You have to give me points for trying!
Blizzard has released two new Mercenaries bundles today, and for Canadians who are already having a rough enough time with their dollar value compared to the folks south of them, they're in for a wild ride. Let's check out the two new bundles and then talk about the pricing error.
Epic Coin Purse
For $3.75 CAD, or $2.99 USD, you can purchase the Epic Coin Purse which contains a total of 600 Coins for Epic Mercenaries. They will be split up into three bundles of 200 Coins a piece, so you can get coins for up to 3 random Epic Mercenaries.
Quote From Blizzard An Epic Coin Collection!
Invigorate your collection with 200 Mercenary Coins for each of three random Epic Mercenaries! Use them to craft new Mercenaries or strengthen Mercs you already own.
Legendary Mercenary Mega Bundle
We've got another bundle that focuses on Legendary Mercenaries. This time around you'll be getting the following for $29.99 USD:
- 30 Mercenary Packs
- 2 Random Legendary Mercenaries
Quote From Blizzard A Massive Party!
This Legendary Mega Bundle gives you two random Legendary Mercenaries and 30 Mercenaries packs to add a slew of Mercs to your Collection. With such a long invite list, you'll have plenty of Mercs to choose from when forming your Parties.
More Bundles?
I'm seeing reports there may be bundles available for some people that focus on a specific Mercenary, giving you their card and 10 packs $9.99 USD. There's also reports of an Anduin Coin bundle (or other heroes) that gives you 300 Coins for Anduin for $9.99 USD.
Pricing Error Not In Your Favor!
Canadian Prices for the new Legendary bundle are not correct. Currently, Blizzard is looking for a cool $3,749 CAD for the bundle. I knew this mode was going to be monetized, but not that hard. The bundle's price was fixed 43 minutes after it went live, and is now properly $37.49 CAD.
Oh, nevermind, not a great deal with those taxes.
This is very clearly a pricing error, but it's a funny mistake and shows some severe incompetence so we thought it was worth highlighting. I made an attempt to purchase it, but either the transaction got declined from my bank - though Blizzard did make a temporary $1 attempt against my card - or some internal system realized something was funny with the transaction and didn't want it to go through.
Maybe Bobby doesn't want my money?
Regardless of the funny situation, its a bit nuts at how heavy out the gate Blizzard has been with Mercenaries. We've seen so many bundles so far. Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with asking players to buy stuff - it's not like any of us are forced to do so - but when you throw so many deals at us early on, it does feel a bit like you know the mode doesn't have a lot of staying power for most of your audience so its time to try and suck everyone in for a little bit longer.
Maybe it's a change up in how we can expect future Hearthstone content to be, after all, we have seen more and more deals coming to the constructed side of Hearthstone through the past few expansions. It just feels a bit off when Mercenaries debuted with three huge bundles and the mode largely sight unseen.
Comments
To be fair, it's a MEGA bundle and should be priced as such!
Petition for this article's thumbnail to become a profile header.
Hmmmmmmm.
FWIW Original art by Michael Loda for this video
If they were selling more diamond skins that would be one thing, but if you play a lot, I don't see the point in just buying coins.
Even if they were cheaper, I'm not sure I'd want to buy coins, since what that effectively does is shorten the time before I run out of PvE rewards.
This is exactly correct. The genius that came up with the idea that people will continue to buy packs to collect random portraits was sadly mistaken.
Worse than that is the genius that decided to give you coins when you buy a legendary bundle if you already have the legendary mercenary . This mode is purely less than beta and blizzard is taking a different approach in putting out games. If players can’t see that the games are being released “half -assed”” on purpose to see how players will react to the game and whether it will continue to be developed or abandoned based on that response. They aren’t wasting money to find and fix bugs because if everyone keeps playing what incentive do they have? Less devs means less cost period.The insane amount of bundles is happening because they are being smart and making money off of the market research they are conducting. Your choices here will determine the future of the coins and how they work in the game.
Blizzard will find out that people who have all the toons won’t bother to buy more packs because extra portraits are worthless and should be actual rewards for completing the 18 part quest chain for each toon or flat out sold as standalone items.
The targeted bundles are designed to determine a player’s willingness to spend money based on their current progress in the game. I have all toons at. 30 and have cleared all content 18 of these toons are fully maxed. There is no need for me to buy anything anymore but will I buy 600 coins for $2.99 sure I will but I will not buy anything else.
The mode is great right now because the card game is worse than watching paint dry. The coins will be used to trade up at a reduced rate in the future to upgrade them to the next level 20 rares gives 1 epic 20 epics gives 1 legendary and so on. I have hundreds of coins that are useless on my maxed toons right now and unless they plan on releasing new skills for each toon that will need to be leveled along with equipment they will have to do something.
Until there is a need to have a specific combo of mercs to clear content the current state of the game is spend about $250 to get all the toons then just play the game to level them. What we don’t know is how much per player are they looking to get, This might seem easily answered with “as much as they can” but it’s not that easy. To balance how much cocaine comes out of the bottle when the rats drink it vs how much electricity you are making from them running on the wheel vs how long it will take them to develop a tolerance for the cocaine causing you to have to up the cocaine vs how long til they die is a very complicated thing.
The internal surveys I took that blizzard sent to me were very specific. I took a bunch of screenshots and maybe I’ll post them sometime but needless to say they were very enlightening.
All I can say is if they do not patch the mode with new content and quickly there isn’t any reason to keep playing it. The pvp is stale imo and is only there to establish a baseline dollar amount to reach a certain level..
Ill eventually max out all the toons but it won’t be endlessly grinding this starting content but will progress as the mode does. Right now , after playing since closed beta and owning everything in the game up to this point even I’m bored with it.
Trust me when I say…Blizzard will notice when people like me finally leave because when we do we will never come back.. I hope they make mercs a card based WoW with multiplayer raids with monthly rewards and different content. I see the potential here but I don’t know if the current people they employ have the talent to pull it off.
We will see soon enough!
That boy man ain't right.
You got to be more understanding guys. Bobby needs to buy his 37th Ferrari, which is not going to pay for itself. Especially not with current inflation levels.
I have two personalized deals:
For reference, the Legendary Mercenary Mega Bundle (2 legendaries & 30 packs) costs 29.99€, same as U$.
I'm debating if it's better to buy guaranteed Diablo, or two random legendaries. Thoughts?
Diablo doesn't seem to be personalized, unless I just randomly got the same one.
It offered me Garrosh instead of Diablo and I don't have either in my collection, so it might be random after all.
I got no diablo pack bundle... Just Uther and anduin coin bundles, neither of which seem that appealing tbh (300 coins for 12.50$)
"Goddammit, Bobby got into the coding room and changed all the decimals again."
When asked by the press while being carried away in handcuffs, Bobby yelled
"It was a mistake! I didn't mean it!"
Just kidding, everyone knows billionaires don't do time.
"In order to demonstrate how seriously we take this matter we shall remove any and all references to money from our games."
I'm awaiting the next patch notes:
The Coin -> "Worthless Token"