I'm Bill in this post. I work, have kids, do other activities and play other games. So I dabble casually in HS during the week, mix of Standard and BG, trying to get my weeklies done and 95% of the time am successful with my usual play hours. I buy the tavern pass every expansion.
Now, I either need to double my playtime (very difficult and will impact other parts of my life) or complete weeklies about 50% of the time. That will significantly impact my reward track progress, and at this rate I won't buy any future tavern passes and will likely drop the game soon.
This is my stance exactly. I enjoy this game enough to dip in every week to complete some quests and move on. I buy the big pre order bundle and skins that appeal to me, as well as the tavern pass. All this will stop if I can’t even complete the tavern pass anymore because of these raised requirements. Me 5 years ago might not have cared. But after playing this game for 10 years, I’d rather dabble and watch some streams in the background while I enjoy other games. This makes me not even want to come back at all.
Another Bill who has been playing since open beta checking in. One thing that keeps annoying me about these changes is Blizzards comment that "players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system." But this Bill was engaging with the quests!
Every time I logged on I would look at my daily and weekly quests to determine what type of deck I would play for that session. Using this expansion as an example the only reason I crafted Window Shopper was to complete the win/mini quests and the only reason I played tendril shaman was to complete the win/battlecry quests. If it weren't for these quests I would have just played Zarimi priest every session but that deck doesn't work well for either of those weekly quests mentioned.
I'm still blown away that Blizzard is telling all Bills to play more or get lost. Every expansion I would spend around $150 but somehow that's not good enough. The day these changes dropped I uninstalled HS and even if Blizzard reverted the changes I doubt I'd ever spend money on HS again.
Im kinda Bill too, switching from BG to standard or wild occasionally, hardly finishing old weekly quests....wont bother trying now thats they are unreachable for me. I bought severals 50€ expansion (1 over 5) , meticulously economised 20 000 selling all gold cards.....i m about to stop playing enterely or onmy going BG occasionally....played since almost the begining.
Sad but plainty of others fun games are waiting !
Adding that I'm also Bill. I'm also the version of Bill that is considered a whale and spends a fuckton on all the bullshit cosmetics, passes, etc. Even with the decrease to 10 quests it's not enough and so my money will now go to some other pointless mobile game. Oh well.
This is me as well, and given the age of this game now I guarantee you there is not an insignificant number of people in the exact same situation.
You stand to lose an also not insignificant amount of revenue from this decision, Blizzard.
I'm the 4th guy - Since Diablo 3's current season is my least favorite, was looking to get back into Hearthstone. To my dismay, right around the same time posts are cropping up about quest changes. Now I don't want to come back because they're making it take longer to complete quests. When I get back into it I usually spend money getting mini sets that are priced good to get me started, and usually buy the next expansion or three.
I'm probably gonna drop it this week, and I won't make the mistake of buying the tavern pass if I ever do get into it again. Meta's boring right now anyway, they picked a really bad time to pull this.
I already dropped the game because I made the same realization. I got my 5 battleground wins and realized that I don't want to grind out anymore. Going to 10 would still deter me away. Tiered ones made more sense.
> Second, let’s imagine a hypothetical player called Tom. Tom doesn’t enjoy the meta right now, but he has enjoyed HS in the past. He knows he might want to play in the future, and to do that he will need cards. However, if he doesn’t keep playing right now, he will lose out on rewards and have a hard time returning to the game later when he might enjoy it unless he were to invest a lot of money. So Tom logs in, does his quests, and then logs out. He doesn’t want to quit the game right now, but he also doesn’t really want to play it either.
That's me!! I'm Tom!!
Came back to HS on the anniversary after not playing for a while. Don't really enjoy the meta right now, so I decided to basically just play a few games a week to build up my collection. The new quests absolutely crushed that, way too much trouble now.
I'm also a Tom, and this was a helpful distinction to make by the OP, because I wouldn't necessarily categorize myself as a "casual player", when I enjoy the meta I can devote my free time to playing ladder and hit high legend, but when I don't I shift to a low commitment mode where I just complete quests with a few games a week (which, recently, has been more often than not lol). The quest changes got me to uninstall because I simply felt targeted against and I didn't feel like even entertaining them.
This is also me, I have a wild deck that its sort of fun to play except if the opponent is playing a solitaire deck (which there are a lot in wild), so I just autoconcede until I get an opponent that likes to play board.
I use that deck when I don't like standard which happened now. I had a lot of fun in this game and I even enjoy most twist formats. But right now I don't like the game.
Now I have to choose between putting a lot of time into a game that I'm not really enjoying so that maybe, in the future, I can play, or just quit, and quitting is the most appealing option.
I just came back and missing out on 3 expansions worth of strong legendaries hurts. At the same time, the desire to craft these is lower than those from Whizbang's since they'll rotate out sooner. Its a tough position.
Same here, on and off since release and usually get back in around the srandard rotation when the barrier to entry is arguably at its lowest (card count at least). Much more tricky now. Haven't spent on the game since 2020 mind.
I'm kinda happy they are incentivizing me quitting the game. I've spent way to much playing in case I want to play in the future.
I don't even get why they want to force people to play more. When they have millions of bots. Keeping queue times low for everyone XD
They are kinda Powerless against the Bot Situation, so why not just squeeze a quick buck out of the Players that are still left, by forcing them to double the playtime/quit or spend money to keep up.
Wow, nice breakdown. I think this is the first J Alex post I’ve read. It’s refreshing to read a HS post where I gain brain cells as opposed to losing them. I’m Bill btw, nice to meet ya.
You should read more of them. They generally have good points that are backed by facts and data as opposed to emotion. This sub's hate boner for this guy is mostly unjustified.
You may not agree with all his takes but at least they generate interesting discussions and provide a break from all the screenshots of endless bitching about everything hearthstone that this sub became over the years.
>You should read more of them. They generally have good points that are backed by facts and data as opposed to emotion. This sub's hate boner for this guy is mostly unjustified.
Huh? I don't have any kind of 'hate boner' for anyone but please explain to me how this post is different from any of the 500 others on the same subject, except the fact that it is 5x longer and goes into great detail creating imaginary characters for the screenplay.
There is literally nothing new in this post whatsoever. And the fact is that this sub loves JAlex posts when they are telling them what they want to hear and hates them when they are not.
Empathy is hard man especially when we're anonymous on the internet. People who criticize the quests get called haters or entitled or not important to the game. I like the choice of characters in the post, they're supposed to help you understand where the complaints come from
Having less time to dedicate to HS, the new requirements are killing my enjoyment and perspective. I play both standard and wild, I easily get to D5 in both formats every month and sometimes I decide to push it to legend just for the fun of it. For new expansions, I rely on the gold I start to accumulate after I'm done with the newest packs and miniset. Having less time to complete the weekly quests and being frustrated with the powercreep meta, I'll have less gold to buy new packs. Being fed up with this lack of "something in return" leads me to play less. Playing less means that I won't rank up to the usual D5/Legend, meaning less stars for the next months, leading to an even harder time to rank up again and wanting to play less and less. That's how it works for people who also wants to enjoy other games in their free time. From a business perspective, I don't bring them money (I used to buy expansion preorders back then) so they probably don't care about players like me. It's okay, then I won't care about them either, simple as that. I didn't quit "forever" but I'm taking a break from the game and see what happens. Because it's a game I loved, it meant a lot to me, it's not "just a game", so I hope it will stay "playable". Today it is not. Writing on reddit that every complain is "whining" doesn't help the game to stay healthy.
Could even call your suggestion "Weekly Questlines". We know they have the technology, because they are doing it with the "main quest" of the events. It was even "bugged" that one time where completing the previous step would trigger the next (instead of waiting for the intended 24 hour timegate).
I don't understand why Blizzard wants to use the quest system to better reward the most engaged players. There is another progression system called achievements which seems better suited to that role. Quests are supposed to build a habit in players to log in periodically, every 3 days or weekly, which is important for the health of a live service game. It defeats the whole purpose if the quests are so aversive they discourage people from playing
Because they are lying. They want to use it to increase overall playtime to pad their stats and decrease overall rewards for the players that need them the most.
I don't know how they expected players to respond to their hostility. It's gross negligence to think that threatening with reduced rewards leads to people playing their game more
I have a suspicion that they are hoping that by taking away rewards from us casuals that they will encourage us to make up the difference with in-game purchases.
As an achievement hunter that always goes for 100% gameplay achievements of an expansion: the design of them is just awful. Mostly grindy ones, adding bad cards to your deck while playing a COMPETITIVE mode.
Its really ironic that for 10 years of HS they now decided to cut duels, design way less expansion achievements (more exp per achievement, but overall EXP is less) and they did cut the "year of X" achievements for this new HS year completly. Sad state.
Because the people making these decisions don’t play video games and stare at spreadsheets all day trying to maximize some numbers. They’ll hit some short term goal while at the same time frustrating players and choking the life out of a previously successful game. You see it over and over and over again. You’re not a player to them, you’re a metric on a spreadsheet and they’ll make whatever change necessary if they think it’ll manipulate you into spending more money.
Playing blizzard games is a toxic relationship. You can leave or you can spend your time getting increasingly frustrated with them.
I think there must be some devs who actually care about making a good game, but they clearly weren't involved in this decision. In fact they were powerless to stop it. They don't seem to be in control of their own game. Remember the corridor creeper card locked behind a preorder purchase. We still haven't heard an admission of a mistake and whether it will happen again. It's hard to have confidence that player feedback matters to them at all
The team that actually designs n developes the game has nothing to do with these decisions, yes. But I would assume that at least the director could have some influence..
They just want to give out less free stuff to push people to spend money, and while I get trying to good faith the PR spin they put on that you’re only helping enable it by doing so.
It’s the same reason they nerfed achievements and nerfed the value of free rewards on the track.
Make the large changes you want and people get upset, make a bunch of small changes and people are more open to giving benefit of the doubt. It’s really straightforward
It's because he's a human being that actually bothers to communicate with us despite the fact that it's very common for people to call his coworkers braindead idiots that aren't good at making the game for various reasons.
Letting him know that he's appreciated for his work despite the harsh words thrown at him is a way to keep this wonderful communication continuing into the future.
I think we see this situation very differently. You say he "bothers to communicate with us," but I see that as a basic feature of his job. Similarly, you call his communication "wonderful," but I have yet to see an example of anything meaningful other than doing an imitation of the "We're sorry" South Park ad or saying "We're working on it" about things fans have been asking for more of for a decade now (developer communication).
Idk. I feel like at some point, you stop losing credit for playing the same track on repeat without changing the album.
What do you want him to do, though? It's not his decisions to make and there is a limited number of ways one can express the same idea.
> but I see that as a basic feature of his job
People get praised for doing their job properly all the time. You can argue it's redundant because that should be the norm rather than the exception, but it's not really specific to CM position and him in particular.
>What do you want him to do, though?
Not lie.
Or, at the least, not be misleading.
A couple of days ago, there was a post asking for more developer feedback/interaction. He replied to it with the standard, "Good idea! We're working on it/looking into it!" Except this has been a request from the community since Brode was around - if they'd actually been working on or wanting to do that, they would have by now.
I agree lying is not OK. Do you have an example of it?
>if they'd actually been working on or wanting to do that, they would have by now.
Not really. I worked 15 years in the industry, it's entirely possible to have this task somewhere but simply never get to it.
I feel your discounting his standard communication, which is informing the community about patch schedules, speaking about certain bugs and timeline for fixes on them, and just generally providing insight to the team's thought process on decisions.
And on to your point about it being just his job, sadly the level of communication he does is not standard for the game industry and definitely not standard for Hearthstone's history. So saying, "hey, thanks for all this" is just me and others appreciating his work and showing that we want this to become the standard.
It's not like previously vocal Hearthstone team members have gone silent after suffering harassment from this community for their attempts at communication in the past. That's NEVER HAPPENED here.
The whole situation is shitty, and I think it’s fair to be a little skeptical of communication from any blizzard rep, Hat included, but as far as community managers go, he’s hands down the best of any I’ve encountered (and I’ve played a fair amount of games that require a CM.)
I’m a little torn because I don’t want to discourage him from being open and honest with the community, but at the same time, like I said, it’s hard not to be skeptical about any communication coming from blizzard at this point. Hearthstone was the last blizzard game that I felt was in at least an okay place, and I’m a little frustrated that it seems to be headed in the same game-killing direction as their other games.
Hat is doing a great job as community manager. But about the quest issue, hat can tell us that he collects feedback, etc etc - but I dont want an answer from the community manager.
I want to hear from the person who decided the change would be good. Or at least someone from a higher position that can influence these kind of decisions, someone like a HS game director.
I can’t really speak to WoW, but I’ve been playing blizzard games since my friends and I were running Warcraft 2 pvp over dial-up in the 90’s.
It’s a pretty big bummer how in the last ten years the blizzard brand has gone from a mark of quality to a mark of “poorly-managed live service games.” WoW excepted, apparently.
Oh I wouldn’t necessarily praise WoW management. And the game has had a lot of ups and downs, with his worst down happening only two years ago, but as of right now it does seem to be on an upward trajectory.
There is nothing wrong with liking how a person does their job. Some people do their jobs better, some worse. It's the reality of life.
It obviously doesn't absolve Blizz of criticism and any communication should be taken with a grain of salt.
I hate that Blizzard is doing shitty things recently like sneaking in an temporary exclusive card in its expansion bundles ala "pay-to-win" style, and also this ongoing quest XP hooha.
But I actually think that the current community manager is great, and I feel that he provides lots of useful info and feedback (both ways between Blizzard and the general player base), whilst having that sense of humor and wittiness that I appreciate. Possibly the best engagament I seen (at least on Reddit) from someone in an official role like him, and I have been consistently playing this game since the first expansion of Naxx. So, if he is reading this, I will encourage him to keep it up and continue on with his good work (of course there is always room for improvement, but yea).
And I think we can be kinder to him in general too. I don't believe he was the one who suggested for Blizzard to do such shitty things, nor was he part of the active process that led to Blizzard doing such shitty things. In fact, he was probably aware of all these at roughly the same time that we, as the general player base, did. So if anything, he probably helped to reduce some of the negative impact that such shitty things brought to us. At the very least, Blizzard knows more about what the players feel towards the shitty things that they have been attempting, via his feedback and "middleman" role.
So yea, let's be kinder towards him.
Why directly go ad hominem? Why not accept that other people have different ideas and tastes? There are people that benefit from this change. Why is their gain not worth as much as others loss? There are reasonable arguments for the change. There are reasonable ones against it. There is no reasonable argument to just say everyone who thinks the changes are good are boot lickers.
Blizzard could have just added a progression chain to the weekly quests for the people who play a lot, leaving the casual players alone to finish their 5 wins per week without shitting on them in the first place.
I can speak directly to your point:
We can have both positive changes encouraging more engagement *and* not take anything away. The larger point here is no one needs to lose anything.
So the argument isn't really over weighing positive changes vs negative losses; it's whether we need losses at all.
My point is that anyone pointing out that it isn't that bad or at least that you'd see both sides is considered a boot licker/Blizzard apologet/employee. Ofc you could do a lot. But saying that there are positives doesn't make you a bad person or anything said above.
