Hearthstone Designer, Dean "Iksar" Ayala, answered a bunch of community questions on Reddit this past weekend and gave us some interesting insight into the current Achievement System and what will come in the future. 

In the same thread, he hinted at some possible balance changes coming in the near future, but for this topic, we'll still have to wait and see!

In particular, he talked about the following topics:

  • Iksar likes the idea of introducing specific rewards based on your achievement points - in particular, he talked about card backs;
  • There will probably be more convenient ways to claim achievements in the future;
  • Story mode not getting achievements is a bug that will be fixed in a future patch;
  • We're going to get achievements for old adventures too: they'll get retroactively assigned to those who have already completed them;
  • Bugs are something that happens: there are various reasons, but you can't completely avoid them;
  • They worked a lot before the holidays to make sure nothing game-breaking would happen in the meantime;
  • Changes will be made to achievement notification timing. Getting spoiled every time sucks!

On a side note, a couple of Reddit users adopted rough ways to ask questions and to give feedback to the developers. While not everyone can be happy about the current state of the game, there's no reason to be rude or disrespectful. If you want more communication, then you should act in a way that feels you deserve an answer.

If you want to read the actual posts, we quoted them here below.

Quote From Iksar

Have you guys considered making some sort of player flair or cardback for amassing a certain level of achievements? Like 10-15k points or something?

I think it's pretty reasonable to have a card back for some high watermark of achievement points….. I like it :).

Quote From Iksar

Any chance we can get a disenchant all button type thing for claiming these achievements en masse?

Been talking about more convenient ways to claim. Likely it will change in the future, but this isn't as high a priority as getting in older achievements atm. Achievements in general will be something we improve over time.

Quote From Iksar

Some past achievements from before the new system aren’t recognized, but others are. For instance, completing story modes or achieving legend, but not getting the achievement.

Story mode not getting achievement are bugs, we plan on introducing achievements for completing old adventures at some point and those should be retroactive. We just didn't have time for the initial launch of the system.

Quote From Iksar

Why are there many bugs in the recent patches? (Note for the editor: this was not the question asked, but the guy was just straight up rude, so I changed it to match the answer)

It's actually a pretty big hassle to go back and fix things, hotfix, pull people off their tasks […]. Recently, bugs have stayed in the client longer to give our team a holiday break to hang with their families. Not only has nothing been worked on for a couple weeks, but we were tentative to check anything in just before break so those fixes didn't trigger anything game-breaking that would cause people to have to come back from holiday to fix. That said, there will always be issues that slip through to live and we'll fix them as they come up. If you are looking for a promise that bugs will stop reaching the live client then that is never going to be something any dev can give you. For what it's worth, a lot of these back-end systems are brand new. Brand new systems mean a higher likelihood of bugs because there is a lot of unknown. I remember working on HS after we released Naxxramas and… wow… that was a bad time for bugs. Later adventures benefitted from a lot of that pain and I'm sure later achievement, reward, and quest updates will benefit from the bugs that slipped through now.

Bugs happen. Sometimes due to dev miss, sometimes QA miss, sometimes because of some difference in the testing environment and release environment we didn't account for. Unfortunately in this circumstance the fix requires a client patch so we weren't able to get it in right away.

Quote From Iksar

Every time I get an achievement I'm actually disappointed because that means I'm about to lose my next Battlegrounds round. Similarly, before revealing any of the cards I've earned in a new pack I'll see achievements indicating if I got a legendary and for which class. Is anyone at Blizzard even talking about these issues?

In any case, the timing of when the server understands you do something is different than when you visually see it. Specifically for BG the fact you see an achievement pop knowing the game ended is pretty crappy. We are fixing that. There are a lot of edge cases I'm less sure about like whether we should suppress a gameplay achievement until the end of turn or end of game. Knowing exactly when animation timings happen on the client and triggering an achievement on the server is pretty tricky. Opening packs is also something we'll look at. These are less bugs and more just things we couldn't fit in on time but didn't want to delay the whole system because of it.

Normally we have what we'd call 'soak time' for these systems where we play with them for a few weeks or months before they release but in this circumstance we felt like what we had was better to push live than to soak it for another couple months and not release until the next expansion. More bugs than we would have liked because of that decision but I am glad it was a call we made.