Blizzard needs more than "slightly more gold" the game has become much more expensive since the old system was in place.. this system should make the game feel better to play, more affordable and more satisfying, it does none of that.
They only dug themselves deeper with EVERYTHING done this expansion.. just look at the duels requirements, the achievements that grant exp requirements, the price of the battle pass the outrageous "thank you blizzard" bundle with spelling errors (legenderies XD), yogg crashing the game.
There's no announcement to be made, people just need to get the memo and quit the game there are many many other games that the companies running them respect their players, at least more than money bags like Blizzard treats you or anyone else p(l)aying their games.
So far the only information is that there will be no legendaries.
I don't think anything like this was ever said, but I can guess at why you might think that. In the original announcement videos for Darkmoon Faire, they said that thanks to the miniset, you'd be able to do the Collect 135 Darkmoon Faire cards achievement without collecting a single legendary card (this is the one that gets you the custom art for the coin).
It would be easy to misconstrue that as "the miniset has no legendaries," but since there are 25 legendaries in the set today, this would only imply that no fewer than 25 of the miniset cards are less than legendary rarity to make up that difference. That still leaves as many as 10 new cards that could be legendary. That seems high, though. I expect it will look more like 4 or 5 to closely mirror the rarity distribution from the Galakrond's Awakening miniset (15 common, 12 rare, 4 epic, and 4 legendary for a total of 35).
OK, so I have been sitting out of the whole discussion for a long time because while I don't agree that the rewards track was ever really that bad, I am also unimpressed with how Blizzard has handled it so they deserved a bit of an uproar. However, it has reached the point where I'm actually leaning towards the community's handling of it being worse than Blizz's. To help say why, let's break down the gold acquisition in rewards track for me personally:
Show Spoiler
I used to get about 8k gold in the 4 month expansion cycle, which from what I have seen is fairly typical. Up to level 50 in the rewards track you get 4950 gold (plus other stuff that everyone counts differently so I will ignore it completely). To make up the 3050 gold deficit I need an extra 21 levels, putting me at 8100 gold.
The total XP up to level 71 is 284000, so the question is whether I expect to get this much in 4 months of playing. Well, I'm currently just at level 33, which took 73800 XP to reach, or 26% of the way to level 71. Note I don't have the Tavern Pass, but I do have enough cards to make serious progress on achievements.
The crudest calculation would take the number of days I took to get here and multiply XP accordingly. Equivalently we can just look at the fraction of 4 months 16 days is. Calling 1 month 365/12 = 30.4 days, that is 16/(4*30.4)=13%, about half the fraction of the way to level 71. So in this crude calculation I should shoot way past level 71 and get lots more gold than I did before.
Of course that calculation is crude for a reason: I have been playing more than I normally would because it is the start of an expansion, and I got additional one-off XP from achievements. Even so, the fact I have so much more XP than the target 13% needed at this point is reassuring, and that's before considering events that will likely grant more XP.
Now, I know that just because the numbers are kind to me, it doesn't mean they are so kind to everyone. But if I put myself in the devs' shoes and saw the community rage despite the numbers actually being perfectly fine, I know I'd be keeping quite quiet too. What else can you do?
Tell the community they are wrong? Even if that is true it would only provoke further anger.
Perhaps they decide the community is completely right and the game should be made cheaper, but that change cannot come overnight and they cannot make promises before they know what they will do, so they cannot announce anything there either.
If they take the middle ground and say "we have heard the concerns and are discussing them but don't propose any changes yet", then the community accuses them of being out of touch anyway.
So where are we? We have a community holding pitch-forks angry about changes that, by my calculations, don't deserve nearly so much anger as they are still generating. And a dev team that messed up by lack of communication, and have got themselves caught in a tough spot where almost anything they say will spark more anger (seriously, even if they finally told us how much XP per hour we get in each game mode, you can bet people will be angry they haven't also announced a 'fix' to the whole system), as will saying nothing.
I went into this affair being neutral because I wanted to experience everything for myself before making a judgement. Now I'm neutral because, quite frankly, neither side has handled it well enough to deserve my support.
If you enjoy playing the game (as I do), you have no cause for guilt. It's a great game! Have fun!
