Playing HS for fun rather than rewards

I'm posting this on Out of Cards, since this is the most decent and civil Hearthstone-related forum right now, and opinions about controversial subjects like this will probably be kicked on the floor.

Hearthstone's new reward system has left the playerbase up in arms, since gold and experience became harder to get and are rewarded in smaller quantities, and the Battle Pass is a scam. Forcing people to pay up only to get less rewards than they were promised. I've seen people against it, and some defending it. But as for me, the reward system has not hindered my enjoyment of the game, mainly because I don't play for the rewards anyway. I usually play Hearthstone to try out cards and witness all sorts of crazy RNG. But even with the new system ruining things, there are enough alternatives to keep Hearthstone enjoyable. Card packs are more expensive? No problem, I've got enough cards in my collection and even have plenty of legendaries. Singleplayer isn't appealing anymore? No problem, there are lots of single-player adventures to keep me occupied. Dalaran Heist and Tombs of Terror in particular, since the RNG starting decks mean you can try out any card in the game, even for a moment, without having to spend currency on packs. And besides, even Hearthstone's current gameplay is disappointing there's always custom cards in Hearthcards and the Out of Cards fanmade content, so one can still dream.

Ever since the system was implemented, I've seen AFK farmers in Battlegrounds. They boot up Battlegrounds and do nothing all game because they'll just gain rewards anyway. One time I was in a Battlegrounds match (playing as Jaraxxus) in which EVERYONE ELSE was AFK. I just played the match normally and had fun building my warband and defeating my opponents one hit at a time. And upon winning that match, I had just learned an important life lesson. I started seeing this situation in a whole new perspective.

I realized that generosity was enough to keep Hearthstone satisfying for me. Playing for fun rather than rewards made me feel genuine satisfaction, because for me winning or at least having a worthwhile match was the reward I needed. Ask yourself this: Were you truly satisfied by Hearthstone's rewards before the new system? Why do you want rewards in Hearthstone anyway? And finally the biggest question: It's only a game, why you heff to be mad? Okay, just kidding. The main point is: greed begets greed. The temporary elatement from a materialistic desire to get rewards in a game, this is what many monetized games exploit in their consumers. (EA is a notable offender.) They know that players will pay them to get more cool content, and they will make more profit. Even if you complain about rewards being harder to work for, you're probably just playing Hearthstone only for the rewards anyway. I'm not trying to riff on the people whose hate towards the system is understandable, nor force my opinions on everyone. I'm just talking about my own experience with finding satisfaction with the game anyway without paying a dollar.

Besides, blaming "Blizzard" and having them not respond is kinda... yeah. The players' rage is directed at this hivemind of an evil corporate game development company who swindles them out of their money. (Just don't pay them...) But like all companies, Blizzard is composed of employees who make bad decisions, but are still human. Are we going to forget about the developers who have made Hearthstone a better place for everyone? Ben Brode, Hadidjah Chamberlin, Dave Kosak, John McIntyre, etc. Don't put them under the blanket blame since they've only made the game more entertaining. Look at all the stories that they've come up with: the League of Explorers, Rafaam and the League of EVIL, the Book of Heroes... do the rewards undermine all of the adventures and events that have turned Hearthstone into a world of its own?

I personally don't think its possible to have unimpeded fun without taking note of the rewards because not everyone can enjoy every mode and switch their attention when big bad corporate is shitting on where they're sitting at. Hearthstone is simply not cheap to have fun in. Even the adventures get tiring after the 10th time running, and let's be honest, the AI in adventures can never substitute for satisfaction against a human opponent.

But if you can find fun from the sheer satisfaction of a game and tactically avoid all the modes you can't afford, I emphatically congratulate you because that's what I used to do back in the day when I had all but 1 legendaries to work with when I first started. But ultimately, not everyone shares your sanguine nature. Certainly not after what happened.

I have played this game since beta, only spending $20 on it, and playing it casually. I don't care about grinding ladder, i care about having fun. And to me fun isn't winning. It's enjoyable to win, and it sucks losing, but i don't play the game just to win. It's about how i win.

