Blog

Patrick Sullivan

Last weekend was our World Championship tournament.  Beyond the significance of crowning a World Champion (and congratulations to Hans Hoeh and the rest of the Top 16), the tournament has implications for our competitive scene for months to come.  While Classic and Draft are important, supported formats, Core touches the largest number of players.  Therefore, the state of Core is a Big Deal, and something that we need to pay careful attention to.

By reading forums and hearing anecdotal feedback, it appears a number of our players are not thrilled with the current state of the Core format.  That’s a fair critique; there are some legitimate issues right now, and I believe things could always be better.  However, in some circles the vitriol is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I would like to talk about some of the commonly perceived negatives.  I do believe that there is a mixture of real problems, mixed with some false narratives and distorted perspectives, that have gained momentum in the community, and I always think it’s best to talk about these things earnestly and openly.  You may not agree with everything I have to say, but that’s still better than radio silence.

For those of you who aren’t completely looped in, what we’re reading in the forums is:

1)      Horde is significantly more powerful than Alliance.

2)      Grand Crusader is an oppressive card.

3)       More broadly, the format is dominated by rush strategies.

In regards to point one, R&D is in agreement.  Current bias in our metagame towards Horde is unhealthy.  Sava’gin alone provides a tremendous incentive to play Horde because he provides value without even having to be played; when combined with Mazu’kon many players saw little reason to play Alliance.  There is some truth to this; we felt Horde would have a slight edge on Alliance in the real world once Throne of the Tides was released, but certainly not to the extent that Worlds suggests.  We had numerous powerful decks built around allies like Faenis the Tranquil and Faithseer Jasmina (who would have been exceptional against the winning deck, assuming the proper support cards), but the community either didn’t find these decks or rejected them in favor of other options.  Regardless, it doesn’t really matter if the state of things is “perception” or “reality”.  We have to make an effort to correct this imbalance, and I believe our upcoming set provides some compelling tools to play Alliance.  We are too far away from spoiler season for me to leak these cards, but there is a healthy combination of raw power and metagame solving tools that we believe will help to correct some of the current bias.

There is no doubt in my mind that Grand Crusader is an extremely powerful card, and no one in R&D was surprised that it became the lynchpin for one of the defining decks.  We wanted to make “protector of the meek” a theme for Paladin starting with Throne of the Tides, and that provided us a compelling reason to shoot high with this card.   Besides, we need to make cards like this powerful from time to time.  Too often historically in WoW, ally selection comes down to cherry-picking the best ally at each drop point.  Cards like Grand Crusader (and Aspect of the Wild, Orgrimmar, and so on) provide big incentives to play with allies you otherwise wouldn’t.  Put another way, the winning deck was a Horde deck that skipped out on playing Mazu’kon and Saurfang to make room for Korlix Grimvik, among other allies not generally considered good enough for tournament play.  If the TCG is going to be robust and provide a sense of discovery, we need to make tools like Grand Crusader. 

Still, oppressive is oppressive, even if it’s just attacking with small allies.  We anticipate players will be able to react better now knowing the exact manifestation of the deck, as building successful control decks is a lot about knowing exactly what threats you’re facing.  And again, our upcoming set will provide direct, obvious tools for fighting Grand Crusader and similar decks.  While I certainly don’t mind a deck like Grand Crusader being the best deck for one tournament, like any other deck it would sadden me to have it dominate for any length of time, and so we are making a real effort to prevent that from happening with Crown of the Heavens.

The frustration with Grand Crusader is often interlocked with a larger frustration with the state of attacking decks.  Specifically, beatdown decks are “too good” and control decks are frozen out as a result.  Again, there is some amount of truth to this.  When developing Worldbreaker we were still living in a world of Death Wishes, Brodericks, Squall Totems, and Deathchargers, and if we wanted to have attacking decks have any place at all we would have to give them some real tools.  While developing Throne of the Tides, we knew Worldbreaker was heavy with beatdown enablers, but we weren’t comfortable ratcheting up the control cards to the level they were in Scourgewar, for good reason.  With “monsters” being the big new thing, we would hate to have ally-centric decks look unattractive from the get-go.  We were intentionally conservative with our control cards to allow our attacking decks some breathing room, and now we’re ready to correct some of the imbalance.  Again, Crown of the Heavens will have some strong tools for people who want to play a more defensive game, along with some awesome cards for solo decks.

Even with things the way they are currently, I don’t think things are nearly as dire as portrayed on our forums at times.  An Alliance Druid deck built around attachments ran the table during the Core portion, and the winning deck was a Horde Paladin that didn’t play Mazu’kon, Twilight Citadel, or Etched Dragonbone Girdle, three cards considered “auto-includes” by many parts of the community.  I doubt there’s much room to improve Grand Crusader decks, but I do believe there’s plenty of room to improve the other decks, now operating with more complete information.  And, as is often the case, someone will likely come up with a new deck that neither the community nor R&D anticipated.

Feedback from the forums is valuable, but it’s important to put it in the appropriate context.  Think about most experiences you have with consumer products.  When you have a bad experience with orange juice, most people will not go onto the Tropicana forums and express their frustrations.  They probably just won’t buy Tropicana again.  As such, posters on TCG forums are likely to be disproportionally invested in high level, tournament play.  They are the most likely to like “interesting” decks and twenty turn control mirrors.  There’s some room for this stuff, but it’s important to consider the source.  Our forums weren’t nearly as angry about the multi-year –long Mage dominance and misery, even though our attendance and sales were significantly worse during that era.   The only conclusion one can draw from this is that there are tons of players who buy cards, play in tournaments, but never post on the forums.  Our forum posters are valuable customers and their feedback is important, but listening to that feedback to the exclusion of other data is dangerous, and one that has led other TCGs (including other ones that I’ve worked on) down a bad path.  It is only one piece of the puzzle in making a product that’s as good for as many people as possible, which is what R&D is trying to do.

I do hope, even if you aren’t in total agreement with everything I’ve said here, that you will at least give R&D the benefit of the doubt.  We don’t like it when people are having a bad time, and even though the negative experience that Grand Crusader or Mazu’kon can create is nothing compared to Water Elemental or Voidfire Wand, we have to appreciate the fact that no one likes being run over by the same deck over and over again.  I do believe that a combination of innovation and new content will allow a more robust metagame to flourish, and we are always working as hard as possible to make the best experience for our entire community.  Thanks, as always, for your feedback and passion for the WoW TCG.

-Patrick Sullivan

Head Developer, WoW TCG