14 DAY TRIAL // The makers of Blizzard's extremely popular card game, Hearthstone, are aware of the issues that newcomers face when being paired up with veterans that utterly crush them, and are working on improving their situation.
The information comes from a fresh Reddit AMA with three key people behind Hearthstone, namely Senior Game Designer Ben Brode, Producer Yong Woo, and Community Manager Christina Sims, having answered a bunch of questions from the community last night.
This is a good day for Hearthstone, as all this comes just after the developer announced that the collectible card game was live on Android tablets, available on the Google Play store in Australia, New Zealand and Canada for the time being, expected to roll out worldwide in the following days.
For the time being, those who want to play the game on their phones still have some waiting to do, as Blizzard is working on bringing it to smaller screens, but those in the know can get the game to work as of right now. However, the procedure requires some experience and some trial and error.
The three devs provided answers to a bunch of the community's issues and sated the curiosity of many, even though some of the responses were rather vague.
Questions and answers
One of the issues discussed at length was the problem that new players face when picking up Hearthstone. After a few matches against the AI, and unlocking some of the basic cards, they will most likely try their hand at putting together a deck and playing through casual mode.
Unfortunately, the game's normal play mode is not what you would expect, as many gamers use it to test new brews before heading into ranked play, which means that, a lot of the time, newcomers with barely any cards will go against grizzled veterans using the best of what's available.
"We do have some problems with Matchmaking. We had taken steps to make sure brand new players were not matched against players who had already built massive collections, but we recently found some issues there and have been working to make it better," Ben Brode said on the issue.
"We are going to continue to monitor the new player experience, and I do think we'll need to do things to make it better over time, especially as we continue to release new content," he continued.
The developers also mentioned that they were currently looking into adding more daily quests for players to complete, but that at the time, they were not looking into adding more venues for obtaining gold, the in-game currency.
The team also revealed that they had a bunch of cool ideas regarding more fun and easy ways for players to get together and compete against each other in tournaments.
For the time being, the trio did not mention anything regarding the contents of any upcoming expansions, simply stating that they had a lot of options to choose from.
