Be prepared for couples chemistry. We got distracted early by how sexy it can be to communicate really well. We’re both gamers and I was surprised at how much I appreciated watching him learn a new game. Forearms and brains with a mouse, yum?

They will understand it a little and then think they now understand it a lot. Pure Dunning-Kruger: they will hit a learning spike, internalizing a new concept, and think they get it, and then get very confident. For example, my husband loves mechs (he’s a Transformers/Voltron flavor of nerd) and he thought he understood mechs when we played a round of heavy magnetization with the avenge mechademon and then started playing them in a flow state (which was awesome) but also a bit at random, eg reborn on minions who have the spawn 3 mag. Reborn won’t trigger because mech will spawn too many minions – but this is an advanced concept and it’s more valuable to let them go and then review.

Use each turn as a teaching moment: Show them one tribe at a time, as they play through them. It’s a lot easier to understand concepts as you play through them. Also look for ways to teach an overall concept, eg we played Azurite to teach about tavern buffing, or when I had him play a handbuff Murloc while holding a minion to show him handbuff and the value of holding a card. Consider each round a way to teach a few concepts.

Look for a win to enhance a concept: We played a game with Azurite and I had a turn where I walked my husband through casting spells before buying the 4 cost freeze spell. As soon as he realized what had happened, the concept of tavern buffing leveled up in his brain. I had shown him a new concept in a very exciting way – now we had a huge minion which reinforced the value of Azurite. He then became obsessive over azurite and that spell.  I had to gently redirect him to focus on the shellemental we had. In the final buy round I had to tell him we just want stats now – my smart wonderful husband then sold off all 3 of our golden Azurites (like I said, he loved them) and bought pure stat level 1s for an easy victory.

Review each game: In the mech game, we worked because we had the tier 4 end of turn magnetic buff.

He then wanted to play a bunch of magnetizations as soon as he could – better numbers! We were late game, facing a pretty perfect Murloc end of turn battlecry build. It felt wise to just let him stack stats.

But after the game, I explained the strategy of playing magnetizations as solo units to build up stats and explained about Beatboxer, and he realized the value in building really strong magnetics. Now, he’s pretty much thirsting for that 6-drop: he understands the strat, he now knows the advanced version of it and he knows a key minion he needs to get. He’s excited to potentially get Beatboxer and now he wants to play mags with triples.

He wasn’t ready to learn that mid-game, but the recap got him really excited to learn and play more.

Facilitate communication: for us, me trying to point at the screen blocked his view of the screen, so we decided we needed a pointer. It’s the weekend, we’re kinda tipsy and we settled on using his wand, because my husband is awesome and loves magic so we have a wand which shoots fire. We might have taken a break here to go play with a firebolt-casting wand. 😛

After shenanigans, we then used that wand for the next game. The extra length proved better for pointing compared to finger, pen and chopstick. It was silly, but it worked: it streamlined communication and eliminated confusion. If it works, it works!

We also spent a lot of time reviewing communication strategy. As a doubly neurodivergent couple, we really value being able to quickly convey concepts, so we already practice communication shorthand – it was an easy evolution to simply say the word positioning, for example, to trigger him to think about the layout and order of minions.

I liked this way more than I thought I would is a surprising but key thing which also helped this become a future game for us to play together. Husband has played Hearthstone in the early years and because of that – despite me playing battlegrounds for YEARS next to him – still has the concept of buying card packs associated with HS in a negative way. He hated how it felt like he had to buy packs to keep up, so he was reluctant to event TRY battlegrounds for literally like 3 years before he watched me playing duos. HS as a stand alone entity is actually unappealing to gamers who have been exposed to it already, even though BGs are entirely different. As soon as he realized it wasn’t a TCG he got a LOT more interested and excited.

Be prepared for them to make mistakes – lean into that as a learning experience! After 4 games, my husband felt pretty confident and insisted on tiering up to 4 early – after all, we had dominated tempo in earlier games, so why not chase that same gold curve? I asked if he was certain and had him look at his board again. He really liked tiering up, and really wanted to go for it, so I said sure, let’s see how it goes. Remember that your board may be a bit weak, we don’t really have scaling yet.

So he tiered up and found a nice core dragon minion, but tempo overtook us. At the end, I asked “do you think we should have tiered up?” and he replied (and I’m obviously quoting verbatim) “on reflection, dear lady, I wasn’t strong enough to take advantage of the higher tier.” 

He knew we made a key play but also learned about how scaling works. And then, he said the one thing that any duo fan hopes their potential partner can say: “I just wish I had more armor.”

Oh baby, just wait….

Hearthstone has been doing something very interesting recently – the game mode called “Battlegrounds” is an auto-battler, but in the most recent season they have introduced a concept called “anomalies” which introduces variant gameplay. This was first tried out in Heroes of the Storm, before the game was shuttered. In HOTS, variant gameplay was a testbed for introducing new changes but in HS BGs we are seeing this taken to a new level, almost off-the-rails in the number of variant concepts being introduced.

The gameplay changes shakes up the very core mechanics of the game every time the player plays a round. Instead of minions costing a static 3 gold, they might cost their tier (2-6 gold) to buy. Minions might have new buffs or effects, or maybe tempo is entirely removed from the gameplay equation with a static tier up done without the player’s control.

