena community when I say that even a small notification or message is appreciated. Can we expect to see notifications/updates/messages like this in the future?
3) Big picture, we'd love to get Blizzard's thoughts about the Arena and the direction you'd like to take it. This is obviously not a question you need to answer today, but I think it's fair to say that the Arena of today is not that different from the Arena of 2015. Sure, the cards are different and the drafting system has changed, but it's still the "black sheep" of hearthstone...it's non-competitive and there's no true end game like constructed (which has official tournaments, real money prizes, a points system for placement at the end of the year). We here obviously still love the format, but we're often wondering what the "plan" is, if there is even a plan...are we looking forward to anything or is this it? Recently, Shadybunny quit Arena for a while (he's back now, yay!) to focus on constructed because he felt like Blizzard was never going to do anything with Arena to make it anything more than it is currently. I think a lot of people are curious...and even more people are resigned to the fact that nothing will ever change. So if you guys do have any big plans, please consider telling us your thoughts about the "future" of Arena. Thanks.
Sorry it took so long to respond!
1 and 2. I wouldn't mind doing a bucket publish. It's the kind of thing where the information is out there already for players, but it would be easier if there was a one-stop shop for what the buckets actually are. As far as fine-tuning of balance appearance rates, I don't think that's something we'll publish. We will send out something that lets people know some balance adjustments have been made, though.
Arena faces some challenges in terms of growth. Things like esports, ranked systems, and real-money prizes are great for helping the engaged player stay engaged. I think they are less great for growing the arena community with players that aren't already invested in the game mode. Two of the biggest question marks to me are matchmaking and rewards. Right now we have a system that asks you to invest currency you care about to play games in a format you have X amount of experience in, then we reward you based on your performance. The way we match you (outside of your first 3 runs ever) is look at your current record and try to find someone with a similar record, regardless of that players skill level or experience in arena. This favors those that are skilled and experienced while punishing those that are either new or less skilled in the format. I don't think the average player realizes how matchmaking works, I would guess they just think they aren't very good at arena and maybe it's not for them. We could match players based on some combined value of their skill and current record, though I imagine some of our most engaged players would be upset with that solution. The first thing that would happen is that high skill players would win less, the second thing that would happen is that every player would have a similar chance to go 3, 5, 7, 12, or any win amount because they would be matched against players with similar skill level. This actually doesn't sound that bad, but because rewards are based off your performance, there is some expectation that if you are a good player, you should net more wins, and get rewarded more than a player less skilled than you. If there was no entrance fee and no reward, I think it would be pretty reasonable to match players based on a skill/record combined value. Having some entrance fee is also helpful, though, in that it helps players try to make the best of each individual run rather than retire runs until they have the ultimate deck. These are some of the things we've been thinking about. In terms of what the future holds, I think the first thing we'll try to address is how difficult it can be to be a new or inexperienced arena player. Without that, it's going to be very difficult for the community to grow. While that is in progress, we have some ideas to keep arena super fresh expansion to expansion we'll likely debut early next year. Once those things are in place, it's a reasonable time to start thinking about more systems that help the arena community stay engaged long-term.
I know there aren't a lot of hard answers in this post, but I hope it helps you understand where we are in terms of thinking about the future. Whenever we have anything to announce, you'll hear it from our official channels.
I think this might the best response about arena in years. Actual breakdown of issues and a description of some of the directions you want to go. These type of answers are something sorely missed for the arena: what do you want arena to be, what problems you see in the arena, and a sorting of which issues you think are more important than others.
I can understand about the fine-tuning appearance rates. But, could you tell us the bonus or penalty for cards that are more substantial. Obviously, if it's under 10%, then no one really needs that information. But, when it's something like +50%, it really matters.
As for direction in the arena, if you were to change match making to match on skill level, I think you'd have to change the reward structure (maybe a leveling up system, like ranked, where the higher ranks reward better than the lower ranks) because you'd basically kill any incentive to be good at the mode (unless you were the very top and still get to higher wins against the best players). Now that I think about that, that might solve 2 problems. It'd help new players feel like they can win some games and it'd also give good players a progression system that the arena sorely lacks. Hopefully whatever you guys come up with can really help turn Arena into a real game mode other than a side event for Hearthstone.
Thanks for the improved responses and very much hope this continues in the future.
As for the first part, to my knowledge we've never adjusted anything by more than +/- 30% outside of very special cases like Fledgling, Flamestrike, and Abyssal Enforcer.... I might be forgetting one.
As for the second, lately I've been thinking along the same lines. Progression based rewards, skill/record based matchmaking. I do wonder if having a progression system that rewarded high win totals would make up for no longer having access to a system that generated 'infinite' rewards. Imagine a scenario where arena was 100G, always gave you a pack at the end, and any additional rewards were unlocked via a capped progression system that awarded you for your performance over a month. Maybe that means rewards for total wins, total wins per class, or your high watermark win total per class in individual runs. For clarity sake, none of this is currently being worked on, I'd be concerned that taking away 'infinite' arena and having lower win per run numbers would be too jarring a change for the hyper engaged and skilled player, though it might be a great benefit to many others.
Iksar
The post was directed at explaining how things are done. If you have any questions as to why something is or isn't done, I can answer them here. You can also always just hit me up privately. The team I work on has recently taken over most of the arena tasks, so hopefully we can answer any questions you might have.
Iksar
Tian handles a lot of the backend computations for balance. Kris was most recently charged with handling most of the arena decision making, but as with most design, it was a group effort. Nowadays, the final design (game balance) team handles most all arena design decisions. This has happened in the last month or so. Also for clarity, Mike is the lead game designer on Hearthstone, and Iksar (me) is also a game designer.
