After we broke the news and caused a flurry of outrage surrounding the Hearthstone Rewards Track/Battle Pass, Chadd "Celestalon" Nervig responded to the community feedback that started to pile up. Let's look at what he has to say and give it a recap.
Rewards Track
- More features are coming.
- You should earn more total rewards than before. Leaving out certain XP sources hurts the math.
- New expansion packs are weighted heavily towards the front of the rewards track so you get them early when they are more valuable.
- Numbers in the new system can still change, nothing is set in stone.
Achievements
- More achievements will be added to the game over time.
- Chadd thinks it would be "really cool" to do achievements for old adventures. We agree!
- The wild and standard-specific achievements were unable to be autocompleted based on their data.
- Every expansion will see new experience earning achievements.
Quests
- The brawl quests should be playable against friends.
- There will be event quests that reward experience.
We believe that Blizzard, with their continued insistence that everyone is going to make the same amount of gold (if their play pattern doesn't change), means that as we close in towards the end of the pass if things are not looking great, they'll make changes and likely give us some nice ways to boost the experience gains. Of course, don't use that as a quote because Blizzard certainly hasn't said anything remotely close to that, but with the amount of publicity surrounding the rewards track and the number of times they have stated that things aren't going to be different, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn't make things right. Chadd does mention that they could tune experience before we get to that point, so that's an option too!
How do you feel about the rewards track so far? Are you enjoying achievements? Let's talk about progression in the comments below!
Source Material
Quote From Chadd Nervig Loving all the experiences/feedback that people are sharing about the new Progression system! We're reading it all, and thinking about ways to make it the best it can be. This is only the beginning; we've got lots of ideas for the future: more features, more achievements, etc.
One of the goals we set out with was to give more total rewards, whether you play 5 hours or 500 hours in an expansion. I'm seeing a ton of great discussion about that today. But, discussion involving math can get difficult, sometimes, so I'd like to help out!
It's a really complex system, with a wide variety of XP sources, and a ton of different rewards, so the math can get rather involved. Leaving parts out or estimating things can lead you significantly off.
So I wanted to share a distilled summary of a couple hypothetical situations, to help that discussion out. Here are a couple hypothetical players, and the rewards they'd get from the new system, with current tuning numbers (which could still change before anyone gets there).
Added clarification: These numbers are WITHOUT the Tavern Pass. All of that is from the Free Reward Track.
From this thread, Chadd went on to answer community questions.
Quote From Chadd Nervig I gain around 9000-10000 Gold per expansion. Get to rank 5 minimum and reroll quests and always complete my quests. Some days I only complete my quests and not play. I hope I can still earn roughly this much gold.
Same here. I want my packs on day one, not dribbled throughout the expansion.
The latest expansion packs are heavily frontloaded on day 1 (levels 2, 3, 4). If your play pattern is to save up gold all expansion to buy packs on day 1 for the next expansion, you still can do that, just as well as before.
Thanks for the reply. Frontloading does help. Will I have about the same 10,000 gold to spend though?
It's impossible for me to give you exact numbers without having a ton of exact details about your specific play patterns, but yes, that's the goal.
Since you’re appreciating feedback: it’d be nice if you could hover over an Acheivement after you earned it to see what it was for. Or at the end of the game show again the Achievement and what it was for. It’s a bit tedious to remember the name and exit out to the Journal.
Yep, some improvement to that is definitely on our minds right now. Not sure exactly what we'll do, but we agree it's a rough edge.
Should we expect achievements for previous adventures?
Nothing specific to promise yet, but we think it'd be really cool!
So I have at some point in time reached legend in standard and wild, after playing a game in both modes, I have unlocked achievement for standard, but for wild it’s still “to do”.
The data we could carry over from before was based on your highest rank in either Wild or Standard, so you probably started with that achievement. But the Wild-specific or Standard-specific achievements are not historic; sorry.
i just really wish i could play duels. like, why the need for me to have all classes on 10? i know i will be probably bad, but i have so much fun with these kind of things. i loved the adventures, and thats the nearest i get.
would be awesome if this could be changed.A handy tip for this: Unlocking Demon Hunter actually bumps you up to level 10 on all 10 classes, immediately unlocking Arena and Duels.
One thing though, is that Duels rewards are, I assume, a one-time only affair. So, when the next expansions starts, isn't that bit gone forever?
Yes; Duels achievements having XP are because it's a new mode and we wanted to celebrate it a bit more. There will be new XP-rewarding achievements every expansion though.
So I'm in example #1 here. Currently I earn around 8k gold per expansion. In your example I will earn around 5400. This doesn't feel good at all, sir. I believe you missed the mark considerably. You guys led us to believe we'd earn more. This feels horrible.