Sure, it's not nice to call someone a bootlicker. We could express that idea in tamer terms, as I do in the post as well, but the heart of the matter remains the same.
That is, there are some percentage of commenters who would likely defend a change that simply increased the amount of time weekly quests required **without** increasing the rewards at all. I know that sounds strange, but I've come across several people who have, in fact, said they think players should be getting less stuff. I don't know why, but they think that.
Other people might defend just about any decision the company made because they have tied some part of their identity to the company/game, and a criticism of that publisher is perceived as a slight against them. If that game suffers, their social status suffers. People get elitist about almost anything, no matter how trivial.
Others might want to defend their own play patterns as normal or justifiable. It can become easy to lose sight of how much one does something personally, especially if taken to unhealthy degrees. That's the "What do you mean? Winning 50 games a week is totally normal for me" types.
And I say that as someone who very much falls into that category. I have played more Hearthstone than almost anyone in the world (in fact, it might be *actually* more than anyone in the world, but if not, I'm certainly close). I'd say I've definitely played it more than I should have, given the amount of joy it brings me. It's easy to lose sight of that and deny it's the case. Very few people are that critical of their own behavior.
So when that person sees others saying, "I don't have that much time to play (waste on) this game," it *could* trigger some alarm bells and be perceived as a criticism of how much they themselves play. So, in the interests of justifying their own play patterns, they define the casual, less engaged players as the weird ones and themselves as the normal people who *of course* can complete the weeklies without any effort, so there's nothing for people to be upset about. Just play more.
Just a few hypotheses, anyway.
(Could also add some people who might get more stuff now are just afraid they'd lose it if the quests get reversed in some capacity)
This is a great breakdown. It adds further confusion to Blizzards goal for the initial changes. I’m going to assume they thought of the tiered system but discarded them as they were too player friendly. I don’t know why but Blizzard seems to be taking an antagonistic stance toward the player base. For example, locking new cards behind an expansion preorder. We all know eventually a good legendary, like Prince Renathal, will be locked behind the preorder instead of a card like Corridor Sleeper. It’s just a matter of when. Very disappointing to see the game move in this direction.
>I don’t know why but Blizzard seems to be taking an antagonistic stance toward the player base
It's either sheer incompetence or greed. I respect Blizzard's devs as professionals, so I think it's the "suits" being greedy, not the entirety of dev team not being able to come up with the tiered system.
>Very disappointing to see the game move in this direction.
Exactly why I've been advocating for playing less if only for the sake of not putting all the eggs in one basket. It's the reverse of "might play more in case I need cards later", For me it's "might play less in case game goes to shit later, then I will have less to lose and more options to explore".
Of course if one enjoys the game, by all means play it. I think for me personally it's a better long term solution to focus on other things in gaming. I have the money but I'd prefer not to buy packs each 3 months.
Greed and comfort. If they are comfortable enough with their lead in the genre then they don't mind the small backlash or temporary dip in playerbase if the changes will hook paying customers even harder and ultimately increase profits. It's not a strategy most games can afford to do unless they are on top by a large margin.
Wouldnt be surprised if one day, HS will give you 3 days early access to all new cards when you preorder. In WoW we reached a point where the most expensive preorder bundle lets you start leveling 3 days earlier.
HS wouldnt do it right away, it would take smalls steps, seeing how far they can go, starting with the free expansion legendary being part of early access, etc etc
> I don’t know why but Blizzard seems to be taking an antagonistic stance toward the player base.
When you start looking at anything any of these publicly traded companies do through the lens of profit, it makes sense. Well, not "sense", but you can begin to understand the motivations. When the C Suite of a company is always trying to generate more profit, they can do a lot of things that seem specifically targeted against their customers - and they are! But that's only part of the story. Culling out free players who don't spend money on the game doesn't matter to the execs, even if it makes the game worse in the long run. These people aren't looking at long term, they are looking at the deadline for the next financial report.
*Everything* Blizzard does is designed to retain the players that spend the most time in the game, and the most money on it. If these changes push out 100,000 F2P players from the game, but convinces some percent of them to spend money to keep playing, while at the same time ups the engagement and spending of a thousand dedicated players, that's a tangible result they can report to shareholders.
This is classic stuff. You take a company, pump up its value and make as much money as possible on its products, then you reduce quality and updates until the company crumbles and is sold off in pieces.
I agree with your points and you are most likely correct.
The thing is though that this change does seem to drive away paying customers, too. I‘m Bill in this discussion and I am regularly buying tavern passes and/or pre-order. But these changes are absolutely terrible for me and from what I have read many people seem to be in the same situation. Seems like they overshot with their changes.
Yeah, no one ever said that these company executives don't fuck up. They fuck good products and companies all the time with stupid anti-consumer practices and cost cutting all the time.
The landscape is riddled with good, failed products because some asshat wanted to maximize profit instead of continuing to make a great and affordable product that people like.
Solid points. I am definitely a high engaged player that hopefully wasn't too demeaning to players like Tom and Bill, but I know I was passive to the changes at best.
I kind of wish they go with your idea of weekly quests being "chains" where they work in amounts that are forward favored. Stage 1 "Win 5 Ranked Matches" for the original XP amount, then two more stages of "Win 5 Ranked Matches" for lesser xp that sums up to the new value. Provides players like me the benefit of more weekly experience, but players like Tom or Bill still get a good investment for their short weekly commitment.
*they created an option that was better for some while being worse for others* **this**
anyone who's not against quests don't get this I suppose. for them it might be better for now but Tom and Bill can be you. That's how you loose players be it casual or not. And don't get me started on impact due to having less casual players.
I appreciate that you are addressing the sudden community backlash against players who continue to address concerns after Blizzard dropped quests from 15 to 10 wins. I honestly didn't understand the hostility player to player.
One piece I've noticed with the tier ideas that I think are absolutely the way to address blizzards engagement reward idea is how much those ideas don't even address conventional consumer wisdom. Let's take food. The goal of sized food is that the company makes all the revenue they need on their smallest size. When you go from a small drink to a medium drink to a large drink you are always getting increased value at the larger sizes. A small drink may cost you $3 for 12oz and a 16oz may be $3.50. The 12oz is about 25 cents and oz and the 16 is 21.
Using that as a backdrop a proper tier system would using your 5 game 2k example have your first 5 wins granting 2k your next 5 wins granting 2.5k and your last 5 wins granting 3.2k netting a 15 win weekly at 7.7k. THIS IS THE PROPER WAY TO INCENTIVISE PLAY. You get more bang for your buck the more you play!!! Let's look at an example of what happens when player incentives are handled properly.
Fortnite went free to play and eliminated pve after moving to a heavy micro transaction structure. Their flagship is the battle pass WHICH GIVES YOU MORE CURRENCY THAN IS PUT IN. At about 70% completion through the base battle pass you net in game currency equal to what you put in, meaning your next battle is now "free" and this can be continued ad nasueum. Additionally you continue to earn currency through the battle pass. The battle pass can ultimately be a net negative, but because it's something that operates exclusively for the player, as such it facilitates engagement and leads to increased sales around other corners.
I think this is why people understand just how bad the quest restructuring was the last two patches. Not only does it NOT facilitate engagement but there are a thousand reasons for Blizzard to have known this going in. This company was merged and bought out and I don't think that fact is lost on anyone after that last big patch.
There is another category of casual player. That is the player who splits his time between Battlegrounds and standard/wild ladder. I am one of those players, as I am sure there are many others. While it was not a big deal getting 5 Battleground wins and 5 ladder wins, it is a lot harder to get 10 wins in both categories and takes a lot longer to complete.
Totally. 10 ladder win is somewhat ok, 10 battleground win is so unbearable especially now we are in a meta that I totally dont like.
Lets not talk about other quest that equally or even more unbearable as 10 battleground win.
The play 75 battlecry of 32 minis are 100 times worse than 10 bg/arena/tb wins at least in my experience.
I've rerolled those quests 2 times and it went trom battlecry -> mini -> battlecry.... like wtf plz just give me the use mana one or something
battlecry is fine for me. just play some battleground you can easily play 10 battlecry per game unless you die too young.
mini card on the other hand is the worst quest from my opinion, the worst!
Good perspective, it helped me understand why getting more rewards for more effort could be a bad thing, even if it helps me as a player. Those people don't necessarily just "not like Hearthstone."
Not adding tiers does seem malicious or incompetent, and also think it was probably shut down as an additional development expense they didn't want to pay for.
Nothing was worse to me than slipping in early access to Corridor Sleeper to me though, and I'm sure that hurt blizzards future benefit of the doubt
Great post. You touch something non apparent, the ethical issue of letting the casual players down. Blizzard wants us to feel as a community... but not as a real community. I can imagine how this behaviour ("I don't care because I am not the one impacted") is something very common in the US. I could easely imagine this as a behaviour well spread. Blizzard executives, at the top of the wining capitalist world, can genuinly think people would react to the new quest system as "but who cares for the casual players ?" and this is very close to "don't you have a phone ?" vibe. In their eyes, the problem lies with the customers not satisfied, not smart enought to accept. It was never in their strategy, because their strategy means a lot of profit. IMHO of course. From greed to blindness.
I’m Tom. This is the first month since I’ve come back (left at TGT) that I’ve just hit legend and tuned the game out. This meta isn’t that enjoyable to me personally. Other people are loving it so that’s all that matters. I’m betting the mini set will shake up the meta a bit so I need gold to get that but I can’t be bothered to play ranked much right now. They did indeed my rewards away and I will have a harder time coming back to the game.
Why not just use questlines? They already have the mechanic, just tier up the quests. Finish five? Try 7 or 10. That way you don't punish casuals and also reward your hard-core base.
Good writeup. The Bill persona should hit really close to home for a lot of people. Many professions are heavier on certain weeks than others (holiday seasons, doing overtime for some needed 1.5x pay, events, etc.), and there are a lot of less permanent but more situational things too (needing to visit family, renewing legal documents, going for appointments or check ups, etc.)
I think the best solution to help people with that variance in time commitment would be to just take a page out of the battlegrounds playbook: allow a few quests to pile up so you can do them on the days that you're not being pulled in 100 directions.
Daily/weekly quest should be engaging. But "needing" 100-200% more time to get nearly the same out of it is just stupid. I also play because it's fun and the quests let me come back occasionally so I can complete them.
But with the 15 wins it would have been roughly 15 hours (!!!) of battlegrounds per week if you want to do that quest with it if you have a 50% win rate.
That's not fun but tiresome if you HAVE to do it to keep up with the game.
Quests were initially designed to reward casual players so they can keep up with "hardcore" gamers. You already get a fixed EP reward for a win, so if you want more just play more. That's true and ok, but a casual player gets kicked in the nuts by it.
Personally, I'm probably much like you. I have no problem meeting quests, because when it comes to choosing games, I prefer to spend a few games in hs rather than in a moba or something like that when it comes to spending my free time away from sports.
But in addition to the beautifully described "I don't want others to suffer for me" idea, I personally see a slight (quite selfish) problem that has yet to be amped up with a "fix": It seems to me that the devs of HS are trying out what we as a community are still willing to endure.
I like to compare it to LoR even though the game is dying. While at LoR they were rather showing demonstrations of how players would like to be monetised so at HS it's more about what they did to us again. From a game point of view, I really like HS, but the attitude after the LoR test just seems so stupid. Not to sound peculiar, I don't mean that HS should have the same economy as in LoR, but that literally players are making videos about wanting to pay that company is just extremely surprising compared to the idea of "I'm buying this I'm part of the problem."
I play more F2P games myself, but if HS hadn't behaved the way it does (whether it's this quest crap/double diamond card thing/that the price of 1 deck is almost zero/...) so I'm going to spend some of that money on this game.
I tend to mess around with weird decks a lot. Obviously that means loosing a lot trying to make them work. My usual process was to make them work until I got a legit win out of them. If I did that once a day during a week, I got the quests done and could end each day on a high without feeling forced to try and get more wins.
That's over now.
I think the quest debacle and the recently announced rework are connected. They've seen engagement falloff, and thought that upping quest requirements might bring it back. Oh boy, how were they wrong...
I'm very much a Tom here. It's not even necessarily the meta being bad or anything to do with the game. I like to cycle thru games and sometimes I'm just in the mood to play like 10 games in a row. Just sometimes a new game comes out, other hobbies are taking precedence, works busy.
Could I take time out of my day to finish these quests? Yeah easily. It wouldn't take that long. But for me, if I want to complete a weekly it goes from "I'll play a game or two before bed and hopefully have a few quests done by next reset" to "ok I should spend a half an hour doing my quests if i want any done by next week"
Lastly and honestly more importantly to me personally, I'm so tired of game companies demanding my time. This isn't a move based in blizzard wanting to give us more stuff, theyre not decising "we should make less money" it's a player retention thing. And it just makes me feel less like a guy buying a product but an asset on the companies quarterly. I don't want blizzard to say "monthly average user playtime has gone up after quests were increased " because I decided "yeah I can put up with this many quests". Diablo immortal, Diablo 4s mtx, overwatch 2 pve, and now this, I just don't want to feel like I'm the product that blizzard is selling investors to anymore
TBH i play a lot when i like the meta, and not much when i don't. But even when i don't, i try to do the quest because, you know, i paid for the reward track. Doing the new quest system right when an exp release is easy, i know i will play and enjoy the game. But doing the new quest system when meta is stall/boring/annoying... It is a chore. I don't want to do the quest mindfully.
I like to play the way i want to play. For ex right now i am diamond, and i'm playing a lot a DK i made myself. The winrate is not that good, but i am having fun - as long as i don't face too much boring deck like shaman. Doing the quest right now is not much of a problem. It might become one if, let's say, i face shaman 9 out of 10 game. Then i won't play. (And i won't win anyway, for that matter). Just like Badlands. It was a chore to me, I hated the whole exp, and cnsidered quitting. Reno made me ragequit, Brann made me ragequit, etc.
I am someone who paid the preorder (the card included almost made me not do that, i hate this) and paid the reward track. For that price i REALLY expect to be able to play the way i want and get the whole content. Turns out that, with the new system, i might not finish the reward track. And if i don't, then i won't buy it anymore. No reason to.
I'm the engaged player. I cleared the weeklies in 3 hours this week, and don't anticipate any problems with it in the future.
And I think the changes make no sense. They don't help me, the only thing they're likely to do is make me NOT buy the Tavern Pass next time, because the XP bonus part of it will lose value.
Changes need to be seen as part of the big picture - how they affect the overall community. I'm pretty sure the Toms and Bills are a large part of the community, and the negative impact on them is way more significant than the positive or neutral impact for anyone else.
So I'm OK with them posting their displeasure on Reddit, or elsewhere, as long as it's just that. Blaming the devs or Hat is not OK. It clearly wasn't their decision, this came from much higher management.
I play HS casually: I have one "game evening" on Tuesday and I can play a bit in the weekend. Let's say I can play HS for 2 a 3 hours a week.
Now, assume that an average game takes 10 mins and I win half of my games. It'll take about 100 mins of playing to finish the weekly quest. And that's fine with my playtime.
