Hearthstone
New Hearthstone Monetization System [CONCEPT]
We have prepared our changes to the current reward system and invite you to become participants in our research. You will have the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of our idea. Perhaps together we can change the economy of the game, or vice versa, the results of our experiment could confirm the effectiveness of the current monetization system.
VIDEO VERSION
Hearthstone is an important source of income for Blizzard. We respect that. But on the other hand, a crisis has ripened in the economy of the game. According to the results of our survey, only 2 percent of players are completely satisfied with the game economy and don't want any changes. More than half of players are convinced that change is necessary.
Our main goal is to try to offer a system that will not only allow Blizzard to maintain a high profit, but possibly even increase it, while also making the game economy more loyal to players. This would expand the audience of the game and allow completing a collection of cards for free. Subsequently, developers will gain the respect that they deserve.
As you know, we constantly monitor the number of rewards players recieve. Under the current economy during the 4 months between expansions, players have had the opportunity to receive rewards equivalent to approximately 110 packs (sometimes this amount is more, sometimes less). We propose to increase the number of free resources by almost two times, to 200 packs (as you know, you need to purchase approximately 250 packs to get the entire card collection). In addition, we propose introducing a generous reward for a complete collection.
CHANGES
Let's start with the our changes to the quest system. A daily quest should most often award you a pack from the current expansion.Sometimes you will be able to get a classic pack or 80 gold as a reward for completing a quest with a friend. If you refresh the quest you are guaranteed to receive a random quest for 60 gold, or in very rare cases, 100 gold. Thus, you can always choose between a current pack and a smaller amount of gold.
We also want to increase rewards for ranked play. If you manage to reach the tenth rank, you will receive an additional 3 packs. For the fifth rank you will receive 5 packs. If you have reached the legend rank you will receive 10 packs.
In addition, we propose to create weekly special quests with tasks that you can perform in solo mode. As a reward, you will also receive the current card pack. Events should occur every month, as a reward you will receive packs from past expansions and cards. Within 4 months, the reward will be equivalent to 40 old packs.
Thus, you will receive a reward that is equivalent to a minimum of 200 packs if you took part in all events, made 6 victories per day and reached rank 5 each month for 4 months. Most players spend much less time in the game.In this case, if you achieve 3 wins per day and also reach rank 10, your reward will be equivalent to 180 packs.And finally, if you managed to achieve the legend rank every month and won 9 times a day, you will earn at least 230 packs.
In other words, in the long run, players will have all the cards from past sets, regardless of whether they spent money or not. Creating a deck will be easier, and players will be able to use more classes and strategies. Moreover, players will not have to get rid of cards after rotation, since they will have enough resources. In turn, this will allow players to play in wild mode.
Another very important innovation is a special award for the full collection of cards for every new expansion. We offer a very valuable reward. First of all, you will get a golden pack. Secondly, you will receive a special set of golden cards from the current expansion. Let's look at this with the example of Descent of Dragons.
You will get 5 golden legendary Galakrond cards as well as 2 golden copies of Devoted Maniac and Shield of Galakrond. These will be promotional cards that you cannot disenchant. If you already had these golden copies, they will be automatically disenchanted from your collection for the full cost of crafting. And the main reward. A special new golden legendary card that will not affect the balance of the game, but will give a lot of fun to the players. It could be a card that looks like Whizbang the Wonderful or Elite Tauren Chieftain. Maybe it could be a card that will make your deck into random legendary cards. Why not? We are convinced that the developers and the community have a lot of interesting ideas.
The main source of income for Blizzard is still pre-orders. We suggest keeping the current pricing system for the bundles that were introduced in Descent of Dragons. 60 packs and a golden legendary card for $ 50; and 100 packs and a golden legendary card for $ 80. But in addition, we decided to add a new bundle. We called it the "Thank You" Bundle. In other words, by making this purchase you say thanks to the developers. The money received for the purchase will be spent on improving the game, experimenting with modes and new features. For just $ 10 you get 20 packs. This is a great opportunity for Free-2-play players to support developers.
Unfortunately, pre-orders are still too expensive. We tried to find a way to reduce the cost of packs, but this, in turn, inevitably entails a significant reduction in company revenue. Blizzard has created an ingenious monetization system that allows them to get the maximum possible profit. The company will definitely not give up on this approach.
