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
that second one is literally just as much of a scam.
It's basically "hey, craft ALL the cards you want from the current expansion...but only now....not afterwards"
Meaning, as a f2p,, you'll need to gamble to figure out which cards are going to be the most useful because if they become viable later you're losing a huge amount of dust.
as a F2P you have 4 month to figure which cards are safe to craft during the expansion. so it's not bad, better than nothing. no?
which doesn't account for said cards becoming better with more support.
Prime example right now: Archwitch Willow. Good card, but not enough support to make it work. Now, generally I am hopeful Big Demon Warlock will be a thing at some point...but I have no guarantee. So (pretending if we had the system right now) do I craft her now and gamble or do I not and need more dust later on when she does become a real thing?
That's not a good thing, it's a bandaid fix with which they disguise how much they cut down the ability to obtain cards through just playing the game.
I don't like this. The community is already much smaller than it was before and hell no I'm not gonna be paying for these after I spend 50$ every expansion. 150$ a year is already too much for me for 1 game and I've been collecting 9000-12000 gold between every expansion just so together with the 50-60 preorder packs I can get almost all the cards.
If they do this battle pass thing i can't get my 9000 gold and ofc I'm not paying more than 150$ so blizz can fuck off.
This is horrendous. I manage to save up enough gold to buy about 60 to 70 packs every expansion and that's not really enough. I do get the pre-purchase packs as well, and combined it's usually enough that I only have to craft some of the good cards.
But that's impossible if you only get 40 to 50 packs smeared out over months instead of those 60 packs at the start of the season. It means you can't compete without buying a lot more packs with real money.
I'm just stunned that their response to having competition that's more generous in their rewards is to get stingier. Does Kotick need a fourth swimming pool filled with money or something?
I'm a little confused... dailies will no longer award gold? Instead just awarding XP to progress the battle pass? That's how I read the screenshot about potential changes being dailies rewarding XP for the battle pass progression. I feel like that could be a bad idea, and may actually make it so F2P players earn LESS gold/packs throughout an expansion cycle. Hopefully they mean that currently they only reward gold, but they could change they to ALSO reward XP for the pass progression. A combination of current gold rewards from quests plus a battle pass could actually be very rewarding for all players, and especially for F2P players.
Never mind, I just realized there is a note that this system would remove gold from daily rewards, etc. I'm not sure I like this idea as the current info presented here makes me feel like the game will be less rewarding overall. Maybe I'm wrong, but why not maintain gold rewards AND introduce a battle pass rewards system? That's how MtGA is set up.
The current idea would be to replace gold that you could earn outside of the battle pass.
With what is shown in this survey it looks like a really bad deal for F2P players. Capping their gold earnings is going to make their life extremely difficult. I managed to farm 3000 gold in one month of diligent play before this expansion came out. That's almost the total value the players could get if this system was implemented this way. Unless they just decide to give their soul to Blizzard and play like 10+ hours per day they aren't going to be able to purchase enough packs for a comfortable start on a new expansion. These numbers need some serious tweaks. Otherwise, i'd say this is most certainly a trap. In my case, i give the paid pass a pass. These cosmetics don't interest me and a non disenchantable legendary isn't a good deal as the card could just suck and rot in the collection without any use. I wish i could disenchant Zayle, Shadow Cloak as i never used that card since the decks it provides just suck.
Basically, it introduces problems which players can get through by buying the solutions. It's basically a roundabout scam .
To all of the people who didn't want casual to award gold for wins because of net decks in casual, you got what you wanted, at the expense of less gold and packs in between each expansion due to the battle pass.
#carefulwhatyouwishfor
I mean...nice meme, but that's not really the case anyways, unless they make it so normals don't give exp.
I'd even say this makes it worse, because it enforces people grinding games faster which means probably doing so in a low risk environment...like normals.
"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."
Nothing like using what's already well known about FOMO to try to get more players to compulsively play the game. Let's be honest here. You 'get' to "engage" with the game, really means "Here's this digital carrot. Play the game more or miss out on these cool shinies. Oh, and also you get to pay more money so that you don't miss out on said shinies."
Look, I get it, businesses at the end need to make profit, they're not a charity for doing their job, but some business models reek of more greedy practice because of how we've seen them used in other games and with other companies. This is essentially a 'pseudo subscription' model for Hearthstone. Yeah you technically still get to play as a free player, but now arbitrary gates are placed on you as far as in-game 'income' goes. This is one step further away from the type of free-to-play game that would allow said players to not fall behind paying players.
As an fyi I am no longer a free to play player (haven't been for awhile), but I still really dislike this move. Even as a paying player I spend at least the $80 on each expansion mega bundle. I could get everything else without spending more money. Now I 'get' to spend money on top of the $80 just to keep up with the Jones or I start falling behind.
