If a system is bad and built around exploiting you, you should be able to do the same to it without a guilty conscience. It literally gave me nothing doing this, i only did it because i was close to leveling up an didn't want to play any more games because i was busy with something else. I had already done my three quests i had and it didn't even give me a level up. The system is a joke. I think everyone should afk BGs, because "don't you guys have phones?" The small indie company that is ACTIVISION BLIZZARD can afford to pay for servers....Get in as much experience as you can before they cap it to to 1k experience a day and screw us even harder.
I feel like you're kind of putting words in my mouth here. I'm not saying that you should feel guilty about exploiting the system as it exists. Rather, I'm saying that there several compelling reasons for Blizzard to disincentivize that kind of behavior (including the costs of running the game and a bad player experience), so if they're doing that and making it harder for people to game the system, I'm neither surprised nor upset. At the end of the day, it's all just economics. The game should be rewarding for people who are playing the game in earnest, and it should not be rewarding for players who are trying to exploit it. If they succeed at that, whether or not you "should" feel guilty about exploiting it would be irrelevant, as that would simply be a dumb thing to do.
Certainly, any effort to "stealth nerf" the XP for this AFK strategy would be the "stick" approach to nudging players towards positive gaming experiences in Hearthstone rather than exploitative ones. And you're right that they could stand to push harder on the "carrot" approach by making the system more generous for when people are playing the game for fun, thus decreasing the incentive to exploit it. But one way or another, I doubt I'll adopt this approach - it just seems tedious and boring.
I tried it for about 4 hours today and i barely got 200 xp, maybe it was good when the system first came out and i heard rumbling of a stealth nerf to it.
This is much lower than what I've seen on reddit, where the average xp/min is around 4.5 (including this analysis from a couple of weeks ago). Perhaps you're right, and there was a server-side patch to the system, but if you could, I think it would be useful to provide more info about how you implemented the strategy (e.g. how long do you think you were in queue, did you consistently queue up right after each match or was there some delay, etc.).
Depending on how you're implementing it, it's very possible that your four hours spent doing this AFK strategy translated to much less time in games than a bot doing the same thing would have had.
Quote From dapperdog
You getting only a mere 200xp for 4 hours is testament to them willing and having spent every ounce of muscle to stop easy xp from rolling in.
Is it really so bad that they want to limit people AFKing the game for XP? It makes for a more worse player experience if your opponents are regularly just roping/doing nothing. That negative impact is certainly diminished in battlegrounds (because you have six other opponents), but if everyone who AFKs ends up with a low MMR, it also creates two pretty bad results: 1) it means anyone trying out BG for the first time may be stuck with lots of AFK opponents at very low MMRs, and 2) it means the potential of wasting the cost of running servers on games populated mostly by AFK BG lobbies.
The game ought to reward you for playing the game rather than merely spending time in the game. There's room for improvement to how players gain XP, and the issues around queue times, etc., that make it hard for players to get the full value of an hour spent honestly playing the game. But despite that, I think it's entirely appropriate for them to try to prevent people from manipulating XP systems, because no matter how generous they are to players who are seriously playing the game, people will try to manipulate the reward system with bots, etc.
I think the Nazmani Bloodweaver looks a lot more unassuming than it is. I've played a fair amount of Miracle Priest, and while it's not a powerhouse, it's pretty impressive what it can do when you go off with it (usually with a Sethekk Veilweaver also in play). I often found myself playing spells in a clumsy order to account for this bug, so I'm excited to see how it plays now with this fixed.
The fix might not make Miracle Priest a top tier deck, but I think it does open up a ton of possibilities for Combo Priest. Between Insight, Palm Reading, a newly fixed Nazmani Bloodweaver, and Fate Weaver, Priest has access to a ton of discounts, and Inner Fire is still hanging around. Maybe there's something there with Stormwind Knight and a lot of discounted buffs and copy effects.
I just got Myra's Unstable Empress in Duels by building a deck that shuffled cards in and eventually pulling Grand Empress Shek'zara. It may be worth noting to folks that it doesn't matter if you burn the cards you're drawing. I had a near full hand, discovered Plush Bear (I had six copies in the deck), drew the first, which drew a card, then the rest burned because my hand was full. Despite that, I still got the achievement.
There´s something I´ve learned by playing Casual Duels that might be helpful to those of us missing quite a bunch of new legendaries/epics required for the achievement completion. You can force out some of the required cards in buckets by building a specific deck. For example:
Warrior: make a deck with all the rush minions and you weill get E.T.C., God of Metal along with Tent Trasher, and when you´re lucky, you can even get N'Zoth, God of the Deep through the menagerie bucket and complete It´s N´Zothing, Really achievement at once.
Druid: there were suggestions to make a taunt heavy deck to get Greybough with your loot, but I´ve managed to get him only once, so I can´t really confirm this (still trying to test this). But when you make spell heavy deck with Eclipses, you can get a loot bucket with Kiri, Chosen of Elune along with two other Eclipses, so you can do the Sun and Moon to Me achievement quite easily, plus often you´ll get Guess the Weight as an option too.
