Definitely not a fan of the Battle Pass but I have not the slightest doubt that this will be implemented (regardless of survey results). HS is already a very expensive game if you buy all pre-orders (equivalent of several AA games per year) but that is obviously not enough. Blizzard has significantly stepped up monetarization lately beginning with the Tavern Pass, which is essential if you want to play Battlegrounds semi competitive, new pack types and bundles and bringing old cardbacks back to the shop. The increasing powercreep from expansion to expansion is also part of this. From their perspective it is the logical next step. From a player perspective of course this is a very unfortunate development especially as the rewards seem lackluster. F2P players might be slowly pushed out of the game (standard at least).
P.S. We obviously do not know the price yet but we all know Blizzard and this will not be cheap.
I’ve played this dang game since launch. While I still enjoy it, I certainly don’t want to be forced to play more to keep up with some dang battle pass. I already have to do that with Apex Legends. And I tell ya, Blizzard, if you make me choose between the two for how I split my time, you won’t like the result
I think this would be a completely fine change. with one requirement - do it like MTGA where battle pass (they call it mastery) is only a new layer above existing daily quest rewards.
so if the 50-100 gold daily rewards remain, this system is completely acceptable.
2 random legendaries at that point will not make up for it, both for f2p and not f2p.
Especially when you already crafted the legendaries you want
EDIT: from a rough calculation, with the 9000 exp for week, you should get your first legendary card at the end of the second week, and the second one much later (edit: calculated, it comes the 10th week) this if you get max exp every week (we can't say if it will be easy or not)
In hearthstone it will be brutal, especially when finding good cards in a pack is very hard (i opened 53 packs of the new exp and only found 2 legendaries) and so you are almost forced to craft them for a high cost.
Here you will get 2 legendaries granted For F2P players
It's ok in games like LoR because obtaining cards is much easier (i'm f2p and have the whole collection, and still some resources) where you can easily craft what you need
In hearthstone it will be brutal, especially when finding good cards in a pack is very hard (i opened 53 packs of the new exp and only found 2 legendaries) and so you are almost forced to craft them for a high cost.
Now we will be forced to open packs of the current expansion and past expansions, so you have to craft what you need to play a deck (let's be real, even the big 80 cards bundle won't be enough, and we are talking a lot of money here, more than a good game you can just buy) this means opening those packs will just be collecting dust.
They have at least to change the rate of finding a legendary, right now it's ridicolous, in 80 packs you can just find 2 legendaries if you are unlucky, this is a good reason for me to never spend a cent in this game. They just should do more cosmetic things to balance the new rate. Still i'd hate the new system.
The feel you have to grind for the rewards isn't nice too, a lot of people don't have time, some don't want, some just can't play another game after losing to a bs and have to cool down (talking about me). If winning rewards more exp than losing it will be even worse, already people only play tier 1 decks all day, this will be a reason to do that even more.
So i can only see bad things about this new system, but i guess is going to come and stay. Too bad.
Current quest-based gold system is already quite of a grind.
Having it turned into an xp-based continuum looks pretty at first glance, but it's actually just a worse grind.
I am ok with xp giving cosmetics and perks, but gold should be bound as less as possible on intensive grind.
UNLESS there is an easy enough threshold that can give you a favourable compromise as a reward (similar to D5 in ladder), beyond which you only get cosmetics and perks.
Ah, just as I thought things are taking a better direction, I might be leaving if this goes off.
As a long time player, I naturally got burnt out, and with less time on my hands, I decided to get in once every three days for quests, and have a gaming day once a week. Truth to be told, current quest system is really boring and should be modernized. But psychological torture of having to grind to not lose something important for players like me is much worse. And I think there are a lot of us. Not to mention long waiting for those rewards, which functionally is probably the most detriminal factor.
Anyway, this will most likely be introduced in the end, it's too well planned not to. I feel the best way for them not to disappoint the majority of players is to just let gold quests stay, along with the new system. It would still have the same hook-up effect, just without the frustrating part of not longer being able to play normally if you don't pay money. I get their plan, but I think it's not a logical one, considering their competition. Let's just hope this is not the beginning of the end.
P. S. I'm not full f2p, I'll gladly give money if it brings me fun, as I did as soon as I got my first job. Fun has its price. But this doesn't sound like fun to me, more like torture.
