by OtakuMZ - 8 years ago     show comments

Happy Birthday Hearthstone!

I have to admit, I am almost a weeks late to the party with the anniversary of Hearthstone already happening on March 15^th. I was just not able to finish the infographic in time. Putting the whole Thing together turned out to be a much more time consuming process than I thought. Collecting all the dates was one Thing. In fact, it happened to be the fastest part. I had to get deeper only on a few dates, including the date when Team5 initially fomed. At this Point, thanks to Ben Brode for answering that particular question personally!

A Look Back in Time (2008 to 2016)

Putting together the graph was a totally different task. As I have never done a timeline, I had to research the best layout first. After that, the real time-consuming work begun. Arranging all time points in the right scale to reflect the actual duration was a really tidy task. After that, I also had to move around a lot of boxes to prevent cluttering. There were always times in Hearthstone history, normally after the release of a new set, e.g. December 2015 until and February this year, when nothing happened. Then suddenly, a vast number of announcements occur with events and news cluttering, mostly just before release dates of new content. It took me a mere 3-4 hours just to do de-cluttering to maintain readability and appealing visuals. This could also be the result of the fact, that I do the whole infographic thing very amateurish in PowerPoint. During the creation, I switched to Publisher, which made it a bit easier because of a eased alignment. It is far from perfect and I would appreciate suggestion, how I could improve in this process. If you know any tool that might help, please send me message (@OtakuMZ1978 ) or leave comment below. Nevertheless, I hope you like the result. I will try to update this graph periodically, most likely once or twice a year.

Inclusion and Exclusion

I tried to include every significant event and announcement in Hearthstone history. If I missed something, please give me a hint. Additionally, I marked every patch release with a version number. I included Hearthstone World Champions (HWC) but I did not include any third-party tournament results. I also left regional championchips untouched as  it would expotentially increase space needed in the graphic. Finally, I took the liberty to also include some  key blizzpro timepoints. With this I won’t bother you anymore with the technical details.

Acknoledgement

With this timeline, I want to express my thanks to Ben Brode and Yong Woo for leading such a great team. My deepest thanks though, belong to all the other members of Team5, whether we know them by name or don’t. You all do great jobs making a fabulous game better with every Content released. The most importnt thinng by far though is: you care. You listen to the community and implement what is possible and reasonable. A lot of the times you have are exposed to criticism, construtive and and mean, with the latter being the bigger part I suppose. Nvertheless you get going and do not let the negativity wear you down.

League of Explorers (LoE) was a big leap forward, fun and interesting. The cards as well as the boss encounters were refreshingly creative resulting in the best and most diverse adventure so far appealing to casual as well as competitive Players alike.  Whispers of the Old Gods (WOG) looks amazing from what we saw so far. I hope (and am sure) it will be equally fantastic.

I will close my article and leave you with the timeline below by saying once again: BELATED HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEARTHSTONE!