Hearthstone 24: Don't tell the others, but I'm rooting for you!

[Zevox]

Hopped on tonight to see what the new quest/rewards system is like. So far, oh boy, I do not like what I'm seeing. It looks like the new quests still do not work with Battlegrounds unless they specifically mention it - I had two for playing and killing minions that were unaffected by my Battlegrounds games. Also, I have one for playing seven games of standard ranked that I can't re-roll for some reason, so that's just going to be sitting there forever. And probably that one for playing two Duels games that I also can't re-roll, too.

And all of these quests just give experience, which gives... mostly packs, from the looks of it. Which as someone who just wants to play Battlegrounds, I no longer care about. Sure, when gold pops up, it's a decent amount, seems to be 100 at a time usually, but I've got to go through a bunch of pointless levels to get to it.

Also, have to ask: does anyone know if the achievement points matter for anything, or is it just a meaningless number? At a glance it looks like the latter - I don't see any experience, gold, packs, etc being awarded by any of them, nor any place to turn in achievement points for anything.

If this is as bad for me as it looks, well, I'll keep playing until my gold reserves are empty and I can no longer afford to buy the Battlegrounds perks each expansion, I suppose. After that though, I guess I'd be done - they'd have finally killed the game for me.

[Rodin]

It's a much better deal from what I can tell.

The first page is packs and is trivially easy to complete. A single daily quest is enough to get you through it.

After that it shifts to 3 bags of 100 gold and two other rewards - mostly packs, but also stuff like tavern tickets, card backs, and legendaries.

As it goes on it gets tougher to climb (as the experience bar gets bigger for each level), but the gold reward increases commensurately. By the end of an expansion you're getting 300 gold per completion.

For progression speed, it's pretty fast. The new system has been out for 5 days and I'm rank 16. I've earned 600 gold in that time, which is about twice what I would have earned under the old system. That's without counting the 5 card packs, epic Darkmoon card, card back, or tavern ticket (which is worth 150 gold to me for a free Arena or Duels run).

During that period the only ranked I played was the 7 wins for that weekly quest. I'll agree that it's BS you can't re-roll that one, and hopefully it's something they'll fix.

Some achievements DO give rewards - you can tell if they have the treasure chest icon. Most of them relate to the current expansion as they want players to experiment with the new cards and don't want to force players to go into Wild. Most offer minor rewards, but there are some good ones too. Duels have a chainable quest for "best ever Duels run" that offers a very nice chunk. I'm on 7 wins and that one is worth 1050 XP. That's more than a Daily quest's worth.

People have done math on how much you would need to play to hit level 50. If you do your Dailies, Weeklies, and Achievements, it would only take 1 hour per day.

------

As for Battlegrounds? Battlegrounds is actually significantly better off than it was before. You were previously getting 10 gold for every 3 wins, which is about 10 gold an hour. And that assumes you got top 4 in all 3 games! It would take around 5 hours to reach the level of a standard daily quest (50 gold).

Under the new system you're getting about 400 XP/hour in Ranked, 300 XP/hour in Battlegrounds. This is per Dean Ayala and Chadd Nervig. That's roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes to hit the level of a standard daily quest (800 XP). Also: No cap.

Nervig also stated in his quote that there are more Battlegrounds quests than before. This is accurate, as shown here. 3 out of the 12 weekly quests are Battlegrounds specific, and weekly quests can be re-rolled daily to search for them if you're so inclined. The Daily quests have two which apply to Battlegrounds - "Win X games in any mode."

[zlefin]

Trying out the new stuff; rather undecided as of yet as to how good it is.
One thing that did annoy me about the duels I've had so far is the variability in the special equipment you get (the ones that give permanent bonuses to all your stuff); all too often the ones I'm offered are all useless for my deck, and it's a big hit to your deck if you get garbage for that rather than a strong one.

Achievement points are needlessly confusing, since there's no apparent benefit to them.

Need to click for the rewards is so stupid there's a good chance they patch it within a month to not need so many manual clicks.

[Epinephrine_Syn]

I derived that they give XP, from the fact that when I was clicking through my achievements I leveled up.I'm currently level 15 and can't get the tavern pass because I need ... to be... level fifteen.

I'm just hoping that automatically corrects once I hit Lvl 16.

Edit: Yeah, just checked now, achievement points give Xp, but only after you manually go and click the achievement. Which if it's a lot of stacks you need to spam click and then you click too much and it pops out which requires more finagling to get out and you need to do it so many times, and god forbid your computer is lagging cause hearthstone's inefficient as-

tl;dr it's a mess.

