I recently stumbled across this passage in an InvenGlobal article, and it left me shaking my head:
By making the upcoming Core Set free to all players, Blizzard is looking to invite new players into their Hearthstone ecosystem while giving old players who have spent a great deal of money on the game a little break from opening their wallets.
"A little break from opening their wallets"? In what way, exactly? After all, old players who have spent a great deal of money on the game already had complete Classic collections. Hell, even free players who have been around since launch probably had all the Classic cards they would ever need. This move to a Core set does absolutely nothing for veteran players in terms of saving money, and it's disturbing how often I see the lie repeated.
Don't get me wrong: I think the Core set is a great move, a necessary move, for the game. I'm definitely looking forward to a meta that will get refreshed on an annual basis, adding even more meaning to the "Year of ..." paradigm. But can we please stop pretending this is some kind of cost savings for those of us who have actually supported the game for nearly seven years?
Now let's talk about Classic mode. Yes, some people are excited about it. How long that excitement can continue in a mode that is static by definition remains to be seen. But make no mistake: Blizzard didn't do this because they saw a demand for it. Basically no one was asking for anything like Classic mode, and if they were, it was a very tiny minority. Classic mode had to happen because the Core set is about to remove the one very large chunk of every Standard player's assets they could always count on, and Blizzard would have looked fairly villainous if they'd relegated all those cards to Wild and given nothing back. So now we have yet another "apology" game mode that requires no upkeep at Blizzard's end and that will see only a small fraction of the play Standard gets. But hey, at least they did something, right?
Again, I'm not even mad at the business decisions. They did what they had to do to move forward. I'm just pointing out the reality behind Activision's PR propaganda as they try to spin this in a more celebratory direction. The Core set, in and of itself, is worthy of celebration. The virtual removal of 373 cards from your collection is not. It is a necessary evil, and I think it's important to remember that 240 of those cards were not free. Making the Core set free to all isn't generosity; it's actually the very least Blizzard can do.