DISADVANTAGE
Here are a few words about the main disadvantage of this system. About a third of players use a rational strategy for collecting resources. They collect gold for 3 to 4 months. This approach allows you to significantly save money and get the maximum possible number of new packs for free on the release day of a new expansion.
The main source of gold is daily quests. In our system, quests will almost always offer you a pack of cards as a reward. You can always update your daily quest
and choose gold instead of the pack, but it will not be as profitable. Thus, collecting resources over the course of 4 months will be a meaningless exercise, since all players are guaranteed to receive much more cards after the expansion release. They will only need to wait a bit.
We understand that our concept is not perfect, but at the same time, we believe, it solves many problems.
THE MAIN QUESTION
Dear friends, here is the main question. If this monetization system appears in Hearthstone, will you have a desire to regularly pre-order? And how much money will you be willing to spend? Are you ready to thank the developers for their hard work and generosity? Please, think carefully and be honest with everything.
We created a Youtube poll. Just open this video on Youtube, find the "i" button on the screen and vote. Also share your opinions in the comments.
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We have prepared our changes to the current reward system and invite you to become participants in our research. You will have the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of our idea. Perhaps together we can change the economy of the game, or vice versa, the results of our experiment could confirm the effectiveness of the current monetization system.
VIDEO VERSION
Hearthstone is an important source of income for Blizzard. We respect that. But on the other hand, a crisis has ripened in the economy of the game. According to the results of our survey, only 2 percent of players are completely satisfied with the game economy and don't want any changes. More than half of players are convinced that change is necessary.
Our main goal is to try to offer a system that will not only allow Blizzard to maintain a high profit, but possibly even increase it, while also making the game economy more loyal to players. This would expand the audience of the game and allow completing a collection of cards for free. Subsequently, developers will gain the respect that they deserve.
As you know, we constantly monitor the number of rewards players recieve. Under the current economy during the 4 months between expansions, players have had the opportunity to receive rewards equivalent to approximately 110 packs (sometimes this amount is more, sometimes less). We propose to increase the number of free resources by almost two times, to 200 packs (as you know, you need to purchase approximately 250 packs to get the entire card collection). In addition, we propose introducing a generous reward for a complete collection.
CHANGES
Let's start with the our changes to the quest system. A daily quest should most often award you a pack from the current expansion.Sometimes you will be able to get a classic pack or 80 gold as a reward for completing a quest with a friend. If you refresh the quest you are guaranteed to receive a random quest for 60 gold, or in very rare cases, 100 gold. Thus, you can always choose between a current pack and a smaller amount of gold.
We also want to increase rewards for ranked play. If you manage to reach the tenth rank, you will receive an additional 3 packs. For the fifth rank you will receive 5 packs. If you have reached the legend rank you will receive 10 packs.
In addition, we propose to create weekly special quests with tasks that you can perform in solo mode. As a reward, you will also receive the current card pack. Events should occur every month, as a reward you will receive packs from past expansions and cards. Within 4 months, the reward will be equivalent to 40 old packs.
Thus, you will receive a reward that is equivalent to a minimum of 200 packs if you took part in all events, made 6 victories per day and reached rank 5 each month for 4 months. Most players spend much less time in the game.In this case, if you achieve 3 wins per day and also reach rank 10, your reward will be equivalent to 180 packs.And finally, if you managed to achieve the legend rank every month and won 9 times a day, you will earn at least 230 packs.
In other words, in the long run, players will have all the cards from past sets, regardless of whether they spent money or not. Creating a deck will be easier, and players will be able to use more classes and strategies. Moreover, players will not have to get rid of cards after rotation, since they will have enough resources. In turn, this will allow players to play in wild mode.
Another very important innovation is a special award for the full collection of cards for every new expansion. We offer a very valuable reward. First of all, you will get a golden pack. Secondly, you will receive a special set of golden cards from the current expansion. Let's look at this with the example of Descent of Dragons.
You will get 5 golden legendary Galakrond cards as well as 2 golden copies of Devoted Maniac and Shield of Galakrond. These will be promotional cards that you cannot disenchant. If you already had these golden copies, they will be automatically disenchanted from your collection for the full cost of crafting. And the main reward. A special new golden legendary card that will not affect the balance of the game, but will give a lot of fun to the players. It could be a card that looks like Whizbang the Wonderful or Elite Tauren Chieftain. Maybe it could be a card that will make your deck into random legendary cards. Why not? We are convinced that the developers and the community have a lot of interesting ideas.
