by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

The latest edition of Brawl with the Blues, featuring Ragnaros, also included a special Q&A with Alan Dabiri, newly named Game Director, and Travis McGeathy, new Lead Game Designer. Here is a quick summary of some of the things they discussed:

• Alan is accepting of his new nickname, Captain ADab
• They want to show how Heroes is special beyond other games in the genre.
• They are trying to work on more ways to highlight individual achievements with things like Quest Talents and the MVP System. On fire call out may come back. It is still a team based game, but they want to highlight individual performance more.
• More cross games promotions like the Nexus Challenge to come.
• They are working on getting a better kill long into the game.
• The level progression system is Travis’ baby. Progression 2.0 will include uncapped Hero and Account levels, or at least the caps will be so high that most players will never have to worry about them. Account level will now be a total of your Hero levels. More rewards more frequently when leveling. The curve forHero experience will also be redone and it should be more like 2-3 hours per Hero level. XP and reward changes will be retroactive.
• Alan likes tanky Heroes and Support Heroes. Johanna is his most played Hero, level 20. Also really like Specialists. Gazlowe was his first Hero and he would love to figure out a way for him to be more viable. His favorite Batleground is Tomb of the Spider Queen.
• Travis tends to go back to Zagara and Brightwing again and again. Recently he has been picking up The Butcher. Warhead Junction is his favorite Battleground.
• There is no time frame, but they are working on a map rotation of 6-8 maps for Ranked Play.
• Matchmaking is something they will always be working on. While they have made improvements, they know they are still not there. They are looking at some type of performance based matchmaking and looking at your individual performance compared to your team and trying to have that affect your rating after the game.
• They look at where the gaps are in the game and what they need more of when they decide what Heroes to add. They also look to see if there are any cool design ideas such as Varian and Ragnaros that they can add to the game.
• They have seen the Janitor Leoric skin and they have talked about it in the office.
• They envision each increased tier of Ranked being about half the size of the preceeding tier.
• Alan doesn’t have a Twitter just yet, but is always lurking on the forums, streams, Reddit etc. He wants to focus more on those mediums for the time being, but he is open to possibly getting on Twitter eventually. Travis is much the same.
• They are working to make AI stronger. They have a new system that not only allows them to make better AI, but also to make it faster. This helps not only with AI games, but also for disconnects. AI now has gank logic, and can detect when a Hero is out of position.
• They will be updating the profile page in the future.
• They have the ability to release updates very quickly if they need to as in the case of Zarya. They prefer to take two weeks to collect data on new Heroes before making any changes, but they can react more quickly if possible.
• Hero League queue times are down 20-30 seconds in the new patch. Team League queues are up a bit, particularly for duo queues. Adding a third person can dramatically help improve queue times.
• They are working on updating the stat screen.
• They want to have Heroes at all range of skill levels. They are happy having Heroes like Medivh who require a high level of skill to play properly, but they are also okay with lower skill cap Heroes that are easier to play. Skill cap is also something they consider when deciding which Heroes to add.
• Voice chat is a high priority. They don’t have a timeline, but hopefully in the relatively near future.
• They are looking at adding some type of automated tournaments down the road.
• They would like to share more data similar to what Hotslogs does. They are working on making the API more available to the community. They would like to get this out in a fairly short period of time.
• They will make more multi-class Heroes going forward, but there are no reworks planned currently to make any existing Heroes multi-class.
• They are working on a lot of cool new stuff, but they can’t talk about it at this time.

If you would like to watch the interview in it’s entirety you can find the VOD at the Heroes of the Storm Twitch channel.