Other good call is to choose Priests second treasure, where you can discover a corrupt card and corrupt it. This way I was able to get Carnival Clown and make the Coulrophobia achievement without owning the card.
Still trying to find a way to force Il'gynoth (lifesteal heavy deck?), G'huun the Blood God (some heavy spell/healing deck?) and High Exarch Yrel (force some pure version of paladin?).
Hopefully this helps someone :) Happy achievement hunt all and good luck!
These are great! I've also tried to force getting Il'gynoth and had no luck with it. Same with G'huun the Blood God - not convinced he can be forced. I did accidentally make progress on Il'gynoth by getting him from Auspicious Spirits, but it wasn't even enough to get the first rank in the achievement, and that's certainly not a consistent way to go.
I happened to get High Exarch Yrel as one of my free legendaries, and put her into a Duels starting Pure Paladin deck to see if I could get more of her. The game did consistently give me at least one bucket with only Paladin cards, but ultimately she became deactivated when I was forced to pick a treasure card (they're all neutral...). Given that limitation on Pure Paladin decks in Duels, I doubt she'll show up in any buckets.
You don't have to like it, but it's not "broken" in the strictest sense. The effect is an aura rather than a buff - Killmox, the Banished One "has +2/+2 for each card you discarded this game" (unlike, say Clutchmother Zavas, whose text reads "give it +2/+2," implying a buff). Changing the base stats don't work for the same reason changing base stats against Caverns Below Rogue never worked.
I had 2 great opportunities to finish the No Pathetic Cards achievement which is very challenging to set up and in both cases my opponent chooses to concede instead. All other games in between were just mission impossible cause they are simply overpowered, but hey Blizzard decided that this should be done in ranked mode, so thanks a lot for wasting my time!
I had this same problem with the one that has you destroy your opponent with fatigue. (That one's not worth XP, so there have been no posts about it, but it's common for opponents to concede instead of let you get it.)
It definitely feels like the HS playerbase needs to be a bit more achievement-friendly when they see their opponent is trying a wacky "just for the achievements" combo.
I completely agree there is value to those items. Your post seems like a reasonable delve into the value but, ultimately, you agree the value is not 1:1 with gold.
The context is everything here. Again, the concern was absolute and specific: will we earn the same amount of gold in between expansions? The answer is no.
For one, a very recent analysis by Bunnyhopper suggests that lots of players will end up with more gold not less at the end of the expansion (https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srg57g). But more to the point, gold doesn't matter, and neither do packs really - all that matters is cards. Gold is only in contention here because specific things were said about gold, and historically it's the most direct way for F2P players to get new cards at the start of an expansion. Blizzard could just as easily have said "we're getting rid of gold entirely, and will be rewarding you with new 'player packs' that you can trade in for packs of any set you want" and you'd have a functionally equivalent system because gold is just a means to more cards.
My contention with your original point was not that the non-gold rewards were all equivalent to the gold rewards in value, but rather that you shouldn't throw them out of the analysis entirely the way you did. Understanding their gold-equivalent value is important to understanding the overall value to the player. The question that actually matters is not "will I get more gold?" but rather "will I get more new cards?" That question just happens to be easiest to answer in terms of gold-equivalence because gold still buys cards in the same way it used to, and gold is an easy tool for comparing to the old reward system. (Gold is also a good but imperfect way to measure card acquisition concretely, as it's easy to count packs from gold, but card probabilities from packs is largely opaque.)
Your conclusion that "analysis by Bunnyhopper suggests that lots of players will end up with more gold" seems vague. How are you defining "lots of players" in this situation?
I'd have to do some digging to source it [edit: source], but team 5 is on record stating that ~75% of players were below rank 15 in the old ranked system. That seems to suggest that most players are not putting in more than an hour per day, since even schlub's like me reach rank 5 with 1 hour per day of play. This suggests that most players are playing less than the 3 hours per day in Bunnyhopper's calculations. My math, which is actually supported by Bunnyhopper's math that you linked, suggests that all players that are under 3 hours per day will earn less. Combining both suggests that 75% of the player base will earn less gold in this new system. Again, I'll mention that those calculations are based on the minimum we'd earn in the old system.
This is why I feel that the bad faith started with Blizzard, and why I disagree with your assessment that the player base is arguing in bad faith.
I will say it's not cool for people to be attacking streamers and/or devs on their channels/streams. That's not going to help and is way out of line.
For what it's worth, those numbers are very stale. The 2019 numbers had already begun to move upward, with only 63% of players below rank 15 (even before the major update to the ranked system, which is much better for ranked progress and amount of rewards for ranked play). And Dean Ayala mentioned that a large chunk of players get counted in these analyses simply because they played a tiny bit of ranked in the month despite mostly playing other formats (e.g. Battlegrounds or Arena mode). All that is to say, I think treating season rankings as a proxy for time spent playing Hearthstone wouldn't have been correct when these numbers were released, and it's made even worse by the continued increase in different game formats (Duels recently, and another mode coming up soon).
