Riot is rethinking how patches are done for Legends of Runeterra so that it remains fair to players on all platforms.
Unlike Runeterra's competitor Hearthstone, the titan in the digital card game space, Riot is rolling out a new bit of tech to its game updates so that players on mobile platforms aren't treated unfairly. Currently in Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra, when a game update goes out, players on mobile are late to receive the patches due to how the Android and iOS stores work in that patches get to go through an approval process and then take some time to push out.
This new approach from Riot which arrives in patch 1.2 which will hit in 2 weeks and include card balance changes will make it so that the game will patch before the changes go live, requiring only a tiny server to client update to activate the changes. Here is the update schedule for all of Runeterra's patches going forward.
- Mondays will remain the day we get patch notes.
- Tuesdays are for the patch itself to arrive throughout the day to all players.
- Wednesdays will activate the changes that everyone has already downloaded.
If we look at Hearthstone as a comparison, when game updates arrive, mobile players get to experience some content later than those on the Battle.net app found on PC and Mac. This includes when card balance changes go out which forces mobile players to play on the old version of the game for a few hours, still being plagued by unjust card stats and effects. In fairness to Blizzard, large updates such as those for expansions and adventures will arrive a few days before they are scheduled to go live so everyone can patch beforehand and much like Riot, these end up being activated on the server-side. Still, that's not great, and it means every time patches arrive it leads to confusion from players on mobile wondering why they don't see these new updates.
Riot has done great things in the card game genre with Legends of Runeterra so far, so more changes that even the playing field are more than welcome - they should become industry standards. Their philosophy behind keeping all cards in the game viable so that the money and effort you put into the game doesn't feel negative when things change is quite a contrast to Hearthstone's refund policy that doesn't include when they make small tweaks to how certain cards work internally, even if the stats themselves don't change (looking at you Lynessa Sunsorrow and Shudderwock when the card caps were added). Letting players continue their progression with unlimited vault progression was also a smart move since it lets players who really love to play the game also feel rewarded for their time spent; Hearthstone tells you 30 wins a day is enough when it comes to gold rewards. Riot has also come out and stated that the typical systems for "progression" in a game have prioritized business over the experience of playing the game - it is great that they're upfront about this stuff and from what we can tell will continue to be.
Here at Out of Cards we're all happy to see Riot continue to pave the path the card games are going to need to follow if they want to break into the market or remain at the top. Your players are your most important asset, don't treat them like a simple number.
If you want to see Riot's announcement on the update, see below for the excerpt from the official patch notes.
Quote From Riot Games For Patch 1.1 (this week’s patch), we’ll patch to PC as normal at ~9:30 AM PT on Tuesday and send the new version to the app stores—depending on your location, it may take several hours for the new version to show up on your store / phone Starting with Patch 1.2 in two weeks, we’re adjusting how we patch LoR to make sure players get to play on new versions as simultaneously as possible, regardless of platform or location. The short version is we’ll continue to patch on Tuesday ~10 AM PT, but you won’t actually see changes until 24 hours later. Starting with 1.2, here’s what it’ll look like when we update LoR every other week:
- Monday, ~10 AM PT
- Patch notes article goes live (unchanged).
- Tuesday, ~9:30-10:30 AM PT
- We’ll deploy the new client to PC and the app stores. Players will be able to immediately update on PC, while mobile may take several hours based on your location.
- This deployment will now be client-only, with no visible changes—think of it as the foundation for the new patch. You’ll be able to play afterwards as normal (though matchmaking will be separated by version), but functionally it’ll feel like you’re playing on the previous patch (in almost all cases).
- Wednesday, ~9:30-10:30 AM PT
- We’ll push a data-only update that enables the new changes. You’ll briefly bounce to the Ashe loading screen if you’re in-client but won’t have to re-log (and games won’t be interrupted). We'll also force-update everyone to the new version—if you haven’t updated, you won’t be able to queue until you download the new version from your app store or re-log on PC.
Comments
As a Hearthstone mobile player the only thing that really makes me feel like a second class citizen is that the Hearthstone client just likes to randomly shut itself off. This has improved over time, in the sense that it used to always happen DURING games and now most of the time it closes on the result screen. I guess that counts as progress.
Somehow missed before now that mobile has launched for Runeterra. Maybe I'll have to give it a shot.
Quick preface: I'm not trying to put Blizzard on a pedestal - they've done a lot wrong over the years, and Hearthstone is clearly less F2P friendly than Legends of Runeterra. Despite that, I think this article is really trash. It's honestly almost impressive how lacking in neutrality this piece is. The aggressively pro-Riot/anti-Blizzard bias in this article is shocking.