This is very annoying. My gold is saved to buy packs of NEXT expansions. I don't care about PAST expansions.
With this reward system each four months I will have less than one half gold than usual to buy new expansion decks and a bunch of old packs that I don't care to have (good cards have been already crafted at the beginning of the expansion)
I accidentally ended up watching almost the entirety of thijs' stream yesterday (while working, cooking etc.) so the packs felt like a nice reward for watching games all day lol.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind them doing this more often on purpose, especially after a new expansion release since it might raise interest of players for the new expansion. The more I think about it, it actually makes more sense than rewarding watching tournaments in the middle of the season. You're technically spending time on the game and as Beardo would say: "time is money my friend!"
Getting packs of past and even current expansions is far from the same value though, than when i can buy them with gold day one. I want to play my cards, not just obtain them at some point.
I hoped to see Intrepid Initiate in here. The card art doesn't have anything wrong with it, but the design of the character isn't really like every other human in hearthstone, they're too realistic. I mean compare it to other humans in the same set.
Losing the Dailies would be just such a fatal Hit to the F2P Side of the Game, since these are the main Source for your Gold. And having a Gold Cap would also be pretty bad. Most F2P Players rely on the huge Amounts of Gold they earn in an Expansion Cycle to prepare for the next one. Capping it to a much lower Maximum than the usual Amount they can gather could force them to spend Money, which is probably a giant Turn-Off for them.
(Fun Fact: I'm one of the probably 5 F2Players that would actually benefit from this.)
I hope that the Devs get a lot of constructive Feedback on this Topic in the Reddit AMA next Tuesday.
Honestly, I'd much prefer it if the System they thought out would give me only half the Amount of Gold from leveling up, or even less (like 10g), if that means that I can keep the Daily Quests.
You cant just take everything at face value, convert them into gold and call it a fair crack.
- The '32' packs are actually 18 current expansions packs and 14 standard packs. Those 14 packs are not current expansion, and can range from (taking the current as example) AoO to RoS and I think its fair to say that no one at this point would value RoS packs in the same way as say, AoO or Scholomance packs.
- Arena tickets are a little trickier. 150 gold per ticket is an okay way to call it, but I personally dont care about arena and will be good to simply receive 1 pack in exchange. But lets just accept its 150 gold for now.
- You cant take epics and legendaries and ascribe a gold value to it. It can range from being choice to complete garbage
- Skins and card back dont affect gameplay, and in most cases FTP players wouldn't give a toss for it. So again, you can't just paste a gold value on it and call it fair.
In reality, you're staring at 3990 + 1800 + 600 = 6390 gold + whatever 14 packs you get. Even with this extra 1400 gold its still 7790 for 4 months. Let's also not forget you dont get these straight up. Its incremental, so you either resist buying packs, or play with half-assed decks assuming you've no dust hanging around.
I get like 80-90 packs per expansion. And I still dont get most of the better cards. This battlepass doesn't even match that, and the incremental nature of the rewards is but a thinly veiled attempt at getting us to buy packs. Ironically many of us won't mind paying a little to have more fun, but this is not paying to have fun. Its more like paying to grind. Grind up enough before the fun eventually comes, or pay more money to lessen the grind. That's the real change isn't it?
The problem you don't mention is that this new systems want you to be hardcore, because this system binds you for playing more with effective less reward than the old system.
Very hard to agreed with you, because all those goods you have mantion above are worth less then pure gold which is equivalent to packs of the new expansions. No one care much about arena tickets or card backs because they are not in the rewards pool that are relevant when you want buy new expansion packs.