If you earn around 8k gold per expansion right now, you're considerably above example #1, and will earn considerably more gold than 5400g. Rerolling quests, consistently completing all your quests will add more. Arena/Duels can give more. Seasonal events still exist, etc.
It will not add much more because after lv 50 it's just hard to level up. If you just complete your daily quest (reroll for 60) with the old system (15 min of play), it's 7200 golds in 4 months. With the new system is just less.
The 5400g example is someone who doesn't do all their Quests, and doesn't reroll. Someone who *does* reroll for max gold, and does all their quests/achievements, will get much more than that. (About the same as before, plus other rewards.)
Is there anyway you'd reconsider making weeklies not progress against friends? as someone who only plays against friends, the new weekly quests and their requirements harm my battlepass progress a lot, so if this is set in stone I can't justify playing this game anymore :(.
Quests (including Weeklies) do progress in Friendly Challenges, unless otherwise specified. Which one would you expect to work, but doesn't? Might be a bug, I'd love to investigate that!
The one that surprised me was the "win 5 games in brawl", in the old system quests for brawl wins could be completed against friends, now that doesn't seem to be doable anymore. I wish you reconsider and change "win X" quests in general into "play X" instead, reduces frustration.
That one should work fine against friends. Must be a bug; I'll look into it. Thanks!
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Comments
Why do they need to make the system really complex in the first place ?
Believe it or not, some players prefer easier quests that can be completed more quickly. You may think that's the stupidest thing in the world, but that is why you are allowed to reroll them.
Have a look at the full list. I'll cherry pick a few, but outside of more specific demands like play 20 murlocs, you'll find that finishing the 'harder' quests to be either equal or only minutely inconvenient to the 'easier' quest.
Use your hero power 20 times - 800 xp
Win 2 games - 800 xp
Play 10 odd costed cards - 1000xp
Play 3 games of (3 different classes) - 1000xp
That's beside the point here. The rule where you reroll your 1000xp quest will always result in a 800xp quest still applies I think, but the reverse is not true. If they were being sincere about presenting a choice of difficulty then it should be theoretically impossible for me to reroll a 800xp quest to another 800xp quest.
Also, let's point out that the demands of 1000xp quests is 'play' not 'win'. In many cases, you'd only need about half an ounce of effort to finish up any of these so called difficult quests. Even the play 20 murlocs quest, which is about as egregious as it can get, is only a mild annoyance, certainly nowhere near the theoretical 30 minutes it will take for me to earn that 200xp difference.
Can I just add, them adding multiple sources of XP, some of which are buried in menus, and making levels inconsistent in how much XP is needed, it all smells like a lot of trying to make it as confusing as possible so we would have a hard time trying to prove that they're up to something so the average player doesn't even try to question them
The menu system for achievements is, to put it mildly, like trying to navigate through the 4 digestive systems of a cow. I didn't mention this because I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, and its no doubt something they would fix in time. I wouldn't attribute anything malicious to it.
That said, it is very much sprawling all over the place, and the fact that I have to click on every one of them to get the rewards is a little more than tilting.
They could also just display the amount of xp I gained from each game, instead of having me having to find out myself. But I think stuff like these will be fixed in time.
This reminds me of the fallout 76 email. Where too many people were asking for refunds because the game was broken, and they ended up turning people down and saying "We're sorry for your poor experience with the game, we don't plan on doing anything about it."
Though it's good he's engaging with the community feedback, I am somewhat dismayed at his 2 examples.
5 hours - nearly a third of our waking life playing Hearthstone every single day without fail? Streamers maybe, or people running bots.
Even 1 hour per day is more than many people play, whereas before they could simply play 3/6 games win or lose in casual every 2 or 3 days and net over 7200g and rank/arena/bg if/when they wished as time permitted.
This is directly counter to what was promised. Hopefully it will be addressed especially as the game became a lot more expensive due to 3 extra mini-expacs a year.
See my problem with this quote alone is that the moment I have every rare and common in a set, packs in that set are no longer equivalent to gold in my eyes, as I'm frequently just given 40 dust for them
I would rather save 2000 gold for the next expansion to continue having every rare and common instead of being forced to swap it for 800 dust...
This is excluding the fact that one reward is just "have an epic", and another is "have a card back"
Also, side note, with their math they provided, they try to make a whole 2 legendaries and 1 epic seem good by not saying those numbers directly, they call it "a slew of legendary and epic cards"
Don't let the "New and improved" advertising blind you into thinking this system is good
and it remains to be seen if we will still be given the customary free legendary on expansion launch. If not, the free legendary on the rewards track is not extra but rather instead of. Perhaps that detail has already been announced and I missed it (more than possible).