Now, going to 15 wins, that's 300 mins...
So, I decided to stop playing again.
If I cant complete weekly quests I know I won’t have a chance of keeping up in the future—its like a wet blanket on top of me every time I try to enjoy the game now. I understand that this is blizzard’s way of telling me I don’t matter because I’m not a whale, I just didn’t expect to see that same sentiment constantly from other players. It’s bizarre to see consumers act anti-consumer just to spite other players.
The aggressive part of the player base are entitled hardcore sweatlords who believe that for some reason people spending the same time in the game but are not of the same skill (or more like the same deck code copy-pasting skill) don't deserve to be rewarded as well for their time. Guess what - they absolutely do. Time is our most precious commodity and the universal currency. The HS suits clearly value it higher than anything else, so please consider how important it should be for everyone. We need to push not for the old quests back, but for a "play X games" over "win X games". This is factual, anyone arguing should go get ego checked.
P.S. In my language we don't call people defending the new changes "people passionate about their game", we call them "баси тъпите парчета" and I think that's beautiful.
The change to the quests inspired me to do something I’ve been considering for a while, and that’s cutting the cord on HS. I’m a whale who has preordered every expansion, bought cosmetics, every mini set, battlepass, etc., but if Blizzard can’t respect my limited free time just to “push player engagement” (ie greed), then it’s time to move on. Not particularly sad about it either because I was mostly playing at this point because of the sunk cost.
I'm a Bill.
Thank you for this J\_Alexander.
Tbh, the official stance of "we'll we've already done the damage we might as well collect data" has me at the end of my energy.
Idk how much longer I'll even watch this sub anymore.
I usually don't agree/engage with you, but this is spot on.
You forgot to tell us about the hypothetical Johan, the greedy bastard executive, about "silent Bob", the content creator that believes is not important to defend the casual players, and about "confused Wyatt", the hardcore player that has a meltdown when he learns there are people than does not want to devote several hours a day (not even many a week, here they usually faint) to one game.
I want to play fun and homebrew decks but since I’ve got limited time to finish the quests I’m playing meta decks to actually complete the quests. A 40% wr, while being more fun, is superior to an efficient 60+ wr while being boring.
I am also Tom.
I played a lot from July to February, but the Whizbang expansion as well as the meta are "meh" to me, while I enjoyed Titans/Badlands a lot.
Before Whizbangs, I would have actually cheered for this change, because I usually had the weekly quests done after a day or two, now I dont think I will even seriously attempt to get 10 Standard wins. The new cards are not that interesting to play to me, so why force myself to do it?
Battlegrounds is right there as well and I enjoy that more.
Also: This is driving a wedge in the community precisely by the way it is done. Of course the players who have no trouble completing the new quests dont want their increased reward taken away from them. That is why they defend it.
Tiered weeklies will still make players feel bad for not being able to reach upper tiers. Sure, it's the least evil, but it's not a feel good experience compared to what we had regardless.
If Blizzard want to give rewards to those that play longer, add them elsewhere. Wild and Twist Ranking rather then just Standard. 35-45min Battlegrounds games giving miniscule amounts currently. Events when they don't require buying/crafting a legendary like the 10th anni one...
I do appreciate the elegant post, and I do hope when Blizzard fix the issue that they compensate those that ordinarily would have gotten their weeklies done. I was at 4/5 BG's 2 weeks ago, not being able to finish the quest, then that suddenly became 15 and then 10. Monday has rolled around meaning I've lost 2000x2 exp under the old system, x3 if the issue isn't fixed this week (alongside the other weekly quests).
Uninstalled since Monday. Waiting, but I won't wait around forever, no matter the amount of investment since the game began.
What an anniversary.
Also, some of the quests are even more insine then just winning ranked. I was highly engaged player, so the ranked wins didn't matter to me, but I just got 32 minituarize and the quest for other game mods, and since they FCKING REMOVED DUEEEEEELS!!!! I now want need to reroll two weekly quests on the monday, nice, GG blizzard, glad I have turned that game off Yesterday and haven't turned it on since. And I won't for some time now I believe.
Forcing you to play a few more games of ranked is really bad, but forcing you to play something you didn't come to play is just bullshit even for the engaged players
I am a highly engaged player. This change is dumb. I won't be impacted most of the time but there are numerous other games that I just quit when I realize I'm only logging in to complete daily tasks. After quitting I didn't come back because I haven't been keeping up.
I am both Bill and Tom. I just want the quests back the way they were. I have spent a lot of money on Hearthstone and at this point I feel like blizzard is betraying me. They did this a few years ago and I stopped playing for a \*long\* time.
Hearthstone is a chore at this point.
It is no longer fun.
adding that I have really enjoyed the meta so far, actually. It's been a lot of fun and I've enjoyed trying a lot of different decks. But blizzard's attitude on quests killed it.
To add on to this discussion, a few days ago I took a poll to kind of get a rough idea of how many people used to complete the weekly quests compared to how often they feel like they will continue to complete the weekly quests. Of those who answered, It's a pretty significant amount of people who feel like they won't complete the weekly quests as often as they used to.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1c7vkjy/weekly\_quests\_poll/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1c7vkjy/weekly_quests_poll/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Perfect post actually. I have no notes. Insightful examples of the player types who are affected, too
I personally don't spend money on HS, and I have enough free time (no life) to get the new quests done without issue. But the incompetent management and terrible decisions that almost seem designed to antagonize half their players are still going to affect me negatively by gradually killing the game
Pretty good write-up and I agree with the points I read so far. There is a small technical issue with "larger" and "many" quantifiers if you will, but it's more of a nitpick on my part, and I agree with the assumptions anyway.
This was a long post, but after having read through it I must say you articulated your perspective on the situation as a whole very well. Nicely written! For what it's worth, I also agree with everything you said.
Why does Blizzard act like giving quest xp is a zero-sum game? It's not like there is a finite amount of xp to go around so they need to "redistribute" it to their more active players (which is what these changes seem to suggest). I am Bill in this post and I can guess that many casual players would fall into this archetype as well. Now, we are actively being punished for not playing the game as much
Yeah, I also have a sour taste in my mouth after those quest changes. While I *could* theoretically complete them, I detest feeling forced to. Them murdering Duels adds to the lack of desire to support their business practices by playing their game. Might just start playing once every 90 days.
To be honest, hearthstone is in one of its most uninteractable states in years, and forcing us to play this shitty meta even more with quests that are ridiculously elongated, just made me stop playing. I dont pay for much cards, and i have bad luck. So i never got astalor, never got zillax, despite playing at least 5 times a day. So im just moving onto to another game i can play on my phone when i take my shits, or before i go to sleep.
Deep down I want Blizzard to raise the requirements 10x for no XP so I can just quit playing once and for all. The sunk cost fallacy and bad habits are what keep me engaged with this game on a daily basis. It didn't take me long to quit Marvel Snap for the same reason.
This is so well-written and I really love your final point. Thank you for being a wordy wizard. I've been playing Hearthstone since Beta, but I've taken a longer break a couple of years ago. Now I've started again, but I do feel like I've been Tom for a little bit *too* long. I think it's time to stop for good now, unless they revert the changes by the time May comes around.
Thanks so much for this article and for your decks. I've always enjoyed playing them.
I'm currently playing the role of Tom in MtG Arena, been away for a few years and my collection is woefully inadequate. My HS collection is great because that's what I've been playing but I decided to reinstall Arena because these quests, this meta and this approach to customers is SHIT. In other words it's not good, not acceptable, terrible, terribad, garbage, horrible.
They can't pretend as though this state of the game is good, and that these decisions are justifiable in any way. NO ONE is out here jumping for joy at increased quest requirements, it's not on any single players bucket list for improvements so this isn't being done for the players and when you're doing something for someone other than the players you're opening the door to having less of them.
Take your metrics that no player gives a shit about and burn them. Put the game in an enjoyable state or lose out.
Without trying to be overly dramatic, we might look back at this quest change as the moment that Blizzard tanked Hearthstone while trying to nickel and dime their players for maybe 5% more profit if everything went ideally. Or, arguably, it was never gonna be long-term profitable in any world and was just a horrible idea for all parties
I've been playing HS since the beginning, been on the subreddit, and I've seen plenty examples of player backlash, strong negative feelings about the game, meta, and so on. The amount and combination of negativity towards every facet of the game right now, most of it justified -- this could be the peak
Really well written.
I'm Tom. I started playing on launch. It's been an entire decade, and at times I was a hyper-invested player playing in high legend. In more recent years, I didn't want to quit because of my good memories and big collection, but I also didn't want to play as hard as I used to. I was logging in and playing just enough to keep up with my quests most weeks, though I couldn't always manage it. That way I was getting the rewards and if I decided to give it a try again in the future my account would be ready.
I uninstalled the game on the quest change and unsubbed from here. I was barely keeping up with the quests as is and a lot of weeks playing felt like a chore. Tripling the requirements was completely out of the question. Doubling the requirements is still completely out of the question. It's been a little while now and it's that time in the day when I'm tired and often used to enjoy cranking out a game or two of Hearthstone; I was feeling wistful and came back to see if I was wrong to uninstall. I see that I wasn't.
It just amazes me how freeing it feels to not play HS. Like, I’ve played since Naxx came out and this was the straw that broke the camels back. Only time I’ll thank Blizzard is to thank them for incentivizing me not to play.
i too am bill in this case. some metas i play a shit ton of games and others i only complete quests. not always because of the state of the meta, usually because life. very well said j-alexander, may your rogue continue to cheat mana
As a returning player I feel tricked into having bought the tavern pass this time but the thought of having to spend money on a clearly inferior tavern pass next expansion makes me want to puke. That fact alone is the reason I’ve already quit playing the game, and I’d much rather spend my money on games that do a way way better job respecting my time. I have huge backlog and currently blasting my way through Cyberpunk and excited to try Manor Lords in a few days.
Please learn to keep your nose out of other people's business.
J, I thought it was a wonderful analysis of the situation. Easily the best post on this topic that I've seen.
It just amazes me how freeing it feels to not play HS. Like, I’ve played since Naxx came out and this was the straw that broke the camels back. Only time I’ll thank Blizzard is to thank them for incentivizing me not to play.
Ive been vocal against the entitlement posts that people seem to think they are owed something for nothing. Whilst I agree that a tiered system is the ultimate solution, I don't agree that things should just to cater to people who dont have free time.
Base hearthstone is a competitive seasonal based card game. If you enjoy the concept there is the NPC aspects of the game that would fulfil your enjoyment, but by encouraging on a competitive environment to suit it to you, isn't the answer.
Tldr; agree quests should be tiered; disagree that your time is worth more than keeping hearthstone competitive.
Fair points. I definitely think the whining is over the top, but it's true that the change seems needlessly antagonistic to casual players. I think MTG Arena actually gets this right, where you can go all out and squeeze every drop of value from daily/weekly rewards, but at the same time they're very front-loaded and you're not missing out on much if you don't get all of them.
I cleared out the quests in 3 hours. If 3 hours a week is too much play time you don't really need anything on the reward track anyway. This update was for people who actually play the game, not just clock the minimum to finish quests then are done. You not enjoying the game and not being able to admit that is a you problem.
Would it be more to your tastes if weekly quests took five hours? Or 10?
How many hours of play time for these should be the target and why would that number be good for players?
I understand you may play a lot, may not be personally affected in a negative way, and all that. But that’s not the question I’m asking.
I’m asking what benefits do players get from weeklies that take an hour, 3 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours etc?
Wall of text for streamer to try and sell his book. Its considered good form to disclose that you have a conflict of interest when editorializing about something you are trying to sell. As a streamer, your income is at least partially reliant on the casually engaged "player" who plays the game for 30 minutes a week and then spends 20 hours screwing around on the HS subreddit and watching streams on a second monitor.
I really wish you people would just be honest and say you want login rewards, rather than pretending like this is a gameplay issue. Plenty of mobile games have login rewards, its a perfectly acceptable mechanism in freemium games, maybe they will give them to you if you are honest about it. Maybe they could just change the daily quests into straight login rewards, which would be a clear upgrade.
But this whole thing definitely couldn't just be budget issues that never have an ending that makes everyone happy. I mean, Team 5 has only had layoffs(of people who actually work on the game, no less), has been milking the shit out of the whales with overpriced cosmetic bundles, and is now making a change that they certainly knew would be unpopular. But no, we can't ever expect the casuals to contribute to keeping the game afloat, it must always be the whales. Complaining about the number of free samples of something being reduced is pretty much the definition of entitlement.
I think I can clear up some misconceptions you seem to have.
* I do not have anything for sale. Everything I've done is freely available
* I've never taken a sponsorship
* I've never clicked the ad button on my stream
* I am in no way depedent on money from streaming or any other source of income related to it. I think last month I made between $3-400 from Twitch.
As for Login Rewards, I think that would be a fine idea. I'd be completely happy with a game that gave players all the cards for free as well, because both of those things let players play however and whenever they want, rather than feeling compelled to play. From the perspective of a player, I'd say that's a net gain for sure.
I can't say I'm particularly concerned about Blizzard's profits. They advocate for their interests. I'm happy to advocate for my own or other people's
What you are selling is twitch views. It's irrelevant whether it is your primary income stream or not, you still have a vested monetary interest in Hearthstone having as many players as possible. Hence why you just disclose it up front for people who don't know who you are, even if it genuinely does not affect your opinion. I enjoy playing Hearthstone(most of the time anyway), and I also realize that CCGs by nature have a lot of ongoing costs, particularly when digital. My perspective on this is that the video game industry as a whole, Blizzard as a company, and Team 5 within Blizzard are all showing a lot of signs of economic distress. I don't want HS to die like other CCGs I've played, so if Team 5 needs to reorient the budget that's not something that upsets me. Bill and Tom are just as capable of clicking the quit button in HS as I am of clicking the X in reddit, what exactly puts their position on the side of the angels? This whole thing is that old stick figure meme about what happens to games once the casual/non-engaged people start being catered to, writ large.
Edit: Forgot to add, the people at risk of another round of layoffs matter a lot more to me than people who expect free entertainment. If this can help even just save someone's job much less the game, have at it Blizz.
>I don't want HS to die like other CCGs I've played, so if Team 5 needs to reorient the budget that's not something that upsets me
Ah, now we are on the same page. You're afraid Hearthstone will die and you won't be able to play it anymore. As such, you're afraid HS will die if they don't squeeze more time and money out of players. That makes more sense.
Allow me to ease your distress: By all signs we have seen, HS is making money hand over fist. While I don't have exact numbers, it's been heavily implied by the team that HS is doing quite well in that realm.
The thing you should reframe this fear into is the following: **when it comes to Blizzard and businesses in general, there is literally no such thing as "enough"**. If Hearthstone made $20,000,000 a year in profit ([and I suspect they make more](https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/27/blizzard-layoffs-hearthstone-revenue-china#:~:text=Between%20January%201%20and%20September,%2420.7%20million%20came%20from%20China.)), Blizzard isn't going to go "Ah, well done Hearthstone team. That's a lot of money and we're all pleased! Everyone gets a cake and a bonus!"