I don't see how your math could be supported by Bunnyhopper's analysis unless you're making different assumptions about XP per hour. His conclusion is pretty explicit - "If the new system does award 400XP/hr then only players that play 1 hr/day will actually lose gold in this system and the rewards easily make up for it and that is not considering seasonal events." So, the non-gold rewards make up for the missing gold in terms of value, and it may yet be the case that seasonal events push these "losing players" over the line on actual gold.
Perhaps the 400 XP per hour figure isn't right, but that number came from Blizzard, and if people aren't seeing that in practice then Blizzard needs to adjust the numbers to realize that figure. Mind you, there's some indication that people aren't seeing those numbers because queue times and time spent in client changing decks, etc., doesn't count toward XP, so an hour of honestly playing Hearthstone doesn't necessarily translate to an hour in matches. That seems like something Blizzard should adjust for given the analyses everyone has been performing - including them - use these values as a baseline.
Were you active on this site during the Halloween events, when you could earn candy corn? Snowflakes appear to be another currency you can earn by doing things on outof.cards, which you can then spend on cosmetics like titles or banners for your profile.
I completely agree there is value to those items. Your post seems like a reasonable delve into the value but, ultimately, you agree the value is not 1:1 with gold.
The context is everything here. Again, the concern was absolute and specific: will we earn the same amount of gold in between expansions? The answer is no.
For one, a very recent analysis by Bunnyhopper suggests that lots of players will end up with more gold not less at the end of the expansion (https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srg57g). But more to the point, gold doesn't matter, and neither do packs really - all that matters is cards. Gold is only in contention here because specific things were said about gold, and historically it's the most direct way for F2P players to get new cards at the start of an expansion. Blizzard could just as easily have said "we're getting rid of gold entirely, and will be rewarding you with new 'player packs' that you can trade in for packs of any set you want" and you'd have a functionally equivalent system because gold is just a means to more cards.
My contention with your original point was not that the non-gold rewards were all equivalent to the gold rewards in value, but rather that you shouldn't throw them out of the analysis entirely the way you did. Understanding their gold-equivalent value is important to understanding the overall value to the player. The question that actually matters is not "will I get more gold?" but rather "will I get more new cards?" That question just happens to be easiest to answer in terms of gold-equivalence because gold still buys cards in the same way it used to, and gold is an easy tool for comparing to the old reward system. (Gold is also a good but imperfect way to measure card acquisition concretely, as it's easy to count packs from gold, but card probabilities from packs is largely opaque.)
Card rewards, packs from old sets, and Tavern Tickets cannot be used to buy packs...Assigning values to those non-gold rewards is disingenuous because those rewards are not 1:1 equivalent to gold, as they can’t be used to buy packs.
This is not really fair.
Card rewards for legendary and epic cards enable you to buy fewer packs. If I'm planning to get a full collection, then after about 50 packs or so I've got all the common and rare cards. A legendary comes in about 1 out of every 20 packs, so in some sense, that free legendary has saved me the cost of 20 packs. (Note that my math on this does not value a Legendary card at 2000 gold, but the 1 in 20 packs is illustrative of my point that they enable me to buy fewer packs on my way to a full set.) We can reasonably debate what the right gold-equivalent value of those is, but it's clear that anything that enables you to spend less gold on an expansion has a gold-equivalent value.
Tavern Tickets translate to Arena runs and Heroic Duels runs, which net packs of the latest set and gold. They are effectively much better than gold, as you can save them up until the next expansion and spend them to get packs and gold with which you can get more packs (all while completing your daily quests).
Packs from old sets are complicated, but it's clear they're not worth nothing because the dust you get from them can go toward crafting new cards. Where it gets tricky is in determining how much they should be valued.
Let's start with an extreme case, where the player in question has a full collection. Every pack from every set has the exact same value until a new set comes out. When the new set comes out, those new packs have dramatically greater value, but that value difference drops significantly after about 50 or so packs when all that's left to collect is the epics and legendary cards. The new packs are still more valuable because every now and then they'll provide some new card, but oftentimes you'll just get a bunch of common and rare cards you already have, all of which become dust. Those packs are basically the same value as a pack from any other set.
A much more common case is that the player in question doesn't have every card in every set, which shrinks the value differential even further because there are lots of older epic and legendary cards that see play in top tier decks (e.g. Kayn Sunfury and Soulciologist Malicia in Soul DH, Lady Liadrin and High Abbess Alura in Pure Pally, and Dragonbane and Lorekeeper Polkelt in Face Hunter).
