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!