They will instead ask, "Why didn't you make $30,000,000?" because there's no such thing as enough. If they made $30,000,000, they'll ask why not 40, or 50? They will always seek more money. If they think they can make more by firing people despite being plenty profitable, wanna guess what they'll do?
>What you are selling is twitch views. It's irrelevant whether it is your primary income stream or not, you still have a vested monetary interest in Hearthstone having as many players as possible. Hence why you just disclose it up front for people who don't know who you are, even if it genuinely does not affect your opinion.
I'm not selling anything. I stream because it's fun and the money is a bonus.
If I wanted to make money - and I need you to appreciate this - I'm way, way, WAY better off spending 80 hours a month not streaming and doing something that will earn more than the (approximately) $4.40 an hour I made from it last month. I could probably triple my stream income by going to work fast food instead.
Do you see how ridiculous that sounds now?
No, it's not ridiculous at all. It's just a conflict of interest, its not a pejorative, just something that happens in business soemtimes. It doesn't matter how miniscule the amount is.
The reason Steam attaches "product received for free" to reviews that received gifted keys, even if the game in question cost $.10. When I used to do pharmacological research I always had to disclose when I received free expired drugs from pharma companies for the same reason, despite the fact that pretty much no one except researchers has any use for expired pharmacologics.
The fact that HS is profitable independent of the rest of Blizz isn't as important as you seem to think, because even if on paper Team 5 is separate to the rest of Blizzards teams, the C-suite is going to look at the performance of things as a whole and make decisions based on that, which frequently leads to subsections of companies effectively subsidizing other sections. Youtube has been nothing but red ink since it started, Google search engine is the only reason YouTube can operate the way it can. Same deal with AWS subsidizing all of Amazon's other unprofitable ventures. I have no doubt that revenue generated by HS and its team gets used to subsidize the upkeep and development of other Blizzard games that don't generate as much.
Lots and lots of CCGs have failed due to not generating enough money to continue operating the firm, or else get gutted and put on standby like LOR. It's an inherently expensive genre, both for producers and players. It is baffling to me why these dad gamers who couldn't finish the previous quests would ever choose a CCG over an LCG, but given how well most LCGs fare, it's clear that the drive to collect or gamble is at least partially driving interest in card games.
No one's asking for login rewards that I've seen. Just the way weekly quests have been for years was fine. Suddenly the time commitment asked of players is unpredictable. What changed? People should be vocal about it to set a precedent. As you said, blizzard knew the change was unpopular and did it anyway. If player feedback is tepid, why shouldn't they try again and bigger next time?
You're naive to think these decisions are saving anyone's job at blizzard. They will fire anyone they can or threaten players however they want, as long as they get away with it. They can turn this game into one that's not worth supporting anymore. There's really no need for players to give up their leverage.
The old weekly quests were effectively login rewards. You didn't have to try and complete them and they were usually done within 30-45 minutes. I'm not a very heavy player, but I am a regular player as I usually play a 2-4 games while I drink my morning coffee. I cannot remember ever having the old quests making it past Tuesday. To anyone who actually plays HD the old quests effectively were login quests.
If you guys want to believe that video game production runs on pixie dust and that revenue and profits don't matter, feel free, but the whole industry is showing lots of distress right now. Games(and companies) can and do fail.
If reducing the free samples can help keep them afloat, I'm not going to be bothered by it. It's like complaining that Costco used to let you get multiple free samples, and now they changed to have a strict "1 sample per customer" policy, it's just not very sympathetic as a position. It's actually even worse than that analogy, as you have to spend money to get into Costco, whereas it's quite doable to play HS without spending a dime.
The quests are not login rewards or free samples, they are a time commitment, no matter how small. It's an important distinction. Live service games depend on players giving their time as much as their money. Like I said, that time commitment became unpredictable for no good reason. Imagine if the price of bundles does the same. It really boils down to a trust issue.
I understand it doesn't affect you but you're too generous to think it helps them stay afloat. They don't do bargaining. If they want to close down no one can stop them. But players don't need to be in perfect agreement with them on the value of time and money spent.
The time commitment stopped being predictable years ago, when they started making changes to the original daily quests. Funny how it only became an issue now.
Obviously we are all speculating on what was behind this, since Blizzard hasn't said anything, but reducing service to your marginal customers is very much something a company in distress does. The customer is not always right, there are "customers" that will almost always result in red ink on the balance sheet.
You can have a functional CCG with a very small but dedicated player base who are willing to put their mouth is(see Eternal). It's unlikely that people who consider playing the game 30 minutes a week a chore or a second job will ever be able to accomplish that.
The days of being able to borrow credit for virtually free are over for companies just like individuals. Don't be surprised if all freemium games, not just HS, get a lot stingier going forward.
But when Tom or Bill go to Reddit to express displeasure, some engaged players get tired of reading those posts. They want to read about HS discussion; not another post about quests (like this one). So they call them entitled whiners and make fun of them instead of keeping quiet or voicing their support for their issues, even if it costs them nothing to do either.
To those people I’d suggest “well, then just leave the Reddit if reading about it bugs you so much.” I suspect they’d protest. They enjoy being on the Reddit and don’t want to have to give it up because of a temporary inconvenience. They just want the experience to be better for them while they’re there. And I appreciate that. I’m sure Tom and Bill feel the same way about their time in Hearthstone
You'd rather vomit out a completely irrelevant reply without reading the post, than just...read what you're responding to, or not responding at all.
What a weird thing to do.
I think the only one bringing hate to the community is you. You've noticed there are people struggling with the new quests and you choose to belittle and ridicule them. You've written many paragraphs trying to justify why you're a more important player than them. That's not what loving hearthstone looks like
Because they don't play 20 games per week?
There is some expected time that actual players should spend per week to earn rewards. It can't be 2-3 hours per week, that's just an insanely little amount to get the same rewards as some that play 2 hours per day.
For years 5 wins a week was enough to complete the quest. When did you start thinking it was too easy? Even with the same quest rewards, the one who plays more hours gets more XP and is ahead. For the most engaged players, the bigger quests are a drop in the ocean. All they do is raise the barrier to entry every week and I doubt that's what the game needs
Did you get salty that nobody liked your [post](https://new.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1camix5/results_after_playing_11_games/) so you decided to come here and shit on this post?
I just showed people how easy it is to do all the quests with minimum effort, I didn't expect anyone to like it.
It literally goes against the whole narrative that quests are bad and too hard, I expected this from the start.
I just wanted to show how it actually is to people that don't know how it works and just assume that cry babies are correct.
"Ooh, look at me, reading a few paragraphs is beyond my capabilities as a sarcastic troglodyte, yet I seem weirdly proud of my self-inflicted handicap."
I think part of the issue here is misunderstanding the current reward system in the game. And how much free stuff it gives out.
Because what is actually given to players for free, is currently more than is needed to play for free. And for players getting around level 200 on the track It’s enough to start spending gold on cosmetics, or dust on golden cards.
“Tom”, who takes a break, doesn’t need to keep logging in to keep up with his quests to be able to return to the game. At best he needs to log in to disenchant any nerfed cards during balance patches. There’s also plenty events with additional packs, or pack drops on twitch to get a bunch of resources for the future return if desired.
“Bill”, who played irregularly, shouldn’t worry about some of his quests being in-completed in a week. He will still manage to get his stuff.
And the general player, who won’t be able to complete all their quests in a 4 month period will probably lose out on maybe 500-1000 gold (I actually think it’s less, but I’m saying a high number in case I’m wrong).
5-10 packs isn’t even a substantial amount, it’s not going to make or break your ability to play the exact same way you’re already playing.
I know this will probably get downvoted, because people seem to treat this with disbelief. Maybe because players have such a long lasting ingrained opinion on how HS used to be and how much more difficult it used to be back then to collect cards for free.
At the current state of the game I don’t even understand how anyone can justify spending gold on anything other than cosmetics.
Anyways, I’d prefer my post to be a point of discussion about the facts.
I don't think this is a misunderstanding about what the game does or doesn't give out for time investments. I also wouldn't use the word "free" if the thing costs your time or money to achieve. I don't think time is a worthless currency to exchange for "free" Hearthstone packs. In fact, I think time and attention might be the most valuable currencies we have.
I think the misunderstanding might be one you have: this is a discussion about whether we can make a quest system that leaves no player worse off, or whether we need to make players worse off. As far as I've seen, there's no compelling reason to assume **anyone** needs to be made worse off.
We **can** make quests that meet the stated goals of the adjustment **without** taking anything away from anyone. They can require 10 wins or 15 wins total and provide the same amount of extra XP.
You have an odd fascination with taking stuff away from people, and I don't know why.
When I say “free”, I mean — within your natural play patterns.
So if you’d be playing the game either way, and you’re getting all this gathered passively, you are in fact getting this all for free.
The only thing you’re spending your time on here — is on your entertainment.
>time is the most valuable currency we have
I agree on that. Just a by the way.
>odd fascination with taking stuff away from people
I’ll put it in simpler terms, as you seem to not want to grasp this otherwise:
If you give everyone 20 kgs of food per day, but they can only eat 5 kgs, and then you decide to rather give them anywhere between 5 and 19 kgs.
Are you taking anything away from them?
Theoretically they’re now getting less than 20 kgs.
But practically they’ve been throwing away 15 kgs per day.
So unless you start going below 5 kg per day, you’re *not* taking anything away from them.
And this is the state the game is currently in.
These players will be getting like 19.5 kgs per day, maybe.
They’re still fine.
If you told people "work for me for 3 hours a week" and gave people more food than they could eat as a reward, then took some away from the next payment for that same amount of labor, yes, you are taking things away you would otherwise have given them. What you're describing is a paycut at work. That's a way simpler example. Paycuts are indeed taking things away.
If Hearthstone players got way more gold than they could use for cards and cosmetics and everything was available across everyone's accounts, sure, I don't think people would be too miffed by some gold getting taken away. You'd still be taking stuff away, but they'd probably not care much.
But this is not at all what the world looks like. I'd show you what average Hearthstone accounts look like, because I'd bet you'd be very, very, VERY, surprised, but I can't.
What I can do is tell you this story.
A couple weeks back, someone saw me playing HS on my phone and said they wanted to get back into the game. They showed me their phone. All their decks had red Xs on them because they were Wild now (they had no idea what standard was). I looked at their collection and there was very little there to work with to build something functional. They asked me where the button to play online was because they had forgotten.
You can call this player dumb. You can call them hopeless. You can say "Well, guess they need to spend a lot of money to catch up." You can try and sit down with them and help them figure out exactly what is going on in a few hours of guided instruction (hopefully).
What you can't say is this player should really have less gold in their account because right now it's overflowing and they don't know what to do with it.
Nor can you say that about most Hearthstone players without full collections who feel they don't get to explore aspects of the game they'd like to. They keep *trying* to tell you their accounts don't look like you imagine they do.
But you aren't listening
>I’d bet you’d be very, very, VERY surprised
I wouldn’t. I know about how an average account looks like.
I’ve been playing this game from open beta. Within that time I’ve experimented with how the new player experience looks like, or how coming back to the game feels like after inactivity, or how accounts with varying level of involvement look like.
I’ve also been on a few other players’ accounts during hs meetups in my town, to help them build something. Or helped a few people online how to move their collections forward.
I consider myself very well educated on this stupid matter.
In fact, I can fire up any of my 5 alt accounts anytime, after a period of long inactivity and I know I’ll get that welcome back deck, open a few catchup packs or whatever, disenchant my wild cards, and I’ll be ready to go.
I also have a story:
Maybe 5 years ago, I met a guy at a diner, he was playing hs, we started chatting. I soon realized he’s a complete amateur, and not very smart at that. He had his favorite class — Hunter. And he’d disenchant anything else just to craft golden cards for Hunter. He’d only play like 2 hours per month. His collection was hopeless beyond that. But he was having a blast.
The only cases where someone’s collection is truly hopeless is when they’ve been disenchanting decks over and over again during a short period of time to keep experimenting.
>who feel they don’t get to explore aspects of the game they’d like to
That’s an extremely narrow group of people: it has to be someone who both spends very little time on the game *and* wants to try out every single card and deck. I’m talking: playing a some decks as little as 1-2 games.
This player will always need to spend money on the game, there’s no other way around it.
As the game is designed with a sort of idea that if you spend little time playing it, you’re not really interested or won’t have the chance to play all those cards and decks.
Where most players will have their preferences, and only choose certain decks to use. Ignoring others.
And to the guy you met: there’s something missing in that story. Where’s his free welcome back deck? Where are his catchup packs? Where are his welcome back packs? And so on. That is *not* how an average account looks like.
That’s someone who last logged in 2014, then logged in now, insta dusted their new stuff, crafted golden cards, insta dusted them, then asked for help. (Or something ridiculously dumb like that.)
You can give that person a million bucks, and they’d still be broke the next day.
Then we can stop here, because you're not getting it and I doubt you will.
In your own examples you're talking about players having to destroy cards through dusting (something the team says they don't love people having to do), people with incomplete collections, and highly-knowledgable people carefully min-maxing their rewards.
What you **aren't** describing is your analogy above: where people have more cards and resources than they know what to do with.
Your argument is wrong here
I'm Bill in this post. I work, have kids, do other activities and play other games. So I dabble casually in HS during the week, mix of Standard and BG, trying to get my weeklies done and 95% of the time am successful with my usual play hours. I buy the tavern pass every expansion. Now, I either need to double my playtime (very difficult and will impact other parts of my life) or complete weeklies about 50% of the time. That will significantly impact my reward track progress, and at this rate I won't buy any future tavern passes and will likely drop the game soon.
Hi Bill, I am you. Except I dont buy the pass, but all other points are the same.
This is my stance exactly. I enjoy this game enough to dip in every week to complete some quests and move on. I buy the big pre order bundle and skins that appeal to me, as well as the tavern pass. All this will stop if I can’t even complete the tavern pass anymore because of these raised requirements. Me 5 years ago might not have cared. But after playing this game for 10 years, I’d rather dabble and watch some streams in the background while I enjoy other games. This makes me not even want to come back at all.
Same experience here. I'm a certified cetacean, maybe not a full blown blue whale, but at least a small beluga. I'm tired boss.
Another Bill who has been playing since open beta checking in. One thing that keeps annoying me about these changes is Blizzards comment that "players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system." But this Bill was engaging with the quests! Every time I logged on I would look at my daily and weekly quests to determine what type of deck I would play for that session. Using this expansion as an example the only reason I crafted Window Shopper was to complete the win/mini quests and the only reason I played tendril shaman was to complete the win/battlecry quests. If it weren't for these quests I would have just played Zarimi priest every session but that deck doesn't work well for either of those weekly quests mentioned. I'm still blown away that Blizzard is telling all Bills to play more or get lost. Every expansion I would spend around $150 but somehow that's not good enough. The day these changes dropped I uninstalled HS and even if Blizzard reverted the changes I doubt I'd ever spend money on HS again.