If you're concerned about how Blizzard is handling recent changes (as Alfi pointed out), maybe hold off on spending money on the game for awhile (if you do that).
uhh what? the outrage isn't because the game is unfun. It's also based on worry of the future of the game. The reward track hasn't lasted a month, so it didn't affect our ability to craft/and open a lot of packs yet. But it will next year with the mini sets and the new expansion.
If the people being angry didn't enjoy the game they wouldn't care enough to get outraged in the first place.
I was curious to know with all the hate directed at Blizzard right now if anyone else is feeling guilty for continuing to enjoy the game?
I'm in a constant state of 'oh god this game is too expensive' and 'I wish I could play x deck but can't due to not owning the right cards' while also really enjoying the decks I can craft.
Is it just me who constantly has this moral dilemma? Should I be this stressed about a game?
That´s a good point :) I think it depends how far you are on the track. I´ll be LVL 35 on Monday one way or another (thanks to the new quests) so there´s no downside for me to wait to collect those achievements a bit longer.
Took a while but managed to do it, thanks for the tip.
It felt amazing and bad at the same time, as I somehow managed to take control against an aggro druid and would've won the match, but an achievement hunter must do what an achievement hunter must do. I had plenty of minions on board and I rotated the giant as the only minion of my opponent while having 8 health and counter lethal on board for next turn. My opponent took their chance, I got the achievement pop-up even before seeing any arrows indicating an attack.
I just managed to finally assemble the combo and play it (after losing quite a few games), and rather than attack me, my opponent just used their own removal spells on the giant.....I'm pretty sure my opponent was playing for the Cascading Disaster achievement (they thanked after playing one for three kills), making me all the more annoyed that they didn't attack. Seems like it could have been a mutually beneficial game.
EDIT: I managed to complete this, but not with the full combo. I eventually found an Odd Paladin, stalled a ton, and gave them an Arcane Giant with Silas Darkmoon and played Shadow Clone. They could have attacked with a buffed Silver Hand Recruit for lethal and denied me the achievement, but they didn't. Despite dying when they attacked, the secret still triggered and I still got the achievement.
Yeah it's always pretty annoying when you are clearly messing around but the opponent gets suspicious and thinks you have some master plan that will ruin them, so they do the opposite of what you need them to.
Yesterday I forced the 'Yogg, take the wheel' achievement with a Demon Hunter decks that had nothing but removal, card draw, Yogg, Blur and an Eater of Secrets to clear off any possible Ice Blocks or Evasions (I did it in Wild so there was less aggro). The plan was simple: stall to play Blur and Yogg into Rod of Roasting for a guaranteed OTK (5% of the time). There was no point in me attacking the opponent so I never did, yet they still sometimes conceded just before I could play Yogg :(
For anyone daunted by needing to summon a whopping 200 Greyboughs, I managed it in a few hours earlier with this deck:
It not a cheap deck, but if you have the pieces it is well worth trying it out. It was the most fun I have had playing druid in a long long time, and can gladly say Elise the Enlightened was an absolute star, doubling key pieces meaning you can press through several waves of board clears. I had a mammoth game against a Big Priest that ended up summoning 99(!) Greyboughs, where we both went down to fatigue after shuffling lots of cards into our decks (2 Psychic Screams, several Excavated Evils, and a ton of resurrected Reliquary of Souls). It truly was a game of the unstoppable force vs the immovable object.
I don't think this actually makes a difference, because if you claim the XP now you'll reach level 35 faster, and get the boost on the XP you would otherwise use to get to 35. Basically you are changing which XP you get the boost on, but your total should sum to the same.
Just another PSA: if you Maxima a Tonk into your opponent's face and the deathrattle kills them, it does NOT count for that achievement. They need to be killed by the initial impact.
By the way, calculating, that casual player will do 75% of achievments is VERY far from truth. You need a specific legendary for a lot of them. You need to grind the ladder A LOT with very specific decks to get them (kill 25 minions with rabbit, deal 500 damage with Tonks, Silence a minion with 3 different buffs, play 10 outcast cards while a specific minion is in play, keep a minion in your hand the whole game, attack with rush minions 50 times while specific small legendary minion is in play etc.)
Edit: I just discovered that achievemnt is to summon 200 Dreadboughs, not 20 as I thought before.
I want it to be known that anyone who has uploaded their collection over the past day has had their collection automatically synced onto the site again since we keep a history of your uploads and were able to do that.
