Card games by nature are expensive and if anything, Blizzard has helped move it in the other direction. Prior to the Year of the Phoenix starting, we received a huge update that gave us duplicate protection for all rarities.
Now, I know this doesn't help with the legendary problem, where players want more legendary cards than they get because they are arguably the most important cards in the game, but at a baseline, Hearthstone did get cheaper to play.
But, back the battle pass. The math is definitely not working for a chunk of the players as it stands right now which has been disappointing. My biggest issue though with the whole problem is that we don't have the full picture yet. Yes, Blizzard fucked up and should have provided us with the full picture and it would have been great if they were to actually provide us with a preview of this before it went live. Of course, they did not because they can't write a blog post to save their own lives, but when they do, they do so to bump some unfortunate soul's card reveal.
Blizzard needs to announce either an immediate boost to the base level of experience or they need to tell us what we can expect from legendary quests. Are we going to have quests appear that give us 20k experience? If so, completing a handful of those is going to net you some huge swings in progression as we get deeper into the pass and it would be in line with receiving a few packs from a legendary quest.
And yeah, honestly, the premium pass should have been included in the mega bundle. In fact, a big change that I'd like to see, and I was even considering doing an article for it because I think it makes for an excellent discussion point, is I'd love to see them move the cosmetic Hero that comes with the mega bundle into the premium rewards track.
We now know that they are willing to bring expansion pre-order bonuses back to the shop and they have mentioned wanting to do this with heroes. I have my doubts that the most important item to boost pre-orders is the addition of a cosmetic hero so if they just dumped that into the pass, it provides two ways of obtaining it. The more expensive way, buying a ton of packs and getting the pass alongside it, and the cheaper way of just buying the pass.
They definitely have some work to do with their communication. It really hurts to see because I've always heard we're improving, things are going to be better, we're excited to interact more. Then it falls flat multiple times during a year. Blizzard doesn't really seem to value their community team as much anymore and instead focus their efforts on streamers. I get it, they have huge, live audiences with a measurable impact which is perfect for the execs that just love to talk those live numbers.
I'm sure many of you remember when we'd get bundles of packs to giveaway (as did other community sites) or cards to reveal and now that isn't a thing anymore for the non-streamers. It isn't that big of a deal since the traffic for a dedicated card reveal doesn't really matter much (it just ends up as an image across twitter, fb, reddit so you get no clicks) but it was one hell of a nice gesture. Sure, I loved the Scholomance Robe and Shoes that they gave me, and the stuff that came in the Warglaive box (that was super awesome), but that isn't something we get to share as a community. The card dump is wasted potential after the final stream is over - not everyone needs to get exciting cards, had them out in batches of 3 or 4 and let people create some cool content around them.
Ultimately, yes, they have a lot to work through with the new rewards track. I think it's a good start though and we're going in the right direction with it provided they open up and give us the full picture so we can continue to do the math on it.
This is great to hear and something we should probably find some room for on the homepage (especially if anyone finds other ways to complete achievements early).
Getting that XP early can get you some extra gold for DMF packs aka hell yeah!
Achievement Points are always a "bragging rights" thing. Don't expect to ever be able to "spend" them as they are not a currency.
Maybe they could add in some rewards for hitting specific milestones, but I have high doubts about that as the whole pass itself is where rewards come from now.
Achievement Points themselves do not award experience.
Some achievements will reward point achievement points and XP. You can make the distinction by looking at the achievement itself. If it has a chest, it contains XP and AP.
Sorry for the deckbuilder trouble. I still honestly have no idea what happened.
I had to crash shortly after we were done with reveal related stuff on the site because I've been super sleep deprived.
At 4 PM Eastern, I was pinged that there were problems on the site, at the same time this thread was created.
At 6 PM Eastern, I woke up.
At 8:22 PM Eastern, a fix was deployed to our live site and our cache server was kicked, fixing the deckbuilder.
I still do not have an understanding of what changed to cause this problem. The deckbuilder was fine after all the new cards were added into the site and code for the API that powers the deckbuilder has been stable for weeks. Due to the stability of it, the API was not the first thing I looked at but apparently, it should have been because I noticed a bug.
I believe this bug gave way for a cache-based race condition within the API if and would only happen if we had a large surge in traffic on the deckbuilder. I have not yet created a proper test case to confirm this is the case, but I'm at least confident this won't happen again.
I'm going to say something unpopular.
I don't think Hearthstone is too expensive.
Card games by nature are expensive and if anything, Blizzard has helped move it in the other direction. Prior to the Year of the Phoenix starting, we received a huge update that gave us duplicate protection for all rarities.
Now, I know this doesn't help with the legendary problem, where players want more legendary cards than they get because they are arguably the most important cards in the game, but at a baseline, Hearthstone did get cheaper to play.