People say all the time that hearthstone is a cheap game, you don't need to have a big collection or several legendaries to play it. And they're right. If you like playing aggro. If you don't the game is VERY difficult to get into, and stay into. Look up any deck that isn't braindead face aggro where you just play cards on curve and ignore their side of the board until you win and you'll find the list has at least 4 legendaries. Before the system was good. Expansions would come out with PvE where you could get cards for completing it, or if you didn't care about the PvE and had a large enough dust collection you could just craft the cards you wanted. This has changed. More legendaries every expansion, doubled with releasing cards that are ESSENTIAL in many decks that you HAVE to pay to unlock that you can't craft, like Risky Skipper. A rare card that would be very easy to craft for just 100 dust. But you can't. Because it is arbitrarily locked behind a paywall/grindwall. A wall that with the release of the battlepass just got higher. 

The way you phrase people hating the game makes no sense to me. Maybe it's because you don't understand. When people say they hate the game and are uninstalling. They don't mean the game. They mean what the game has become. They had fond memories of it and aren't liking what activision blizzard is turning it into. I've quit the game in the past, when rise of shadows came out it was clear what the meta would be like for a long time and that was endless lackey spam and aggro, and so it has been since. When i came back recently i resigned myself to only play wild since that's where people like me that don't enjoy playing cards just because they're green in my hand are pidgeon holed to go. Because you can't play control in standard anymore. Have you tried? But enough with my tangent.

Solem said it best in his video he made in november.

You make some good points. When content that was once easy to get now has to be obtained by paying up, it loses its accessibility. So yeah, I can see why this is such a big deal. I was trying to cover a more reasonable approach by looking at both sides to the argument. There are people who are defending the new system by saying it's better than the one we had before, but from what I can see they're just insulting the complainers and making themselves look bad.

Out of Cards is the most civil Hearthstone related forum period.

The reward system has players up in arms for a few reasons but I'm going to highlight two. The first being that Team 5 lied, kind of. Are players able to get more gold with the new Rewards Track? The answer to that question is objectively yes. Are ALL players going to be able to reasonably earn more gold than what they previously did? Probably not, I honestly don't know. What I can say is that I'm not passing judgement on the system until I am able to look at what I'VE earned by the next expansion. What I will say however is that we're barely a month into the Rewards Track and some people have already hit level 50, so is the outrage really justifiable without seeing the end result? The second reason is that the communities (mainly found on r/hearthstone and the official forums) kind of fuel this, for lack of a better term, Rage Machine where it's a continuous cycle of hate regardless of what the issue is. If it's not the Rewards Track, it's Demon Hunter, if not that, it's Shaman, if not that, it's Tickatus Warlock, if not that..... you get my point.

AFKing is unfortunately here to stay now, regardless of what Team 5 does. If Team 5 DC's players who are AFKing those player will just write/get scripts that 'play' the game for them by making them buy and sell random minions with no rhyme or reason.

Honestly, I was fine with the old system. I like that Hearthstone ASKED for my time instead of DEMANDING it. I've always had fun playing Hearthstone, whenever the meta had gotten ridiculously broken in Standard I would bounce over to Wild with one of my meme decks and go to town. I'm not trying to climb ladder every month and I'll never be a pro player so I don't feel the need to grind like some of these kids who cry over everything do.

Part of me hopes Blizzard doesn't respond, part of me really wants to see that most, if not all, players hit level 50 and get around the same amount of gold they would have before. Just so I can get some good hardy laughs out of the goldmine that r/hearthstonecirclejerk will become.

I get that you're trying to look at this in a positive light, bravo by the way, but what you're missing is that some of the loudest players (meaning constantly complaining about the game regardless of what's happening) are entitled to something they aren't even paying for. Not meaning that one MUST pay blizzard money but I think the F2P players have forgotten the only thing they've invested into the game is their time. The P2P players feel burned as well because they were most likely on a budget and now FOMO will get to them hard. I haven't seen many  Whales say anything about it, unless I've just missed the posts. As a whale I'm just gonna cut my spending on the game, it's absolutely atrocious that the Rewards track isn't included into the Mega Bundle.

