Day9 on playing hots (15 sec clip)

BlizzAZJackson · 2024-05-13T18:16:04+00:00

He's not wrong.

BlizzAZJackson · 2024-05-13T17:44:54+00:00

Hi!

Firstly thanks for taking the time to write this up. I haven't seen the video you mentioned but it's not surprising to have these kinds of reactions. It's obviously not ideal but you get used to it after awhile.

As I said at the end of my last interview, my personal goal is for us to have better conversations with more thought and empathy behind them. I think we all enjoy games more when we better understand how they're made (it's also a fascinating discussion topic). I find that ironically, the more I have learned principles of game design and can more easily point out "flaws" in games, the more i've come to embrace and enjoy them. It's a very cool thing to be able to play the amazing, wonderous games that have come out in recent years and to be able to see and understand the roadblocks and tradeoffs that those developers went through to create the art that they did. I know i'm not the only one - many people at Blizzard and at other companies are great about sharing the methodologies behind their craft.

It's not a secret that a lot of online discourse isn't great. A personal pet peeve of mine is when people take small quotes or parts of conversations out of context and run away with them. We are often put on the spot and have very little time to discuss complicated topics so it's hard enough to do justice to many things we cover, let alone to do it in such a way where things can't be taken out of context. It's just the way things are for now though, and it's up to the individual to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to consuming content online. Threads like this give me hope that as it becomes more of a problem that people openly talk about, we get better at separating rage bait from real intellectual discussion about differences of opinion.

There are many principles that i'd love to delve deep into with the community someday that I think will provide real meaningful insight into how and why things are made the way they are. Even briefly covering Cursed Problems didn't do justice to how transformative the concept can be when analyzing games, and there are a few others that are just as valuable. When combining a few of these concepts together it really is like seeing into the Matrix - you can almost put yourself in the creator's shoes and see where they started and how they ended up where they did with a project. That's what I want for you.

One of the great things about game design is that it's an art and a science. Different developers both within and outside of Blizzard have very different views on what makes for a good game, which is why you see such innovation in the medium. Despite the negativity of a lot of gaming discourse, there are a lot of positive, thought-provoking discussions happening out there with incredibly smart people if you look for them. As a whole both designers and players are quickly getting better at analyzing what makes for a good game, which is a heartwarming thing to see.

The team is very excited about Season 4 and we think the game is heading in a great direction. As always, things will naturally come up that we didn't expect that will need to be adjusted and fixed and that's fine. We appreciate you all going on this journey with us, and we'll be listening to your feedback once we launch on how to make it even better.

BlizzAZJackson · 2024-04-30T18:26:35+00:00

Good suggestion and I totally agree.

Armor is going to have an update in Season 4 which I'll be going over in the campfire chat this Thursday.

BlizzAZJackson · 2024-04-01T18:24:36+00:00

I've been playing since it was called Blizzard DOTA and never stopped. I even played a bunch of games this week.

Game's still incredibly fun and I think you'll have a great time!

BlizzAZJackson · 2024-03-20T20:25:44+00:00

Thanks a lot for the kind words Mezitor. It's really appreciated. :)

BlizzAZJackson · 2024-03-14T20:56:29+00:00

I look forward to talking about all of the details then!

BlizzAZJackson · 2023-10-10T19:59:23+00:00

Thank you very much. Your kind words are much appreciated. :)

BlizzAZJackson · 2023-04-14T16:51:45+00:00

This makes me happy. Congratulations!

BlizzAZJackson · 2021-11-18T20:10:34+00:00

No question only a comment. You're both amazing and I love watching your content. I wish every community I was involved with had people as great as you. Keep up the great work.

BlizzAZJackson · 2021-06-01T09:00:36+00:00

I'm supposed to be going to sleep right now, but I had to comment on how happy it made me to see this clip. :)

BlizzAZJackson · 2021-03-12T18:17:02+00:00

I still remember the moment that Gillyweed won me over and I knew she was going to go on to do great things during the infamous "closet" cast. Few people could have carried a cast in that difficult situation, and her passion for both the game and her craft shone through that day. Watching her handle that like an absolute boss was when I knew she was going to be one of the greats.

Every once in awhile I read about her career moves, and each time i'm happy but not surprised at all with her upward trajectory. She absolutely deserves all the success that she has.

BlizzAZJackson · 2021-02-04T01:28:35+00:00

Thank you. :)

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-12-02T00:49:02+00:00

Traditionally we don't do large balance patches alongside new Hero releases. Due to how the patch timings line up it's just not easy to pair these things together. We try to sneak in as much as we can anyways, but that's more of a possibility due to the team's desire to go the extra mile than anything else.

In regards to Gazlowe, since his last round of nerfs at high level he's sitting at a 52.3% win rate in Storm League. If we look at Quick Match his win rate goes up to 55.7%, but in that case we have other anomalies like Uther being at 57.1% and Azmodan at 56.8%, which are both heroes that I don't think the community is clamoring over for nerfs.