Yes, everyone saves up gold to buy cards from the new expansion. But that's not because everyone collected up full collections and don't get anything new from old packs, it's because they know they'll get a lot more out of that gold by buying all the common and rare cards of the next set, plus a couple of legendaries. But that's not a compelling case for saying that a pack from an older set has zero gold-equivalent value. Given that much of the time, packs of each set are worth the same (i.e. some amount of dust because they're all dupes), it's at most a decent case for saying that a pack from an older set has less value than 100 gold (though how much less will vary by player).
My first game was against a C'Thun Druid that easily racked up tons of armor and beat me, but I got the achievement in the next game when I went up against a Big Priest. I could imagine making a couple of adjustments if you're encountering a ton of Odd Paladin on ladder, but this makes a lot of sense for countering most Wild control decks. No idea what you'd do to make this work if you find yourself against a Control deck in an armor class. It's hard to have enough pressure without compromising the AOE you need for most other decks (and the achievement in general, to ensure there's no opposing board).
but if you're playing against a paladin wait for a 7 mana spell to play against oh my yogg because it seems pretty common that you'll get wisps of the old gods and a board full of 5/5s
It probably just seems pretty common because it's the only case worth posting online for 7-drop spells (that is, Wisps of the Old Gods is the only Choose One 7-drop, and it's broken impact is quite substantial). There are dozens of 7-drop spells in Wild, but no one is going to go to r/hearthstone to show off screenshots of the game working exactly as intended.
It's an interesting bug, and it seems like one they probably should have been able to catch (Choose One spells aren't that rare, and they have a unique behavior that ought to be tested for any example of "random casting").
Tl;dr: Everyone gets a full collection over time but you have to pay to access the cards early on. The additional resources you accumulate over the course of an expansion can be invested into older expansions or cosmetics but not saved for future expansions.
I don't really like the premise of this change. As laid out, you're basically asserting that having a full collection is critically important to the game, and that F2P players need a rewards system/in-game economy that enables them to reach a full collection.
It's true that Blizzard could make the game more F2P friendly by changing its in-game economy and changing how packs work to reward players with larger collections sooner. But there's another route to solving the F2P problem, and it's a route we've actually seen them take several times in the past. Specifically, I'm thinking of making legendary cards less important, and providing free access to some of the build-around legendary cards when they're introduced. Some examples of this in the past include:
For the former, we see more and more legendaries like Vectus or Sky Gen'ral Kragg or Frizz Kindleroost - legendary cards that are good in certain decks, but aren't critical to their success. You can play a quest deck without Sky Gen'ral Kragg, for instance, and still win.
For the latter, giving away the original C'Thun, a free Uldum Quest card, each form of Galakrond, Archmage Vargoth, and Kael'thas Sunstrider - all of which are fun build-around type legendary cards (also Sathrovarr, I think?)
This shows something of a missed opportunity for Darkmoon Faire - Blizzard probably should have made everyone's first reward legendary an Old God, or better yet just given everyone an Old God legendary in addition to the rewards track.
This is one of the best ways to approach the economy, because people feel better about playing and paying in when they are ensured they'll get one or two build-arounds they can try out (ideally, neutral build-arounds).
This strikes me as a much better way to adjust the economy, because it makes building a budget deck easier and it doesn't call for a major shift to in-game economies, which would probably mean compensating existing players (and however they decide to do that inevitably ends with a lot of people feeling angry about whatever the new system ends up being).
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).
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.
It's not even about the Battle Pass anymore. The fiasco with the Battle Pass has just served to wake people up to all the problems with the way the game has always been operated. I think Blizzard is permanently losing a LOT of players who have just had enough - they don't want to give another dime to a company that they now see as greedy and corrupt.
This story of people "waking up" to the greed is more than a little overdone. Here's a post on their forums from the early days of COVID in the US where someone is complaining that Blizzard should be giving away more free stuff to...help frontline workers or something like that? And here's an r/hearthstone post from years ago with mostly the same theme of Blizzard being too greedy.
And this is not unique to Blizzard - Wizards of the Coast gets its fair share of hate too. Here's a petition that cites a popular MTG youtuber talking about the predatory designs of MTGA, and an article from last July about the greedy (at the time) new Mastery system in MTGA. The fact is, the internet is full of people complaining about how greedy CCG companies are whenever they make any changes, because in that moment those people feel personally that they're not getting the value they want for their money.
In some ways, this gets back to a response from @clawz161, who said "Packs and cards don't have REAL VALUE...[because] you can't [resell your cards] in hearthstone, and the devs will never allow you to do that." This argument is flawed, and sits at the heart of the "greed" discussion. Hearthstone cards do have real value for anyone who enjoys playing Hearthstone because value isn't defined exclusively as "resale value." What value these digital products have will vary person to person, and if someone sees that value equation flip for them in a game they enjoyed, they cry out "this is greedy!" because the value equation no longer works for them.
I'm not saying Blizzard and WotC and companies like them should not do more to make their games more F2P friendly. I would love to see these games be more F2P friendly. But I think Blizzard has taken steps over the last year to do just that. They can do more, but they deserve some credit for what they've done.