Worst will be the last 10 levels. Imagine doing level 48, grinding the 9000 xp for a week and as a reward getting 1 (one) cardpack from Last year with cards remaining in standard for few weeks. Cool.
You receive three times as much gold per level near the end of the track, so it shouldn't actually feel all that bad.
What you get for each level is actually irrelevant. What matters is how much gold you end up with by the next expansion. It would be super-crazy for a Blizzard developer to lie about any of this, so I think it makes sense to trust that you'll end up with at least as much gold as you used to, given the same play habits.
Actually they pumped up the expansions with new 35 cards by 30%, so justto keep up you need to be able to earn at least 30% more than before
Not true, because they propagated the no-duplicates rule to commons and rare. Furthermore, you don't need every card to be able to play.
However, I do tend to collect (nearly) every card, and I know for a fact I am personally spending less now for each expansion than I used to.
I just wish Weekly Quests weren't based on specific modes, especially on performances in specific modes.
Like, I'm not going to spend hours trying to get 2nd in a BG or wasting gold to finish Arena runs with 4 wins...
The concept of the track is great tho. I'm almost more excited about it than about the incoming expansion. As long as it is properly tuned about gold gains per playtime.
That's why you are allowed to reroll Weekly quests. I intend to reroll every Arena quest I see, and probably most of the Battlegrounds ones.
I certainly don't mind that those quests exist for the players who enjoy them.
EDIT: I got a BG quest this week, and it's actually so easy that I'll probably just complete it instead of rerolling.
It's a good thing we can refresh 1 weekly quest a day to try & get an weekly that would suit each of us.
I have a few doubts about the new system as well, but I'm not ready to freak out just yet. I know Blizz had their calculations and a lot of players have their own calculations. I'm kind of in a "wait and see" mode. They have guaranteed we should receive the same or more rewards, so if we don't then I'm hopeful they will make adjustments and possibly even BOOST XP for the second half or so of the expansion to help everyone catch back up to expected levels.
Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but if they did overestimate how much people could earn, and then don't follow through on their promises, then they are choosing to kill the game by chasing away players after broken promises. So again, would expect them to make those changes and offer some sort of apology gift to keep a high revenue game like Hearthstone going strong.
We'll see how things play out in the next 4 months, but they don't look promising right now.
I don't play ranked, play pretty casually, play my quests and a little bit more, and have saved 9000 gold since the last expansion. If the new system nets me around 5400 gold for the same effort, I'm going to be down over 30 packs come the next expansion.
I already buy the mega bundle each expansion, on top of all the packs I buy with gold, and still end up with a substantial amount of legendaries missing each expansion.
I'm already reluctant to keep on spending $240 a year on a game I play casually. I'm definitely not going to spend $40 more per expansion to make up for lost gold.
This isn't even considering 35-card sets released between expansions. The game is already way too expensive in regard to what you get for your money, and, considering the fact that you have a game with limited functionality even if you spend as much as I do, there's no way I'm going to keep on playing if I buy mega bundles and 35-card sets and am missing even more cards than I am missing now.
Of course, I'll wait until the next expansion and see where my gold's at. The cost of the game isn't justifiable, but I keep spending money on it because I like it, but there are limits.
I've probably spent over $2000 on the game over the past 6 years. (I spent more heavily in the beginning to get up to speed.) Which is kind of ridiculous, especially when you consider that you start with a partially-functional game and participate in a lottery system to add random functionality to the game for a comparatively high cost. Referring to the process as 'buying packs' is an illusion, since no real cards exist and you're simply spending a lot of money to gain little bit of added functionality while hoping to get the bits you want the most.
Like I said, I put up with the illusion because I want to play the game, but my playing the game will not survive if the rewards become less, considering that I already feel like a bit of a sucker playing things under the way that they've been.
Maybe things will work out. We will have to see. As for my observations about the cost of the game, I'm not criticizing anyone who chooses to spend money on the game. Obviously, I'm one of those people. But I do it with some reluctance, so I'll have to see if this makes the game more expensive or not and decide from there.
Very well said sir. I could have said every word myself, though I do play ranked but often casual as well. I've definitely spent over $2000 on this game, maybe closer to $3000. I'm scared to go back and look. It's unimaginable. I'll never tell most people I know probably. My everyday sane mind keeps telling me I can't keep spending $300 to $400 on the same game year after year...but I keep throwing money at em. I've gotten a lot of fun out of Hearthstone of course but in the end I feel like a sucker. I don't feel good at all about having spent that much money just to have this online collection. I don't feel good about feeling like I have to preorder if I'm going to play constructed at all. I definitely feel like I've been milked and milked and I'm sensitive to being taken advantage of even further. Clearly a lot of people feel that that's what's happening with this new system, or they feel that their tenuous F2P or semi-F2P workarounds will no longer work.