The main source of income for Blizzard is still pre-orders. We suggest keeping the current pricing system for the bundles that were introduced in Descent of Dragons. 60 packs and a golden legendary card for $ 50; and 100 packs and a golden legendary card for $ 80. But in addition, we decided to add a new bundle. We called it the "Thank You" Bundle. In other words, by making this purchase you say thanks to the developers. The money received for the purchase will be spent on improving the game, experimenting with modes and new features. For just $ 10 you get 20 packs. This is a great opportunity for Free-2-play players to support developers.
Unfortunately, pre-orders are still too expensive. We tried to find a way to reduce the cost of packs, but this, in turn, inevitably entails a significant reduction in company revenue. Blizzard has created an ingenious monetization system that allows them to get the maximum possible profit. The company will definitely not give up on this approach.
DISADVANTAGE
Here are a few words about the main disadvantage of this system. About a third of players use a rational strategy for collecting resources. They collect gold for 3 to 4 months. This approach allows you to significantly save money and get the maximum possible number of new packs for free on the release day of a new expansion.
The main source of gold is daily quests. In our system, quests will almost always offer you a pack of cards as a reward. You can always update your daily quest
and choose gold instead of the pack, but it will not be as profitable. Thus, collecting resources over the course of 4 months will be a meaningless exercise, since all players are guaranteed to receive much more cards after the expansion release. They will only need to wait a bit.
We understand that our concept is not perfect, but at the same time, we believe, it solves many problems.
THE MAIN QUESTION
Dear friends, here is the main question. If this monetization system appears in Hearthstone, will you have a desire to regularly pre-order? And how much money will you be willing to spend? Are you ready to thank the developers for their hard work and generosity? Please, think carefully and be honest with everything.
We created a Youtube poll. Just open this video on Youtube, find the "i" button on the screen and vote. Also share your opinions in the comments.
Just watched your video actually.
People have been suggesting for since the game start to change the economy of the game there have been really minor changes since beta.
They won't do that cause they manage to sell enough to satisfy their costs and such but there are not many new players to the game cause the P2P aspect of the game (if you want to be anywhere near competitive you need to preorder at least 1 year worth of packs ATM AND be active).
I feel like I already paid the game enough as a player I bought preorders in KOFT,kobolds and witchwood and also bought the 20 packs bundle of RR..
I am not going to buy any more content I have enough dust to craft almost anything but I save it cause the crafting costs are painful, and I would rather have extra resources.
I think the best change to the system is not to change the number of packs but the quality of packs:
If they makes the 40 dust pack be an edge case rather than the most common case, it would not only make the packs be more interesting but would make the game cost SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper. epics should be sort of rare but not as rare as they are now.. there are too many epics in the game to make them as rare and they are so core to many strategies.. legendaries are sort of OK cause they are much less in quantity and you need less of them.. but epics.. should appear on average every third pack and not every 10th..
I play LoR I am really pleased (a word you use a lot in your videos XD) with their system there's enough progress there to keep me engaged and I can experiment a lot with new decks which is the msot fun thing in card games.. something in HS I can't do without regrets..
As a semi-f2p player (spend around 100 EUR since beta), I would definitely invest more if this system is implemented.
No, it won't happen. In the last 3 years I've played there's no drastic change about currency.
Besides, giving 10 packs to Legends? The rich will get richer and stays on top (having the most complete deck), and the poor will always need to buy everything. The gap will be wider than ever.
And, again, no. I can only called this a "blasphemy" of some sort. No offense, but, Blizzard is already rich. The only thing they will do is adding another feature like BG in the future to increase popularity. They haven't even maximize the opportunity of getting money by utilizing cosmetics sales.
Knowledge is Power
I mean, this system sounds great for the players... and thus terrible for the developers. I can't think why they'd ever implement it.
At a quick glance at this system, F2P players will find it far too easy to collect close to a full collection of cards. What incentive do they have to spend any money on card packs at all? I know that I would never pre-order again, because I'd be wasting money - those extra 80 packs or whatever would just increase my dust count in the long run, because I'd have such a surplus of packs from other sources. Pre-ordering would basically be only for the Hero portrait.