I have to admire the ingenuity of the strategy. I had already given up on this one since I didn't get Deck of Chaos. Now I just have to check if I even got the Rabbit or Webweavers...
I'd also like to suggest adding Master's Call for even better draw, in case you didn't have that already.
Hah, I had totally forgotten about Master's Call. I had a bunch of neutral draw minions like Novice Engineer, so it wouldn't have made sense in my deck anyway. Also, since the combo relied on Mana Wraith, it might end up being less helpful, but I like that thinking! You could maybe do it with Call Pet too (another card I had completely forgotten about).
Actually got round to thinking about this a little further; I think the real question is whether it is now time for BG and duels to exist on their own server, their own client, and therefore also their own progressions and rewards. Even arena seems a bit out of place compared to standard ranked play. This will resolve the quests issues entirely, as well as give non-ranked players quests that actually matter to them.
Maybe its going a bit too far to suggest partitioning now, but I do certainly think that those that prefer rank shouldn't be given quests that don't matter to them, and vice versa to those that prefer non-rank modes.
I wouldn't hold my breath on this - there's really zero incentive to split the games (probably ever).
Hearthstone is F2P, so Blizzard wants to drive high player engagement (obviously - in every F2P game, the more engagement you get out of any given player, the more likely that player is to feel invested enough to pay for something in game). These quests work as nudges from a behavioral economics standpoint. You can opt out of them by re-rolling if you really don't like them, but they might nudge players toward trying out formats that they wouldn't otherwise consider. That can be mutually beneficial; for players who find a format they like as much or more than ladder, they have more fun, and for Blizzard they get higher engagement from the player in question.
Quick side note, I believe this engagement issue is why Hearthstone has invested so much in new game modes and why there's yet another new game mode coming soon. The Arena "draft mode" for Hearthstone has always been terrible compared to other CCGs, and the various Auto-Chess games out there were stealing away players from the traditional "competitive, turn-based strategy game" market that CCGs exist in. Duels basically solves the "draft mode" problem (leaving Arena limping along), so it should be interesting to see what the next new format is.
I'm a bit surprised that, over the course of an entire week, you weren't able to roll into two weekly quests you could complete. Because that's all you'd need to complete to avoid losing out on a quest - you can store up to four quests of each type at once, and you gain three weekly quests at the start of the week, so you can roll over one without losing anything. This is specifically designed to help players who used to lose out on quests because of infrequent logins or slow completion times.
I know the "Win 7 Ranked Games" quest can be pretty tedious if you don't have a strong meta deck, but one win a day is not that bad, and a lot of the other ones are pretty straightforward, and only look grindy if your frame of reference is doing a whole quest in a day:
Deal 200 damage to enemy heroes. In context, this is less than the total HP of 7 enemy heroes, so if you complete your ranked games Quest, you've probably completed this by default
Deal 2000 damage to enemy minions in Battlegrounds. Since this is damage to enemy minions, it's very easy to achieve. By the late game in BG, your minions tend to have very high stats (20/20s or 30/30s, maybe higher), so this can usually be done in 4 or 5 BGs over the course of a week
Play 50 Battlecry cards. This is only about 7 battlecries a day, which seems pretty achievable if you play two or three games
Play 50 Corrupt cards. This is only about 7 corrupt cards a day. Harder than Battlecries, since there are fewer cards to satisfy this condition, but still pretty easy over the course of a week
Spend 500 mana. Contextualizing this a bit, if you play on curve, by turn 8 you'll have spent 36 mana. Two games like that a day and you'll have done this quest.
Use your Hero Power 50 times. As trivial as the Battlecry one, maybe even easier if you're doing this in Duels where many hero powers are less than two mana and much stronger than standard hero powers.
Win 5 games of Tavern Brawl, Battlegrounds, or Duels. A little more annoying, but winning a BG is just getting top 4, and playing Duels exclusively for easy early wins is not that hard. If your deck gets bad after a couple . This also plays nicely with the various Daily "Play Class A, B, or C" quests.
Win a game with 4 different classes. Basically the same as the 5-win quest above, assuming you're playing some casual Duels this should be a quick one
A number of the other ones are arbitrarily harder (e.g. can't play an Old God from DMF if you don't have one), but you can reroll those away. There's probably some room for improving those, but the reroll is not a terrible stop-gap for that.
I feel like you're kind of putting words in my mouth here. I'm not saying that you should feel guilty about exploiting the system as it exists. Rather, I'm saying that there several compelling reasons for Blizzard to disincentivize that kind of behavior (including the costs of running the game and a bad player experience), so if they're doing that and making it harder for people to game the system, I'm neither surprised nor upset. At the end of the day, it's all just economics. The game should be rewarding for people who are playing the game in earnest, and it should not be rewarding for players who are trying to exploit it. If they succeed at that, whether or not you "should" feel guilty about exploiting it would be irrelevant, as that would simply be a dumb thing to do.