[Zevox]

So, apparently something that Blizzard did recently broke something in my collection, because I can no longer see my Wild cards. And I don't mean it thinks I disenchanted them, I mean they just do not appear in my collection, even if I turn on crafting, or pull up a Wild deck I already have made. So, until they fix that, I cannot make any new wild decks, edit my existing ones, nor even in theory even try Duels since half of the sets in that are from wild.

...also, apparently it's locked away my deck slots #10-18 for some reason. Possibly because I don't have Demon Hunter unlocked, since it says to defeat other heroes to unlock them.

Goddamn it Blizzard.

It's a much better deal from what I can tell.
[...]
People have done math on how much you would need to play to hit level 50. If you do your Dailies, Weeklies, and Achievements, it would only take 1 hour per day.
[...]

Okay, you're throwing around a lot of numbers there which have absolutely nothing to do with my situation personally. I don't play for an hour a day. I don't play every day, period. When I'm active, it'll maybe be for a few days, for a one to three hours per day tops, then I'll stop playing for a while - no particular set period, just until I feel like playing again. Might be next week, might be next month.

Previously, while playing like this, if I took a little time to do a handful of casual wild games to clear out my quests, I could earn enough gold over the course of an expansion period to pay for the Battlegrounds perks. Since no quests cared whether I won, it didn't even matter that I'm just playing random old decks that I used to like that usually lose against what people actually play in wild. Under this new system, I am quite skeptical of whether that will similarly earn me enough gold to keep up like that, since so many rewards are packs that are functionally meaningless to me - and I can definitely tell at a glance that they did not do nearly enough to reward Battlegrounds play for me to stick strictly to that and be able to earn enough gold, which would have been the best-case scenario to hope for.

One thing that did annoy me about the duels I've had so far is the variability in the special equipment you get (the ones that give permanent bonuses to all your stuff); all too often the ones I'm offered are all useless for my deck, and it's a big hit to your deck if you get garbage for that rather than a strong one.

That is one of the reasons I really do not like the Dungeon Run style mechanics, yeah. It's an outgrowth of them offering you three random sets of things to add to your deck after every match - but because they're random there's no guarantee you get anything good for your given deck. That was probably the most frustrating thing to me in Rumble Run, when the shrines (or whatever those special items were that each hero got) defined what your deck wanted to be, so if you just randomly didn't get sets of cards that synergized with your shrine, you were completely wasting your time. Duels looks like it has the same problem, just in the form of the power-ups and how they define decks. You need to get the good ones, and cards that work with them, or you're going to get stomped by those who do.

I derived that they give XP, from the fact that when I was clicking through my achievements I leveled up.
[...]
Edit: Yeah, just checked now, achievement points give Xp, but only after you manually go and click the achievement. Which if it's a lot of stacks you need to spam click and then you click too much and it pops out which requires more finagling to get out and you need to do it so many times, and god forbid your computer is lagging cause hearthstone's inefficient as-

tl;dr it's a mess.

Uh, don't know what's going on then, because I just checked myself, watching my experience before and after claiming two Battlegrounds achievements, and there was no change. From what I'm seeing achievements seem to award absolutely nothing besides their own "points," which don't seem to do anything.

[Rynjin]

At a certain point, Zevox, you simply have to accept that no company can make a game specifically tailored to you, and only your extremely niche situation.

[Zevox]

At a certain point, Zevox, you simply have to accept that no company can make a game specifically tailored to you, and only your extremely niche situation.

I don't expect them to - if I did, I'd have dropped the game entirely years ago, when they started doing balance changes to classic that I was strongly against. But don't expect me to just grin and bear it silently if they change it such that it goes from one that I can play to the extent that I still wish to, to one that I cannot.

Which, to be fair, I don't know for sure yet if they have here, as the new system is quite opaque and I can't be sure how it'll work out over time, but I'm not going to be silent about first impressions that make it look like they may have done that, either.

[Rynjin]

The thing is, you brushed off a post essentially explaining that the new system is better for everyone...except people who play one game of Battlegrounds every 3 days, IDK.

[Zevox]

The thing is, you brushed off a post essentially explaining that the new system is better for everyone...except people who play one game of Battlegrounds every 3 days, IDK.