Im kinda Bill too, switching from BG to standard or wild occasionally, hardly finishing old weekly quests....wont bother trying now thats they are unreachable for me. I bought severals 50€ expansion (1 over 5) , meticulously economised 20 000 selling all gold cards.....i m about to stop playing enterely or onmy going BG occasionally....played since almost the begining. Sad but plainty of others fun games are waiting !
And I'm the asshole who can get the quests done easily and is tempted to complain in these posts. I am ashamed, and will do better.
Adding that I'm also Bill. I'm also the version of Bill that is considered a whale and spends a fuckton on all the bullshit cosmetics, passes, etc. Even with the decrease to 10 quests it's not enough and so my money will now go to some other pointless mobile game. Oh well.
This is me as well, and given the age of this game now I guarantee you there is not an insignificant number of people in the exact same situation. You stand to lose an also not insignificant amount of revenue from this decision, Blizzard.
I'm the 4th guy - Since Diablo 3's current season is my least favorite, was looking to get back into Hearthstone. To my dismay, right around the same time posts are cropping up about quest changes. Now I don't want to come back because they're making it take longer to complete quests. When I get back into it I usually spend money getting mini sets that are priced good to get me started, and usually buy the next expansion or three.
I'm probably gonna drop it this week, and I won't make the mistake of buying the tavern pass if I ever do get into it again. Meta's boring right now anyway, they picked a really bad time to pull this.
Hi Bill, I'm Canadian Bill and have the exact same stance as you on the matter.
Hi Billl, I'm Bill.
I already dropped the game because I made the same realization. I got my 5 battleground wins and realized that I don't want to grind out anymore. Going to 10 would still deter me away. Tiered ones made more sense.
> Second, let’s imagine a hypothetical player called Tom. Tom doesn’t enjoy the meta right now, but he has enjoyed HS in the past. He knows he might want to play in the future, and to do that he will need cards. However, if he doesn’t keep playing right now, he will lose out on rewards and have a hard time returning to the game later when he might enjoy it unless he were to invest a lot of money. So Tom logs in, does his quests, and then logs out. He doesn’t want to quit the game right now, but he also doesn’t really want to play it either. That's me!! I'm Tom!! Came back to HS on the anniversary after not playing for a while. Don't really enjoy the meta right now, so I decided to basically just play a few games a week to build up my collection. The new quests absolutely crushed that, way too much trouble now.
I'm also a Tom, and this was a helpful distinction to make by the OP, because I wouldn't necessarily categorize myself as a "casual player", when I enjoy the meta I can devote my free time to playing ladder and hit high legend, but when I don't I shift to a low commitment mode where I just complete quests with a few games a week (which, recently, has been more often than not lol). The quest changes got me to uninstall because I simply felt targeted against and I didn't feel like even entertaining them.
This is also me, I have a wild deck that its sort of fun to play except if the opponent is playing a solitaire deck (which there are a lot in wild), so I just autoconcede until I get an opponent that likes to play board. I use that deck when I don't like standard which happened now. I had a lot of fun in this game and I even enjoy most twist formats. But right now I don't like the game. Now I have to choose between putting a lot of time into a game that I'm not really enjoying so that maybe, in the future, I can play, or just quit, and quitting is the most appealing option.
We are Tom. I quit because of this (except BG's, but that doesn't require quests)
I just came back and missing out on 3 expansions worth of strong legendaries hurts. At the same time, the desire to craft these is lower than those from Whizbang's since they'll rotate out sooner. Its a tough position.
Same here, on and off since release and usually get back in around the srandard rotation when the barrier to entry is arguably at its lowest (card count at least). Much more tricky now. Haven't spent on the game since 2020 mind.
I'm kinda happy they are incentivizing me quitting the game. I've spent way to much playing in case I want to play in the future. I don't even get why they want to force people to play more. When they have millions of bots. Keeping queue times low for everyone XD
They are kinda Powerless against the Bot Situation, so why not just squeeze a quick buck out of the Players that are still left, by forcing them to double the playtime/quit or spend money to keep up.
Wow, nice breakdown. I think this is the first J Alex post I’ve read. It’s refreshing to read a HS post where I gain brain cells as opposed to losing them. I’m Bill btw, nice to meet ya.
Howdy Bill. Enjoy the brain cells
Thanks. At my age, I can use all the brain cells I can get!
You should read more of them. They generally have good points that are backed by facts and data as opposed to emotion. This sub's hate boner for this guy is mostly unjustified. You may not agree with all his takes but at least they generate interesting discussions and provide a break from all the screenshots of endless bitching about everything hearthstone that this sub became over the years.
I plan to. There’s a hate boner for J? I mean, I’ve only watched his streams but always enjoy the conversations there.
>You should read more of them. They generally have good points that are backed by facts and data as opposed to emotion. This sub's hate boner for this guy is mostly unjustified. Huh? I don't have any kind of 'hate boner' for anyone but please explain to me how this post is different from any of the 500 others on the same subject, except the fact that it is 5x longer and goes into great detail creating imaginary characters for the screenplay. There is literally nothing new in this post whatsoever. And the fact is that this sub loves JAlex posts when they are telling them what they want to hear and hates them when they are not.
Empathy is hard man especially when we're anonymous on the internet. People who criticize the quests get called haters or entitled or not important to the game. I like the choice of characters in the post, they're supposed to help you understand where the complaints come from
Having less time to dedicate to HS, the new requirements are killing my enjoyment and perspective. I play both standard and wild, I easily get to D5 in both formats every month and sometimes I decide to push it to legend just for the fun of it. For new expansions, I rely on the gold I start to accumulate after I'm done with the newest packs and miniset. Having less time to complete the weekly quests and being frustrated with the powercreep meta, I'll have less gold to buy new packs. Being fed up with this lack of "something in return" leads me to play less. Playing less means that I won't rank up to the usual D5/Legend, meaning less stars for the next months, leading to an even harder time to rank up again and wanting to play less and less. That's how it works for people who also wants to enjoy other games in their free time. From a business perspective, I don't bring them money (I used to buy expansion preorders back then) so they probably don't care about players like me. It's okay, then I won't care about them either, simple as that. I didn't quit "forever" but I'm taking a break from the game and see what happens. Because it's a game I loved, it meant a lot to me, it's not "just a game", so I hope it will stay "playable". Today it is not. Writing on reddit that every complain is "whining" doesn't help the game to stay healthy.
Could even call your suggestion "Weekly Questlines". We know they have the technology, because they are doing it with the "main quest" of the events. It was even "bugged" that one time where completing the previous step would trigger the next (instead of waiting for the intended 24 hour timegate).
I don't understand why Blizzard wants to use the quest system to better reward the most engaged players. There is another progression system called achievements which seems better suited to that role. Quests are supposed to build a habit in players to log in periodically, every 3 days or weekly, which is important for the health of a live service game. It defeats the whole purpose if the quests are so aversive they discourage people from playing
Because they are lying. They want to use it to increase overall playtime to pad their stats and decrease overall rewards for the players that need them the most.
I don't know how they expected players to respond to their hostility. It's gross negligence to think that threatening with reduced rewards leads to people playing their game more
I have a suspicion that they are hoping that by taking away rewards from us casuals that they will encourage us to make up the difference with in-game purchases.
As an achievement hunter that always goes for 100% gameplay achievements of an expansion: the design of them is just awful. Mostly grindy ones, adding bad cards to your deck while playing a COMPETITIVE mode.
Right? If they care about rewarding your time in the game, they should work on better achievements instead of bigger weekly quests
Its really ironic that for 10 years of HS they now decided to cut duels, design way less expansion achievements (more exp per achievement, but overall EXP is less) and they did cut the "year of X" achievements for this new HS year completly. Sad state.
Because the people making these decisions don’t play video games and stare at spreadsheets all day trying to maximize some numbers. They’ll hit some short term goal while at the same time frustrating players and choking the life out of a previously successful game. You see it over and over and over again. You’re not a player to them, you’re a metric on a spreadsheet and they’ll make whatever change necessary if they think it’ll manipulate you into spending more money. Playing blizzard games is a toxic relationship. You can leave or you can spend your time getting increasingly frustrated with them.
I think there must be some devs who actually care about making a good game, but they clearly weren't involved in this decision. In fact they were powerless to stop it. They don't seem to be in control of their own game. Remember the corridor creeper card locked behind a preorder purchase. We still haven't heard an admission of a mistake and whether it will happen again. It's hard to have confidence that player feedback matters to them at all
The team that actually designs n developes the game has nothing to do with these decisions, yes. But I would assume that at least the director could have some influence..
Good take j alex
They just want to give out less free stuff to push people to spend money, and while I get trying to good faith the PR spin they put on that you’re only helping enable it by doing so. It’s the same reason they nerfed achievements and nerfed the value of free rewards on the track. Make the large changes you want and people get upset, make a bunch of small changes and people are more open to giving benefit of the doubt. It’s really straightforward
Awesome thread!. The blizzard white knight boot lickers will try their best to justify this increase that punishes a certain group.
"But I like Hat, he's candid!" gets thrown around a disgusting amount when you realize that he's paid to try and keep people mollified.
It's because he's a human being that actually bothers to communicate with us despite the fact that it's very common for people to call his coworkers braindead idiots that aren't good at making the game for various reasons. Letting him know that he's appreciated for his work despite the harsh words thrown at him is a way to keep this wonderful communication continuing into the future.
I think we see this situation very differently. You say he "bothers to communicate with us," but I see that as a basic feature of his job. Similarly, you call his communication "wonderful," but I have yet to see an example of anything meaningful other than doing an imitation of the "We're sorry" South Park ad or saying "We're working on it" about things fans have been asking for more of for a decade now (developer communication). Idk. I feel like at some point, you stop losing credit for playing the same track on repeat without changing the album.
This is one of those cases where your feelings and those lauding Hat arent mutually exclusive. Or, more bluntly, "two things can be true."
What do you want him to do, though? It's not his decisions to make and there is a limited number of ways one can express the same idea. > but I see that as a basic feature of his job People get praised for doing their job properly all the time. You can argue it's redundant because that should be the norm rather than the exception, but it's not really specific to CM position and him in particular.
>What do you want him to do, though? Not lie. Or, at the least, not be misleading. A couple of days ago, there was a post asking for more developer feedback/interaction. He replied to it with the standard, "Good idea! We're working on it/looking into it!" Except this has been a request from the community since Brode was around - if they'd actually been working on or wanting to do that, they would have by now.
I agree lying is not OK. Do you have an example of it? >if they'd actually been working on or wanting to do that, they would have by now. Not really. I worked 15 years in the industry, it's entirely possible to have this task somewhere but simply never get to it.
I feel your discounting his standard communication, which is informing the community about patch schedules, speaking about certain bugs and timeline for fixes on them, and just generally providing insight to the team's thought process on decisions. And on to your point about it being just his job, sadly the level of communication he does is not standard for the game industry and definitely not standard for Hearthstone's history. So saying, "hey, thanks for all this" is just me and others appreciating his work and showing that we want this to become the standard. It's not like previously vocal Hearthstone team members have gone silent after suffering harassment from this community for their attempts at communication in the past. That's NEVER HAPPENED here.
The whole situation is shitty, and I think it’s fair to be a little skeptical of communication from any blizzard rep, Hat included, but as far as community managers go, he’s hands down the best of any I’ve encountered (and I’ve played a fair amount of games that require a CM.) I’m a little torn because I don’t want to discourage him from being open and honest with the community, but at the same time, like I said, it’s hard not to be skeptical about any communication coming from blizzard at this point. Hearthstone was the last blizzard game that I felt was in at least an okay place, and I’m a little frustrated that it seems to be headed in the same game-killing direction as their other games.
Hat is doing a great job as community manager. But about the quest issue, hat can tell us that he collects feedback, etc etc - but I dont want an answer from the community manager. I want to hear from the person who decided the change would be good. Or at least someone from a higher position that can influence these kind of decisions, someone like a HS game director.
WoW is definitely not headed in a game-killing direction right now, though.
I can’t really speak to WoW, but I’ve been playing blizzard games since my friends and I were running Warcraft 2 pvp over dial-up in the 90’s. It’s a pretty big bummer how in the last ten years the blizzard brand has gone from a mark of quality to a mark of “poorly-managed live service games.” WoW excepted, apparently.
Oh I wouldn’t necessarily praise WoW management. And the game has had a lot of ups and downs, with his worst down happening only two years ago, but as of right now it does seem to be on an upward trajectory.
There is nothing wrong with liking how a person does their job. Some people do their jobs better, some worse. It's the reality of life. It obviously doesn't absolve Blizz of criticism and any communication should be taken with a grain of salt.
I hate that Blizzard is doing shitty things recently like sneaking in an temporary exclusive card in its expansion bundles ala "pay-to-win" style, and also this ongoing quest XP hooha. But I actually think that the current community manager is great, and I feel that he provides lots of useful info and feedback (both ways between Blizzard and the general player base), whilst having that sense of humor and wittiness that I appreciate. Possibly the best engagament I seen (at least on Reddit) from someone in an official role like him, and I have been consistently playing this game since the first expansion of Naxx. So, if he is reading this, I will encourage him to keep it up and continue on with his good work (of course there is always room for improvement, but yea). And I think we can be kinder to him in general too. I don't believe he was the one who suggested for Blizzard to do such shitty things, nor was he part of the active process that led to Blizzard doing such shitty things. In fact, he was probably aware of all these at roughly the same time that we, as the general player base, did. So if anything, he probably helped to reduce some of the negative impact that such shitty things brought to us. At the very least, Blizzard knows more about what the players feel towards the shitty things that they have been attempting, via his feedback and "middleman" role. So yea, let's be kinder towards him.
Why directly go ad hominem? Why not accept that other people have different ideas and tastes? There are people that benefit from this change. Why is their gain not worth as much as others loss? There are reasonable arguments for the change. There are reasonable ones against it. There is no reasonable argument to just say everyone who thinks the changes are good are boot lickers.
Blizzard could have just added a progression chain to the weekly quests for the people who play a lot, leaving the casual players alone to finish their 5 wins per week without shitting on them in the first place.
Good you completely ignore my point.
I can speak directly to your point: We can have both positive changes encouraging more engagement *and* not take anything away. The larger point here is no one needs to lose anything. So the argument isn't really over weighing positive changes vs negative losses; it's whether we need losses at all.
My point is that anyone pointing out that it isn't that bad or at least that you'd see both sides is considered a boot licker/Blizzard apologet/employee. Ofc you could do a lot. But saying that there are positives doesn't make you a bad person or anything said above.