Certainly, any effort to "stealth nerf" the XP for this AFK strategy would be the "stick" approach to nudging players towards positive gaming experiences in Hearthstone rather than exploitative ones. And you're right that they could stand to push harder on the "carrot" approach by making the system more generous for when people are playing the game for fun, thus decreasing the incentive to exploit it. But one way or another, I doubt I'll adopt this approach - it just seems tedious and boring.
This is much lower than what I've seen on reddit, where the average xp/min is around 4.5 (including this analysis from a couple of weeks ago). Perhaps you're right, and there was a server-side patch to the system, but if you could, I think it would be useful to provide more info about how you implemented the strategy (e.g. how long do you think you were in queue, did you consistently queue up right after each match or was there some delay, etc.).
Depending on how you're implementing it, it's very possible that your four hours spent doing this AFK strategy translated to much less time in games than a bot doing the same thing would have had.
Is it really so bad that they want to limit people AFKing the game for XP? It makes for a more worse player experience if your opponents are regularly just roping/doing nothing. That negative impact is certainly diminished in battlegrounds (because you have six other opponents), but if everyone who AFKs ends up with a low MMR, it also creates two pretty bad results: 1) it means anyone trying out BG for the first time may be stuck with lots of AFK opponents at very low MMRs, and 2) it means the potential of wasting the cost of running servers on games populated mostly by AFK BG lobbies.
The game ought to reward you for playing the game rather than merely spending time in the game. There's room for improvement to how players gain XP, and the issues around queue times, etc., that make it hard for players to get the full value of an hour spent honestly playing the game. But despite that, I think it's entirely appropriate for them to try to prevent people from manipulating XP systems, because no matter how generous they are to players who are seriously playing the game, people will try to manipulate the reward system with bots, etc.
I think the Nazmani Bloodweaver looks a lot more unassuming than it is. I've played a fair amount of Miracle Priest, and while it's not a powerhouse, it's pretty impressive what it can do when you go off with it (usually with a Sethekk Veilweaver also in play). I often found myself playing spells in a clumsy order to account for this bug, so I'm excited to see how it plays now with this fixed.
The fix might not make Miracle Priest a top tier deck, but I think it does open up a ton of possibilities for Combo Priest. Between Insight, Palm Reading, a newly fixed Nazmani Bloodweaver, and Fate Weaver, Priest has access to a ton of discounts, and Inner Fire is still hanging around. Maybe there's something there with Stormwind Knight and a lot of discounted buffs and copy effects.
I just got Myra's Unstable Empress in Duels by building a deck that shuffled cards in and eventually pulling Grand Empress Shek'zara. It may be worth noting to folks that it doesn't matter if you burn the cards you're drawing. I had a near full hand, discovered Plush Bear (I had six copies in the deck), drew the first, which drew a card, then the rest burned because my hand was full. Despite that, I still got the achievement.
These are great! I've also tried to force getting Il'gynoth and had no luck with it. Same with G'huun the Blood God - not convinced he can be forced. I did accidentally make progress on Il'gynoth by getting him from Auspicious Spirits, but it wasn't even enough to get the first rank in the achievement, and that's certainly not a consistent way to go.
I happened to get High Exarch Yrel as one of my free legendaries, and put her into a Duels starting Pure Paladin deck to see if I could get more of her. The game did consistently give me at least one bucket with only Paladin cards, but ultimately she became deactivated when I was forced to pick a treasure card (they're all neutral...). Given that limitation on Pure Paladin decks in Duels, I doubt she'll show up in any buckets.
You don't have to like it, but it's not "broken" in the strictest sense. The effect is an aura rather than a buff - Killmox, the Banished One "has +2/+2 for each card you discarded this game" (unlike, say Clutchmother Zavas, whose text reads "give it +2/+2," implying a buff). Changing the base stats don't work for the same reason changing base stats against Caverns Below Rogue never worked.
I had this same problem with the one that has you destroy your opponent with fatigue. (That one's not worth XP, so there have been no posts about it, but it's common for opponents to concede instead of let you get it.)
It definitely feels like the HS playerbase needs to be a bit more achievement-friendly when they see their opponent is trying a wacky "just for the achievements" combo.
For what it's worth, those numbers are very stale. The 2019 numbers had already begun to move upward, with only 63% of players below rank 15 (even before the major update to the ranked system, which is much better for ranked progress and amount of rewards for ranked play). And Dean Ayala mentioned that a large chunk of players get counted in these analyses simply because they played a tiny bit of ranked in the month despite mostly playing other formats (e.g. Battlegrounds or Arena mode). All that is to say, I think treating season rankings as a proxy for time spent playing Hearthstone wouldn't have been correct when these numbers were released, and it's made even worse by the continued increase in different game formats (Duels recently, and another mode coming up soon).
I don't see how your math could be supported by Bunnyhopper's analysis unless you're making different assumptions about XP per hour. His conclusion is pretty explicit - "If the new system does award 400XP/hr then only players that play 1 hr/day will actually lose gold in this system and the rewards easily make up for it and that is not considering seasonal events." So, the non-gold rewards make up for the missing gold in terms of value, and it may yet be the case that seasonal events push these "losing players" over the line on actual gold.