It's not better for everyone if it's worse for people who don't play daily. Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with my longstanding complaint about other things they've done - that they keep making the game worse for more casual players. Though again, new system is too opaque to be sure that's what's happened, it's just striking me as likely to have that effect based on first impressions.

[Eurus]

I derived that they give XP, from the fact that when I was clicking through my achievements I leveled up.I'm currently level 15 and can't get the tavern pass because I need ... to be... level fifteen.

I'm just hoping that automatically corrects once I hit Lvl 16.

Edit: Yeah, just checked now, achievement points give Xp, but only after you manually go and click the achievement. Which if it's a lot of stacks you need to spam click and then you click too much and it pops out which requires more finagling to get out and you need to do it so many times, and god forbid your computer is lagging cause hearthstone's inefficient as-

tl;dr it's a mess.

Some achievements give experience, most don't. There should be a different little reward icon for the ones that do.

[Amechra]

I decided to look at Hearthstone again after, like, a year of not paying attention to the game... and the feeling I get is that I really shouldn't bother? I kinda just want to mess around with decks (I loved Shuffle Rogue when I played) without having to deal with grinding ladder with decks I don't find fun (AKA, most of the classes - I don't really like playing Priest, Ranger, Shaman, Warlock, or Warrior) just to get cards for the decks I do like. And Tavern Brawls/Dungeon Runs/whatever else they've added don't particularly interest me - I want to build a deck to play around with, not deal with whatever aggressively "wacky" randomness Blizzard wants me to engage with.

This is going to sound really dumb... but is there a way to play Hearthstone (the card game) without having to go through Blizzard's client, the way that YuGiOh has DuelingBook and Magic has Cockatrice (and others)?

[Rynjin]

It's not better for everyone if it's worse for people who don't play daily. Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with my longstanding complaint about other things they've done - that they keep making the game worse for more casual players. Though again, new system is too opaque to be sure that's what's happened, it's just striking me as likely to have that effect based on first impressions.

I think your definition of casual and mine really differ, I don't think an hour of play a day sounds like much. I play almost literally all my Hearthstone on the toilet, and so far the thing seems solid. I played a grand total of three games of Duels each yesterday and the day before and shot up to like level 18 instantly.

I decided to look at Hearthstone again after, like, a year of not paying attention to the game... and the feeling I get is that I really shouldn't bother? I kinda just want to mess around with decks (I loved Shuffle Rogue when I played) without having to deal with grinding ladder with decks I don't find fun (AKA, most of the classes - I don't really like playing Priest, Ranger, Shaman, Warlock, or Warrior) just to get cards for the decks I do like. And Tavern Brawls/Dungeon Runs/whatever else they've added don't particularly interest me - I want to build a deck to play around with, not deal with whatever aggressively "wacky" randomness Blizzard wants me to engage with.

This is going to sound really dumb... but is there a way to play Hearthstone (the card game) without having to go through Blizzard's client, the way that YuGiOh has DuelingBook and Magic has Cockatrice (and others)?

Sounds like you should play Wild Casual, if anything. But yeah, card games are designed such that not following them for a while is usually a bad deal, with the exception of trying to get into them when something cycles out and a new standard season starts.

If you want a new card game to try, Runeterra was pretty good when I played it during the beta, I just fell off of it because it has way less cards to play around with. It has a pretty generous card gaining path, though much like Zevox was complaining about with Hearthstone...you'll need to actually play the game more than 5 minutes every other week.

[Amechra]

Sounds like you should play Wild Casual, if anything. But yeah, card games are designed such that not following them for a while is usually a bad deal, with the exception of trying to get into them when something cycles out and a new standard season starts.

If you want a new card game to try, Runeterra was pretty good when I played it during the beta, I just fell off of it because it has way less cards to play around with. It has a pretty generous card gaining path, though much like Zevox was complaining about with Hearthstone...you'll need to actually play the game more than 5 minutes every other week.

Part of my issue is that my internet is currently really bad. I tried out one of the new dungeon runs when I poked at Hearthstone again, and I was getting kicked from the match repeatedly due to my internet fritzing out. So "5 minutes every other week" might actually be a generous time estimate, especially with how utterly gargantuan the files are for Hearthstone.

And I'll be honest - I'm basically done with the actual "collecting" part of CCG/TCGs. I want to play with all the shiny pieces and build the decks I find fun, not artificially limit myself to whatever cards I happen to luck into getting (or what cards I can grind towards, depending). That's part of the reason I referenced Cockatrice and DuelingBook - those applications let me enjoy the game part without having to worry about the collecting part. I get why that's very much not what the people selling the game want, but that's just life I guess.