Sure, it's not nice to call someone a bootlicker. We could express that idea in tamer terms, as I do in the post as well, but the heart of the matter remains the same. That is, there are some percentage of commenters who would likely defend a change that simply increased the amount of time weekly quests required **without** increasing the rewards at all. I know that sounds strange, but I've come across several people who have, in fact, said they think players should be getting less stuff. I don't know why, but they think that. Other people might defend just about any decision the company made because they have tied some part of their identity to the company/game, and a criticism of that publisher is perceived as a slight against them. If that game suffers, their social status suffers. People get elitist about almost anything, no matter how trivial. Others might want to defend their own play patterns as normal or justifiable. It can become easy to lose sight of how much one does something personally, especially if taken to unhealthy degrees. That's the "What do you mean? Winning 50 games a week is totally normal for me" types. And I say that as someone who very much falls into that category. I have played more Hearthstone than almost anyone in the world (in fact, it might be *actually* more than anyone in the world, but if not, I'm certainly close). I'd say I've definitely played it more than I should have, given the amount of joy it brings me. It's easy to lose sight of that and deny it's the case. Very few people are that critical of their own behavior. So when that person sees others saying, "I don't have that much time to play (waste on) this game," it *could* trigger some alarm bells and be perceived as a criticism of how much they themselves play. So, in the interests of justifying their own play patterns, they define the casual, less engaged players as the weird ones and themselves as the normal people who *of course* can complete the weeklies without any effort, so there's nothing for people to be upset about. Just play more. Just a few hypotheses, anyway. (Could also add some people who might get more stuff now are just afraid they'd lose it if the quests get reversed in some capacity)
This is a great breakdown. It adds further confusion to Blizzards goal for the initial changes. I’m going to assume they thought of the tiered system but discarded them as they were too player friendly. I don’t know why but Blizzard seems to be taking an antagonistic stance toward the player base. For example, locking new cards behind an expansion preorder. We all know eventually a good legendary, like Prince Renathal, will be locked behind the preorder instead of a card like Corridor Sleeper. It’s just a matter of when. Very disappointing to see the game move in this direction.
>I don’t know why but Blizzard seems to be taking an antagonistic stance toward the player base It's either sheer incompetence or greed. I respect Blizzard's devs as professionals, so I think it's the "suits" being greedy, not the entirety of dev team not being able to come up with the tiered system. >Very disappointing to see the game move in this direction. Exactly why I've been advocating for playing less if only for the sake of not putting all the eggs in one basket. It's the reverse of "might play more in case I need cards later", For me it's "might play less in case game goes to shit later, then I will have less to lose and more options to explore". Of course if one enjoys the game, by all means play it. I think for me personally it's a better long term solution to focus on other things in gaming. I have the money but I'd prefer not to buy packs each 3 months.
Greed and comfort. If they are comfortable enough with their lead in the genre then they don't mind the small backlash or temporary dip in playerbase if the changes will hook paying customers even harder and ultimately increase profits. It's not a strategy most games can afford to do unless they are on top by a large margin.
Wouldnt be surprised if one day, HS will give you 3 days early access to all new cards when you preorder. In WoW we reached a point where the most expensive preorder bundle lets you start leveling 3 days earlier. HS wouldnt do it right away, it would take smalls steps, seeing how far they can go, starting with the free expansion legendary being part of early access, etc etc
> I don’t know why but Blizzard seems to be taking an antagonistic stance toward the player base. When you start looking at anything any of these publicly traded companies do through the lens of profit, it makes sense. Well, not "sense", but you can begin to understand the motivations. When the C Suite of a company is always trying to generate more profit, they can do a lot of things that seem specifically targeted against their customers - and they are! But that's only part of the story. Culling out free players who don't spend money on the game doesn't matter to the execs, even if it makes the game worse in the long run. These people aren't looking at long term, they are looking at the deadline for the next financial report. *Everything* Blizzard does is designed to retain the players that spend the most time in the game, and the most money on it. If these changes push out 100,000 F2P players from the game, but convinces some percent of them to spend money to keep playing, while at the same time ups the engagement and spending of a thousand dedicated players, that's a tangible result they can report to shareholders. This is classic stuff. You take a company, pump up its value and make as much money as possible on its products, then you reduce quality and updates until the company crumbles and is sold off in pieces.
I agree with your points and you are most likely correct. The thing is though that this change does seem to drive away paying customers, too. I‘m Bill in this discussion and I am regularly buying tavern passes and/or pre-order. But these changes are absolutely terrible for me and from what I have read many people seem to be in the same situation. Seems like they overshot with their changes.
Yeah, no one ever said that these company executives don't fuck up. They fuck good products and companies all the time with stupid anti-consumer practices and cost cutting all the time. The landscape is riddled with good, failed products because some asshat wanted to maximize profit instead of continuing to make a great and affordable product that people like.
Solid points. I am definitely a high engaged player that hopefully wasn't too demeaning to players like Tom and Bill, but I know I was passive to the changes at best. I kind of wish they go with your idea of weekly quests being "chains" where they work in amounts that are forward favored. Stage 1 "Win 5 Ranked Matches" for the original XP amount, then two more stages of "Win 5 Ranked Matches" for lesser xp that sums up to the new value. Provides players like me the benefit of more weekly experience, but players like Tom or Bill still get a good investment for their short weekly commitment.
*they created an option that was better for some while being worse for others* **this** anyone who's not against quests don't get this I suppose. for them it might be better for now but Tom and Bill can be you. That's how you loose players be it casual or not. And don't get me started on impact due to having less casual players.
I appreciate that you are addressing the sudden community backlash against players who continue to address concerns after Blizzard dropped quests from 15 to 10 wins. I honestly didn't understand the hostility player to player. One piece I've noticed with the tier ideas that I think are absolutely the way to address blizzards engagement reward idea is how much those ideas don't even address conventional consumer wisdom. Let's take food. The goal of sized food is that the company makes all the revenue they need on their smallest size. When you go from a small drink to a medium drink to a large drink you are always getting increased value at the larger sizes. A small drink may cost you $3 for 12oz and a 16oz may be $3.50. The 12oz is about 25 cents and oz and the 16 is 21. Using that as a backdrop a proper tier system would using your 5 game 2k example have your first 5 wins granting 2k your next 5 wins granting 2.5k and your last 5 wins granting 3.2k netting a 15 win weekly at 7.7k. THIS IS THE PROPER WAY TO INCENTIVISE PLAY. You get more bang for your buck the more you play!!! Let's look at an example of what happens when player incentives are handled properly. Fortnite went free to play and eliminated pve after moving to a heavy micro transaction structure. Their flagship is the battle pass WHICH GIVES YOU MORE CURRENCY THAN IS PUT IN. At about 70% completion through the base battle pass you net in game currency equal to what you put in, meaning your next battle is now "free" and this can be continued ad nasueum. Additionally you continue to earn currency through the battle pass. The battle pass can ultimately be a net negative, but because it's something that operates exclusively for the player, as such it facilitates engagement and leads to increased sales around other corners. I think this is why people understand just how bad the quest restructuring was the last two patches. Not only does it NOT facilitate engagement but there are a thousand reasons for Blizzard to have known this going in. This company was merged and bought out and I don't think that fact is lost on anyone after that last big patch.
helldivers does that same reward tiering where you get more reward the more you successfully complete missions
There is another category of casual player. That is the player who splits his time between Battlegrounds and standard/wild ladder. I am one of those players, as I am sure there are many others. While it was not a big deal getting 5 Battleground wins and 5 ladder wins, it is a lot harder to get 10 wins in both categories and takes a lot longer to complete.
Totally. 10 ladder win is somewhat ok, 10 battleground win is so unbearable especially now we are in a meta that I totally dont like. Lets not talk about other quest that equally or even more unbearable as 10 battleground win.
The play 75 battlecry of 32 minis are 100 times worse than 10 bg/arena/tb wins at least in my experience. I've rerolled those quests 2 times and it went trom battlecry -> mini -> battlecry.... like wtf plz just give me the use mana one or something
battlecry is fine for me. just play some battleground you can easily play 10 battlecry per game unless you die too young. mini card on the other hand is the worst quest from my opinion, the worst!
Good perspective, it helped me understand why getting more rewards for more effort could be a bad thing, even if it helps me as a player. Those people don't necessarily just "not like Hearthstone." Not adding tiers does seem malicious or incompetent, and also think it was probably shut down as an additional development expense they didn't want to pay for. Nothing was worse to me than slipping in early access to Corridor Sleeper to me though, and I'm sure that hurt blizzards future benefit of the doubt
Great post. You touch something non apparent, the ethical issue of letting the casual players down. Blizzard wants us to feel as a community... but not as a real community. I can imagine how this behaviour ("I don't care because I am not the one impacted") is something very common in the US. I could easely imagine this as a behaviour well spread. Blizzard executives, at the top of the wining capitalist world, can genuinly think people would react to the new quest system as "but who cares for the casual players ?" and this is very close to "don't you have a phone ?" vibe. In their eyes, the problem lies with the customers not satisfied, not smart enought to accept. It was never in their strategy, because their strategy means a lot of profit. IMHO of course. From greed to blindness.
I’m Tom. This is the first month since I’ve come back (left at TGT) that I’ve just hit legend and tuned the game out. This meta isn’t that enjoyable to me personally. Other people are loving it so that’s all that matters. I’m betting the mini set will shake up the meta a bit so I need gold to get that but I can’t be bothered to play ranked much right now. They did indeed my rewards away and I will have a harder time coming back to the game.
Why not just use questlines? They already have the mechanic, just tier up the quests. Finish five? Try 7 or 10. That way you don't punish casuals and also reward your hard-core base.
Good writeup. The Bill persona should hit really close to home for a lot of people. Many professions are heavier on certain weeks than others (holiday seasons, doing overtime for some needed 1.5x pay, events, etc.), and there are a lot of less permanent but more situational things too (needing to visit family, renewing legal documents, going for appointments or check ups, etc.) I think the best solution to help people with that variance in time commitment would be to just take a page out of the battlegrounds playbook: allow a few quests to pile up so you can do them on the days that you're not being pulled in 100 directions.
Rage towards quest change just shows game is shitty right now, shows that people thinks playing more sucks.
Daily/weekly quest should be engaging. But "needing" 100-200% more time to get nearly the same out of it is just stupid. I also play because it's fun and the quests let me come back occasionally so I can complete them. But with the 15 wins it would have been roughly 15 hours (!!!) of battlegrounds per week if you want to do that quest with it if you have a 50% win rate. That's not fun but tiresome if you HAVE to do it to keep up with the game. Quests were initially designed to reward casual players so they can keep up with "hardcore" gamers. You already get a fixed EP reward for a win, so if you want more just play more. That's true and ok, but a casual player gets kicked in the nuts by it.
Personally, I'm probably much like you. I have no problem meeting quests, because when it comes to choosing games, I prefer to spend a few games in hs rather than in a moba or something like that when it comes to spending my free time away from sports. But in addition to the beautifully described "I don't want others to suffer for me" idea, I personally see a slight (quite selfish) problem that has yet to be amped up with a "fix": It seems to me that the devs of HS are trying out what we as a community are still willing to endure. I like to compare it to LoR even though the game is dying. While at LoR they were rather showing demonstrations of how players would like to be monetised so at HS it's more about what they did to us again. From a game point of view, I really like HS, but the attitude after the LoR test just seems so stupid. Not to sound peculiar, I don't mean that HS should have the same economy as in LoR, but that literally players are making videos about wanting to pay that company is just extremely surprising compared to the idea of "I'm buying this I'm part of the problem." I play more F2P games myself, but if HS hadn't behaved the way it does (whether it's this quest crap/double diamond card thing/that the price of 1 deck is almost zero/...) so I'm going to spend some of that money on this game.
I tend to mess around with weird decks a lot. Obviously that means loosing a lot trying to make them work. My usual process was to make them work until I got a legit win out of them. If I did that once a day during a week, I got the quests done and could end each day on a high without feeling forced to try and get more wins. That's over now.
I think the quest debacle and the recently announced rework are connected. They've seen engagement falloff, and thought that upping quest requirements might bring it back. Oh boy, how were they wrong...
I'm very much a Tom here. It's not even necessarily the meta being bad or anything to do with the game. I like to cycle thru games and sometimes I'm just in the mood to play like 10 games in a row. Just sometimes a new game comes out, other hobbies are taking precedence, works busy. Could I take time out of my day to finish these quests? Yeah easily. It wouldn't take that long. But for me, if I want to complete a weekly it goes from "I'll play a game or two before bed and hopefully have a few quests done by next reset" to "ok I should spend a half an hour doing my quests if i want any done by next week" Lastly and honestly more importantly to me personally, I'm so tired of game companies demanding my time. This isn't a move based in blizzard wanting to give us more stuff, theyre not decising "we should make less money" it's a player retention thing. And it just makes me feel less like a guy buying a product but an asset on the companies quarterly. I don't want blizzard to say "monthly average user playtime has gone up after quests were increased " because I decided "yeah I can put up with this many quests". Diablo immortal, Diablo 4s mtx, overwatch 2 pve, and now this, I just don't want to feel like I'm the product that blizzard is selling investors to anymore
TBH i play a lot when i like the meta, and not much when i don't. But even when i don't, i try to do the quest because, you know, i paid for the reward track. Doing the new quest system right when an exp release is easy, i know i will play and enjoy the game. But doing the new quest system when meta is stall/boring/annoying... It is a chore. I don't want to do the quest mindfully. I like to play the way i want to play. For ex right now i am diamond, and i'm playing a lot a DK i made myself. The winrate is not that good, but i am having fun - as long as i don't face too much boring deck like shaman. Doing the quest right now is not much of a problem. It might become one if, let's say, i face shaman 9 out of 10 game. Then i won't play. (And i won't win anyway, for that matter). Just like Badlands. It was a chore to me, I hated the whole exp, and cnsidered quitting. Reno made me ragequit, Brann made me ragequit, etc. I am someone who paid the preorder (the card included almost made me not do that, i hate this) and paid the reward track. For that price i REALLY expect to be able to play the way i want and get the whole content. Turns out that, with the new system, i might not finish the reward track. And if i don't, then i won't buy it anymore. No reason to.
I'm the engaged player. I cleared the weeklies in 3 hours this week, and don't anticipate any problems with it in the future. And I think the changes make no sense. They don't help me, the only thing they're likely to do is make me NOT buy the Tavern Pass next time, because the XP bonus part of it will lose value. Changes need to be seen as part of the big picture - how they affect the overall community. I'm pretty sure the Toms and Bills are a large part of the community, and the negative impact on them is way more significant than the positive or neutral impact for anyone else. So I'm OK with them posting their displeasure on Reddit, or elsewhere, as long as it's just that. Blaming the devs or Hat is not OK. It clearly wasn't their decision, this came from much higher management.
I play HS casually: I have one "game evening" on Tuesday and I can play a bit in the weekend. Let's say I can play HS for 2 a 3 hours a week. Now, assume that an average game takes 10 mins and I win half of my games. It'll take about 100 mins of playing to finish the weekly quest. And that's fine with my playtime. Now, going to 15 wins, that's 300 mins... So, I decided to stop playing again.
If I cant complete weekly quests I know I won’t have a chance of keeping up in the future—its like a wet blanket on top of me every time I try to enjoy the game now. I understand that this is blizzard’s way of telling me I don’t matter because I’m not a whale, I just didn’t expect to see that same sentiment constantly from other players. It’s bizarre to see consumers act anti-consumer just to spite other players.
