With WoG coming out, Blizzard is finally reaching a point in the game where the possible card selection offered is rivaling MTG drafts and there are overall just more cards to collect. While standard helps newer players stay competitive in the constructed ranked scene and is the "meat and potatoes" of the base game, arena has not seen any vast improvements itself. If you're new to hearthstone, Arena is likely one of the most frustrating experiences ever and many choose to forgo it all together as it is both expensive and incredibly competitive which is really frustrating for people who like to casually draft. You have to be reasonably good and often draft unfun competitive classes before expansions to even have a chance to run infinite arenas, many players have to wait 2 days to get the 150 gold from quests just to get even less playing experience from the good players who play a lot and fall even further behind regardless of all the resources, websites and draft helping you may get, you really can't practice well yourself.
While I'm not a pioneer or the first person to ponder the idea, how open would the hearth stone community be to much like constructed having a casual wild mode for fun and standard as the competitive high stakes atmosphere; there is a drafting mode cheaper and more open to newer players and those looking for just a fun experience drafting while also offering a competitive higher skill cap arena system. Here are some fundamental ways to split classic Arena with the high stakes arena.
Casual Arena or just arena will do the following and keep the rest the same.
Gold price to enter the Classic arena will be reduced to 50 gold but will no longer reward a pack
Gold rewards are reduced to compensate with the reduced price.
Possibly increase the lose thresh hold to 4 losses to allow more playing with the same deck as it's less rewarding.
High Stakes or Legendary Arena will be the competitive environment for players looking to win big. [Debatable weather to disallow older non classic sets or allow all cards in general for consistency].
Gold Price will remain at 150 gold or perhaps even be raised to 200 gold
With more player input and decision making, 4 cards will be offered to select from instead of 3. This also improves consistency.
To further improve consistency and make auto retire decks less common, you will draft 35 instead of 30. You then choose to discard 5 of the 35 at the end of the draft.
The maximum wins before auto retiring a deck is raised to 13-15 for a higher prestige and better rewards, 13-15 will be as if you got a legendary season award, often including a golden epic and a pack token (possibly 2).
You get a pack token instead of a strait up pack, you may claim any pack you want with the token. The token will automatically give you a random pack upon reviving another tokento prevent saving tokens up for expansions. You're best option is to pick the pack you want right away unless you don't care about the packs.
After a certain win counter of top ranking (13-15) you get a counter on your name to display and a Silver/non-gold color hero portrait instead of a gold portrait. (even if animated the same way to save production costs/time).
More of an extra, but much like Blizzards constructed scene and leader boards in other Blizzard games. Having a leader board for arena be public in the competitive high stakes arena with win%, most played class and # of 13-15 wins be visible.
You now have a fun draft mode for casual play and those who simply want to play arena just for fun and perhaps earn a little more gold and a competitive scene for hardcore arena players who still earn the same if not more prestige. I'd love to hear any critique or feedback as well on your thoughts for this kind of arena split / new mode function.
I don't think not rewarding a free pack with an arena run is a good idea because it's mostly how I built my entire collection: by getting those packs and a run for 150g.
I am a very casual player and it doesn't take long at all to get 150g if you manage your quests wisely.
Arena is an intermediate game mode and it’s fine that way. Brawl and low level constructed is supposed to cater to the new players and teach them skills to prepare them for arena and higher levels of constructed.
I don’t see a point in a casual mode for arena, just like I don’t see a point in the current casual mode for constructed. The ladder is a great place to learn about mana curve, tech choices, and how to mulligan. I don’t see a need to separate the player pool.
Blizzard will never lower the price to 50 because the arena ticket is their top selling item, it’s pretty much a gambling addiction for some people.
I like the idea of 4 cards being offered for the current arena or a higher stakes arena.
