How beta tests shaped Warcraft Rumble, Blizzard’s next mobile game

polygon.com:

In May 2022, Blizzard first unveiled Warcraft Arclight Rumble, the next mobile game coming to the Warcraft franchise. Over a year later, the game has had beta tests and has received updates and changes, including a snazzy new name — it’s just Warcraft Rumble now. Warcraft Rumble is also going to roll out for more players, starting in the Philippines.

When the game was first announced, Blizzard promised a single-player campaign with over 70 missions, as well as PvP matches. The game has been refined and polished, but one of the biggest things to change was the PvP system. It was simple at first, as explained by game director Tom Chilton in a recent call with Polygon: “It was really just, if you’re in the queue and someone else is in the queue, you fight against each other and the winner gets some XP. That was pretty much it.” Once the bare bones were set up and the mode was declared appropriately fun and balanced, the team built a fully featured PvP mode, including matchmaking, a ladder system, rewards, and a seasonal structure.

Warcraft Rumble runs on a six-week seasonal cycle for both PvE and PvP. In PvP, the featured map changes with the seasons, and certain rules within that map change on a two-week cycle. Sometimes a regular guard tower might become a fearsome dragon tower with AoE fire shots — how will you change your strategy to topple them? It’s a chaotic system that’s meant to avoid metagame stagnation and objective tier lists. Blizzard will nerf and buff armies and heroes as needed, but the designers’ hope is that the constant change in maps and variables will allow every strategy to have its time in the sun.

“Hopefully, that ends up in a spot where players don’t have to suffer through our constant buffing,