Iksar
Yes. Final Design is Realz (Ryan Masterson), Puffin (Stephen Chang), Chakki (Keaton Gill), and myself.
Iksar
When we were looking through the current system, we also thought returning those cards made sense. Cards that will still be left out are negative community reception or gameplay cards like Fledgling, or cards that make less sense in a draft environment like Quests and C'Thun cards. We'll return most of the cards in the category you listed in a future update.
Iksar
I think from a practical standpoint, the existence of a 4/2 Divine Shield for (4) is a totally reasonable arena card. It's just a little strange to see build-around cards you can never realistically build-around. More of a confusing messaging thing than anything else. If we thought those cards meaningfully contributed to varied and interesting arena games we would have to weigh the benefit of that vs the strangeness of having cards that say words on them that are never realistically relevant. Because those cards are mostly just vanillas, we felt it was more upside to leave them out.
Iksar
There is not.
Iksar
Sure. My point was only to say that there was a downside of a confusing message we're sending by citing build-arounds that are impossible to achieve and there wasn't a huge upside. There is nothing wrong with adding vanilla minions to the pool, it's just as with almost all design decisions we weight the potential upsides and downsides and make a call.
Iksar
Pretty reasonable. We have some scattered blogs talking about how arena works and what cards are in and not in, but not a great official source for all things arena. We used to have a sticky on our site that gave the general rules along with banned cards and offer rates but it's a little outdated now. We'll see about getting it updated.
Iksar
The system isn't new, but we are trying to do a better job about having a consistent cadence.
Our current plan is rebucket anything we got wrong about 2 weeks after the expansion launches. We collect data for a week, determine if any cards should have their buckets changed, then coordinate with our live service team to find the soonest reasonable time to send out a server patch. After the new buckets are live (if any changes were made, there probably will be) we collect data for another week or two then do a balance change like Tian mentioned in the blog. The exact times are a little loose right now because of the holiday season, but this should be generally accurate.
Around halfway through the expansion we plan on doing another bucket and balance evaluation to determine if anything has changed enough to warrant a second round of server hotfixes.
Iksar
Data determines what cards should change buckets and what cards should have their rates adjusted. Generally we trust the model to achieve balance but go over each of the individual bucket changes to make sure they make sense.
Iksar
It's mostly that offering bonuses in the past have resulted in individual cards appearing too often. We generally like to keep the cards that appear the most to a <1.5 per draft rate. One of the things core to arena is that each deck feels different than the last, and with large set bonuses this is less true. I do agree that ideally when a new set releases, arena feels fresh and different. We are currently exploring some ideas for this, but they aren't far enough along to dig into quite yet.
Iksar
Been thinking about MCT. As painful as it is to continuously add special rules to cards available and not available, it might still be the right call to remove MCT as we have with cards like DKs and Fledgling.
Would love to hear feedback from other arena players on this.
Iksar
That's up to our community team, but if I remember correctly, hotfixes we want to communicate usually come with an associated twitter/facebook posts that link to a sticky topic on the official forums. Once that happens, someone from reddit almost always posts the changes here as well.
Iksar
Ideally there is public communication as well. I don't think every reddit response is worthy of a public blast from an official channel with a million followers (like this one for example). Reddit isn't the place for announcements, but I'd like to think it can still be a place for discussion. For example, we'll add some of the cards that were previously removed from arena in a future update. I'm not sure exactly what server branch it will be in, but when we are sure, we'll make a public announcement with patch notes for all cards that have been re-released into the pool. Here on the arena reddit, I think it's pretty appropriate to talk a little about what the future might hold and collect feedback from the most engaged arena community before stating what the we're going to do to the whole population.
Iksar
Warrior tends to be so poor in arena that when their background balance happens they get very high weights for their good cards. I think this results in Warrior decks feeling more the same than some of the other classes, though we do get the positive of Warrior having a win rate high enough that it doesn't feel like a bad class to pick.
As far as the expansion bonus goes, it sounds like most of the feedback I hear anecdotally and from here is that some adjustment would be welcome. We'll talk some today about it and I'll refresh my memory on all the feedback that caused us to remove the bonus in the first place. We'll talk about it today.
Iksar
While I understand as well as anybody it's perception that matters, I would challenge actually how true this is. There is rarely a situation where a class has such extreme high power level cards that all decks with them are 'great' and all decks without them are 'bad'. The deck you draft should have some impact on how your run goes, but not so much to the effect that it is the only thing that dictates your performance.
Iksar
Sorry it took so long to respond!
1 and 2. I wouldn't mind doing a bucket publish. It's the kind of thing where the information is out there already for players, but it would be easier if there was a one-stop shop for what the buckets actually are. As far as fine-tuning of balance appearance rates, I don't think that's something we'll publish. We will send out something that lets people know some balance adjustments have been made, though.
I know there aren't a lot of hard answers in this post, but I hope it helps you understand where we are in terms of thinking about the future. Whenever we have anything to announce, you'll hear it from our official channels.
Iksar
As for the first part, to my knowledge we've never adjusted anything by more than +/- 30% outside of very special cases like Fledgling, Flamestrike, and Abyssal Enforcer.... I might be forgetting one.
As for the second, lately I've been thinking along the same lines. Progression based rewards, skill/record based matchmaking. I do wonder if having a progression system that rewarded high win totals would make up for no longer having access to a system that generated 'infinite' rewards. Imagine a scenario where arena was 100G, always gave you a pack at the end, and any additional rewards were unlocked via a capped progression system that awarded you for your performance over a month. Maybe that means rewards for total wins, total wins per class, or your high watermark win total per class in individual runs. For clarity sake, none of this is currently being worked on, I'd be concerned that taking away 'infinite' arena and having lower win per run numbers would be too jarring a change for the hyper engaged and skilled player, though it might be a great benefit to many others.