I find this absolutely fascinating. At first I found it frustrating, but when I began to delve into why I was so frustrated by these shifting rules, I began to realize that the reasons for my frustration are also an example of an entire rewrite of one of the core fundamentals of game design: ***the learning or skill plateau.***

In typical gameplay, the player learns as they play, but eventually they reach a static point where the existing knowledge and skills they have developed are not enough to boost them further. They need external resources to help them have those insights about gameplay and how to improve it. In MUDs, it was analyzing combat logs, in WoW it’s reading parses, in a MOBA it might be rewatching videos of your gameplay – usually there is a third party involved here to help the player get better. A tutor, mentor, tool, something to help the player review their past play in order to improve future play.

Useful links about this concept:
https://www.chess.com/blog/Renate-Irene/understanding-plateaus-and-how-to-beat-them
https://psychologydictionary.org/learning-plateau/

Here is a graph of what that type of learning looks like in something like ELO rating:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1XRt-4Q7Jic/WQ9J_U-A_ZI/AAAAAAAARKg/UmSKOYvErTI98LJo01YrsQCWrlYRAbSQgCLcB/s1600/Trader-Learning-Curve.jpg

Now, with Hearthstone Battlegrounds, we have something incredibly interesting happening. Instead of having a long space and time to develop skill as the player learns, reaches a boundary and then eventually overcomes it, the player is forced to do that within the context of a single competitive game which takes about 15-20 minutes. The sheer number of variant gameplay options means the player can’t deeply dive into the gameplay concepts, but must instead develop strategies which change in ***every single game they play.***

I don’t really have a conclusion here – I’ve just observed this and wanted to pass it on. This, to me, is a big change in a core concept of game design. It focuses learning and skill into emergent tactics instead of more static and long-term improvement. We’ve obviously seen things like this with roguelikes, but they usually have a core underlying set of rules. I feel like it’s showing us the start of an upending of something we assumed to be integral to the concept of gameplay, something uniquely possible through the digital. What other changes are we going to be seeing soon?

**Potential discussion topics:**

– What has spawned this and why would players find it exciting?
– What are the downsides of such a gameplay design?
– Where can this concept go?
– Are we seeing a split in the types of way people game?

I *love* Trial of Style. It lets me show off fun transmog, get new stuff and boosts my transmog sales on the Auction House. Here are some thoughts on how to improve the concept:

First, make it more regular or even permanent, based on participation numbers.

With this, add some sort of overall faction or even several. There is a lot of potential here for fun NPC personalities we don’t see usually much of: goblin stylistas, a bespectacled gnome who hates capes, a range of crafters, Ethereals. Earn favor with them to obtain things like recipes, pets, gear, on-use effects like the summonable transmog tool. The typical faction setup.

Introduce a pool of broad themes that rotate either weekly or each time the event is held. In addition, add multiple venues which are each themed, eg the current one is Silvermoonish. Pull the current competition category from a pool of prompts from generic themes + rotation theme + location theme. This gives us a fresh rotation while also maintaining variety and the potential for favorite classic themes.

Having a rotating theme opens the door to more varied gameplay with transmog as the motivation. For example, if the theme was fire, you might find yourself visiting Molten Core or Firelands to get specific pieces. Lean into this by adding global buffs that match the theme, eg things like increased cloth, leather, ore, herbs or legacy loot drops in zones associated with that theme. This would add excitement and directed gameplay variety to running old raids and old world crafting.

The trial itself could be revamped a bit. First, it’s far too slow. Each voting round should be 1/4 the length it is. Ranked choice is another alternative to consider – maybe display each player on the stage and let us inspect them ourselves, and then rank them from first to last.

The voting itself is inherently flawed because some folks will always try to game it to ensure the nicer transmogs don’t beat them – it’s why you often see the lower quality ones win. Why don’t we have voting be for a team the player *isn’t* competing against? Match up 2 parties against each other and have them vote for the other party. There’s nothing be gained from tanking ratings in this scenario, so the end result will be more genuine voting.

There’s plenty more we could add in to make the event more fun AND help stimulate the economy in a sector that’s been neglected. Examples include ideas like:

– Make the prompts more evocative and varied. Some of them are a bit too vague and there aren’t enough in the pool. As an example, an overall Fire theme could have prompts like: Fire’s Wrath, Cleansing Fire, Extinguished Flames, Firehawk, Elementals, Too Hot To Handle, Chilled Flames, Hot Stuff, Fiery Memories. This gives a range of potential interpretations and designs with each prompt which helps ensure replayability.

– Make it super easy to share/copy/save transmogs you’ve seen. Find a way to plug this into the auction house, collection tab and explorer journal. Basically breadcrumb buying or farming.

– Upgrades to existing transmog, which use crafted or found base items and morph them into a new or recolored or updated design. This will help with the economic issue of transmog becoming less needed as player collections become filled. It could be tied into old world crafting patterns to help ensure a slow and steady demand, which would uplift old material prices as well, ensuring more types of gameplay can be profitable. It would also help push down extreme prices because a larger market means it’s harder for one person to corner.

– Drops off old bosses for items usable in trial of style, like cheer squads and spotlights in different colors

– Crafted recipes to make things like a sonic enhancer that plays a theme song you pick (engineer creates enhancer, scribes make scrolls to play for riffs?), a red carpet to walk down, a stampeding swarm of spiders – all of these are silly fun but if there’s enough variety players can use visual effects to help enhance their transmog display, such as a red spotlight and flames at their feet for a fire-themed competition

– Let us display a battle pet, mount and title along with the transmog

– More minigames beyond just the judging. Match up colors or gear to a displayed transmog (see dress up games for gameplay like this). Have a timed trial to make an outfit featuring X color. Have a quiz about where different items are sourced from.


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Anyways, this is quite long. What sort of updates would you like to see in trial of style?