I also think this survey is the illusion of choice when it comes to the direction of Hearthstone. As was suggested in the article the survey very much does not have any impact on whether this massive change to the game is going to happen. It's more to pretend like the big boys upstairs are listening to the community (I haven't seen any streamers whose content I follow or any well known HS competitive players ask for a battle pass).
Same here. I've been getting pre-purchases, usually the larger one, and saving up gold. I'm currently only a few legendary minions away from having all of Scholomance, and I recently completed Outland. The rarity protection really helped make that happen as it used to be harder to get a wide variety of epics than it was to get legendaries. But now I didn't have to spend dust on epics and could make more of the legendaries.
But anyway, if they make this change I personally don't know what I will do. If they give us ample opportunity to earn gold other than just what's in the battle pass, such as leaving gold rewards in the daily quests, then I'll probably keep going on with what I do now, and maybe throw in $20 more for a battle pass from time to time. But if they really hamstring our ability to earn and stockpile gold, I'm going to be pissed and likely quit the game. Or at the very least, stop paying any real money for cards and just playing with my existing collection and whatever I can earn.
This is actually a roundabout method of getting players to buy packs with real money rather than grind up gold. Here's some problems I can see at first glance.
- The total packs you get throughout the 4 months would be 39+18 = 57, but since FTP players tend to hoard their gold for the next expansion, in theory you're opening 18 packs of the current expansion throughout that 4 months of grinding. The number of packs I tend to open per expansion is around 80-90, and I'm usually nowhere near the amount of cards I need or would like. So halving this, and then subjecting me to a 4 month grind since packs are granted incrementally means I would have to be content with playing half-assed decks, get lucky with my legendaries, or...you know...buy more packs.
- You get another 14 packs of the current expansion, 4 months after the next one launches. I'd like to immediately point out that most players focuses on the current expansion, and not the previous one. It doesn't really matter even if I chanced that one legendary I always wanted at the very last pack I get. The fact of the matter is I've been doing without for the past 8 months, so what are the chances that I still give a shit after 8 months, or havent just crafted the card myself?
- Arena tickets. Not my thing. But if everyone just concedes three times, I wonder if the meta would then be to wait out at least the minute mark for the mulligan phase so the other player concedes first and give you a freebie.
- Skins, artwork, etc. Well, these don't actually affect the game, and since everyone gets one, its like the non-golden SN1P-SN4P phenomenon where the non-golden card is actually more glamorous than the golden one.
- And, of course, we still don't know how the grind would be like. But if its really really bad, then its just netdeckers left right and center all over again. Ceiling floors are important so players can choose their ceiling and stay there playing fun decks, but if you're being tracked for xp all day, then its just more important to just grind out that 9k xp limit per week than actually experimenting with sub optimal decks. It also makes it a lot worse for those without an adequate collection.
Of course things can change. Its just a concept for now, but I hope they will change their minds about giving out previous expansion packs instead of current. Your personal experience (for good or ill) of an expansion should ideally stay within that expansion.
Personally don’t like the idea of this too much, especially since it means f2p players will be getting less gold, and will need to grind a lot more for the less gold.
Not looking forward to the reduced amounts of gold in saving up for the following expansion. Definitely a hit to F2P players.
I loathe this a lot.
I hope I'm misunderstanding this, but is this insinuating that free to play players would be capped at earning only 3990 gold per expansion, and thus only being able to buy 40 packs or so per expansion release? If so, that's a massive blow to that community as it's very common for us to earn 8000-11000 gold per expansion depending on how much we play. I opened 115 packs this expansion. If I can't do that anymore, that might destroy my ability to play at the level that I'm able to now. I can't see how I would continue playing at that rate.
You are, unfortunately, correct in your understanding.
This is exactly what this survey is for though - getting feedback. By getting this topic out into the open, the community can use the data to have a conversation with Blizzard instead of relying on the random chance that they get to participate via email.
I am curious if the pass will end up being better for players that are more on the casual F2P side. It's possible they will see an increase in earnings and Blizzard is instead trying to get the hardcore dedicated F2P players pony up for the paid pass, doubling the rewards for playing. It'll always come down to price though. If this is a $5 upgrade, it's incredibly smart, though it does suck in a way since it would have been free before.
So much unknown!
Well, lets hope they don't do this then. Because I wouldn't play this game anymore and... Well, yeah. That would just suck,
Battle pass systems with paid models are predatory business practices that abuse FOMO to take advantage of people with poor impulse control and children, but I'm not surprised that blizzard would be attracted to that.