Playing for fun?

sure, if I could play the decks that I consider fun, I like experimenting with concepts but the game doesn't let you do that at all, that's my fun, also I like collecting card.

I don't understand how anyone tolerates the new system it's a a small buff to gold income AT BEST, which is not what most players (like me) expected, the game has been becoming gradually more expensive since release, the old system was outdated to keep up with the increasing cost of the game, and the new system was expected by many to mitigate that dramatically, what we got is almost the same economy, BUT more convoluted.

Which does not address the concern of increasingly expensive game at all.

Even if you get that small increase in gold it's in a way that encourages you to spend more money and time on the game, having to buy packs or arena/duels entries in a delayed way encourages you to spend money cause you are delayed of what was before gotten sooner, when I play hs I wanted to try a variety of decks specially on release, then I would face that pay/time wall and stop playing until I got resources again..

Now that delay got increased.

Blizzard always made a lot of f2p antagonizing moves with their game, they now tried to copy a model used in other games and yet they didn't copy the good parts about such systems.

Quote From griffior

Part of me hopes Blizzard doesn't respond, part of me really wants to see that most, if not all, players hit level 50 and get around the same amount of gold they would have before. Just so I can get some good hardy laughs out of the goldmine that r/hearthstonecirclejerk will become.

This to me is the biggest thing - the rewards track is a four month process, we're only a quarter the way through it, and we're not even past the typical Winter Veil seasonal event. Despite that, the loudest voices in the room are still raging against Blizzard about it because they don't think they'll have enough gold in April. Dean Ayala was quoted as saying "We’re making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions are incorrect." I think it's clear from the way that Blizzard was talking about this new system back in the summer that they want it to be a positive change for everyone, and that they're working toward that. It is simply too early to pass judgement on how much gold you'll be able to rack up.

The battle pass doesn't offer very much, and it's reasonable to be mad if you bought it thinking it would give you more, it's valid that leveling up feels slow (so maybe they need more levels with smaller gaps in between), and it was valid that packs as late level rewards were bad, but they changed that. There's still room for improvement, but there's also time for improvement and a lot to appreciate about Blizzard's approach to Hearthstone in the last year. People ought to reserve judgement about their end-of-expansion gold until the actual end of the expansion.

Don't understand your point.

People are raging against the new system because it effectively lowers their potential to have fun in the future. Nobody plays this game just for the sake of the rewards. The rewards for someone that doesn't invest a lot of money into the game is what makes them actually able to play the game.

As pointed above, the rewards are needed to have cards ergo to have fun. The fewer cards you have the fewer selection of decks you can play. I am purchasing the preorders and have full collection and I would love for F2P players have all cards so they can play various decks not only needed to stick to one or two they are able to craft

I've been playing HS since Old Gods, on and off (mostly off), but I've started to spend a lot more time with it since Saviors of Uldum. It was that game I played on the subway, the game I played when I had one free hour midday or in the evening. And it was great for that, a small dopamine burst in dull hours. Initially I played very casually. I completed both Dalaran Heist and Tombs of Terror on Heroic, the best single player content in HS. But that started to dry out after a while, I've already done seen everything in it. All Year of the Phoenix single player adventures were shoddy, uncreative and one-and-done.

I started playing Standard ladder afterwards. Descent of Dragons was coming up, I preordered the small bundle. I opened like 90 packs, thinking it was a lot. "Wow, this set has a lot of crazy cards, this'll be totally worth it!" But my legendaries were garbage and the only deck I could afford afterwards without mass disenchanting my old collection was extremely boring Zoolock. I had terrible buyer's remorse and haven't purchased anything since. 50 euros are a lot for me, comparing it to spending it on other games. This was when I decided to switch over to Wild. I really liked that card crafts were permanent, and I had much more decks than I ever did in Standard. I hit Legend with Pirate Warrior, I had Cubelock, Odd Paladin, Odd DH, Secret Mage, Jade Druid and others. I completed every daily quest. But my dust was mostly from disenchanting old Legendaries.