Alright so here's how I understand this, and why I think this might not hurt f2p players as much as people are thinking
Currently, from daily quests alone, it is possible to get a maximum of 60 gold per day if you do one quest each day (you only get one new quest daily so let's just assume that's all you have). Earning 60 gold per day over a 16 week period nets you a total of 6720 gold (if you grind out all of your gold from wins then the total comes to 17920 gold, but that requires 30 wins daily and not many people do that anyway). At face value this does seem like a lot more than the 3990 you get from the total battle pass rewards, however:
You get a total of 32 packs, equivalent to 3200 gold
You get 4 arena tickets, basically equivalent to 600 gold plus however much you might get from the rewards
You get two free epics and legendaries, which if we use an approximate 1:1 conversion of gold to dust comes to ~4000 gold (this one might be pushing it, I know, disregard this if you feel it right)
You get a free hero skin and card back, which while hero skins don't have a precedented value, card backs have recently been showing up in the shop for 500 gold, so lets just go with that
All in all that means the rewards from the battle pass are worth a whopping ~12290 gold
However, we don't yet know how much XP will be granted per win/quest/achievement. We know the weekly cap is 9000, but we don't yet know how much grinding it would take to reach this cap. The optimist in me hopes that if they're going to require maxing xp for 16 weeks then it'll be relatively easy if you play enough each day (Brawlhalla's first battle pass is an example of this done well. By playing enough to finish my weekly quests, at most 8 hours each week, I was able to reach max level with a whole week left in the battle pass). Of course, this is Blizzard we're talking about, so there's no guarantee it will be handled so well.
I have high hopes for this, since it seems to be the opposite of most battle passes since most of the rewards come from the unpaid side rather than the paid side. As long as the XP gain works at a good enough pace to make it not feel like a grind, I can see this being significantly better than the current F2P experience.
Well as a f2p I'm done with hearthstone if they implement these rewards. If you max out on xp you get 5240 gold plus 17 packs of latest expansion, while casual completing quests through expansion gets you 7000 gold. So hard grind gets you the same amount of packs as casual completing quests. There are 14 classic packs and few epics/legendaries but I just don't think those are worth the difference between hard grind and casual playing. Not to mention when you stack up gold until release you get to open all of your packs on the launch day while with this system you get 52 packs on launch plus 17 through 4 months of playing
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Definitely not a fan of the Battle Pass but I have not the slightest doubt that this will be implemented (regardless of survey results). HS is already a very expensive game if you buy all pre-orders (equivalent of several AA games per year) but that is obviously not enough. Blizzard has significantly stepped up monetarization lately beginning with the Tavern Pass, which is essential if you want to play Battlegrounds semi competitive, new pack types and bundles and bringing old cardbacks back to the shop. The increasing powercreep from expansion to expansion is also part of this. From their perspective it is the logical next step. From a player perspective of course this is a very unfortunate development especially as the rewards seem lackluster. F2P players might be slowly pushed out of the game (standard at least).
P.S. We obviously do not know the price yet but we all know Blizzard and this will not be cheap.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
I’ve played this dang game since launch. While I still enjoy it, I certainly don’t want to be forced to play more to keep up with some dang battle pass. I already have to do that with Apex Legends. And I tell ya, Blizzard, if you make me choose between the two for how I split my time, you won’t like the result
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
I think this would be a completely fine change.
with one requirement - do it like MTGA where battle pass (they call it mastery) is only a new layer above existing daily quest rewards.
so if the 50-100 gold daily rewards remain, this system is completely acceptable.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
2 random legendaries at that point will not make up for it, both for f2p and not f2p.
Especially when you already crafted the legendaries you want
EDIT: from a rough calculation, with the 9000 exp for week, you should get your first legendary card at the end of the second week, and the second one much later (edit: calculated, it comes the 10th week) this if you get max exp every week (we can't say if it will be easy or not)
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Here you will get 2 legendaries granted For F2P players
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
This system sucks.
It's ok in games like LoR because obtaining cards is much easier (i'm f2p and have the whole collection, and still some resources) where you can easily craft what you need
In hearthstone it will be brutal, especially when finding good cards in a pack is very hard (i opened 53 packs of the new exp and only found 2 legendaries) and so you are almost forced to craft them for a high cost.
Now we will be forced to open packs of the current expansion and past expansions, so you have to craft what you need to play a deck (let's be real, even the big 80 cards bundle won't be enough, and we are talking a lot of money here, more than a good game you can just buy) this means opening those packs will just be collecting dust.
They have at least to change the rate of finding a legendary, right now it's ridicolous, in 80 packs you can just find 2 legendaries if you are unlucky, this is a good reason for me to never spend a cent in this game. They just should do more cosmetic things to balance the new rate. Still i'd hate the new system.
