We've received insight into a survey Blizzard sent out to some players asking about a Hearthstone "battle pass". This new addition to the game would potentially replace rewards from dailies, achievements, and simply winning games with a system based on experience. There are both paid and free versions of this battle pass that are discussed, and they have some very interesting rewards including alternate art for cards for the first time ever.
The survey states that this pass would launch with a new expansion and would last until the next set releases, giving you around 4 months to complete the pass. Earning the maximum amount of experience per week would take you 16 weeks to get the full 100 levels of the battle pass, where the main reward structure is.
Battle passes have become very popular with games over the past few years with it originating in Valve's DotA 2, back during The International tournament pass. The goal is simple: You play the game, earn experience, unlock rewards. The passes last a limited amount of time so they get players to engage more with the game so they don't miss out on rewards. Epic Games really pushed the battle pass approach to free-to-play monetization with its Battle Royale game, Fortnite, giving it a huge spotlight and getting other companies to jump on board such as rival Battle Royale, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
Whether you like them or hate them, the battle pass appears to be here to stay. Although this survey, which we're going to get into in a moment, is a solid indication of development plans for Hearthstone's new progression systems, it should not be taken literally for the rewards may change based on survey feedback. This is potentially good news for Hearthstone due to rival card game, Legends of Runeterra, being more rewarding to play and thus open to free to play players. If this pass is done right, this could be a huge boost to the free-to-play side of the game and may even beat out the pass that MTG Arena has been doing for a few sets now.
Let's check out that survey!
Types of Rewards Discussed
Here are all the different types of rewards mentioned in the survey.
- Latest Expansion Packs
- Prior Expansion Packs
- Upgradable Hero Skins
- Experience Boost for the Pass
- Arena Tickets
- Individual Random Cards
- A Choice of Hero Skins
- Alternate Art for The Coin
- Expansion Card Back
- Gold
Rewards Breakdown
Here is a breakdown of the rewards and what level you would obtain them at.
As you can see, the idea is that you'd be able to upgrade the skins of certain heroes with 3 different tiers available. We're assuming this means each upgrade they get cooler looking. Perhaps this is related to the new heroes that we datamined just over a week ago.
In total, here's what this pass would give you as a member of the free tier if you get to level 100.
- 18 Packs for the Latest Expansion
- 14 Packs for a Prior Standard Expansion
- 4 Arena Tickets
- 2 Legendary Cards
- 2 Epic Cards
- A choice of a Hero Skin (unknown list)
- Expansion related Card Back
- 3990 Gold
Paid members of the pass would receive these rewards in addition to the free ones:
- 1 Non-disenchantable Golden Legendary (Likely a unique legendary and not random)
- 2 Upgradeable Hero Skins (3 levels of upgrades each) (Jaina and Rexxar)
- 20% XP Boost for the Pass
- Alternate Art for The Coin
- 17 Packs for the Latest Expansion
- 14 Packs for a Prior Standard Expansion
- 4 Arena Tickets
- 2 Legendary Cards
- 2 Epic Cards
Additionally, all players are able to earn 25 Gold for each level above 100, to a cap of 150, which would grant you an additional 1250 Gold.
How This Changes Progression Now
The way it is explained in the survey, this would remove the Gold rewards from daily quests, winning 3 games, and achievements. Instead, you'd be earning experience from completing these tasks.
A rough maximum of experience earned per week is stated to be 9000. With a total XP count of 145000 being required for Level 100, a free to play pass player would have to max out their experience for 16 weeks - roughly the full 4 months. I don't know about you, but I've never maxed out my daily wins more than a handful of times which means if that's the metric to go by, this might be a hard experience for the free-to-play among us.
Other Mentions
In addition to the above, the following were mentioned.
- Appropriate gold costs for cosmetic upgrades.
- More upgradeable hero portraits.
- Emblems by your name depending on your current experience.
- Crafting cost discounts for cards from the current expansion.
- Customizable visual emotes.
Fitting Into the Year of the Phoenix Roadmap
Since earlier this year, we've already known that we'd be getting an achievement system and player progression update in Hearthstone during Phase 3, which means if this battle pass does happen, it should begin with Hearthstone's December expansion to allow the pass go through its full 4 months of play.
That still leaves the question of whether or not achievements gets launches with the December set or if we'll see it in the new year as some nice new bait to get everyone back into Hearthstone as things begin to calm down mid-set. We've also still got a few more "locked spells" so it will be interesting to see what the Hearthstone team is cooking.
Achievements & Progression - Phase 3
Comments
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Aaaah yea, upgradeable Jaina's skin, each one with bigger cleavage ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I'm a semi-F2P in that I buy 1 pre launch pack a year, then bank coins earnt throughout the year for the 2 other expansions. Normally gets me 80 free packs for each of those 2 expansions.