Perhaps the 400 XP per hour figure isn't right, but that number came from Blizzard, and if people aren't seeing that in practice then Blizzard needs to adjust the numbers to realize that figure. Mind you, there's some indication that people aren't seeing those numbers because queue times and time spent in client changing decks, etc., doesn't count toward XP, so an hour of honestly playing Hearthstone doesn't necessarily translate to an hour in matches. That seems like something Blizzard should adjust for given the analyses everyone has been performing - including them - use these values as a baseline.
Were you active on this site during the Halloween events, when you could earn candy corn? Snowflakes appear to be another currency you can earn by doing things on outof.cards, which you can then spend on cosmetics like titles or banners for your profile.
For one, a very recent analysis by Bunnyhopper suggests that lots of players will end up with more gold not less at the end of the expansion (https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1srg57g). But more to the point, gold doesn't matter, and neither do packs really - all that matters is cards. Gold is only in contention here because specific things were said about gold, and historically it's the most direct way for F2P players to get new cards at the start of an expansion. Blizzard could just as easily have said "we're getting rid of gold entirely, and will be rewarding you with new 'player packs' that you can trade in for packs of any set you want" and you'd have a functionally equivalent system because gold is just a means to more cards.
My contention with your original point was not that the non-gold rewards were all equivalent to the gold rewards in value, but rather that you shouldn't throw them out of the analysis entirely the way you did. Understanding their gold-equivalent value is important to understanding the overall value to the player. The question that actually matters is not "will I get more gold?" but rather "will I get more new cards?" That question just happens to be easiest to answer in terms of gold-equivalence because gold still buys cards in the same way it used to, and gold is an easy tool for comparing to the old reward system. (Gold is also a good but imperfect way to measure card acquisition concretely, as it's easy to count packs from gold, but card probabilities from packs is largely opaque.)
This is not really fair.
Card rewards for legendary and epic cards enable you to buy fewer packs. If I'm planning to get a full collection, then after about 50 packs or so I've got all the common and rare cards. A legendary comes in about 1 out of every 20 packs, so in some sense, that free legendary has saved me the cost of 20 packs. (Note that my math on this does not value a Legendary card at 2000 gold, but the 1 in 20 packs is illustrative of my point that they enable me to buy fewer packs on my way to a full set.) We can reasonably debate what the right gold-equivalent value of those is, but it's clear that anything that enables you to spend less gold on an expansion has a gold-equivalent value.
Tavern Tickets translate to Arena runs and Heroic Duels runs, which net packs of the latest set and gold. They are effectively much better than gold, as you can save them up until the next expansion and spend them to get packs and gold with which you can get more packs (all while completing your daily quests).
Packs from old sets are complicated, but it's clear they're not worth nothing because the dust you get from them can go toward crafting new cards. Where it gets tricky is in determining how much they should be valued.
Let's start with an extreme case, where the player in question has a full collection. Every pack from every set has the exact same value until a new set comes out. When the new set comes out, those new packs have dramatically greater value, but that value difference drops significantly after about 50 or so packs when all that's left to collect is the epics and legendary cards. The new packs are still more valuable because every now and then they'll provide some new card, but oftentimes you'll just get a bunch of common and rare cards you already have, all of which become dust. Those packs are basically the same value as a pack from any other set.
A much more common case is that the player in question doesn't have every card in every set, which shrinks the value differential even further because there are lots of older epic and legendary cards that see play in top tier decks (e.g. Kayn Sunfury and Soulciologist Malicia in Soul DH, Lady Liadrin and High Abbess Alura in Pure Pally, and Dragonbane and Lorekeeper Polkelt in Face Hunter).
Yes, everyone saves up gold to buy cards from the new expansion. But that's not because everyone collected up full collections and don't get anything new from old packs, it's because they know they'll get a lot more out of that gold by buying all the common and rare cards of the next set, plus a couple of legendaries. But that's not a compelling case for saying that a pack from an older set has zero gold-equivalent value. Given that much of the time, packs of each set are worth the same (i.e. some amount of dust because they're all dupes), it's at most a decent case for saying that a pack from an older set has less value than 100 gold (though how much less will vary by player).
The CerberusBT deck for No Pathetic Cards worked like a charm for me (I made two minor changes - swapped one Plague of Murlocs for Maelstrom Portal because I only had one copy, and swapped one Kobold Stickyfinger for Harrison Jones).
My first game was against a C'Thun Druid that easily racked up tons of armor and beat me, but I got the achievement in the next game when I went up against a Big Priest. I could imagine making a couple of adjustments if you're encountering a ton of Odd Paladin on ladder, but this makes a lot of sense for countering most Wild control decks. No idea what you'd do to make this work if you find yourself against a Control deck in an armor class. It's hard to have enough pressure without compromising the AOE you need for most other decks (and the achievement in general, to ensure there's no opposing board).