[Zevox]

I think your definition of casual and mine really differ, I don't think an hour of play a day sounds like much. I play almost literally all my Hearthstone on the toilet, and so far the thing seems solid. I played a grand total of three games of Duels each yesterday and the day before and shot up to like level 18 instantly.

They definitely differ, then, because I'd say that if you're playing daily, you're not that casual of a player. More so than the hardcore types that play 5-6 hours a day and grind to legend every month, or the streamers for whom the game is literally their job, certainly, but you're playing very regularly. Casual play, as I think of it, means that you don't have any kind of schedule or regularity for when you play - you play when you want to, you don't when you don't feel like it. Which probably means playing in erratic bursts off and on over time. Hearthstone is just another game to you, not a constant part of your life.

[Rynjin]

They definitely differ, then, because I'd say that if you're playing daily, you're not that casual of a player. More so than the hardcore types that play 5-6 hours a day and grind to legend every month, or the streamers for whom the game is literally their job, certainly, but you're playing very regularly. Casual play, as I think of it, means that you don't have any kind of schedule or regularity for when you play - you play when you want to, you don't when you don't feel like it. Which probably means playing in erratic bursts off and on over time. Hearthstone is just another game to you, not a constant part of your life.

I mean, it is just another game to me. I play Rainbow Six: Siege almost daily as well, but purely in a casual sense; I don't play Ranked, and only play for fun. And when I play that, I'll play it for hours at a time.

By your definition, my mom (who plays some dragon farming game or whatever for hours every day) is a "hardcore gamer".

[Seerow]

So I'm just going to throw out there, the new system isn't actually better for everyone. Or even most people.

It's heavily front loaded so it looks great for this first week. You log on do your 3 weekly quests and 3 daily quests it refreshed, and suddenly you're level 13 or so already! How awesome!

But the exp cost to level goes up dramatically as you hit higher levels, like the last level of the battle pass before it switches to pure gold rewards costs 9000 exp. That's basically an entire week's worth of quests by itself.

Just to take myself for an example. I have been playing for years. I save up all my gold every expansion. I do every daily quest and average 3 wins probably every other day on average (I'll play for about an hour in a normal session every 2-3 days, and occasionally I'll binge), I typically earn between 7500 and 8500 gold in the time between expansions (pure math of 65g per day says it should be 7800, which tracks with the occasional binge and 80g quest making up the difference to ~8000g).

Under the new system, if I do exactly what I've been doing, here's what I am looking at:

Daily Quests: 120days x 1000xp = 120,000xp
Weekly Quests: 17weeks x (2500xp+1750xp+1750xp) = 102,000xp
Playtime: 100 hours per cycle x 400xp = 40,000xp
Achievements: I'm going to be generous and assume I get half. Most of it is tied up in duels which I am not enjoying personally. = 15,000xp

Total: 277,000xp

That gets me to level 68 by the end of the expansion. So I end up with 6,900gold. In exchange for the ~1100 gold I am losing, I pick up a bunch of packs mostly from old expansions, some arena tickets, and a few singleton cards. Also worth noting no new pack quests for the new expansion have been datamined, so it's likely that the packs from this battlepass (especially the super frontloaded first 10 levels) are replacing the traditional free 6-9 packs we would get from day one quests, making it an even worse deal.


I'd almost shrug my shoulders and call it a wash if weren't for Iksar explicitly promising months ago that gold income would not go down, but instead go up, for most players, and then the packs and other extras would be just that, extras. That has turned out to be a lie, as I have not seen a single example of someone gaining gold from the battlepass.

[Rynjin]

The question becomes "are you most players"? Did most players complete every quest, as an example? Many quests were impossible to complete daily for some people, so would need to be re-rolled and hope you got one you could do (play X Divine Shield minions, etc.). Some were hard to complete for anyone (use Hero Power X times); almost all were impossible to complete for people who typically played single player, Arena, and Battlegrounds content, which comprises a huge amount of the population, so far as I know.

I, personally, never made 8000 gold per expansion cycle, at least not that I recall. That 6900 gold figure sounds closer, and my total might have been quite a bit less than that. I currently have around 4k gold banked, and I think I bought an extra 20 packs from Scholomance early in the expansion, or thereabouts, and haven't spent any money since.