If this went through I'd stop playing, as I just wouldn't be able to build competitive decks on $70 a year cost, through the 3 expansions.
Agree with other comments that the pass doesn't seem to make sense on a casual game like this.
Have no idea on the overall economics for them, but this feel like a massive jump. Why not go micro transaction first and offer skins on cards, hero's, game boards, etc first. See how much that can generate then look at this.
If I lose the gold rewards that my daily missions and victories bring to me, the rewards I get through the battle pass are far from enough. In this way, the only way to get more card packs is to recharge.
If Blizzard really cancels daily rewards, it will lose a lot of players.
I can understand this system being implemented in full-attention games, but Hearthstone is a casual game. You pop out your phone on the bus to work, play a game, put it away; bring up a game in the background while you do some school reading; occupy yourself a bit more by pulling out your phone and having a game while you watch a movie; etc. I can't speak for anyone else, but I imagine that I'm not the only one who rarely, outside of new expansion week, plays Hearthstone and only plays Hearthstone. That's part of why I love it, really - I can have fun and occupy my mind while I do some chores or complete some brainless work.
So, games like Fortnite, where you have to invest your attention to play it, I think a Battle Pass makes more sense there. Games like Hearthstone, I think that you'd be sacrificing, slighting, a huge portion of your casual playerbase who won't be able to slide by on daily quests as they did before. Unless the rewards are extravagant, of course - but why would they be, if Blizzard is looking to make money? As other folks have said, the currently shown gold amounts are disappointing, and the fact that you aren't only rewarded gold means that you can't save it up and buy a bunch of packs at once - meaning suboptimal decks and suboptimal fun throughout much of an expansion.
As someone who buys the 80 smackers bundle each expansion, I know that Battle Pass vs. Daily Quests won't impact my progression greatly, barring Blizzard screwing the pooch. More harmful, to my attention, than whatever rewards are offered is that it's another generic patch to the game. Like the new ladder system - it works better, yes, but there isn't much to set it apart from other ladders, other Battle Passes. The game slides into the background, becoming more and more one of a homogeneous mass of similar games which I've played, and further and further from the nostalgic memories which I hold. Once that connection is lost, while a conscious decision to stop playing won't happen, Hearthstone will nonetheless gradually fade into the background, fade out of my habits, and stop becoming something which I consider part of and important to myself. A bit overly poetic, but still, true!
Exactly this. I play this game when I want to . I will just drop it if i am forced to grind
This is the worst battle pass to ever be introduced. Couldn't they do it as it is in mtga, where you get BOTH the xp and gold from dailies and on top of that in mtga you can max out the pass just by doing dailies and getting 15 wins a week. This system seems like making f2p experience even worse.
This cuts the amount of packs a free to play can get to a crazy low amount. Fuck that.
18 recent packs and 14 from earlier expansions is worse than collecting your gold and spending it at once at the expansion release. Sure, you may get more in total- assuming 10G per 3 won games stays- but you won't have the cards for the whole expansion life time, which will make especially the start of each expansion worse, since you only get to buy around 40 packs then, so you'll be more reliant on crafting.
Few things to copypaste from other games:
-Add wild cards and insert them instead of random epics/legendaries
-Remove random packs from rewards and add pack shards instead (1 shard = 1 pack of your choice).
-Add more premium content for paid pass
-Rework arena or introduce new draft mode (runterra like), nobody wants 4 tickets now
-I usually get 9000+ gold in 4 months, this pass is decreasing the mere value of our economy...
(18+14=32 PACKS) 3200 + 4000 =7200 Gold
BAD
I've started out as an F2P about 5 years back and gradually began to spend money on the game after some time. It started with the Medivh skin and culminated in preordering both Scholomance bundles, something I thought I'd never do only months ago.
If these changes should happen, I'll never play a single game of standard again, switch to Wild for good and become F2P again.
The more I look at it the more it reminds me of the Paladins OB 64 fiasco....which they backpedalled on heavily after most of their playerbase just straight up left.
This is good news for new and F2P players with a lot of time on their hands. Bad news for me and any other F2P, more casual player.
I have never ever maxed out my games ina day, I don't even play 30 games a day, let alone with that much. averaging 10 minutes a game, that's 5 hours of play at the very minimum. I sure hopw the system changes somewhat to make it more possible to get to level 100 without investing so much time in it.
As I play now, I buy about 75 packs per expansion with gold. These new changes would mean a LOT less choice of what to do with my gold, and only very slight advantage in the overall gold value, which I will never get since I'll never get to level 100.
TL;DR - I hate this with a fiery passion.