It probably just seems pretty common because it's the only case worth posting online for 7-drop spells (that is, Wisps of the Old Gods is the only Choose One 7-drop, and it's broken impact is quite substantial). There are dozens of 7-drop spells in Wild, but no one is going to go to r/hearthstone to show off screenshots of the game working exactly as intended.
It's an interesting bug, and it seems like one they probably should have been able to catch (Choose One spells aren't that rare, and they have a unique behavior that ought to be tested for any example of "random casting").
I don't really like the premise of this change. As laid out, you're basically asserting that having a full collection is critically important to the game, and that F2P players need a rewards system/in-game economy that enables them to reach a full collection.
It's true that Blizzard could make the game more F2P friendly by changing its in-game economy and changing how packs work to reward players with larger collections sooner. But there's another route to solving the F2P problem, and it's a route we've actually seen them take several times in the past. Specifically, I'm thinking of making legendary cards less important, and providing free access to some of the build-around legendary cards when they're introduced. Some examples of this in the past include:
This strikes me as a much better way to adjust the economy, because it makes building a budget deck easier and it doesn't call for a major shift to in-game economies, which would probably mean compensating existing players (and however they decide to do that inevitably ends with a lot of people feeling angry about whatever the new system ends up being).
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).
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.
This story of people "waking up" to the greed is more than a little overdone. Here's a post on their forums from the early days of COVID in the US where someone is complaining that Blizzard should be giving away more free stuff to...help frontline workers or something like that? And here's an r/hearthstone post from years ago with mostly the same theme of Blizzard being too greedy.
And this is not unique to Blizzard - Wizards of the Coast gets its fair share of hate too. Here's a petition that cites a popular MTG youtuber talking about the predatory designs of MTGA, and an article from last July about the greedy (at the time) new Mastery system in MTGA. The fact is, the internet is full of people complaining about how greedy CCG companies are whenever they make any changes, because in that moment those people feel personally that they're not getting the value they want for their money.
In some ways, this gets back to a response from @clawz161, who said "Packs and cards don't have REAL VALUE...[because] you can't [resell your cards] in hearthstone, and the devs will never allow you to do that." This argument is flawed, and sits at the heart of the "greed" discussion. Hearthstone cards do have real value for anyone who enjoys playing Hearthstone because value isn't defined exclusively as "resale value." What value these digital products have will vary person to person, and if someone sees that value equation flip for them in a game they enjoyed, they cry out "this is greedy!" because the value equation no longer works for them.
I'm not saying Blizzard and WotC and companies like them should not do more to make their games more F2P friendly. I would love to see these games be more F2P friendly. But I think Blizzard has taken steps over the last year to do just that. They can do more, but they deserve some credit for what they've done.
Hah, I had totally forgotten about Master's Call. I had a bunch of neutral draw minions like Novice Engineer, so it wouldn't have made sense in my deck anyway. Also, since the combo relied on Mana Wraith, it might end up being less helpful, but I like that thinking! You could maybe do it with Call Pet too (another card I had completely forgotten about).
I wouldn't hold my breath on this - there's really zero incentive to split the games (probably ever).
Hearthstone is F2P, so Blizzard wants to drive high player engagement (obviously - in every F2P game, the more engagement you get out of any given player, the more likely that player is to feel invested enough to pay for something in game). These quests work as nudges from a behavioral economics standpoint. You can opt out of them by re-rolling if you really don't like them, but they might nudge players toward trying out formats that they wouldn't otherwise consider. That can be mutually beneficial; for players who find a format they like as much or more than ladder, they have more fun, and for Blizzard they get higher engagement from the player in question.
Quick side note, I believe this engagement issue is why Hearthstone has invested so much in new game modes and why there's yet another new game mode coming soon. The Arena "draft mode" for Hearthstone has always been terrible compared to other CCGs, and the various Auto-Chess games out there were stealing away players from the traditional "competitive, turn-based strategy game" market that CCGs exist in. Duels basically solves the "draft mode" problem (leaving Arena limping along), so it should be interesting to see what the next new format is.
I'm a bit surprised that, over the course of an entire week, you weren't able to roll into two weekly quests you could complete. Because that's all you'd need to complete to avoid losing out on a quest - you can store up to four quests of each type at once, and you gain three weekly quests at the start of the week, so you can roll over one without losing anything. This is specifically designed to help players who used to lose out on quests because of infrequent logins or slow completion times.
I know the "Win 7 Ranked Games" quest can be pretty tedious if you don't have a strong meta deck, but one win a day is not that bad, and a lot of the other ones are pretty straightforward, and only look grindy if your frame of reference is doing a whole quest in a day:
A number of the other ones are arbitrarily harder (e.g. can't play an Old God from DMF if you don't have one), but you can reroll those away. There's probably some room for improving those, but the reroll is not a terrible stop-gap for that.