But, back the battle pass. The math is definitely not working for a chunk of the players as it stands right now which has been disappointing. My biggest issue though with the whole problem is that we don't have the full picture yet. Yes, Blizzard fucked up and should have provided us with the full picture and it would have been great if they were to actually provide us with a preview of this before it went live. Of course, they did not because they can't write a blog post to save their own lives, but when they do, they do so to bump some unfortunate soul's card reveal.
Blizzard needs to announce either an immediate boost to the base level of experience or they need to tell us what we can expect from legendary quests. Are we going to have quests appear that give us 20k experience? If so, completing a handful of those is going to net you some huge swings in progression as we get deeper into the pass and it would be in line with receiving a few packs from a legendary quest.
And yeah, honestly, the premium pass should have been included in the mega bundle. In fact, a big change that I'd like to see, and I was even considering doing an article for it because I think it makes for an excellent discussion point, is I'd love to see them move the cosmetic Hero that comes with the mega bundle into the premium rewards track.
We now know that they are willing to bring expansion pre-order bonuses back to the shop and they have mentioned wanting to do this with heroes. I have my doubts that the most important item to boost pre-orders is the addition of a cosmetic hero so if they just dumped that into the pass, it provides two ways of obtaining it. The more expensive way, buying a ton of packs and getting the pass alongside it, and the cheaper way of just buying the pass.
They definitely have some work to do with their communication. It really hurts to see because I've always heard we're improving, things are going to be better, we're excited to interact more. Then it falls flat multiple times during a year. Blizzard doesn't really seem to value their community team as much anymore and instead focus their efforts on streamers. I get it, they have huge, live audiences with a measurable impact which is perfect for the execs that just love to talk those live numbers.
I'm sure many of you remember when we'd get bundles of packs to giveaway (as did other community sites) or cards to reveal and now that isn't a thing anymore for the non-streamers. It isn't that big of a deal since the traffic for a dedicated card reveal doesn't really matter much (it just ends up as an image across twitter, fb, reddit so you get no clicks) but it was one hell of a nice gesture. Sure, I loved the Scholomance Robe and Shoes that they gave me, and the stuff that came in the Warglaive box (that was super awesome), but that isn't something we get to share as a community. The card dump is wasted potential after the final stream is over - not everyone needs to get exciting cards, had them out in batches of 3 or 4 and let people create some cool content around them.
Ultimately, yes, they have a lot to work through with the new rewards track. I think it's a good start though and we're going in the right direction with it provided they open up and give us the full picture so we can continue to do the math on it.
Ramble out.
Guilty
Discuss anything and everything duels in this forum.
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We do not yet have a release date confirmed by Blizzard.
You know, I was actually considering calling you out specifically in the post - glad you commented :D
This is great to hear and something we should probably find some room for on the homepage (especially if anyone finds other ways to complete achievements early).
Getting that XP early can get you some extra gold for DMF packs aka hell yeah!
Thanks, Alleria!
One day. One day you will become renderable and we'll finally meet.
Achievement Points are always a "bragging rights" thing. Don't expect to ever be able to "spend" them as they are not a currency.
Maybe they could add in some rewards for hitting specific milestones, but I have high doubts about that as the whole pass itself is where rewards come from now.
You will eventually unlock all the skins. You just get 1 per pass (at the moment anyway)
Achievement Points themselves do not award experience.
Some achievements will reward point achievement points and XP. You can make the distinction by looking at the achievement itself. If it has a chest, it contains XP and AP.
Blizzard has previously stated you should still earn the same amount of gold each month if you don't change how long you play.
Just make sure you're getting your dailies and weeklies done!
Ah, yeah, we don't have that whitelisted. I'll make sure we add it!
As stated in the article:
Oops, that was the intention! Fixed
I pushed this live a bit early because I didn't want to bump down our card reviews., I've now added in the math stuff.
It is in the data twice =)
Hey all,
Sorry for the deckbuilder trouble. I still honestly have no idea what happened.
I had to crash shortly after we were done with reveal related stuff on the site because I've been super sleep deprived.
At 4 PM Eastern, I was pinged that there were problems on the site, at the same time this thread was created.
At 6 PM Eastern, I woke up.
At 8:22 PM Eastern, a fix was deployed to our live site and our cache server was kicked, fixing the deckbuilder.
I still do not have an understanding of what changed to cause this problem. The deckbuilder was fine after all the new cards were added into the site and code for the API that powers the deckbuilder has been stable for weeks. Due to the stability of it, the API was not the first thing I looked at but apparently, it should have been because I noticed a bug.
I believe this bug gave way for a cache-based race condition within the API if and would only happen if we had a large surge in traffic on the deckbuilder. I have not yet created a proper test case to confirm this is the case, but I'm at least confident this won't happen again.
15 minutes to go! What cards do you think we'll see?
Blizzard goofed hard. This if the 4th or 5th reveal now that just didn't make much sense.
They had such an open schedule, they even bumped one of their own reveals with patch notes =/
Including some additions from previous days. Its all a blend because card reveal season is sooo much fun!
New Features
Runeterra
Changes
General
Hearthstone
Mythgard
Runeterra
Bug Fixes
Hearthstone