Patching
Regarding patching, you undercut your own basic premise when you concede that Blizzard:
The explanation for why Blizzard is worse despite these points, is that their balance patches are still delayed. You decry the way this "forces mobile players to play on the old version of the game for a few hours, still being plagued by unjust card stats and effects." But you completely ignore the fact that the Riot version will simply have every player plagued by bad balance for an extra day, and completely ignore that when Blizzard recently did a hotfix for balance of various Demon Hunter cards, they did so without patching via server-side updates. (Here's the article you published about that hotfix, in case you forgot it: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/1142-the-day-2-demon-hunter-card-nerfs-details-on-the-changes-and-demon-hunter-arena-adjustments)
The fact is, while Blizzard has a history of slow mobile patching, they've also done a lot to try to make important content and balance patches as seamless as possible for users across platforms, and your praise for Riot ignores the benefits they get out of learning from Blizzard's mistakes (many of which they're working hard to make better).
Refunds
Regarding refunds, Riot gives no refunds regardless of what they do to rebalance the game, and they've shown a willingness to radically change cards. Capping a number of duplicate battlecries on Shudderwock is pretty minor compared to the massive shifts Riot made throughout the betas to Lux and her supporting cast of Mageseekers, for example. Moreover, while Riot says they want to make every card viable, that doesn't mean ever card is good (here's your piece on what they define as viable https://outof.cards/legends-of-runeterra/780-legends-of-runeterra-will-not-see-refunds-when-cards-change - note that it really focuses on having a critical mass of tools to build around each champion, not about making each card competitively viable).
Gold vs Experience points, and the business of card games
Yes gold is capped in HS. and yes, experience is no longer capped in LoR. But you don't bother to mention that Blizzard specifically caps gold to disincentive people from bot farming their accounts. Enabling players to bot farm your F2P game means less revenue, which makes it harder to support the game for the actual people trying to have fun playing it.
And yes, Riot has said that the "typical model" prioritizes business over player experience, but of course they did. They're a new player in the CCG space trying to fight for market share. You see these kinds of blatant attacks all over their PR and ad content - phrases like "skill not randomness" and "typical CCG models prioritize business, but not us." They are trying to attack the Goliaths in the market and create an environment where they can pull people away from other major CCGs, and being more F2P friendly is an important way to do that. There's nothing wrong with them doing that, but please don't drink the koolaid here and pretend that they're somehow more honest, or that their goals are just good, pure gameplay fun. Riot is a business, and their goal is revenue.
(Also worth noting that they made their statements about "typical models" back when they were still capping in-game purchases of cards to make for better deck building/exploration experiences. Today they've opened the floodgates for people to come in and buy/netdeck any meta deck, probably because it's the more profitable way to do things.)
From a price standpoint, if you're not F2P, the price really isn't that different from Hearthstone. Buying a full collection today would cost something like $670 dollars, $450 of which is the base launch set. Those base set numbers aren't meaningfully different from the costs to buy the classic set in Hearthstone, and while the expansion costs are certainly cheaper in LoR, they're also designed to scale up as more expansions come out (that is, more regions means more new champions for old regions when expansions hit, means higher and higher costs as the game expands).
Summary
To reiterate my preface - I'm not here to cheer the accolades of Blizzard. They, and Activision more broadly, have done a lot shitty things with their properties as a way to squeeze money from consumers. But Blizzard is not just some evil caricature of a company, and Riot isn't some bastion of good, honest game-making - they're a business just like Blizzard, and their goals are the same. Both have made some decisions to try to make for better gameplay experiences as well as some to make better revenue models, and both have to find ways to balance the two so they can continue to make their respective games. It's fine to have opinions about one company or another, but this kind of sycophantic content dropped right into the middle of your news feed really diminishes the integrity of the OutOf.Cards website.
You'd never want a refund in LoR since you'll have all the cards
I would agree that the title of this article seems overly inflammatory, and I was frankly shocked when I saw that Flux was the author.
As for the rest of the article: I think there was definitely some favoritism but I wouldn't say it was excessively so. This is a 3rd party fan site run on passion; respectfully voicing personal opinions isn't unreasonable. I would say the bigger issue is that it was essentially combining two separate topics: the announcement of LoR's new patch methodology and a comparison of mobile LoR versus mobile HS. That created a weird blend of objective and subjective sentences, so the end result sounded like a partisan hit piece.
Just to respond to your point on Riot’s Wilcard purchasing cap being removed, I’m pretty sure that it’s safe to say that they did not remove the cap in order to make more money. Actually, LoR initially had no way to buy wildcards, until playtesters told Riot that they wanted to be able to buy wildcards to skip Progression. Without wildcards, newer players, especially ones coming to the game in a few years, would have absolutely no way to catch up with older players. Buying cards is a necessary part of any card game, so Riot was forced to add that ability.
