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How Has Hearthstone Changed During Iksar’s Game Director Tenure (And Before It)?

By: yellorambo - - Updated:

The departure of August Dean „Iksar” Ayala was a huge surprise to the Hearthstone community. Just six months after his position was made permanent as the game director in Team 5, he abruptly announced his departure from the company as a whole in a tweet. We don’t yet know who’ll be next at the helm and what is going to happen next with Hearthstone, but we can look back to appreciate – and debate – the changes made during Iksar’s time heading the game.

The Fog of War

To start, let’s get down to brass tacks. There are way too many unknown unknowns in this process to fully appreciate what has happened. We know how the team works on multiple expansions far into the future, so therefore any specific content release we get to see at any time has been in the works for multiple years. Because of this, it can be challenging to pinpoint just where exactly Iksar’s influence begins – or indeed, how far into the future it will last even after his departure.

Still, there are many specifics to consider. Iksar became Hearthstone’s interim game director after spending almost eleven years at Blizzard. According to his LinkedIn profile, he began his career in June 2011 as a QA analyst, first with World of Warcraft and Diablo 3, then eventually Hearthstone.

In February 2014, he got a full-time game designer role in the game we all know and love. In November 2016, he was promoted to Lead Designer, a role that included work on card expansions and Battlegrounds as well. Then in February 2022, he was made the interim game director after Ben Lee’s departure to another in-house project at Blizzard, a promotion that was made permanent three months later, in June. Then, another three months later, he was gone. September 16 was his last day at the company.

Promotions like these are not handed out on a short-term basis and there can be no doubt that his departure was unexpected – and that it has caused a lot of internal stress amid Team 5. For what it’s worth, Iksar’s clarified in a future tweet that he didn’t just take a leap of faith: he will start something new “in a couple of weeks.”

Perhaps we will learn eventually what led to such a sudden departure after his position was made permanent. Right now, it seems more likely that Iksar’s got an excellent offer he couldn’t refuse than that he was fed up with whatever internal corporate matter Reddit has imagined behind his tweet. For now, all we’ve got to consider is his tenure, and what it has brought us.

The Ringing Grooves of Change

Again, it is not entirely feasible to draw a line in the sand at February 2022 and pretend that it marks the beginning of Iksar’s influence on the game – or that it all ended with August’s departure in September. Especially since a lot of the decisions made over the last few months won’t be seen until a while later. The best approach is to consider his public pronouncements – interviews and Q&A segments – over the years to glean an idea of how he saw Hearthstone, far beyond the forumite misunderstandings of “oh, he hates control decks.” Dean had a big impact on Hearthstone way before becoming the Game Director.

To start, let’s go back to September 2019. Even then, Iksar was more willing to lift the veil on internal deliberations and future plans than his predecessors were, even if the regular Q&A sessions were not exactly set in stone.

It was a discussion about the then-prevalent Divine Spirit+Inner Fire combo, with a hint of the Core set rotation to come. More importantly, the ensuing threads also gave a couple of interesting tidbits about the way the team approached win rate considerations at the time, as they are “statistically speaking […] the most relevant to the entire population.”

Iksar’s also revealed shortly after the launch of Galakrond’s Awakening that the faster cadence of nerfs is a conscious change in policy.

“There are some advantages and disadvantages to waiting. One of the advantages is that the fewer changes you make, the more I think players are motivated to deckbuild and create new solutions rather than depend on us to make balance changes to things that might appear to be slightly out of line. In general, it’s probably healthier for the game if your first reaction to a powerful strategy is to try and find ways to beat it rather than join along and ride the wave because investing time into finding alternatives is undermined by constant changes.

One of the core disadvantages is that change happens less frequently. If there is something that frustrates you, maybe you can play a different strategy but maybe you don’t enjoy that strategy as much. Maybe you don’t own the cards for it. Maybe your favorite class is just weak to whatever the popular deck is and you don’t get to play it. Some of these things are very hard to avoid, but a faster rate of change makes it so you are less likely to be frustrated by a particular thing for too long. Change can be fun. Expansions aren’t just fun for players with the new cards, they can be fun for players playing old strategies too because the meta environment totally changes.

So, why are we trying something different? Some of it has to do with research. We dug through a bunch of data trying to find out what the behavior of players is when they have a strategy they play get nerfed. I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume that a dedicated Shaman player might see a large decrease in play if their deck is nerfed in a way that makes them less excited to play it. It turns out, data hasn’t really backed up that theory in a way we might have expected. We’ve done this kind of research in the past, but as Garrosh might say, times change.”

This has been the approach ever since, and though the pros do seem to outweigh the cons in the eyes of the developers, the main metrics of Hearthstone’s Constructed gameplay don’t seem to have bounced back from their Year of the Raven-induced drop-off. As for the early balance changes, Iksar’s thoughts looking back at Demon Hunter’s release were more about making more initial nerfs rather than releasing the class in a different state, which is an interesting distinction to make.

In many ways, this adjustment has indeed been a sign of the times: as more and more of the game’s playerbase plays from mobile devices, conforming to their expectations in that particular niche also means a shift towards more regular content releases and updates. Ch-ch-changes, new stuff all the time!

Back in early 2020, Iksar even posted “meta updates”, but they haven’t become a regular part of his public communication the same way the Q&As did. It makes sense: instead of crowding out community content (most of those meta updates roughly lined up with non-official stats), he added to it with different, valuable insider information.

In retrospect, many of the future changes were teased or outright revealed by him during these Q&As, from small things like the nerf to Rogue’s Galakrond card to the inevitable arrival of the eleventh class to the game.

Arguably, this openness did more to improve the relationship between the community and the creators of the game than anything else we’ve seen in the past. Back in Ben Brode’s days, his informal videos were also very much appreciated, but the regularity and breadth, and depth of topics covered were leaps and bounds ahead of what we’ve seen in the past (and especially night and day in comparison to Eric Dodds’ and then later Ben Lee’s complete radio silence.) No matter who comes next, replicating this sort of community outreach will make a massive difference. Equally, it will be fascinating to see where Dean will end up next, and whether he will carry on communicating in the same manner in his new role, whatever it may be.

Yellorambo

Luci Kelemen is an avid strategy gamer and writer who has been following Hearthstone ever since its inception. His content has previously appeared on HearthstonePlayers and Tempo/Storm's site.

Check out Yellorambo on Twitter!

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One Comment

  1. Phoesias
    September 22, 2022 at 8:38 am

    I’ve been playing since the beta – non-stop. I’ve experienced everything in Hearthstone and seen every development.

    I’ve never seen so much approval from the community for a director…or anyone leaving Hearthstone.

    What does that mean ?

    Many players are simply unhappy with the current status of the game – especially the Standard format.

    We don’t know how much of this is actually Ayala’s fault, but it doesn’t matter either.

    As it is, people like playing less Hearthstone and that shows the sentiment towards the director.