As I explained in my post below the rewards in the new progression system do seem to even out with the past rewards for the average player (1 hour/day completing all quests), but some people will get less gold than I showed below due to play time lower than 7 hours a week. However, people that play a lot and don't aggro gold farm will actually make more gold than before as they get XP from all that time played and some extra achievements. Even playing casually and just completing quests you'll get past level 50 but people that play like 2 hours a day and then sometimes 4 or 6 hours will go way beyond that, and for those people the Tavern Pass will almost pay for itself in gold along with the cosmetics.
The main group that loses with new system are the people that ran super efficient aggro decks to farm 30 wins/day. To each their own and I don't blame them too much because, as we know all too well, Hearthstone is unfairly overpriced, so kudos to them for finding a way to work around costs. However, this style of play forces an aggro gold farming economy on the game. It warps the game towards aggro. This has become increasingly wearisome to me. Honestly I'm glad to see it go.
Having said that....it's still a fact that some players are worse off now and Blizzard was pretty explicit in saying that we wouldn't be earning less gold than we have been and would in fact be earning more. That is true in some cases, but not true for people who play less or who farmed wins. They should have been more specific about the cases. They shouldn't have been so vague. Looking at the new rewards it is a bit of a slap in the face to be given packs from old expansion (basically dust) instead of gold. It's hard to interpret that as anything other than them wanting us to have less gold to spend on the next expansion. A much better mechanic would be to allow us to choose: take an old pack you can open now or a pack from the next expansion that you can't open until it starts.
Even though I don't agree with the logic of what a lot of people are saying on Reddit I agree that Blizzard has already pushed us to the limit and not throwing us a bone with this new system and making it clearly, unquestionably more rewarding is really disappointing and frustrating. They're already sucking us dry. Why risk Artifacting the game just to gain that extra little monetary edge? Player loyalty and appreciation is another kind of currency that maybe they don't value enough.
Guys...everyone needs to take a deep breath. There is almost no difference from before for a player that completes all his quests, plays about an hour a day and puts minimal effort into achievements. If anything we come out slightly ahead, despite all the howls of rage on Reddit from people that aren't great at math (God bless em). Allow me to explain:
Previous system: Completing a 60 gold quest every day, playing about an hour a day and earning 10 gold a day from wins on average gets you 70 gold per day. Over 120 days that's 8400 gold. That's the number we're comparing to.
New System -
Daily Quests: Some people say we'll get 900 daily XP on average. I don't agree. There are ones that give 1500 XP and there are many more 1000 ones than 800 ones. I think 1000 is a better estimate. So that's 120,000 XP for all daily quests over the 120 days of an expansion.
Weekly quests: This is a set number: 102,000 XP for completing all over 17 weeks.
Achievements: No way most people are getting all the achievements but some will come without even trying and I think most people will look at them and try to get some XP from some. We're comparing this to not having to do anything before so whatever number goes here has to be from casual effort into it and even having a bit of fun with it. We can't be sure but I think it's reasonable to think you can get to 10,000 (out of the 27,300 XP available) before you start grinding.
Play time: Players are already experiencing XP gains that are under the the 400 XP/hour so maybe 350 XP/hour is closer to what we're getting. At an hour a day over 120 days that's 42,000 for play time over the expansion.
Add it all up: 120,000 + 102,000 + 10,000 + 42,000 gets you 274,000. That's 1000 XP from level 68. That's within a reasonable margin of error so let's just say playing about an hour a day, completing all quests, and putting mild effort into achievements you get to level 68 before the battle pass expires. That gets you 6900 gold. That's 4,200 from levels 1-50 and 2,700 from 51-68.
6900 gold is 1500 less than the 8400 gold we would have got before. So is what we're getting in the battle pass worth 15 packs? Let's look at it.
We get 16 card packs (7 Darkmoon), 2 tavern tickets (worth a pack each), 2 Darkmoon legendaries and 1 Darkmoon epic. Subtract the 6 free packs we're not getting from legendary quests, subtract the legendary we're not getting free when the expansion starts, count the tickets as packs, and we're left with 12 packs, 1 legendary and 1 epic. So we have 12 packs that are divided between different expansions and thus not getting us a good chance at legendaries BUT we get a free legendary. One legendary out of the 15 packs we would have had in the old system would have been great (and there's a chance to pull one from the 12 packs) so we're actually in better shape for legendaries. We're kind of even on epics (rolling from 12 packs instead of 15, mostly from old expansions...but then add the free one from Darkmoon). And what's left is: we're down 3 packs (unless you did well with those tickets). For that we get to choose a hero skin.
So that grinds down to a really small difference in my eyes. Please break down my logic if you can but the numbers don't lie. We end up in basically the same situation if not slightly better off.