While it may be true that the people earning the maximum amount of gold are getting less (since 8k seems close to the absolute maximum you could earn per expansion cycle just by completing quests), it may also very well be true that MOST PEOPLE are going to be earning more for the same amount of effort in, since the ways to earn rewards are broader and more forgiving.

[Seerow]

The question becomes "are you most players"? Did most players complete every quest, as an example? Many quests were impossible to complete daily for some people, so would need to be re-rolled and hope you got one you could do (play X Divine Shield minions, etc.). Some were hard to complete for anyone (use Hero Power X times); almost all were impossible to complete for people who typically played single player, Arena, and Battlegrounds content, which comprises a huge amount of the population, so far as I know.

I, personally, never made 8000 gold per expansion cycle, at least not that I recall. That 6900 gold figure sounds closer, and my total might have been quite a bit less than that. I currently have around 4k gold banked, and I think I bought an extra 20 packs from Scholomance early in the expansion, or thereabouts, and haven't spent any money since.

While it may be true that the people earning the maximum amount of gold are getting less (since 8k seems close to the absolute maximum you could earn per expansion cycle just by completing quests), it may also very well be true that MOST PEOPLE are going to be earning more for the same amount of effort in, since the ways to earn rewards are broader and more forgiving.

I mean it's easy enough to adjust the numbers to whatever scenario you think is normal.

Say for example you normally earn 6000g per expansion because you miss 25% of your daily quests, and have a similar amount of reduced playtime.

Daily Quests: 120days x 1000xp = 120,000xp * .75 = 90,000xp
Weekly Quests: 17weeks x (2500xp+1750xp+1750xp) = 102,000xp *.75 = 76,500xp
Playtime: 100 hours per cycle x 400xp = 40,000xp
Achievements: We'll leave this the same for both of us because it's uncharted territory = 15,000xp

Total Exp: 221,000xp. That gets you to level 56. Good news, that's still enough to finish the battlepass. But that means we just compare your level to mine (12 level difference), and it's 150g per level. That's 1800g less than I expect to earn. So if I am expecting to get 6900g for the expansion cycle, you can look forward to earning 5100g.

edit: And I just realized I didn't even modify the play time, so in practice if you're spending less time playing that will average out to a bit more loss.

[Geno9999]

My 2 cents on the new progression system: I think it's actually good, but it really needs more sanding and polishing to get rid of some "feels bads."
First off, I'm disappointed that there's no recap of how much Exp you gained from each game. One thing that was nice about the 3 Wins = 10 Gold system was that it showed you after every match how much closer you were to getting to that extra bag of virtual change. Dang it Blizzard, gimme that tiny serotonin shot, I want to see progress bars move! At least it does pop up after you complete a quest.

All aside, I set a personal litmus test for the progression system: what is my Gold per Day?
Obviously, with how early in the progress track I'm on, it's not going to be accurate since the levels start with low requirements, but it has been datamined what the Experience requirements are for all the levels. For this ideal Gold per Day calculation, I'm assuming the 4500 per level up starting from level 59.

Under the old system, I rerolled my quests every day to get 60g as often as I can, and Won 3 games besides, so let's assume it comes out to 70 gpd.
With the new system, it does obfuscate how much gold I'm getting a day with new sources of Exp, and slowly increasing requirements for level ups, which is why I simplified it to grinding out Levels past 59. The 60g quests (usually the play 3 games as X, Y, or Z classes quests) have been converted to 1000 Exp quests. It's been estimated that an hour of Ranked is about 400 exp, which is usually what it takes for me to win 3 anyway. With our total of 1400 exp so far, it's not looking good with it barely shy of 1/3rd of the way of the 150 gold reward. HOWEVER, there's the 3 weekly quests now, a 2500 quest (which seems to always be win 7 ranked games), and two 1750 quests. You'll always get 3 weekly quests at the start of the week, so that's another 6000 exp a week, or 857.14... exp a day. So every day on average, I'm actually getting 2257.14... Exp a day, roughly taking me 2 days to level up and get 150 Gold, or 75 gpd...

...Wait, I'm gaining gold?! But Reddit said I'm losing gold from this new system, and they're always right! Like they predicted that Glide will completely take over the meta! /s
Well, this is making a LOT of assumptions about how much Exp and Gold I make a day on average, and it doesn't touch on the levels from 1 to 58, which probably does have some overall losses of gold due to being rewarded packs directly (which are variable in actual worth to each player depending on how new the pack is/how complete their collection is, and how interested they are in playing Wild or Duels in the case of the soon to be rotated packs from the Year of the Dragon.)