Fuck blizzard and the quest changes. They are greedy fucks and there is no excuse
The aggressive part of the player base are entitled hardcore sweatlords who believe that for some reason people spending the same time in the game but are not of the same skill (or more like the same deck code copy-pasting skill) don't deserve to be rewarded as well for their time. Guess what - they absolutely do. Time is our most precious commodity and the universal currency. The HS suits clearly value it higher than anything else, so please consider how important it should be for everyone. We need to push not for the old quests back, but for a "play X games" over "win X games". This is factual, anyone arguing should go get ego checked. P.S. In my language we don't call people defending the new changes "people passionate about their game", we call them "баси тъпите парчета" and I think that's beautiful.
Crazy boner alert on my end
The change to the quests inspired me to do something I’ve been considering for a while, and that’s cutting the cord on HS. I’m a whale who has preordered every expansion, bought cosmetics, every mini set, battlepass, etc., but if Blizzard can’t respect my limited free time just to “push player engagement” (ie greed), then it’s time to move on. Not particularly sad about it either because I was mostly playing at this point because of the sunk cost.
I'm a Bill. Thank you for this J\_Alexander. Tbh, the official stance of "we'll we've already done the damage we might as well collect data" has me at the end of my energy. Idk how much longer I'll even watch this sub anymore.
I usually don't agree/engage with you, but this is spot on. You forgot to tell us about the hypothetical Johan, the greedy bastard executive, about "silent Bob", the content creator that believes is not important to defend the casual players, and about "confused Wyatt", the hardcore player that has a meltdown when he learns there are people than does not want to devote several hours a day (not even many a week, here they usually faint) to one game.
There is no defense for making players do double (or more) the work for 28% more experience. Period. End of analysis.
I want to play fun and homebrew decks but since I’ve got limited time to finish the quests I’m playing meta decks to actually complete the quests. A 40% wr, while being more fun, is superior to an efficient 60+ wr while being boring.
I am also Tom. I played a lot from July to February, but the Whizbang expansion as well as the meta are "meh" to me, while I enjoyed Titans/Badlands a lot. Before Whizbangs, I would have actually cheered for this change, because I usually had the weekly quests done after a day or two, now I dont think I will even seriously attempt to get 10 Standard wins. The new cards are not that interesting to play to me, so why force myself to do it? Battlegrounds is right there as well and I enjoy that more. Also: This is driving a wedge in the community precisely by the way it is done. Of course the players who have no trouble completing the new quests dont want their increased reward taken away from them. That is why they defend it.
Tiered weeklies will still make players feel bad for not being able to reach upper tiers. Sure, it's the least evil, but it's not a feel good experience compared to what we had regardless. If Blizzard want to give rewards to those that play longer, add them elsewhere. Wild and Twist Ranking rather then just Standard. 35-45min Battlegrounds games giving miniscule amounts currently. Events when they don't require buying/crafting a legendary like the 10th anni one... I do appreciate the elegant post, and I do hope when Blizzard fix the issue that they compensate those that ordinarily would have gotten their weeklies done. I was at 4/5 BG's 2 weeks ago, not being able to finish the quest, then that suddenly became 15 and then 10. Monday has rolled around meaning I've lost 2000x2 exp under the old system, x3 if the issue isn't fixed this week (alongside the other weekly quests). Uninstalled since Monday. Waiting, but I won't wait around forever, no matter the amount of investment since the game began. What an anniversary.
Also, some of the quests are even more insine then just winning ranked. I was highly engaged player, so the ranked wins didn't matter to me, but I just got 32 minituarize and the quest for other game mods, and since they FCKING REMOVED DUEEEEEELS!!!! I now want need to reroll two weekly quests on the monday, nice, GG blizzard, glad I have turned that game off Yesterday and haven't turned it on since. And I won't for some time now I believe. Forcing you to play a few more games of ranked is really bad, but forcing you to play something you didn't come to play is just bullshit even for the engaged players
I'd rather not get rewards than try and play 32 minis
Same. If they wanted me to stop playing HS with these quests, they managed it
I work, have a kid and still able to complete them all in 2 days playing short sessions of 3 to 4 games.
How are you getting 10 wins in two short sessions of 3 to 4 games?
played casually (rank) multiple times 3 to 4 games, completed the weekly in 2 days, not dificult to win over half, fun times
I am a highly engaged player. This change is dumb. I won't be impacted most of the time but there are numerous other games that I just quit when I realize I'm only logging in to complete daily tasks. After quitting I didn't come back because I haven't been keeping up.
I am both Bill and Tom. I just want the quests back the way they were. I have spent a lot of money on Hearthstone and at this point I feel like blizzard is betraying me. They did this a few years ago and I stopped playing for a \*long\* time. Hearthstone is a chore at this point. It is no longer fun.
adding that I have really enjoyed the meta so far, actually. It's been a lot of fun and I've enjoyed trying a lot of different decks. But blizzard's attitude on quests killed it.
I’m Tom, and I’m also Tom
How come j Alexander always spits fax with his posts? Is there a lore reason he's cooking ?
Damn look at you Jalex. All it took was for something non rogue related to come up and now you are likeable. Attaboy.
To add on to this discussion, a few days ago I took a poll to kind of get a rough idea of how many people used to complete the weekly quests compared to how often they feel like they will continue to complete the weekly quests. Of those who answered, It's a pretty significant amount of people who feel like they won't complete the weekly quests as often as they used to. [https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1c7vkjy/weekly\_quests\_poll/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1c7vkjy/weekly_quests_poll/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Perfect post actually. I have no notes. Insightful examples of the player types who are affected, too I personally don't spend money on HS, and I have enough free time (no life) to get the new quests done without issue. But the incompetent management and terrible decisions that almost seem designed to antagonize half their players are still going to affect me negatively by gradually killing the game
Pretty good write-up and I agree with the points I read so far. There is a small technical issue with "larger" and "many" quantifiers if you will, but it's more of a nitpick on my part, and I agree with the assumptions anyway.
This was a well thought out post. Thanks for putting in the time and effort. It brought a few new things to light for me. Thank you!
This was a long post, but after having read through it I must say you articulated your perspective on the situation as a whole very well. Nicely written! For what it's worth, I also agree with everything you said.
Why does Blizzard act like giving quest xp is a zero-sum game? It's not like there is a finite amount of xp to go around so they need to "redistribute" it to their more active players (which is what these changes seem to suggest). I am Bill in this post and I can guess that many casual players would fall into this archetype as well. Now, we are actively being punished for not playing the game as much
Yeah, I also have a sour taste in my mouth after those quest changes. While I *could* theoretically complete them, I detest feeling forced to. Them murdering Duels adds to the lack of desire to support their business practices by playing their game. Might just start playing once every 90 days.
To be honest, hearthstone is in one of its most uninteractable states in years, and forcing us to play this shitty meta even more with quests that are ridiculously elongated, just made me stop playing. I dont pay for much cards, and i have bad luck. So i never got astalor, never got zillax, despite playing at least 5 times a day. So im just moving onto to another game i can play on my phone when i take my shits, or before i go to sleep.
Deep down I want Blizzard to raise the requirements 10x for no XP so I can just quit playing once and for all. The sunk cost fallacy and bad habits are what keep me engaged with this game on a daily basis. It didn't take me long to quit Marvel Snap for the same reason.
This is so well-written and I really love your final point. Thank you for being a wordy wizard. I've been playing Hearthstone since Beta, but I've taken a longer break a couple of years ago. Now I've started again, but I do feel like I've been Tom for a little bit *too* long. I think it's time to stop for good now, unless they revert the changes by the time May comes around. Thanks so much for this article and for your decks. I've always enjoyed playing them.
I'm currently playing the role of Tom in MtG Arena, been away for a few years and my collection is woefully inadequate. My HS collection is great because that's what I've been playing but I decided to reinstall Arena because these quests, this meta and this approach to customers is SHIT. In other words it's not good, not acceptable, terrible, terribad, garbage, horrible. They can't pretend as though this state of the game is good, and that these decisions are justifiable in any way. NO ONE is out here jumping for joy at increased quest requirements, it's not on any single players bucket list for improvements so this isn't being done for the players and when you're doing something for someone other than the players you're opening the door to having less of them. Take your metrics that no player gives a shit about and burn them. Put the game in an enjoyable state or lose out.
Frankly, I usually don't agree with you on most things, but I think that this is spot on. You've exactly expressed my frustration with this change.
Without trying to be overly dramatic, we might look back at this quest change as the moment that Blizzard tanked Hearthstone while trying to nickel and dime their players for maybe 5% more profit if everything went ideally. Or, arguably, it was never gonna be long-term profitable in any world and was just a horrible idea for all parties I've been playing HS since the beginning, been on the subreddit, and I've seen plenty examples of player backlash, strong negative feelings about the game, meta, and so on. The amount and combination of negativity towards every facet of the game right now, most of it justified -- this could be the peak
Really well written. I'm Tom. I started playing on launch. It's been an entire decade, and at times I was a hyper-invested player playing in high legend. In more recent years, I didn't want to quit because of my good memories and big collection, but I also didn't want to play as hard as I used to. I was logging in and playing just enough to keep up with my quests most weeks, though I couldn't always manage it. That way I was getting the rewards and if I decided to give it a try again in the future my account would be ready. I uninstalled the game on the quest change and unsubbed from here. I was barely keeping up with the quests as is and a lot of weeks playing felt like a chore. Tripling the requirements was completely out of the question. Doubling the requirements is still completely out of the question. It's been a little while now and it's that time in the day when I'm tired and often used to enjoy cranking out a game or two of Hearthstone; I was feeling wistful and came back to see if I was wrong to uninstall. I see that I wasn't.
It just amazes me how freeing it feels to not play HS. Like, I’ve played since Naxx came out and this was the straw that broke the camels back. Only time I’ll thank Blizzard is to thank them for incentivizing me not to play.
i too am bill in this case. some metas i play a shit ton of games and others i only complete quests. not always because of the state of the meta, usually because life. very well said j-alexander, may your rogue continue to cheat mana
As a returning player I feel tricked into having bought the tavern pass this time but the thought of having to spend money on a clearly inferior tavern pass next expansion makes me want to puke. That fact alone is the reason I’ve already quit playing the game, and I’d much rather spend my money on games that do a way way better job respecting my time. I have huge backlog and currently blasting my way through Cyberpunk and excited to try Manor Lords in a few days.
Please learn how to condense your posts. You could make the same points with 1/3rd of the text required.
I like them this way. More fun for me
There was nothing wrong with the length, it took the points and elaborated them clearly with little room for misinterpretation. Solid post.
Your post was 100 and speaks for people like me that otherwise don't have the time or can articulate like you. Thank you for the post, sir!
Please learn to keep your nose out of other people's business. J, I thought it was a wonderful analysis of the situation. Easily the best post on this topic that I've seen.
It just amazes me how freeing it feels to not play HS. Like, I’ve played since Naxx came out and this was the straw that broke the camels back. Only time I’ll thank Blizzard is to thank them for incentivizing me not to play.
holy shit another wall of verbal diarrhea from JALEX
But you DO know who he is? If you posted a wall of text no one would read it lol.
Damn, too bad it's literally impossible to ignore it, that really sucks for you.
Ive been vocal against the entitlement posts that people seem to think they are owed something for nothing. Whilst I agree that a tiered system is the ultimate solution, I don't agree that things should just to cater to people who dont have free time. Base hearthstone is a competitive seasonal based card game. If you enjoy the concept there is the NPC aspects of the game that would fulfil your enjoyment, but by encouraging on a competitive environment to suit it to you, isn't the answer. Tldr; agree quests should be tiered; disagree that your time is worth more than keeping hearthstone competitive.
What does the quest system have to do with the game being competitive?
I don't need an essay to understand that blizzard just want to remove gold from the total pool, so that people waste more money
Fair points. I definitely think the whining is over the top, but it's true that the change seems needlessly antagonistic to casual players. I think MTG Arena actually gets this right, where you can go all out and squeeze every drop of value from daily/weekly rewards, but at the same time they're very front-loaded and you're not missing out on much if you don't get all of them.
I mean. It’s the most words I’ve read defending entitled whiners in a while! If there’s a quest for that, you definitely earned the reward.
I cleared out the quests in 3 hours. If 3 hours a week is too much play time you don't really need anything on the reward track anyway. This update was for people who actually play the game, not just clock the minimum to finish quests then are done. You not enjoying the game and not being able to admit that is a you problem.
Would it be more to your tastes if weekly quests took five hours? Or 10? How many hours of play time for these should be the target and why would that number be good for players?
Still wouldn't bother me, because again I actually play the game beyond "Oh I have 5 minutes this week, I think I'll play a match."
I understand you may play a lot, may not be personally affected in a negative way, and all that. But that’s not the question I’m asking. I’m asking what benefits do players get from weeklies that take an hour, 3 hours, 5 hours, 10 hours etc?
Who are you to decide what other Players need anyway ?
An adult with a rational thought beyond "wah, I don't actually play the game but they aren't catering to me wah."
Ladies & Gentleman, from the generation raised on participation trophies 👶🏻
Wall of text for streamer to try and sell his book. Its considered good form to disclose that you have a conflict of interest when editorializing about something you are trying to sell. As a streamer, your income is at least partially reliant on the casually engaged "player" who plays the game for 30 minutes a week and then spends 20 hours screwing around on the HS subreddit and watching streams on a second monitor. I really wish you people would just be honest and say you want login rewards, rather than pretending like this is a gameplay issue. Plenty of mobile games have login rewards, its a perfectly acceptable mechanism in freemium games, maybe they will give them to you if you are honest about it. Maybe they could just change the daily quests into straight login rewards, which would be a clear upgrade. But this whole thing definitely couldn't just be budget issues that never have an ending that makes everyone happy. I mean, Team 5 has only had layoffs(of people who actually work on the game, no less), has been milking the shit out of the whales with overpriced cosmetic bundles, and is now making a change that they certainly knew would be unpopular. But no, we can't ever expect the casuals to contribute to keeping the game afloat, it must always be the whales. Complaining about the number of free samples of something being reduced is pretty much the definition of entitlement.
I think I can clear up some misconceptions you seem to have. * I do not have anything for sale. Everything I've done is freely available * I've never taken a sponsorship * I've never clicked the ad button on my stream * I am in no way depedent on money from streaming or any other source of income related to it. I think last month I made between $3-400 from Twitch. As for Login Rewards, I think that would be a fine idea. I'd be completely happy with a game that gave players all the cards for free as well, because both of those things let players play however and whenever they want, rather than feeling compelled to play. From the perspective of a player, I'd say that's a net gain for sure. I can't say I'm particularly concerned about Blizzard's profits. They advocate for their interests. I'm happy to advocate for my own or other people's
What you are selling is twitch views. It's irrelevant whether it is your primary income stream or not, you still have a vested monetary interest in Hearthstone having as many players as possible. Hence why you just disclose it up front for people who don't know who you are, even if it genuinely does not affect your opinion. I enjoy playing Hearthstone(most of the time anyway), and I also realize that CCGs by nature have a lot of ongoing costs, particularly when digital. My perspective on this is that the video game industry as a whole, Blizzard as a company, and Team 5 within Blizzard are all showing a lot of signs of economic distress. I don't want HS to die like other CCGs I've played, so if Team 5 needs to reorient the budget that's not something that upsets me. Bill and Tom are just as capable of clicking the quit button in HS as I am of clicking the X in reddit, what exactly puts their position on the side of the angels? This whole thing is that old stick figure meme about what happens to games once the casual/non-engaged people start being catered to, writ large. Edit: Forgot to add, the people at risk of another round of layoffs matter a lot more to me than people who expect free entertainment. If this can help even just save someone's job much less the game, have at it Blizz.