I would like to see a weekly sealed draft or high stakes arena for a 500-1,000 gold buyin for the top players. Merps and Ratsmah have talked about this before.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
4x Top 150 arena player #95 June 2017 6.80, #108 Aug 2017 7.67, #127 Feb 2018 Wildfest 7.7, #33 Nov 2018 7.53
HCT Challenger Finals qualifier: 2018 Season 1, 2, 3
- Your "casual" arena is actually a direct replica of the current one except the buy-in and payout. That is like introducing smaller stakes table in a casino, and why do you think this would be "casual" or "less competitive"? 50 gold is still 50 gold. You lose or win your gold more slowly but the trends remain exactly the same. Shortly after launch we will simply have new players tiers such as "casual" infinite players and "casual" losers.
In fact as an infinite player if I can guarantee a higher win rate I would switch to your casual arena in a heartbeat. I don't mind winning gold slowly as I get better return for investment in the long run. Imagine the best player achieve a win rate of 80% which is basically 12 wins every time and each time wins 100-150 gold... see the flaw?
- There is a similar logic flaw with 4 losses. The skill level of players is no different and does not change the win rate. It either prolongs the suffering for 0-4 and 1-4 players (will they appreciate the extra loss?), or make it hard to finish for infinite players as you probably need 15 wins to max out. There are very good reasons for "3 strikes", not 2 or 4.
In fact as an arena player I enjoy the process of drafting and play of different decks, so if we are to change the number we should lower it to 2 losses instead. It is a casual arena after all and I can't think of anything casual about playing the same deck over and over.
- I am sorry but offering 4 cards is also logically flawed. The flaw is directly on the word "consistency", which is usually a good word, but very bad when we are talking about arena. We do not want to improve consistency as that breaks the fundamental concept of arena. We need it to be just "consistent enough" that we get a HA deck tierscore bell curve between 60 and 70, so we get a variation of decks that centers right on average, and bell curves out so it is very unlikely to be godlike decks or complete garbage. It should not be any more consistent than that, which is exactly what we have right now.
With more cards available to choose and filter you simply get consistently crazy, OP, ranked-like decks. A deck will almost never have a bad card and every card should be "above average". Lets say we alter the algorithm in some way so we do not get OP decks, but due to the "consistency" idea everyone will have similar mediocre/average/good/OP deck, whichever power level you decide to set the consistency at. Every deck is about the same and so it comes down to RNG and draw... is that more fun?
In fact if you want things consistent then what is the point of drafting at all, and why not just system generate and give everyone fair decks to play with? We all end up with similar things anyway so you could save me some time.
Remember part of the fun of arena is sometimes we play very good decks, which the flip side means sometimes we play very bad decks... it is only fair that may happen.
- Overall you are not fixing anything because your idea is very lazy. The mechanics and the basics remain exactly the same except changing a few numbers and adding a tier. Whatever problems of the current draft system you are just passing it along, not to mentioned the numerous flaws above that makes it even worse.
With WoG coming out, Blizzard is finally reaching a point in the game where the possible card selection offered is rivaling MTG drafts and there are overall just more cards to collect. While standard helps newer players stay competitive in the constructed ranked scene and is the "meat and potatoes" of the base game, arena has not seen any vast improvements itself. If you're new to hearthstone, Arena is likely one of the most frustrating experiences ever and many choose to forgo it all together as it is both expensive and incredibly competitive which is really frustrating for people who like to casually draft. You have to be reasonably good and often draft unfun competitive classes before expansions to even have a chance to run infinite arenas, many players have to wait 2 days to get the 150 gold from quests just to get even less playing experience from the good players who play a lot and fall even further behind regardless of all the resources, websites and draft helping you may get, you really can't practice well yourself.
While I'm not a pioneer or the first person to ponder the idea, how open would the hearth stone community be to much like constructed having a casual wild mode for fun and standard as the competitive high stakes atmosphere; there is a drafting mode cheaper and more open to newer players and those looking for just a fun experience drafting while also offering a competitive higher skill cap arena system. Here are some fundamental ways to split classic Arena with the high stakes arena.
Casual Arena or just arena will do the following and keep the rest the same.
High Stakes or Legendary Arena will be the competitive environment for players looking to win big. [Debatable weather to disallow older non classic sets or allow all cards in general for consistency].
You now have a fun draft mode for casual play and those who simply want to play arena just for fun and perhaps earn a little more gold and a competitive scene for hardcore arena players who still earn the same if not more prestige. I'd love to hear any critique or feedback as well on your thoughts for this kind of arena split / new mode function.