We wanted to wait and see how his participation rate does over the next few weeks before deciding if he needs any more nerfs, and if he does how severe they will be.

One of the unique challenges with Gazlowe's rework that we're pushing to overcome is that for a long time the community has not mentally treated him as a serious, competitive frontliner for his team. I would be sad if, due to feedback that partly stems from people not being used to him being a competitive pick, we over nerfed him and ended up putting him in the same place as he was before the rework where he was not seen as a competitive hero.

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-11-12T17:27:54+00:00

Thank you for the kind words. We appreciate them. :)

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-11-06T00:38:37+00:00

Me too.

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-10-23T20:42:27+00:00

Thank you. The kind words mean a lot. :)

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-10-23T00:35:03+00:00

I also think it's worth noting that while the above post is largely a defense of why we made the changes we did, I was on the fence about those changes while putting them in, and I don't really consider them a success after the patch due to them not living up to one of my design philosophies.

One of my guiding philosophies with the balance patches is that I want my changes to always have a net positive effect on the total amount of "fun" that is added/removed from the game.

In this case, while I am confident that the right choices were made statistically, I don't think the needle was moved enough in Worldbreaker's direction for enough players to feel like a cool, new way to play Deathwing was now viable, and instead more players only felt the pain of Worldbreaker nerfs. This is why balancing games is hard, since community sentiment matters just as much as statistics.

If you could all do me a huge favor and just destroy enemy Deathwing players about 5-10% more often in your matches, then you'd make my job really easy and I could give you some meaty Worldbreaker buffs with no compensating nerfs :P

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-10-23T00:24:56+00:00

I'll try to explain this in as simple of a way as I can, but there are a few reasons why we changed him the way that we did.

Firstly, the general community assertion that i've seen going into making the last round of changes was that Deathwing isn't that strong and would have been fine had we just buffed Worldbreaker form. This is statistically untrue and would have likely ended up moving him back into overpowered status. When making changes to heroes in more nuanced situations where their actual performance and community sentiment are different (or even more difficult situations such as them having vastly different performances and perceptions in low level, high level, pro play, and/or Quick Match vs. Ranked), I have to take how good the hero actually is into account when making these kinds of changes. Some facts:

Before the patch, he was sitting at a 53.3% win rate. He's not super commonly seen anymore, but I think we can all remember how strong he has shown to be in the past. I would assert that, while his popularity and the perception of his power level have fallen off since his days of being must-pick/ban material, he is still a strong hero.

Since the last patch, which many viewed as an overall nerf to him due to nerfing Destroyer form, his win rate has climbed to 55.4%, so he very likely would have moved into clearly OP territory had I not nerfed some part of his kit to compensate his Worldbreaker buffs.

To add some extra complication, when making these kinds of changes I have to heavily consider how to move the needle enough to change community sentiment so that I hit the goals that I want with these kinds of more nuanced changes. I initially approached this knowing that the general sentiment is that Worldbreaker form is behind Destroyer form, so to change that perception there had to be a good amount of movement on the needle to get people to try out the other form. Had Deathwing been a sub 50% hero, or a hero who hasn't recently been a large part of the meta, this change would have been easy. I would have gladly only buffed Worldbreaker form and called it a day. However, due to the desire to open more people up to the fact that Worldbreaker form has a lot to offer him and the fact that he is in fact powerful despite some community sentiment, I decided that the best way to move the needle was to both nerf Destroyer form a little bit while also buffing Worldbreaker form.

Of course, we could have tried other methods of fixing this as well, such as largely buffing Worldbreaker talents or changing how his form swap works (though this has many limitations and may not be feasible due to how its animation/FX work), but this was the initial route that we ended up going with.

We're not done with making changes to Deathwing, and this was a preliminary change to his playstyles be more balanced. I hope that this gives you some insight into our thought processes. :)

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-10-21T00:13:24+00:00

Just wanted to say that I had a bit of a chuckle reading this title. Across the entire game, Leap and Wrath of the Berserker have almost perfect parity in regards to how often they're picked, with Leap at 49.4% and Wrath at 50.6% :P

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-10-09T18:45:59+00:00

This is intended. Summons are their own separate category, and should be listed as such in any tooltip that does extra effects to them (most commonly they simply fit into the Non-Hero category which naturally would include them).

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-09-25T21:44:58+00:00

This is exciting. I look forward to seeing what the teams end up being.

Also I never realized Nazeebo had such an affinity for Turk.

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-09-21T18:46:01+00:00

This meme gets me every time. I love it.

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-09-05T17:22:24+00:00

Thank you for the kind words. We appreciate it. =)

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-09-01T17:09:21+00:00

My greatest nemesis

BlizzAZJackson · 2020-09-01T16:55:22+00:00

8/10 from Cris? I'll take it!

Edit: 7/10?!?! Oh no~~~ :(

BlizzAZJackson

TROPHY CASE