[Joran]

I'd almost shrug my shoulders and call it a wash if weren't for Iksar explicitly promising months ago that gold income would not go down, but instead go up, for most players, and then the packs and other extras would be just that, extras. That has turned out to be a lie, as I have not seen a single example of someone gaining gold from the battlepass.

Yeah, seems like an unforced error to promise that all players would get more gold. If he had said that most players would get more gold value (I think the free packs valued at 100 gold add up to more than the missing gold), then it would have been true.

From his reddit post:

Assuming you play the same amount and have the same quest completion rate, you shouldn't earn less gold or non-gold in the new system. In nearly all circumstances you should be earning slightly more gold and more non-gold (packs, etc).
...
Our intent with the system is for it to be upside for all players. We've done many checks on different player segments to try and make sure that is the case no matter how you play. Despite all this, we're making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions were incorrect. We can push legendary quests or give out additional rewards during events as well."

I'm playing less Hearthstone overall (not even capping out to Diamond 5 to use up my stars and get the free packs), but the new progression/achievement system does hit that nice dopamine hit that the 3 wins for 10 gold didn't. Hearthstone seems friendlier to F2P than previous iterations, given the extra bonus packs from the ranking system, the duplicate protection for all rarities.

[Seerow]

...Wait, I'm gaining gold?! But Reddit said I'm losing gold from this new system, and they're always right! Like they predicted that Glide will completely take over the meta! /s
Well, this is making a LOT of assumptions about how much Exp and Gold I make a day on average, and it doesn't touch on the levels from 1 to 58, which probably does have some overall losses of gold due to being rewarded packs directly (which are variable in actual worth to each player depending on how new the pack is/how complete their collection is, and how interested they are in playing Wild or Duels in the case of the soon to be rotated packs from the Year of the Dragon.)

The big thing is that the levels from 1 to 50 take wildly differing levels of experience (49 to 50 takes 9,300 and awards a hero skin for example).

Once you get past the initial 50 level hurdle and into the pure lower exp cost gold making, a combination of daily and weekly quests averages out to roughly the same as what we get now. That's why in my comparison to Rynjin, the gap between what we earned stayed more or less the same, we both just lost about the same amount (somewhere between 1500 and 2000 gold). That can pretty much all be attributed to the Rewards Track.

Yeah, seems like an unforced error to promise that all players would get more gold. If he had said that most players would get more gold value (I think the free packs valued at 100 gold add up to more than the missing gold), then it would have been true.

Would have been. But given the explicit complaint he was addressing was people wanting to open the same number of packs on day one of the expansion, a drip feed of packs from older expansions that you no longer need cards from does not make up that deficit.


And of course all the comparisons to the old system fail to include the fact that with new mini expansions coming at the halfway mark of every expansion, requiring you to buy another 40ish card packs to complete your collection, Hearth's cost just went up another ~50 bucks or 5000 gold per expansion cycle. When Iksar made that post, I had some hope the intent was to keep our gold the same, and those extras would help offset some of that extra cost from the new mini-set. Now that that's turned out to be false, I feel like I am losing on all sides. It's a repeat of when we switched from getting every other expansion for 20 bucks and being able to save two cycles worth of gold towards your pack openings for the main expansions. Just a huge spike in the cost of the game, with lip service being payed to making the game more budget friendly.

[Geno9999]

And of course all the comparisons to the old system fail to include the fact that with new mini expansions coming at the halfway mark of every expansion, requiring you to buy another 40ish card packs to complete your collection, Hearth's cost just went up another ~50 bucks or 5000 gold per expansion cycle. When Iksar made that post, I had some hope the intent was to keep our gold the same, and those extras would help offset some of that extra cost from the new mini-set. Now that that's turned out to be false, I feel like I am losing on all sides. It's a repeat of when we switched from getting every other expansion for 20 bucks and being able to save two cycles worth of gold towards your pack openings for the main expansions. Just a huge spike in the cost of the game, with lip service being payed to making the game more budget friendly.

I haven't heard anything about the mini-set will be a thing for all future expansions, I assumed it's basically like Galakrond's Awakening but not tied to an adventure because they're slowly adding to Book of Heroes for their single-player content. That said, it'd really suck if the mini-set added Epics and Legendaries, because I could have sworn it was said that getting 135 unique cards post-miniset would be possible without needing to get any Legendary at all or something.