Now, obviously this is fantastic for me as a player, but I don't see the reasoning for any of this being adopted by the developers. It's all downside. The only thing I can see them maybe taking is the idea of a much smaller additional pre-order option, with enough packs for the Battlegrounds incentives; that's something that makes them more money.
I think asking for more and more packs is the wrong way to fix the economy of the game. Packs need to give better rewards. As it stands, you could open all these new packs and still be missing a bunch of Epics that you have to craft, because they refuse to give Epics any sort of protection.
Welcome to the site!
I think that instead of increasing the amount of gold you earn from a daily quest, it would be better to change the amount of gold you earn from daily wins. This would give you more incentive to play after you have completed your quest, and it would also reward you more for playing every day instead of every third day. Right now you only earn 10 gold every three wins, and if you have a 60% winrate (and that is being very generous) and an average game takes you 10 minutes, then you would have to grind for 8 hours just to get a single pack, which probably has 40 dust inside. This system is terrible.
You can earn a maximum of 100 gold from winning each day, but it is spread out so thinly that almost 0% of Hearthstone players will ever earn that. I think the reward structure should be way more front heavy so that instead of having to win 30 games a day to earn maximum rewards, you only have to win 15. And no, I do not think we should simply change it to 20 gold every third win, I don't think that system would be satisfactory either.
I think you should earn something every time you win a game. This gives you incentive to start another game after each game. Right now you can't really feel the rewards, you don't get a feeling of accomplishment, the rewards are almost imperceptible. So I think that the gold rewards should look like this:
1st Win: 20 gold. This way, after completing your quest you will have almost enough gold to buy a pack. This gives you a lot of incentive to keep on playing without just giving you maximum rewards after the first game.
2nd Win: 15 gold. I know people hate 5 gold for some reason, so I think that you should earn 5 gold more often so that the number is constantly fluctuating and you don't sit with 5 gold for 2 years straight.
3rd - 4th Win: 15 gold.
5th - 10th Win: 10 gold.
11th - 15th Win: 5
This system will earn you a total of 140 gold for 15 wins. I don't want to give players too much stuff too easily, so in addition to these changes to the daily wins I also suggest that we change all daily quests to give you 20 less gold. Now players have more incentive to play, but you don't have to play as much to earn a significant number of rewards.
Also, as DoubleSummon mentioned, the lowest quality of pack should not be nearly as common as it is now. The worst case scenario should be expected.
And the third change I would like to make to the economy in Hearthstone is a slight increase to the Common dust value from 5 to 10.
Carrion, my wayward grub.
This will never happen, Blizzard is a company after all, and despite some people might think it otherwise, they care more about their own money than the players'.
On a sidenote, I started playing at the end of last year, and on my f2p Europe account I made 2 full playable decks, Face Hunter and Galakrond Zoo Warlock. Not very expensive decks, but they managed to get to rank 10. HS is still f2p/
New players trying to get into the game have an absolutely hellish time trying to get decks that can be viable for ranked. I don't know how many packs ranks 50-25 award, but I suspect that they are nowhere near enough to build a standard-viable collection.
Who is “we” in the original post? To me it souns like written by someone who wants to sound better.
Btw, better than current packs are gold, so you can save for next expansion.
basically what you are suggesting:
why stop there? Why not a free packs daily for signup with 4 packs every seventh day straight?
what will the developer have from such changes?
-=alfi=-
Its Bot mathematician and holomancer. If you watch their videos (which I recommend) the two of them makes the presentation, hence the use 'we'. I assume that's why the post uses the same term.
Just watched the video and can say that the proposal is kinda alright and should deserve full support. The changes to the daily rewards is particularly clever, since it awards packs not gold, and therefore it does not provide an incentive to hoard gold for the new expansion, and instead pressure players to pre-order instead. You can still get more than 100 packs eventually, but that is within the span of the expansion (around 4 months) assuming you pick packs over gold.
I think blizzard should pay attention to the poll numbers. The current system is going nowhere. Those who will not spend, will just not spend. So a fresh change might get us somewhere, even if it only makes the game more fun for those with smaller wallets.