Anyone before that, please resync with HDT to ensure we have the latest collection data for you. Having HDT loaded and going into your collection will start the process.
Just today I´ve realized during our Achivement hunt, that our 10%, 15% and 20% boost applies to these achievements too. Just now I´ve completed Tent out of Tent and got 230 XP (I have 15% bonus). So that makes me think that it´s a good idea to claim your XP for these achievements AFTER you reach LVL 35 where you get 20% XP boost to them. Not much, but still something. So right now I´m hoarding my 500 XP achievements without opening/claiming them, so I can collect more XP after LVL 35.
Sorry if this is a known thing, but maybe it helps those like me who didn´t have a clue :)
Idk at this point, if they don't respond to the outrage in monday then HS's future is in a big doubt.
It wouldn't have taken much to please the outrage when it first started. But now since they waited too long, more and more people are focusing on the general cost of the game and not just the battle pass anymore.
Never wanted a company to fail more in my life. So greedy.
Took a while but managed to do it, thanks for the tip.
It felt amazing and bad at the same time, as I somehow managed to take control against an aggro druid and would've won the match, but an achievement hunter must do what an achievement hunter must do. I had plenty of minions on board and I rotated the giant as the only minion of my opponent while having 8 health and counter lethal on board for next turn. My opponent took their chance, I got the achievement pop-up even before seeing any arrows indicating an attack.
I just managed to finally assemble the combo and play it (after losing quite a few games), and rather than attack me, my opponent just used their own removal spells on the giant.....I'm pretty sure my opponent was playing for the Cascading Disaster achievement (they thanked after playing one for three kills), making me all the more annoyed that they didn't attack. Seems like it could have been a mutually beneficial game.
EDIT: I managed to complete this, but not with the full combo. I eventually found an Odd Paladin, stalled a ton, and gave them an Arcane Giant with Silas Darkmoon and played Shadow Clone. They could have attacked with a buffed Silver Hand Recruit for lethal and denied me the achievement, but they didn't. Despite dying when they attacked, the secret still triggered and I still got the achievement.
Hot take - Blizzard is actually not that bad
Blizzard needs more than "slightly more gold" the game has become much more expensive since the old system was in place.. this system should make the game feel better to play, more affordable and more satisfying, it does none of that.
They only dug themselves deeper with EVERYTHING done this expansion.. just look at the duels requirements, the achievements that grant exp requirements, the price of the battle pass the outrageous "thank you blizzard" bundle with spelling errors (legenderies XD), yogg crashing the game.
There's no announcement to be made, people just need to get the memo and quit the game there are many many other games that the companies running them respect their players, at least more than money bags like Blizzard treats you or anyone else p(l)aying their games.
Feeling guilty for enjoying the game
Keep on enjoying it, then. So many things cause stress nowadays, there's no reason to add a game to them.
Hearthstone is expensive, true, but since you enjoy the decks you craft, thumbs up!
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Odd Shaman, Albatross Hunter, Togwaggle Paladin, and More!
Just don't look closely at the Warrior deck :D At least Dorkpork's version which I also mention is a proper Wild variant.
Togwaggle Paladin
Looks inconsistent, I prefer togwagle priest, but I'll try It for sure!
+1 for you.
mini expansion
I don't think anything like this was ever said, but I can guess at why you might think that. In the original announcement videos for Darkmoon Faire, they said that thanks to the miniset, you'd be able to do the Collect 135 Darkmoon Faire cards achievement without collecting a single legendary card (this is the one that gets you the custom art for the coin).
It would be easy to misconstrue that as "the miniset has no legendaries," but since there are 25 legendaries in the set today, this would only imply that no fewer than 25 of the miniset cards are less than legendary rarity to make up that difference. That still leaves as many as 10 new cards that could be legendary. That seems high, though. I expect it will look more like 4 or 5 to closely mirror the rarity distribution from the Galakrond's Awakening miniset (15 common, 12 rare, 4 epic, and 4 legendary for a total of 35).