Now on to removing the wildcard cap. The reason Riot removed the cap was that it did not actually serve to limit how much someone could spend on the game. Players could just buy the max wildcards each week, then save them up to buy the entire next expansion when it released. The wildcard cap only limits how fast newer players can buy cards, so it fails at its job and only causes frustration and harms new players. Riot could have done something like limit how many wildcards you can purchase over the course of an expansion or something, but they ultimately decided to allow players to decide for themselves how much they want to spend. Because you can get the entire expansion just through playing the game, wildcards serve to hasten Progression in LoR, instead of being the only way to play the expansion, like in HS. Overall, I thought you brought up some good points, but Riot’s monetization scheme is not exploitative, and HS could learn a lot from them, if Blizzard ever decided to try to build and retain a fan base instead of seeking short term profit.
I think Hearthstone has done a very good job with the recent launch of the Year of the Phoenix and being more generous with its monetization. Now, it is far from perfect but it is so much easier to get into the game as far as commons and rares go, which is an EXCELLENT change. I'm still disappointed that we don't see additional ways to get packs from the current expansion though. Yes, classic card packs are great for new players, but old players get no value out of them at all. Tavern Brawl is such a disappointment for its rewards structure; It could be so much better.
If we received Wildcards like the ones we see in Runeterra and MTG Arena, it would go a long way in making that weekly pack feel less terrible and allow new players to choose what they want to create. An adjustment to disenchant costs of cards or the crafting costs would also help in this area quite a bit. I'm not saying that every player should have every single card with minimal effort because that would be silly, but the effort it takes to obtain even just a few good legendaries as a F2P player, which are definitely required for playing decks that aren't just aggro, becomes problematic.
I'd love to see the numbers on how people may make more purchases with the game when they actually can create a cool deck. Some players may stick to a single deck, but plenty do want to experiment and adapt to the meta. Also, Blizzard really is missing out on cosmetic revenue. The little board minions in MTG and LOR are fantastic and I remember talking about how cool this concept would be back when Hearthstone wasn't even in beta (that and alternate art).
Riot is seriously kicking ass with their monetization and honestly should be the way forward for a lot of games that need huge numbers of players to be successful. It is a bit different with card games in that you can still "sell progression" through cards/packs, selling guns in an FPS would be absurd, but low barrier of entry, solid progression systems, and plenty of cosmetics to deck yourself out in is fantastic.
The article was written to highlight the fact that the card game genre has problems that Riot is solving. The largest person in the space right now is Hearthstone and they have dropped the ball which is why they were used as the comparison. They also happen to have a mobile game when Magic and other titles do not which makes the 1:1 comparison easier, as does myself following Hearthstone since the game was announced at PAX East.
Now that's not to say things have been total garbage with Hearthstone -they have gotten a LOT better over the past year and the start of this year is the most exciting moment for the game since they fixed a lot of problems. The biggest issue though is they stagnated hard with the game for so many years, possibly because they needed to get rid of the old team, but maybe just because papa Blizzard wasn't letting them touch the goldmine for fear it would harm revenue until it ran out. I've spent a lot of time giving my personal opinions on Hearthstone and lately it has been a lot more positive than in the past. This just happens to be one of those times where Hearthstone has really, really screwed up.
I'd like to address several parts of your well-put-together post. Before I do though, I just wanted to say I appreciate your clear passion for the game and your willingness to talk about it.
I don't believe I've undercut myself when I stated that Blizzard is doing a poor job with patching. Yes, the last round of nerfs did happen server-side and that was cool. They have not addressed publicly though if this was something they were actually going to do going forward with reactive balance patching which is why I wouldn't consider it a standard just yet. Also, it isn't exactly a perfect process since this only applies to cards seen in-game and those in the collection manager itself lack the technology to show the updates which can create confusion. A large chunk of players are very casual and aren't checking the latest updates on sites. Imagine going into game, creating a deck with some cards you just opened up and then finding out that they are worse than they had appeared. That's a bad experience. Now, they did end up releasing an actual game data patch that rectified that within 24 hours, but mobile users still got that patch late which is the entire preface of the article - mobile users are treated worse than those on Battle.net's app.
Yes, I agree that the Shudderwock change was quite minor in comparison to even other changes made in Hearthstone, but it still feels like a bad excuse from Blizzard to not give him full refund status. It doesn't cost them anything to do so, and the majority of people playing with him weren't likely to disenchant it anyway since the card remained amazing. I can see this type of thing doing more harm than good when they choose to not refund it. You aren't going to make anyone angry by offering refunds, but you will make someone angry by not. Blizzard has had the (paraphrased) viewpoint of "your cards should feel physical, we don't want to make changes to them because that would hurt that experience" which is the whole reason why the offer refunds on changes. The hardcore version of this philosophy greatly hurt the game when they refused to balance anything. Thankfully, we are past that now and although I believe they still want stuff to feel physical and like we own the cards since they are willing to give us refunds, but it just feels weird otherwise. Riot has never gone on the record saying they want their game to feel physical, they're quite the opposite and have said they want to use the benefits of going digital to their advantage by being able to play with the game as they desire. It also doesn't really help things though when they have just come out of Beta which is the time where huge changes are most likely to occur. It will be interesting to see how many major changeups to cards we'll see in the future.