And then comes Darkmoon Faire. I was really hyped after the reveal stream, my favourite things in HS are the fantastic expansion themes. The prepatch dropped, and the Battle Pass was revealed. And hearing the community's reactions, calculating hours played and gold received, a thought dawned on me.

This game is simply not fun for the amount of hours invested I have invested in it. There are only two options: become a whale, spend hundreds of euros on the game, experiment with cards, decks and have fun. Or be free to play, play the game for dailies, and afford 1-2 decks per expansion, even as a Wild player. If I make bad crafts, I'm completely crippled. All enjoyable things, like "Wow, this new combo deck looks so fun! I'll try it out!" were far out of my reach. Any attempts at creating and refining my own homebrew decks went to complete garbage because I couldn't afford crafting more Epics and Legendaries. I was playing for a lot of hours for very little enjoyment.

Blizzard has been moving in a direction where they only care about whales. Only they are allowed to have fun. All other player demographics must suck it up and play 1-2 decks for scraps of rewards. Any steps forward in easing the problem like duplicate protection has been followed by opposite actions. The progression system rework solved nothing, only obfuscated the reward process and introduced another money sink for whales.

In summary, it has become way too expensive to have fun. I can't support the game if the future is like this. (If you ask, yes, I quit.)

Quote From Theodrinus

Blizzard has been moving in a direction where they only care about whales. Only they are allowed to have fun. All other player demographics must suck it up and play 1-2 decks for scraps of rewards. Any steps forward in easing the problem like duplicate protection has been followed by opposite actions. The progression system rework solved nothing, only obfuscated the reward process and introduced another money sink for whales.

I disagree, we've gotten two new game modes within a year that don't absolutely require money or gold to play. Are there perks to spending money/gold for those modes? Absolutely. Are they required? Not really.

Quote From griffior

Quote From Theodrinus

Blizzard has been moving in a direction where they only care about whales. Only they are allowed to have fun. All other player demographics must suck it up and play 1-2 decks for scraps of rewards. Any steps forward in easing the problem like duplicate protection has been followed by opposite actions. The progression system rework solved nothing, only obfuscated the reward process and introduced another money sink for whales.

I disagree, we've gotten two new game modes within a year that don't absolutely require money or gold to play. Are there perks to spending money/gold for those modes? Absolutely. Are they required? Not really.

If you want to be remotely competitive, then Yes.

Quote From DoubleSummon

Quote From griffior

Quote From Theodrinus

Blizzard has been moving in a direction where they only care about whales. Only they are allowed to have fun. All other player demographics must suck it up and play 1-2 decks for scraps of rewards. Any steps forward in easing the problem like duplicate protection has been followed by opposite actions. The progression system rework solved nothing, only obfuscated the reward process and introduced another money sink for whales.

I disagree, we've gotten two new game modes within a year that don't absolutely require money or gold to play. Are there perks to spending money/gold for those modes? Absolutely. Are they required? Not really.

If you want to be remotely competitive, then Yes.

Genuine question: Why even try to be competitive in Hearthstone?

For Standard ladder I can kind of sympathize with those budget players who are really putting in the effort by finished in high Legend at the end of each month and attending tournaments/events. From my perspective, unless playing Hearthstone is a full time job, why are some players so adamant about being competitive?

I'd totally understand if they got invited to Blizzard tournaments/events but they just don't, not to any fault of their own of course. While Blizzard keeps hosting events that only streamers and influencers ever really get to participate in. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this, it just makes me scratch my head when a player states that they're "competitive" but aren't really trying to get into the pro scene.

Maybe we have differing definitions of what competitive means.

Some people just enjoy being competitive. It's just another way to enjoy the game.

I rarely touched ranked for the first couple of years of playing Hearthstone. But in DoD expansion for whatever reason I went for legend and got it, since then I kept getting legend every month ever since and have the 11 bonus stars of the new system in both wild and standard every month since.