Hot take - Blizzard is actually not that bad
OK, so I have been sitting out of the whole discussion for a long time because while I don't agree that the rewards track was ever really that bad, I am also unimpressed with how Blizzard has handled it so they deserved a bit of an uproar. However, it has reached the point where I'm actually leaning towards the community's handling of it being worse than Blizz's. To help say why, let's break down the gold acquisition in rewards track for me personally:
I used to get about 8k gold in the 4 month expansion cycle, which from what I have seen is fairly typical. Up to level 50 in the rewards track you get 4950 gold (plus other stuff that everyone counts differently so I will ignore it completely). To make up the 3050 gold deficit I need an extra 21 levels, putting me at 8100 gold.
The total XP up to level 71 is 284000, so the question is whether I expect to get this much in 4 months of playing. Well, I'm currently just at level 33, which took 73800 XP to reach, or 26% of the way to level 71. Note I don't have the Tavern Pass, but I do have enough cards to make serious progress on achievements.
The crudest calculation would take the number of days I took to get here and multiply XP accordingly. Equivalently we can just look at the fraction of 4 months 16 days is. Calling 1 month 365/12 = 30.4 days, that is 16/(4*30.4)=13%, about half the fraction of the way to level 71. So in this crude calculation I should shoot way past level 71 and get lots more gold than I did before.
Of course that calculation is crude for a reason: I have been playing more than I normally would because it is the start of an expansion, and I got additional one-off XP from achievements. Even so, the fact I have so much more XP than the target 13% needed at this point is reassuring, and that's before considering events that will likely grant more XP.
Now, I know that just because the numbers are kind to me, it doesn't mean they are so kind to everyone. But if I put myself in the devs' shoes and saw the community rage despite the numbers actually being perfectly fine, I know I'd be keeping quite quiet too. What else can you do?
So where are we? We have a community holding pitch-forks angry about changes that, by my calculations, don't deserve nearly so much anger as they are still generating. And a dev team that messed up by lack of communication, and have got themselves caught in a tough spot where almost anything they say will spark more anger (seriously, even if they finally told us how much XP per hour we get in each game mode, you can bet people will be angry they haven't also announced a 'fix' to the whole system), as will saying nothing.
I went into this affair being neutral because I wanted to experience everything for myself before making a judgement. Now I'm neutral because, quite frankly, neither side has handled it well enough to deserve my support.
Feeling guilty for enjoying the game
If you enjoy playing the game (as I do), you have no cause for guilt. It's a great game! Have fun!
If you're concerned about how Blizzard is handling recent changes (as Alfi pointed out), maybe hold off on spending money on the game for awhile (if you do that).
mini expansion
Where is this info from?
Feeling guilty for enjoying the game
The game os great! Achievements are fun! Decisions of Blizzard management on monetization and lack of communication is the bad thing here.
Feeling guilty for enjoying the game
uhh what? the outrage isn't because the game is unfun. It's also based on worry of the future of the game. The reward track hasn't lasted a month, so it didn't affect our ability to craft/and open a lot of packs yet. But it will next year with the mini sets and the new expansion.
If the people being angry didn't enjoy the game they wouldn't care enough to get outraged in the first place.
Feeling guilty for enjoying the game
Hi all,
I was curious to know with all the hate directed at Blizzard right now if anyone else is feeling guilty for continuing to enjoy the game?
I'm in a constant state of 'oh god this game is too expensive' and 'I wish I could play x deck but can't due to not owning the right cards' while also really enjoying the decks I can craft.
Is it just me who constantly has this moral dilemma? Should I be this stressed about a game?
Rog
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Odd Shaman, Albatross Hunter, Togwaggle Paladin, and More!
This was a fun post! Very interesting decks to try this weekend!
mini expansion
So far the only information is that there will be no legendaries.
Reminder: For those with Tavern Pass
That´s a good point :) I think it depends how far you are on the track. I´ll be LVL 35 on Monday one way or another (thanks to the new quests) so there´s no downside for me to wait to collect those achievements a bit longer.
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Odd Shaman, Albatross Hunter, Togwaggle Paladin, and More!
A wild mage deck that has only 1 wild card? :D
Achievement Tips/Strategies Sharing
Yeah it's always pretty annoying when you are clearly messing around but the opponent gets suspicious and thinks you have some master plan that will ruin them, so they do the opposite of what you need them to.
