New Player Experience Update 2023

*I CREATED A NEW ACCOUNT SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO*

I got a little bored over the holiday weekend and decided to do something dumb.  I created a new HS account under the name "SantaHS".  Why would I do this?  Because any time they update the New Player Experience I usually make a new one and give it a try.  To see what the experience would really be like for a brand spankin' new player!  And I must say... this new experience is WAY better than before.

The Old Experience

As early as three months ago I did the same thing as I hadn't in a long time.  I was wondering what it was like since I had never gotten a free deck before on a new account.  And it was pretty much the same as it's been for years, parts of it were the same since launch.  You start as Jaina, fight Hogger, Mukla, Millhouse, and a few other familiar characters.  Then you went into the 40 Apprentice ranks and had to climb your way out.  Along the way you unlocked classes by beating them once, and unlocked core cards by leveling up each class.

This process was honestly quite tedious unless you knew exactly what to craft to make fast work of all the 3x Unholy DK bots that Blizzard populated the Apprentice ranks with.  At least, I assumed they were Blizz bots.  Might have been account farming... if people do that.  (Do they?)  I did craft a deck that I enjoyed and happened to already open a legendary for, and I was able to climb to normal ranked ladder in about 6 days.  Don't remember how much time I was devoting to the account, but overall I can say it took a lot of games!  And I can just imagine a brand new player who doesn't know what to craft and build might have had a tougher time as you have to actually win games to climb out in the old system.

The New Experience

This was totally different!  Right off the bat.  You have only three tutorial fights.  First you fight Rexxar and Garrosh in an effort to recruit them so you can take down the real enemy: The Lich King!

After these three fights you enter the new Apprentice track.  Instead of winning games to climb, you simply have to play games.  I think the idea is that an actual new player might not know what they are doing and could lose some early on.  But every game they play they are gaining knowledge, so each game they play they gain 100 xp.  Initially 100 xp is enough to climb one rank.  Later it becomes 150, 200, and 300.  There are also only 25 levels on this track, and a lot of really nice rewards along the way.  Not to mention Apprentice specific quests to get xp faster, and if you complete a page of the special Apprentice quests, you get a pack.  I might be the only one, but I really like the art style of these Apprentice quests.  Could we get updated quest art in normal ladder to be more like these?!

Along the track there are two levels that say "Pick one of three" and have deck images next to them.  Now... I thought this was a way for them to let you try some of the loaner decks.  NO!  These are free decks that you get to keep!  Forever!  If you don't like any of the options, look for the one with the most dust value.  Also, cards won't ask you if you want to reroll if you have two of them, or one legendary, and then get another copy or two in the free deck.  SO if you are choosing just for the dust, keep that in mind.

I should also mention that the non-golden Core cards didn't have to be earned anymore, aside from unlocking each class to get access to their class Core cards.  So no leveling up each hero just to get all the neutrals, etc.  You just get them all, and level up each class to start getting the golden copies.  Personally, I thought that was a very nice change.  I think part of this change leaked through on my previous run a few months ago.  When the old system was still in place, I definitely had some Core Hunter cards, and even some golden Core Hunter cards prior to unlocking them.  Classic indie gaming Blizzard!

Lastly, the entire experience was quick.  Easily done in a single day or two depending on how much time you have to devote to the Apprentice track.  And at the end you still get three loaner decks, and you get to keep one after 7 days.

Recap

• Shorter tutorial section to get into Apprentice
• New Apprentice Track replaces Apprentice Ranks, and is much easier to get through
• Leveling up classes no longer seems necessary to unlock non-golden Core cards, you just get the regular versions of the Core cards immediately
• You get to pick two complete decks along the track, and one after a loaner period, making for THREE FREE DECKS!!!
• Ketch... *uh-hmm*... Catch Up packs also make the new player experience very nice, getting a lot of cards faster.
• Best of all, I didn't get stuck in 3x Unholy DK hell!  I barely saw any of this.
  • In fact, the three pre-made DK recipes are a thing of the past.  They give you a Rainbow DK to start, and the 3x Unholy recipe still exists as "Core Death Knight" if you really want to play it right away.

The only odd things that I wasn't sure how to feel about was that in the tutorial games some cards are altered from their actual form.  Examples would be Huffer has no charge in the tutorial, and Pyroblast is a 9 mana spell that can only hit the enemy hero.  I realize this is all due to the first three fights being scripted so players can learn, and they want the player to be able to survive and find lethal at a specific point.  But why teach new players with cards that are not correct?  Just seemed odd.

OVERALL, I personally think the overhaul of the New Player Experience is great!  Not sure if it'll do anything to bring new players in, but it definitely won't drive new players away like the old one might have!

The biggest issue still remains - the amount of money and time you need to invest to catch up (and play only until the next set arrives). That's the cow milking that i hate.

In response to Crusader2010:

Sure, but you could say this about any card game.  So that's not so much an issue with Hearthstone as it is the genre of strategic card games as a whole.  Magic the Gathering seems to release new sets more frequently than Hearthstone.  I believe they typically do 4 sets a year, and actually 5 sets in 2023.  And if you prefer physical MtG, you have no guarantees of duplicate protection like in Hearthstone when buying packs.  And buying individual cards after they've been opened can be way more expensive.  I don't play it, but I thought Legends of Runeterra does fairly well with their f2p model, you still have the time commitment to grind out a set of cards prior to a new set being released, and then grinding to get more cards because the new ones change the meta and what you need to be competitive.

This is why historically people have claimed that Wild is cheaper than Standard.  Stronger old cards often and fewer of the new cards are needed to make competitive Wild decks.  However, in the last year or two, more and more new cards seem to become relevant in Wild upon release as the team has had to really power creep to create more new, and interesting cards.  In some cases, entire new archetypes have come up that require a lot of new cards (Curse Warlock, Even 3xUnholy Plague DK... which is an extreme example as the entire class is barely a year old).

And I'm not necessarily saying that Hearthstone is cheap, by any means.  Just more so making a general observation that it and nearly all other games like it, are going to have the inherent cost of time and/or money to build up a collection of useable cards.

I understand what you're saying. For me it's just sad that they saw themselves with a lot of money from this system and didn't care about redesigning it, and making all cards relevant. Like getting all of them in a balanced state and focusing on diversity. They keep chugging out cards, a lot of them useless, just to dilute the pool and thus gain more money.

I guess what i'm saying is that the focus is not on quality and efficiency and strategic thinking. But this is the game now and it's clearly not for me anymore.

Feelsbadman :)