Quote From griffior

Quote From DoubleSummon

Quote From griffior

Quote From Theodrinus

Blizzard has been moving in a direction where they only care about whales. Only they are allowed to have fun. All other player demographics must suck it up and play 1-2 decks for scraps of rewards. Any steps forward in easing the problem like duplicate protection has been followed by opposite actions. The progression system rework solved nothing, only obfuscated the reward process and introduced another money sink for whales.

I disagree, we've gotten two new game modes within a year that don't absolutely require money or gold to play. Are there perks to spending money/gold for those modes? Absolutely. Are they required? Not really.

If you want to be remotely competitive, then Yes.

Genuine question: Why even try to be competitive in Hearthstone?

For Standard ladder I can kind of sympathize with those budget players who are really putting in the effort by finished in high Legend at the end of each month and attending tournaments/events. From my perspective, unless playing Hearthstone is a full time job, why are some players so adamant about being competitive?

I'd totally understand if they got invited to Blizzard tournaments/events but they just don't, not to any fault of their own of course. While Blizzard keeps hosting events that only streamers and influencers ever really get to participate in. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this, it just makes me scratch my head when a player states that they're "competitive" but aren't really trying to get into the pro scene.

Maybe we have differing definitions of what competitive means.

Because if you hadn't noticed yet with the "win 7 games in ranked" quest, being competitive is one of the only ways to get gold in this game without spending money. Saying "Why do people play competitive" is like saying "Why don't people just spend money to have the cards they need" Arena, you need to tryhard to make decent profit in the game mode, keeping up with stats and what minions are good after each rotation. Duels, you need the dust required(or have bought the expansions) in wild to have even a snowball's chance at winning games early against anyone else who is netdecking what some streamer said was good.  "Why do people play competitive?" To have cards in this game.

Quote From griffior

Genuine question: Why even try to be competitive in Hearthstone?

Because losing isn't fun.

Competitiveness isn't just going to legend every month. It's about becoming a better player.

In a card game, that obviously also means having the best cards available. I could make an Elemental Mage deck from commons and rares only. But if I don't have (or can't afford to have) Frost Lich Jaina, that deck is going to be so much worse in every matchup. I'll lose much more than if I had that card.

You can play Duels for completely free. But if you aren't Demon Hunter or Warlock, and you don't have 20 Scholomance epics for Gift of the Legion or Killmox, the Banished One, you'll have a much more difficult time. You'll get 3 losses quickly, you can't pick the more interesting treasures.

In the end, competitiveness in HS is reaching a level where if you lose, it's only because you could have played better instead of being able to afford better cards. You can try again, improve yourself or switch some tech cards around. That's where the fun of success begins. No hard feelings, I hope you understand my viewpoint.

Quote From Theodrinus

Quote From griffior

Genuine question: Why even try to be competitive in Hearthstone?

In the end, competitiveness in HS is reaching a level where if you lose, it's only because you could have played better instead of being able to afford better cards. You can try again, improve yourself or switch some tech cards around. That's where the fun of success begins. No hard feelings, I hope you understand my viewpoint.

I respect that answer, but it almost seems impossible because 'playing better' simply doesn't exist anymore due to the amount of 'Created by' RNG in the game.

Quote From griffior

Quote From Theodrinus

Quote From griffior

Genuine question: Why even try to be competitive in Hearthstone?

In the end, competitiveness in HS is reaching a level where if you lose, it's only because you could have played better instead of being able to afford better cards. You can try again, improve yourself or switch some tech cards around. That's where the fun of success begins. No hard feelings, I hope you understand my viewpoint.

I respect that answer, but it almost seems impossible because 'playing better' simply doesn't exist anymore due to the amount of 'Created by' RNG in the game.

That's another problem..

It bothers me a lot to play a suboptimal list without it's actual win condition and key cards.. and I want to try a variety of decks.. expected the new system to aid in that aobut what it did? a small stingy increase in the economy in some cases while requiring more commitment, how are you expecting the playerbase to accept that?

