A previous survey from March used the "in the past two months" time frame, and I wanted to be able to compare these results with the older ones. I did expect that the number of respondents who purchased an adventure in the last two months to be low for the same reason you did, but it turned out we were both wrong - over 70% of the first 1600 responses say they had paid real money for an adventure in the last 60 days.

Those kinds of accidental surprises are the most interesting, and can help shape more research in the future.

There are a number of legitimate criticisms about Magic Online, but most people agree one of the best features is that you can turn on your computer and in five minutes be playing in a Booster Draft tournament. This launched in 2002, so it's difficult to say that the technical issues (signups, pairing, etc) are a showstopper for players.

Magic Online has a fraction of the players that Hearthstone has, and still manages to have a healthy tournament environment.

Edit: To be clear, it's possible for tournaments to be an additional way to experience Hearthstone, without taking away from the existing options. It doesn't have to appeal to everyone to still be relevant.

Me too. :)

I used to play in Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour Qualifiers (PTQs), which regularly lasted 10-12 hours. Now it sounds crazy to use my weekend that way, but there are still thousands of people that play in Magic PTQs every month.

Over time there is no reason that Hearthstone can't support longer tournaments. My guess is that it's not the best way to prioritize development resources today, but what if 30% of players surveyed prefer longer tournaments?

The longer it takes to finish a survey means that more people will abandon it before answering all the questions. I had a few more questions that went into more detail about tournament structures, but the explanation of the various terms like Swiss and Conquest made the survey take a lot longer to complete.

How many Hearthstone players can and want to devote 3+ hours to a game?

And that is why I'm doing the survey. :)

We know over 30 million players have tried the game. What if 10% of those players want to pay for in-game tournaments? That's over three million potential tournament players.

You actually mention the experiences of "mobile, new players, and experienced" players, which illustrates how different kinds of players want different experiences. Tournaments is another kind of experience that some players clearly want, and hopefully the survey will give an idea of the level of desire. Ideally, Hearthstone would have different experiences that cater to all kinds of players, but there is always the real world limits of how to prioritize limited resources (developers, artists, game designers). Hearthstone is also a business, so Blizzard also has to balance keeping the game accessible with paying salaries and meeting the expectations of their stockholders.

The decision point should be "How many players want this kind of experience, and does it justify the allocation of resources?"

I plan on doing data analysis on these results beyond just the standard pie charts, and specifically looking at questions like:

1) How does attitudes toward tournaments change based on player experience (length of time playing)?
2) How do attitudes toward tournaments changes based on how much a player has spent?

I predict that players on the higher end of those two scales are the ones most interested in tournaments, but it will be interesting to see if the data matches that prediction.

I had questions about number of decks and a few other details, but cut them out of this survey so it wouldn't take too long to complete. It would be very interesting to ask them as a follow up.