[Zevox]

I mean, it is just another game to me. I play Rainbow Six: Siege almost daily as well, but purely in a casual sense; I don't play Ranked, and only play for fun. And when I play that, I'll play it for hours at a time.

By your definition, my mom (who plays some dragon farming game or whatever for hours every day) is a "hardcore gamer".

Just because you're playing a game in an unranked mode doesn't mean you're not a hardcore player. Most hardcore fighting game players will use lobbies over the ranked mode in many games, for instance - doesn't change the fact that they're playing the game for hours on end daily.

And yeah, sounds like she is hardcore into that particular game, even if she's not otherwise a gamer. Which if that's the game I think it is (I know someone from work who at least used to play a game that sounds like that at lunch every day) makes complete sense, as mobile games of that sort are designed to get people addicted and encourage playing a lot, regardless of whether they're normally gamers or not.

[claypigeons]

The new rewards system gives less gold than the previous one. It gives less useful reward overall than the raw gold of quests. I don't need year of the dragon packs. I want gold for future packs.

There are multiple sources of number crunching detailing how over the course of an expansion, you lose out on possibly thousands of gold. That's not better for players.

Zeddy has a video where he details playing for hours at high legend and recieved something like 600xp during that time. For astute math brains, that's significantly lower than the "400 per hour" that has been repeated to death.

[Seerow]

The new rewards system gives less gold than the previous one. It gives less useful reward overall than the raw gold of quests. I don't need year of the dragon packs. I want gold for future packs.

There are multiple sources of number crunching detailing how over the course of an expansion, you lose out on possibly thousands of gold. That's not better for players.

Zeddy has a video where he details playing for hours at high legend and recieved something like 600xp during that time. For astute math brains, that's significantly lower than the "400 per hour" that has been repeated to death.

I've also seen reports of xp being lower than the 400/hr the developers have claimed, but most examples I've seen were much closer than that. (like within 10-20%). Was Zeddy playing a deck that went into ultra long games or something? Because they did tell us that the exp per time cuts off eventually at some point, so playing super long games can hurt your exp gain.


I've also seen talk of people already about setting up bots to game the system and gain maximum xp, since winning doesn't matter and it's just time played. Like one was a priest that would hero power face then rope every turn until the opponent killed them.

[claypigeons]

Perfect, let's incentivize roping every turn to maximize xp gained. Brilliant system.

[Rynjin]

Perfect, let's incentivize roping every turn to maximize xp gained. Brilliant system.

...Wouldn't that minimize XP gain? You get stuff for completing games, not for time spent in games.

[Seerow]

...Wouldn't that minimize XP gain? You get stuff for completing games, not for time spent in games.

The new system provides 400xp per hour spent in game (capped at some point), rather than a set amount per game completion. The intention is to not punish players for playing slow decks. It doesn't actually reward roping, but it does mean someone who wants to rope is at least getting the same benefit as if they spent that time actually playing.


Anyway, Geno's post actually inspired me to take a closer look at the system breaking it down into raw xp/gold conversions rather than looking at the values over the course of an expansion cycle (which can change so much from player to player). I made a reddit post with my analysis you can check out if you're curious here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone..._it_unfixable/

tl;dr version is that the 4500xp/150g actually checks out as a net gain once you hit that point. The problem lies with the 196,200xp for 4200g you get in your first 50 levels. Exp either needs a 35% nerf in those first 50 levels, or an extra 2200-2300g be added into those first 50 levels.

[Grytorm]

Have not played this game for a year or two but I still keep an eye on it. And my brain started to contemplate an overly complicated idea. Basically I am going to speculate some on an alternate Year of the Dragon with scrambled classes. Going to make a few notes here on some basic stuff.

Rafaam is the Rogue villain. He is supported by Paladin, Druid, Mage and Hunter.

Elise becomes a Priest.
Sir Finley becomes a Shaman.
Brann becomes a Warrior.
And Reno becomes a Warlock.

Villains need: Their initial legendary. Thematic lackey. Returning mechanic. Scheme. Galakrond. Plagues.
Heroes need: Their highlander legendary. Twinspells. Explorers.

Heroes could have a few more things to try and figure out.

[otakuryoga]

SUPER start to a mage duel run

i get offered two treasures related to buffing/returning weapons(100% no use)

and one related to battlecries(very little use)

seriously..a class like mage that uses no weapons should not be offered those weapon treasures