Now, botting and the gold cap. I can't agree that the reason is to prevent botting and if that really is the reason behind it, its a really shitty one. Yes, when you really look at it, not a whole lot of players even come close to reaching the limit each day, but why penalize the people that do love to actually grind the game every day? Or what if I'm one of those players that one or two days a week play all day and hit that cap regularly. If they're afraid of bots, then they should work on banning them. That would improve the player experience twice since we're actively getting rid of scum and the gold cap could be removed and not worried about. As you mentioned about Riot being a business with the goal of making money, yeah, and so is Blizzard which is the more likely reason why the gold cap exists. Let people grind to a cap, obtaining at most a set number of packs per week, and then have people pay for the rest when it ends up being a crazy grind. Riot monetized cosmetics with Runeterra and honestly, Blizzard should have gone more hardcore with that with Hearthstone.
Riot has been very open and honest about their monetization plans with the game, and they're actively discussing stuff with community members throughout the entire Beta and launch experience. Riot is multiple times more transparent than Blizzard is. I can't really say the same about Hearthstone when they are more likely to be active only when they're promoting a new expansion. Admittedly, Blizzard has gotten a bit better with this recently, but I'm interested to see if it continues being the case. Riot on the other hand, when looking at the amount of communication they do with League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, it is incredible to see what happens when developers are allowed to talk. Huge props to Dean Ayala though for being the leading force in engaging with the Hearthstone community as of late.
No company is perfect, especially with the bro culture that Riot has been in the press for over the past couple of years, but that transparency and that desire to create something that everyone can enjoy from the free to play side of things and only charging for cosmetics is what made them a titan in the MOBA genre. I don't have an issue calling Blizzard out on the bullshit when I see it just as I don't have a problem giving them props when they deserve it even at the risk of sounding like a "fanboy".
I'm sorry you weren't a fan of the article and for a lot of it, yeah, we're going to need to wait and see how Riot handles everything once the card pool expands. For now though, the game is more accessible than Hearthstone was when it first started. That would actually be a very interesting piece of content to work on, comparing all the card games and looking at their first era of digital. Magic certainly has been an interesting case on that side of things.
I agree with meisterz39 about the article's tone, I think you should separate opinion posts from news post, this is by essence a policy change, a news post, it would better if you made a small news post and then made a comparison more in depth post about the change (I mean it's less spammy than the riot's reveal season with 4 news posts per champion).
I agree with everything you said actually but I want to point something about the gold cap and gold per win actually.. that system is the worst.. I am aware they have plans that by the end of the year they are revamping the system as a whole but 6 years, really?
the amount of gold given for *wins* is pathetic, you need to win 3 games (at least 30 minutes of play on average in the best case) to gain 1/10 of a pack price or 1/15 of arena price that's pathetic, and they even CAP it? you are playing for hours and all you get in ONE pack..?
Riot made an article about botting in LoR : https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-anti-cheat-in-lol-more/
(*LOL, TFT, LoR and valorant) (sadly didn't saw that part on this site.. not blaming you the article was mostly about league..)
and.. they managed to battle them they were afraid of them as well but found out how to deetect them.. instead of punishing players by giving shitty rewards (10 gold per 3 wins and exp cap, and garbage exp rewards) they fight the bots..
I mean do you even remember HS have an exp system?
Yes--because I still remember fighting with it when I was first starting. In case you weren't being rhetorical: for each class, they lock 5 basic class cards behind progression levels 2-10. Some of them are fairly significant (e.g., Kill Command, Swipe, Shadow Word: Death), so unless you're willing to dump significant cash into this game which you've just started playing not ONLY do you need to build a deck mostly from free cards but you also have this handicap for the first ~week.
Was expecting riot to notice trends in other games and as a new player on the field do it right, right away instead of the blizzard way which is:
A bug appears or there is a lack of a requested feature which is annoying but not game breaking.
It annoys players
Blizzard ignores it for years or promise to fix it/add it soon(tm)
Players coop with it.
One day they fix it
Players are "so" greatful for the fix.
That's being extremely annoying
Example: deck slots.
Haha why the title seems so.. "hateful" lol.
I'm starting to play runeterra out of boredom and it seems Rito is indeed taking care of it really well. Love their effort so far!