Quote From Theodrinus

Quote From griffior

Genuine question: Why even try to be competitive in Hearthstone?

Because losing isn't fun.

[...]

Not for Spikes no, but losing isn't actually a problem for many. I know I am perfectly fine with losing as long as the game itself was interesting, either because I at least got to do what my deck was built for or the opponent does something unexpected. Really I'm even more relaxed than that: as long as my deck's main goal comes within sight - even if I don't quite piece it together - then that at least gives me hope that I might manage it soon. There's also the side where some players just feel icky using a strong meta deck to win, and the emotional cost of using them is worse than the cost of losing with something else.

So I guess I would refine "losing isn't fun" to "failing to achieve what you set out to do isn't fun". That keeps the same meaning for Spikes who only intend to win so losing amounts to failing, while also accounting for Johnnys and Timmys getting enjoyment out of a loss so long as they are realistic and don't expect to win every game.

This is why I dislike aggro metas. I don't dislike aggro decks themselves, but when they are dominant you are not given much freedom on what you can realistically try to do. It is also why I hate Tickatus, since he's bound to crap on anything I'm trying to do if the meta slows down. I'm pretty pessimistic about the enjoyability of Standard for the next year or so, not because I will lose games, but because I won't even be allowed to try any of my usual shenanigans.

To counter the "losing isn't fun" narrative here is a gonk druid game i played yesterday

https://hsreplay.net/replay/FXebKMUyZUwU2ApVNohXUD

Now i haven't played gonk druid in maybe a month, i've been playing warrior, or hunter, or warlock so when i went in to play this old deck i forgot i was still testing around cards and trying out a new deck.

The game started out really well, i have all the removal i needed against the demon hunter i was able to coin out Oaken Summons into Oaken Summons without drawing my patches and i was even able to easily reduce the cost of my gonk with Dreampetal Florist. It wasn't until about halfway through right about this point, that i noticed in my deck tracker. I didn't have Faceless Manipulator, Shan'do Wildclaw, or even Germination to copy my gonk and actually win the game, i didn't run sidequest for more damage if i needed it. I had no way to win the game. Everything i did this game, did not matter. But i kept playing. I kept playing against an opponent playing a class that did not deserve my time. Because the game had been fun to me up to that point. That's hearthstone to me. After the game i laughed to myself as i changed the deck to actually have a win condition. But it was still fun going in knowing i would lose.

Hearthstone is A Scam This Game Should Be Called RIPSTON

This game is 100% CON only a fool wood spend money on this scam game, This RIGGED UP GAME should be 18 only as it has a form of gambling & should not be teaching young people how to gamble, This free to play game model is just designed for GREEDY activision to squeeze every penny they can out of your pocket, The only winner in this house is activision blizzerd, Would not recommend playing this game as you will get no where in less you spend thousand per year on this CON game. WARING THIS GAME IS A WAST OF TIME & 100% RIGGED

So someone made a brand new profile to jump on this old thread and be like "HEARTHSTONE BAD!!!"  Cool...

Quote From Thonson

So someone made a brand new profile to jump on this old thread and be like "HEARTHSTONE BAD!!!"  Cool...

On the other hand, I now have a worthy quote for my sig :-D

HS Needs Mirror Mode: Make Any Deck, 50% You Play it Versus Itself or Play Someone Else's Vs Theirs.

Please Help Support This Obvious and Needed Idea. Stop Playing With 1% of your Collection.

To answer your question, the old system suited me just fine. However, I'm a big fan of the new system. It has a real sense of progression and when things get stale, I can pursue achievements. 

As for the tavern pass and the battle pass, I honestly am not a fan of them but I understand its how business works. I can opt in or out if I so choose. I've been F2P in the past 5 years I've been playing except for the purchase of Naxx (the only old adventure I was missing.)

Companies get greedy - and it was bound to happen eventually. However, I think judgement should be reserved until the next expansion releases.