Hearthpwn

Quote from 1xbenx1 >>

Quote from gm6 >>

It is all about your skill of decision making (no hurry and not misplaying) and your decks power. 
If your decks are strong enough (well balanced, have several win conditions) and you are able to pilot them at the high level - then you can reach some high ranks on ladder. 
This structure does not fit in any "buy packs for real money" or something like that. It is just the way you play and how much "rng blessing" you have during your games. (for example i can lose any game to any one when i have a terrible card draw from the very beginning of the match drawing only high cost cards and losing tempo. It doesnt matter against whom i am playing, a player who pays or a f2p one.)

As for me, i am a f2p player and i have a pretty poor collection (i started to play HS about 9 months ago). 80% of my legendary cards i crafted, but i have only 12 or less. But! Last season i was able to reach 3rd rank on standard. So i kinda won without paying? Wright? 

 You're the rare f2p player who (1) invests time appropriately (2) makes smart crafting decisions, and (3) doesn't cry about how unfair everything is.

I salute you, sir.

Quote from scorpyon >>

I tend to consider this sort of topic by taking a prime example of the methodology and comparing it.

So, recently I've been playing a fair amoutn of World of Tanks. That gam is about as pay to win as it could be. You can buy tanks with real world money that are simply unobtainable any other way in the game - you HAVE to pay for them - and they have stats that outperform the standard free tanks as well, so you are paying for an in-game advantage. So why continue to play the game? Mostly because the game is fun and there aren't that many premium tanks in most lower end matches (they are more common at th higher end).
Not to mention, that even with a super-tank, you still need the skill to drive it and use it well.
And a similar concept can be applied to Hearthstone to determine if it's pay to win or not. There is no card or deck that you can specifically buy with real money that outperforms other cards in the game. The most you can buy in the game that is unavailable to free players is shiny heroes / card backs, etc. So aesthetics - which confer no advantage in game (currently).

Instead, I would say that Hearthstone is Pay-To-Save-Time. Since you would normally have to heavy-grind for packs, in order to fill the collection out, then paying money allows you to skip this process.
This isn't pay-to-win, since paying money gives you no tangible advantage in any card battle. it gives you access to a wider range of cards.... maybe. Assuming you don't get the RNG curse of duplicates and useless legendaries.

So no, this game isn't pay to win any way you look at it. It's "pay to explore and unlock with less grind"....

For old players no,for new players yes.We also have to see how the 3 expansions per year will work out.At the moment for old players is more smorc2win than pay2win.

The game can be played at the highest level without spending any money.

You are paying mostly for "choice". If you want to play the game your way you have to invest money. I don't have fun with incomplete decks and grinding wins out to craft what I need, so I "p2w" to have access to all the cards I want right away.

It's not pay to win.The whole game turned into a coin flip with the latest expansions.The starting hand decides if you win or lose MOST of the time.I wish it was pay to win instead of this bullshit.

If your definition of win is having a complete collection of cards, then yes it is pay to win because I don't think that's possible for f2p. 

Now if your definition of win is climbing to legend or getting top on arena leader boards, you can do that as a f2p player don't need to pay a dime, 

If you want to have more fun playing multiple styles and decks though that is going to be hard to do as f2p with the resources blizzard gives you.

Is it p2w? No.

Is it p2have fun? Definitely yes!

It depends on your definition of p2w.. Hearthstone is not the same level of P2W as certain MMORPGs. A lot of MMOs have some system of equipment enhancement, and the cash shop would sell items that helped during enhancement. This is the ultimate form of P2W. On top of that, many of the items in the cash shop can't be obtained with ingame currency. You don't see this in Hearthstone. Everything you'll need can be obtained with ingame gold currency at reasonable costs.

I believe it depends on your playing preference.

I would say that the speed to acquire all competitive cards is very slow - so people feel that pay is the only option.

Actually I spent a lot on HS and never regret. I know a lot of dudes who are f2p and don't complain either.

Competitive arena is a thing, and a good win rate plus daily quests makes playing a lot of arena for free possible.

Pay to win implies to me that paying more means you will win more, and there's an obvious cap to this. You can't really pay more to win more. It gives you more variety, but not the ability to play those decks better.

Finally, competitive constructed F2P is possible without a massive investment of time.

I think Hearthstone is more pay to enjoy. There were always cheap competitive decks that can bring yoh to legend. Problem is: if you want to enjoy the game and try all new cards and decks every expansion you need to invest at least 100 bucks every expansion (preorder + 40 another packs for 50$ plus whatever gold you saved)

Quote from Meneldor >>

I think Hearthstone is more pay to enjoy. There were always cheap competitive decks that can bring yoh to legend. Problem is: if you want to enjoy the game and try all new cards and decks every expansion you need to invest at least 100 bucks every expansion (preorder + 40 another packs for 50$ plus whatever gold you saved)

Pay to have fun/compete. There is still option to play Arena for free.

No.  The single largest factor in climbing the ladder is time.  Second is knowledge of the game.  Third is card pool (which can be achieved by paying or investing a lot of time).  I think this has been repeatedly proved by streamers who run F2P accounts to legend (Disguised Toast did one recently, Trump had done some multiple times in the past).  If you know the game well (all the cards, popular decks to play around) and have the time to invest (so as to minimize the impact of variance/rng over a large sample size) then you can have a consistently high win rate without paying.

I do feel the game is pay to have fun some of the time though, because it's hard to mess around with a lot of the fun legendary cards if you don't play a lot and don't have tons of hours to sink into the game without paying for packs and getting dust to craft what you want.

Quote from joshx13 >>

legendary pity timer doubled

Quote from joshx13 >>

no more cheep adventures

Quote from BemusedBear >>

No.  The single largest factor in climbing the ladder is time.  Second is knowledge of the game.  Third is card pool (which can be achieved by paying or investing a lot of time).  I think this has been repeatedly proved by streamers who run F2P accounts to legend (Disguised Toast did one recently, Trump had done some multiple times in the past).  If you know the game well (all the cards, popular decks to play around) and have the time to invest (so as to minimize the impact of variance/rng over a large sample size) then you can have a consistently high win rate without paying.

I do feel the game is pay to have fun some of the time though, because it's hard to mess around with a lot of the fun legendary cards if you don't play a lot and don't have tons of hours to sink into the game without paying for packs and getting dust to craft what you want.

No because you can't pay for match wins, you can only pay for tools(cards) which everybody can get for free. There is no advantage over f2p. 

Hearthstone is definitely not pay-to-win... it is however, pay-a-lot to have a complete collection... or pay-at-least-something to have a collection big enough to play more than one or two interesting decks and/or classes.

No, it's pay to have fun/experiment and learn on your own. If you are F2P you are basically playing arena, until a cancer decks is invented in 2 weeks time, and you craft only those cards and play only that deck until the next cancer deck is discovered.