Yesterday I forced the 'Yogg, take the wheel' achievement with a Demon Hunter decks that had nothing but removal, card draw, Yogg, Blur and an Eater of Secrets to clear off any possible Ice Blocks or Evasions (I did it in Wild so there was less aggro). The plan was simple: stall to play Blur and Yogg into Rod of Roasting for a guaranteed OTK (5% of the time). There was no point in me attacking the opponent so I never did, yet they still sometimes conceded just before I could play Yogg :(
For anyone daunted by needing to summon a whopping 200 Greyboughs, I managed it in a few hours earlier with this deck:
Wild · Highlander Druid · by AngryShuckie · 5 years, 10 months ago
It not a cheap deck, but if you have the pieces it is well worth trying it out. It was the most fun I have had playing druid in a long long time, and can gladly say Elise the Enlightened was an absolute star, doubling key pieces meaning you can press through several waves of board clears. I had a mammoth game against a Big Priest that ended up summoning 99(!) Greyboughs, where we both went down to fatigue after shuffling lots of cards into our decks (2 Psychic Screams, several Excavated Evils, and a ton of resurrected Reliquary of Souls). It truly was a game of the unstoppable force vs the immovable object.
mini expansion
any idea when the 35 new cards will be released ? also any idea about the split common / rare /epic / legendary?
with november / december free packs it should be possible to have all common / rare without purchasing packs I assume ...
Reminder: For those with Tavern Pass
I don't think this actually makes a difference, because if you claim the XP now you'll reach level 35 faster, and get the boost on the XP you would otherwise use to get to 35. Basically you are changing which XP you get the boost on, but your total should sum to the same.
Achievement Tips/Strategies Sharing
Just another PSA: if you Maxima a Tonk into your opponent's face and the deathrattle kills them, it does NOT count for that achievement. They need to be killed by the initial impact.
Hot take - Blizzard is actually not that bad
By the way, calculating, that casual player will do 75% of achievments is VERY far from truth. You need a specific legendary for a lot of them. You need to grind the ladder A LOT with very specific decks to get them (kill 25 minions with rabbit, deal 500 damage with Tonks, Silence a minion with 3 different buffs, play 10 outcast cards while a specific minion is in play, keep a minion in your hand the whole game, attack with rush minions 50 times while specific small legendary minion is in play etc.)
Edit: I just discovered that achievemnt is to summon 200 Dreadboughs, not 20 as I thought before.
Out of Cards Changelog - 2020-11-28 (Hearth Collection Fixes)
I want it to be known that anyone who has uploaded their collection over the past day has had their collection automatically synced onto the site again since we keep a history of your uploads and were able to do that.
Anyone before that, please resync with HDT to ensure we have the latest collection data for you. Having HDT loaded and going into your collection will start the process.
Reminder: For those with Tavern Pass
Just today I´ve realized during our Achivement hunt, that our 10%, 15% and 20% boost applies to these achievements too. Just now I´ve completed Tent out of Tent and got 230 XP (I have 15% bonus). So that makes me think that it´s a good idea to claim your XP for these achievements AFTER you reach LVL 35 where you get 20% XP boost to them. Not much, but still something. So right now I´m hoarding my 500 XP achievements without opening/claiming them, so I can collect more XP after LVL 35.
Sorry if this is a known thing, but maybe it helps those like me who didn´t have a clue :)
Out of Cards Changelog - 2020-11-28 (Hearth Collection Fixes)
Bug Fixes
Hearthstone
Hot take - Blizzard is actually not that bad
Idk at this point, if they don't respond to the outrage in monday then HS's future is in a big doubt.
It wouldn't have taken much to please the outrage when it first started. But now since they waited too long, more and more people are focusing on the general cost of the game and not just the battle pass anymore.
Never wanted a company to fail more in my life. So greedy.
Achievement Tips/Strategies Sharing
I just managed to finally assemble the combo and play it (after losing quite a few games), and rather than attack me, my opponent just used their own removal spells on the giant.....I'm pretty sure my opponent was playing for the Cascading Disaster achievement (they thanked after playing one for three kills), making me all the more annoyed that they didn't attack. Seems like it could have been a mutually beneficial game.
EDIT: I managed to complete this, but not with the full combo. I eventually found an Odd Paladin, stalled a ton, and gave them an Arcane Giant with Silas Darkmoon and played Shadow Clone. They could have attacked with a buffed Silver Hand Recruit for lethal and denied me the achievement, but they didn't. Despite dying when they attacked, the secret still triggered and I still got the achievement.