The feel you have to grind for the rewards isn't nice too, a lot of people don't have time, some don't want, some just can't play another game after losing to a bs and have to cool down (talking about me). If winning rewards more exp than losing it will be even worse, already people only play tier 1 decks all day, this will be a reason to do that even more.
So i can only see bad things about this new system, but i guess is going to come and stay. Too bad.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Current quest-based gold system is already quite of a grind.
Having it turned into an xp-based continuum looks pretty at first glance, but it's actually just a worse grind.
I am ok with xp giving cosmetics and perks, but gold should be bound as less as possible on intensive grind.
UNLESS there is an easy enough threshold that can give you a favourable compromise as a reward (similar to D5 in ladder), beyond which you only get cosmetics and perks.
Hearthstone, The Tavern has been Renovated.
I love this idea, and I can't wait to see something like this in Hearthstone. Though it's going to take a lot of getting used to.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Ah, just as I thought things are taking a better direction, I might be leaving if this goes off.
As a long time player, I naturally got burnt out, and with less time on my hands, I decided to get in once every three days for quests, and have a gaming day once a week. Truth to be told, current quest system is really boring and should be modernized. But psychological torture of having to grind to not lose something important for players like me is much worse. And I think there are a lot of us. Not to mention long waiting for those rewards, which functionally is probably the most detriminal factor.
Anyway, this will most likely be introduced in the end, it's too well planned not to. I feel the best way for them not to disappoint the majority of players is to just let gold quests stay, along with the new system. It would still have the same hook-up effect, just without the frustrating part of not longer being able to play normally if you don't pay money. I get their plan, but I think it's not a logical one, considering their competition. Let's just hope this is not the beginning of the end.
P. S. I'm not full f2p, I'll gladly give money if it brings me fun, as I did as soon as I got my first job. Fun has its price. But this doesn't sound like fun to me, more like torture.
Twitch Drops Error In Your Favor - Collect Ashes of Outland Packs (Expired)
I don't watch a lot of hearthstone in twitch but yesterday i did...but i wasn't logged in... Feelsbadman
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Where is written that
Paid members of the pass would receive these rewards in addition to the free ones:
I don't see that in the reward table
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
as a F2P you have 4 month to figure which cards are safe to craft during the expansion. so it's not bad, better than nothing. no?
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
This is very annoying. My gold is saved to buy packs of NEXT expansions. I don't care about PAST expansions.
With this reward system each four months I will have less than one half gold than usual to buy new expansion decks and a bunch of old packs that I don't care to have (good cards have been already crafted at the beginning of the expansion)
Twitch Drops Error In Your Favor - Collect Ashes of Outland Packs (Expired)
I accidentally ended up watching almost the entirety of thijs' stream yesterday (while working, cooking etc.) so the packs felt like a nice reward for watching games all day lol.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind them doing this more often on purpose, especially after a new expansion release since it might raise interest of players for the new expansion. The more I think about it, it actually makes more sense than rewarding watching tournaments in the middle of the season. You're technically spending time on the game and as Beardo would say: "time is money my friend!"
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Getting packs of past and even current expansions is far from the same value though, than when i can buy them with gold day one. I want to play my cards, not just obtain them at some point.
The Artwork Process of Scholomance Academy - Concept Art Spotlight
I hoped to see Intrepid Initiate in here. The card art doesn't have anything wrong with it, but the design of the character isn't really like every other human in hearthstone, they're too realistic. I mean compare it to other humans in the same set.
Pen Flinger
Wandmaker
Smug Senior
There's nothing wrong with it really, but whenever i see the card it just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
I'd rather stay with the current System.
Losing the Dailies would be just such a fatal Hit to the F2P Side of the Game, since these are the main Source for your Gold. And having a Gold Cap would also be pretty bad. Most F2P Players rely on the huge Amounts of Gold they earn in an Expansion Cycle to prepare for the next one. Capping it to a much lower Maximum than the usual Amount they can gather could force them to spend Money, which is probably a giant Turn-Off for them.
(Fun Fact: I'm one of the probably 5 F2Players that would actually benefit from this.)
I hope that the Devs get a lot of constructive Feedback on this Topic in the Reddit AMA next Tuesday.
Honestly, I'd much prefer it if the System they thought out would give me only half the Amount of Gold from leveling up, or even less (like 10g), if that means that I can keep the Daily Quests.