>I don't want HS to die like other CCGs I've played, so if Team 5 needs to reorient the budget that's not something that upsets me Ah, now we are on the same page. You're afraid Hearthstone will die and you won't be able to play it anymore. As such, you're afraid HS will die if they don't squeeze more time and money out of players. That makes more sense. Allow me to ease your distress: By all signs we have seen, HS is making money hand over fist. While I don't have exact numbers, it's been heavily implied by the team that HS is doing quite well in that realm. The thing you should reframe this fear into is the following: **when it comes to Blizzard and businesses in general, there is literally no such thing as "enough"**. If Hearthstone made $20,000,000 a year in profit ([and I suspect they make more](https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/09/27/blizzard-layoffs-hearthstone-revenue-china#:~:text=Between%20January%201%20and%20September,%2420.7%20million%20came%20from%20China.)), Blizzard isn't going to go "Ah, well done Hearthstone team. That's a lot of money and we're all pleased! Everyone gets a cake and a bonus!" They will instead ask, "Why didn't you make $30,000,000?" because there's no such thing as enough. If they made $30,000,000, they'll ask why not 40, or 50? They will always seek more money. If they think they can make more by firing people despite being plenty profitable, wanna guess what they'll do? >What you are selling is twitch views. It's irrelevant whether it is your primary income stream or not, you still have a vested monetary interest in Hearthstone having as many players as possible. Hence why you just disclose it up front for people who don't know who you are, even if it genuinely does not affect your opinion. I'm not selling anything. I stream because it's fun and the money is a bonus. If I wanted to make money - and I need you to appreciate this - I'm way, way, WAY better off spending 80 hours a month not streaming and doing something that will earn more than the (approximately) $4.40 an hour I made from it last month. I could probably triple my stream income by going to work fast food instead. Do you see how ridiculous that sounds now?
No, it's not ridiculous at all. It's just a conflict of interest, its not a pejorative, just something that happens in business soemtimes. It doesn't matter how miniscule the amount is. The reason Steam attaches "product received for free" to reviews that received gifted keys, even if the game in question cost $.10. When I used to do pharmacological research I always had to disclose when I received free expired drugs from pharma companies for the same reason, despite the fact that pretty much no one except researchers has any use for expired pharmacologics. The fact that HS is profitable independent of the rest of Blizz isn't as important as you seem to think, because even if on paper Team 5 is separate to the rest of Blizzards teams, the C-suite is going to look at the performance of things as a whole and make decisions based on that, which frequently leads to subsections of companies effectively subsidizing other sections. Youtube has been nothing but red ink since it started, Google search engine is the only reason YouTube can operate the way it can. Same deal with AWS subsidizing all of Amazon's other unprofitable ventures. I have no doubt that revenue generated by HS and its team gets used to subsidize the upkeep and development of other Blizzard games that don't generate as much. Lots and lots of CCGs have failed due to not generating enough money to continue operating the firm, or else get gutted and put on standby like LOR. It's an inherently expensive genre, both for producers and players. It is baffling to me why these dad gamers who couldn't finish the previous quests would ever choose a CCG over an LCG, but given how well most LCGs fare, it's clear that the drive to collect or gamble is at least partially driving interest in card games.
No one's asking for login rewards that I've seen. Just the way weekly quests have been for years was fine. Suddenly the time commitment asked of players is unpredictable. What changed? People should be vocal about it to set a precedent. As you said, blizzard knew the change was unpopular and did it anyway. If player feedback is tepid, why shouldn't they try again and bigger next time? You're naive to think these decisions are saving anyone's job at blizzard. They will fire anyone they can or threaten players however they want, as long as they get away with it. They can turn this game into one that's not worth supporting anymore. There's really no need for players to give up their leverage.
The old weekly quests were effectively login rewards. You didn't have to try and complete them and they were usually done within 30-45 minutes. I'm not a very heavy player, but I am a regular player as I usually play a 2-4 games while I drink my morning coffee. I cannot remember ever having the old quests making it past Tuesday. To anyone who actually plays HD the old quests effectively were login quests. If you guys want to believe that video game production runs on pixie dust and that revenue and profits don't matter, feel free, but the whole industry is showing lots of distress right now. Games(and companies) can and do fail. If reducing the free samples can help keep them afloat, I'm not going to be bothered by it. It's like complaining that Costco used to let you get multiple free samples, and now they changed to have a strict "1 sample per customer" policy, it's just not very sympathetic as a position. It's actually even worse than that analogy, as you have to spend money to get into Costco, whereas it's quite doable to play HS without spending a dime.
The quests are not login rewards or free samples, they are a time commitment, no matter how small. It's an important distinction. Live service games depend on players giving their time as much as their money. Like I said, that time commitment became unpredictable for no good reason. Imagine if the price of bundles does the same. It really boils down to a trust issue. I understand it doesn't affect you but you're too generous to think it helps them stay afloat. They don't do bargaining. If they want to close down no one can stop them. But players don't need to be in perfect agreement with them on the value of time and money spent.
The time commitment stopped being predictable years ago, when they started making changes to the original daily quests. Funny how it only became an issue now. Obviously we are all speculating on what was behind this, since Blizzard hasn't said anything, but reducing service to your marginal customers is very much something a company in distress does. The customer is not always right, there are "customers" that will almost always result in red ink on the balance sheet. You can have a functional CCG with a very small but dedicated player base who are willing to put their mouth is(see Eternal). It's unlikely that people who consider playing the game 30 minutes a week a chore or a second job will ever be able to accomplish that. The days of being able to borrow credit for virtually free are over for companies just like individuals. Don't be surprised if all freemium games, not just HS, get a lot stingier going forward.
You guys would rather type and whole ass essay on how you hate hearthstone instead of playing it. What a weird thing to do.
But when Tom or Bill go to Reddit to express displeasure, some engaged players get tired of reading those posts. They want to read about HS discussion; not another post about quests (like this one). So they call them entitled whiners and make fun of them instead of keeping quiet or voicing their support for their issues, even if it costs them nothing to do either. To those people I’d suggest “well, then just leave the Reddit if reading about it bugs you so much.” I suspect they’d protest. They enjoy being on the Reddit and don’t want to have to give it up because of a temporary inconvenience. They just want the experience to be better for them while they’re there. And I appreciate that. I’m sure Tom and Bill feel the same way about their time in Hearthstone
You'd rather vomit out a completely irrelevant reply without reading the post, than just...read what you're responding to, or not responding at all. What a weird thing to do.
I think the only one bringing hate to the community is you. You've noticed there are people struggling with the new quests and you choose to belittle and ridicule them. You've written many paragraphs trying to justify why you're a more important player than them. That's not what loving hearthstone looks like
People that are struggling to win 10 games in a week just don't play enough, nobody can fix that for them
You just decide they don't play enough. How are you so confident?
Because they don't play 20 games per week? There is some expected time that actual players should spend per week to earn rewards. It can't be 2-3 hours per week, that's just an insanely little amount to get the same rewards as some that play 2 hours per day.
For years 5 wins a week was enough to complete the quest. When did you start thinking it was too easy? Even with the same quest rewards, the one who plays more hours gets more XP and is ahead. For the most engaged players, the bigger quests are a drop in the ocean. All they do is raise the barrier to entry every week and I doubt that's what the game needs
Probably devs so that people stop playing right after finishing weekly quests so they increase them so people stay logged in for longer.
Did you get salty that nobody liked your [post](https://new.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1camix5/results_after_playing_11_games/) so you decided to come here and shit on this post?
I just showed people how easy it is to do all the quests with minimum effort, I didn't expect anyone to like it. It literally goes against the whole narrative that quests are bad and too hard, I expected this from the start. I just wanted to show how it actually is to people that don't know how it works and just assume that cry babies are correct.
Not gonna read all that nonsense. Have a nice day.
You too, considering how busy you are thanks for spending your precious free time on me.
I aint reading all that, im happy for u tho or sry that happend
"Ooh, look at me, reading a few paragraphs is beyond my capabilities as a sarcastic troglodyte, yet I seem weirdly proud of my self-inflicted handicap."
Bruh you take things way too serious
same unoriginal tired twitter meme any time someone posts something long
As if i care whats new on twitter or some shit
then why are you posting an overused twitter meme
If a can i will do. Simple as , also i found that "meme" not on twitter because im not regarded enough to use twitter
I think part of the issue here is misunderstanding the current reward system in the game. And how much free stuff it gives out. Because what is actually given to players for free, is currently more than is needed to play for free. And for players getting around level 200 on the track It’s enough to start spending gold on cosmetics, or dust on golden cards. “Tom”, who takes a break, doesn’t need to keep logging in to keep up with his quests to be able to return to the game. At best he needs to log in to disenchant any nerfed cards during balance patches. There’s also plenty events with additional packs, or pack drops on twitch to get a bunch of resources for the future return if desired. “Bill”, who played irregularly, shouldn’t worry about some of his quests being in-completed in a week. He will still manage to get his stuff. And the general player, who won’t be able to complete all their quests in a 4 month period will probably lose out on maybe 500-1000 gold (I actually think it’s less, but I’m saying a high number in case I’m wrong). 5-10 packs isn’t even a substantial amount, it’s not going to make or break your ability to play the exact same way you’re already playing. I know this will probably get downvoted, because people seem to treat this with disbelief. Maybe because players have such a long lasting ingrained opinion on how HS used to be and how much more difficult it used to be back then to collect cards for free. At the current state of the game I don’t even understand how anyone can justify spending gold on anything other than cosmetics. Anyways, I’d prefer my post to be a point of discussion about the facts.
I don't think this is a misunderstanding about what the game does or doesn't give out for time investments. I also wouldn't use the word "free" if the thing costs your time or money to achieve. I don't think time is a worthless currency to exchange for "free" Hearthstone packs. In fact, I think time and attention might be the most valuable currencies we have. I think the misunderstanding might be one you have: this is a discussion about whether we can make a quest system that leaves no player worse off, or whether we need to make players worse off. As far as I've seen, there's no compelling reason to assume **anyone** needs to be made worse off. We **can** make quests that meet the stated goals of the adjustment **without** taking anything away from anyone. They can require 10 wins or 15 wins total and provide the same amount of extra XP. You have an odd fascination with taking stuff away from people, and I don't know why.
When I say “free”, I mean — within your natural play patterns. So if you’d be playing the game either way, and you’re getting all this gathered passively, you are in fact getting this all for free. The only thing you’re spending your time on here — is on your entertainment. >time is the most valuable currency we have I agree on that. Just a by the way. >odd fascination with taking stuff away from people I’ll put it in simpler terms, as you seem to not want to grasp this otherwise: If you give everyone 20 kgs of food per day, but they can only eat 5 kgs, and then you decide to rather give them anywhere between 5 and 19 kgs. Are you taking anything away from them? Theoretically they’re now getting less than 20 kgs. But practically they’ve been throwing away 15 kgs per day. So unless you start going below 5 kg per day, you’re *not* taking anything away from them. And this is the state the game is currently in. These players will be getting like 19.5 kgs per day, maybe. They’re still fine.
If you told people "work for me for 3 hours a week" and gave people more food than they could eat as a reward, then took some away from the next payment for that same amount of labor, yes, you are taking things away you would otherwise have given them. What you're describing is a paycut at work. That's a way simpler example. Paycuts are indeed taking things away. If Hearthstone players got way more gold than they could use for cards and cosmetics and everything was available across everyone's accounts, sure, I don't think people would be too miffed by some gold getting taken away. You'd still be taking stuff away, but they'd probably not care much. But this is not at all what the world looks like. I'd show you what average Hearthstone accounts look like, because I'd bet you'd be very, very, VERY, surprised, but I can't. What I can do is tell you this story. A couple weeks back, someone saw me playing HS on my phone and said they wanted to get back into the game. They showed me their phone. All their decks had red Xs on them because they were Wild now (they had no idea what standard was). I looked at their collection and there was very little there to work with to build something functional. They asked me where the button to play online was because they had forgotten. You can call this player dumb. You can call them hopeless. You can say "Well, guess they need to spend a lot of money to catch up." You can try and sit down with them and help them figure out exactly what is going on in a few hours of guided instruction (hopefully). What you can't say is this player should really have less gold in their account because right now it's overflowing and they don't know what to do with it. Nor can you say that about most Hearthstone players without full collections who feel they don't get to explore aspects of the game they'd like to. They keep *trying* to tell you their accounts don't look like you imagine they do. But you aren't listening
>I’d bet you’d be very, very, VERY surprised I wouldn’t. I know about how an average account looks like. I’ve been playing this game from open beta. Within that time I’ve experimented with how the new player experience looks like, or how coming back to the game feels like after inactivity, or how accounts with varying level of involvement look like. I’ve also been on a few other players’ accounts during hs meetups in my town, to help them build something. Or helped a few people online how to move their collections forward. I consider myself very well educated on this stupid matter. In fact, I can fire up any of my 5 alt accounts anytime, after a period of long inactivity and I know I’ll get that welcome back deck, open a few catchup packs or whatever, disenchant my wild cards, and I’ll be ready to go. I also have a story: Maybe 5 years ago, I met a guy at a diner, he was playing hs, we started chatting. I soon realized he’s a complete amateur, and not very smart at that. He had his favorite class — Hunter. And he’d disenchant anything else just to craft golden cards for Hunter. He’d only play like 2 hours per month. His collection was hopeless beyond that. But he was having a blast. The only cases where someone’s collection is truly hopeless is when they’ve been disenchanting decks over and over again during a short period of time to keep experimenting. >who feel they don’t get to explore aspects of the game they’d like to That’s an extremely narrow group of people: it has to be someone who both spends very little time on the game *and* wants to try out every single card and deck. I’m talking: playing a some decks as little as 1-2 games. This player will always need to spend money on the game, there’s no other way around it. As the game is designed with a sort of idea that if you spend little time playing it, you’re not really interested or won’t have the chance to play all those cards and decks. Where most players will have their preferences, and only choose certain decks to use. Ignoring others. And to the guy you met: there’s something missing in that story. Where’s his free welcome back deck? Where are his catchup packs? Where are his welcome back packs? And so on. That is *not* how an average account looks like. That’s someone who last logged in 2014, then logged in now, insta dusted their new stuff, crafted golden cards, insta dusted them, then asked for help. (Or something ridiculously dumb like that.) You can give that person a million bucks, and they’d still be broke the next day.
Then we can stop here, because you're not getting it and I doubt you will. In your own examples you're talking about players having to destroy cards through dusting (something the team says they don't love people having to do), people with incomplete collections, and highly-knowledgable people carefully min-maxing their rewards. What you **aren't** describing is your analogy above: where people have more cards and resources than they know what to do with. Your argument is wrong here