Hearthstone Game Director Ben Brode took to Reddit to speak about some of the upcoming changes to the Seasonal Grinding.
Hearthstone – Upcoming Changes to Seasonal Grinding & Tournament Mode
First the Game Director expanded on what he believes are the 4 major weaknesses to the current Hearthstone ranked system:
- Top end players have to grind too match to just get fun matches
- Low end players have very little progression as well as get “stuck” at rank 20-17 after few wins.
- New players for Ranked get crushed after pretty enjoyable Casual experience
- Players do the same thing over and over again every month, which makes Seasonal Grinding, well, grindy
Ben Brode hopes that the team will be able with all of the above. However, #4 would be pretty hard to tackle. Having progression is fun, but the more you have, the more grindy it feels. The Director also spoke about possible Tournament mode implementation.
There are two possible ways Tournaments could work that the team considered recently:
- Pitting a bunch of players against each other. Giving them all time to finish their rounds, then start the next one. Rinse and repeat until there is a clear winner. Pro: clear tournament fantasy. Cons: Long waits between rounds as well as really variable time commitment.
- 8-player bracket, resulting in asynchronous, competitive event. However, Heroic Brawl and Arena already have some of that.
As the team gathered feedback and looked through the “Tournament Mode” topics dating back years, they began to explore some crazier ideas that might satisfy the “itch”.