Souls Just Wanna Have Fun
How is the deck performing now? Did you push any further on the ladder?
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
You cant just take everything at face value, convert them into gold and call it a fair crack.
- The '32' packs are actually 18 current expansions packs and 14 standard packs. Those 14 packs are not current expansion, and can range from (taking the current as example) AoO to RoS and I think its fair to say that no one at this point would value RoS packs in the same way as say, AoO or Scholomance packs.
- Arena tickets are a little trickier. 150 gold per ticket is an okay way to call it, but I personally dont care about arena and will be good to simply receive 1 pack in exchange. But lets just accept its 150 gold for now.
- You cant take epics and legendaries and ascribe a gold value to it. It can range from being choice to complete garbage
- Skins and card back dont affect gameplay, and in most cases FTP players wouldn't give a toss for it. So again, you can't just paste a gold value on it and call it fair.
In reality, you're staring at 3990 + 1800 + 600 = 6390 gold + whatever 14 packs you get. Even with this extra 1400 gold its still 7790 for 4 months. Let's also not forget you dont get these straight up. Its incremental, so you either resist buying packs, or play with half-assed decks assuming you've no dust hanging around.
I get like 80-90 packs per expansion. And I still dont get most of the better cards. This battlepass doesn't even match that, and the incremental nature of the rewards is but a thinly veiled attempt at getting us to buy packs. Ironically many of us won't mind paying a little to have more fun, but this is not paying to have fun. Its more like paying to grind. Grind up enough before the fun eventually comes, or pay more money to lessen the grind. That's the real change isn't it?
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
The problem you don't mention is that this new systems want you to be hardcore, because this system binds you for playing more with effective less reward than the old system.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Very hard to agreed with you, because all those goods you have mantion above are worth less then pure gold which is equivalent to packs of the new expansions. No one care much about arena tickets or card backs because they are not in the rewards pool that are relevant when you want buy new expansion packs.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Alright so here's how I understand this, and why I think this might not hurt f2p players as much as people are thinking
Currently, from daily quests alone, it is possible to get a maximum of 60 gold per day if you do one quest each day (you only get one new quest daily so let's just assume that's all you have). Earning 60 gold per day over a 16 week period nets you a total of 6720 gold (if you grind out all of your gold from wins then the total comes to 17920 gold, but that requires 30 wins daily and not many people do that anyway). At face value this does seem like a lot more than the 3990 you get from the total battle pass rewards, however:
All in all that means the rewards from the battle pass are worth a whopping ~12290 gold
However, we don't yet know how much XP will be granted per win/quest/achievement. We know the weekly cap is 9000, but we don't yet know how much grinding it would take to reach this cap. The optimist in me hopes that if they're going to require maxing xp for 16 weeks then it'll be relatively easy if you play enough each day (Brawlhalla's first battle pass is an example of this done well. By playing enough to finish my weekly quests, at most 8 hours each week, I was able to reach max level with a whole week left in the battle pass). Of course, this is Blizzard we're talking about, so there's no guarantee it will be handled so well.
I have high hopes for this, since it seems to be the opposite of most battle passes since most of the rewards come from the unpaid side rather than the paid side. As long as the XP gain works at a good enough pace to make it not feel like a grind, I can see this being significantly better than the current F2P experience.
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
hahaha your last sentence got me. Great pun!
New Neutral Minion - Headmaster Kel'Thuzad
I watched some videos with him and discovered funny things:
- works with Nagrand Slam, also ressurects killed Clefthoofs.
- after playing him and 6 cats (Alleycat, Lynx etc.), he adds Mr. Bigglesworth to your hand ;)
Blizzard Adding a Battle Pass to Hearthstone? Survey Highlights Alternate Art for The Coin, New Hero Skins, Paid Leveling Rewards
Well as a f2p I'm done with hearthstone if they implement these rewards. If you max out on xp you get 5240 gold plus 17 packs of latest expansion, while casual completing quests through expansion gets you 7000 gold. So hard grind gets you the same amount of packs as casual completing quests. There are 14 classic packs and few epics/legendaries but I just don't think those are worth the difference between hard grind and casual playing. Not to mention when you stack up gold until release you get to open all of your packs on the launch day while with this system you get 52 packs on launch plus 17 through 4 months of playing