VS
I don't think not rewarding a free pack with an arena run is a good idea because it's mostly how I built my entire collection: by getting those packs and a run for 150g.
I am a very casual player and it doesn't take long at all to get 150g if you manage your quests wisely.
I would simply allow you to choose how much you spend in arena.
There would be a 50 gold arena ticket that rewards less gold and no pack.
Then the regular ticket.
The reasoning is that two arenas would split the playerbase and que times would be longer, especially at higher ranks
Meow
Arena is an intermediate game mode and it’s fine that way. Brawl and low level constructed is supposed to cater to the new players and teach them skills to prepare them for arena and higher levels of constructed.
I don’t see a point in a casual mode for arena, just like I don’t see a point in the current casual mode for constructed. The ladder is a great place to learn about mana curve, tech choices, and how to mulligan. I don’t see a need to separate the player pool.
Blizzard will never lower the price to 50 because the arena ticket is their top selling item, it’s pretty much a gambling addiction for some people.
I like the idea of 4 cards being offered for the current arena or a higher stakes arena.
I would like to see a weekly sealed draft or high stakes arena for a 500-1,000 gold buyin for the top players. Merps and Ratsmah have talked about this before.
4x Top 150 arena player
#95 June 2017 6.80, #108 Aug 2017 7.67, #127 Feb 2018 Wildfest 7.7, #33 Nov 2018 7.53
HCT Challenger Finals qualifier: 2018 Season 1, 2, 3
There are a lot of problems with your idea.
- Your "casual" arena is actually a direct replica of the current one except the buy-in and payout. That is like introducing smaller stakes table in a casino, and why do you think this would be "casual" or "less competitive"? 50 gold is still 50 gold. You lose or win your gold more slowly but the trends remain exactly the same. Shortly after launch we will simply have new players tiers such as "casual" infinite players and "casual" losers.
In fact as an infinite player if I can guarantee a higher win rate I would switch to your casual arena in a heartbeat. I don't mind winning gold slowly as I get better return for investment in the long run. Imagine the best player achieve a win rate of 80% which is basically 12 wins every time and each time wins 100-150 gold... see the flaw?
- There is a similar logic flaw with 4 losses. The skill level of players is no different and does not change the win rate. It either prolongs the suffering for 0-4 and 1-4 players (will they appreciate the extra loss?), or make it hard to finish for infinite players as you probably need 15 wins to max out. There are very good reasons for "3 strikes", not 2 or 4.
In fact as an arena player I enjoy the process of drafting and play of different decks, so if we are to change the number we should lower it to 2 losses instead. It is a casual arena after all and I can't think of anything casual about playing the same deck over and over.
- I am sorry but offering 4 cards is also logically flawed. The flaw is directly on the word "consistency", which is usually a good word, but very bad when we are talking about arena. We do not want to improve consistency as that breaks the fundamental concept of arena. We need it to be just "consistent enough" that we get a HA deck tierscore bell curve between 60 and 70, so we get a variation of decks that centers right on average, and bell curves out so it is very unlikely to be godlike decks or complete garbage. It should not be any more consistent than that, which is exactly what we have right now.
With more cards available to choose and filter you simply get consistently crazy, OP, ranked-like decks. A deck will almost never have a bad card and every card should be "above average". Lets say we alter the algorithm in some way so we do not get OP decks, but due to the "consistency" idea everyone will have similar mediocre/average/good/OP deck, whichever power level you decide to set the consistency at. Every deck is about the same and so it comes down to RNG and draw... is that more fun?
In fact if you want things consistent then what is the point of drafting at all, and why not just system generate and give everyone fair decks to play with? We all end up with similar things anyway so you could save me some time.
Remember part of the fun of arena is sometimes we play very good decks, which the flip side means sometimes we play very bad decks... it is only fair that may happen.
- Overall you are not fixing anything because your idea is very lazy. The mechanics and the basics remain exactly the same except changing a few numbers and adding a tier. Whatever problems of the current draft system you are just passing it along, not to mentioned the numerous flaws above that makes it even worse.