Hearthpwn

 It's a VERY odd thing.  Consider this:

In WoW, Blizzard wanted to get players to take breaks from the game.  Thus they established an exp gain penalty for playing too long.  You get full exp when you first log in then, after a while, you get less for the same actions till you logged off for a time.

The public HATED being controlled and penalized for it.  So blizzard changed it. Instead, they dropped the standard exp rate down, then gave you a bonus.  The bonus could be gained by logging off for a time and showed up when you first logged in.  After a while, the bonus faded.

If you can read between the lines, you'll notice that nothing mechanically has changed.  All they did was rearrange te terms so that it looked different though it gave the same result.  

Still it was enough . The public loved it.

If you want more, go look up when JCPenny decided to drop their sales program for low cost items instead.  

The point: Perception matters. A LOT.  It seems reasonable to have rewards for both modes.  If you play in one, you get the same thing you do now.  The ONLY difference is that those that play in both get double the bonus.  

But that's not how the public sees it.  They will seee it as a way to force people to play both modes, with being 'penalized' with less bonuses if you fail to do so.  

yes, it's stupid.  But even though I write this I can FEEL myself cringe about that very concept.  I play only standard.  If wild rewards were seperate I can, even NOW, feel myself be compelled to play wild or I'll 'miss out'.  It's the same tdrive that keeps me making sure my quests aren't overfilled because that 'missed quest' is a penalty to me.  I feel i SHOULD get it and that I'm losing out if I don't.  

Emotions matter, and emotions don't give a frig about logic.  And you develop programs for people, not robots.  What matters is making people feel like they are having fun and gaining rewards and not being punished doing things they like to do.  

Sidenote: This is also why we have to go through a whole mess of things to get cards: go to the store, buy a pack, go to the pack screen, move the pack to the right, wait for it to open, see the cards we got unflipped, manually FLIP EVERY (#$)#) CARD ONE BY ONE! Mechanically it's worthless.  You could just have a botton next to the gold counter for 'buy pack', click on that and instantly see what cards you got.  

But that would be boring and unfulfilling.  We (including me in this) LIKE going to the store and seeing those packs 'pile' up and shake the board.  We LIKE seeing the pack open.  We not only like opening the cards one by one with anticipation over what card they could be but add additional rituals on top (like hovering over the card to see its color to find out what rarity it is.. instead of..you know, FLIPPING THE CARD to see what CARD it is!) to make it take longer.  It 'feels' good to open cards that way.

We want interesting ways to open cards, even if it takes longer.  We want to feel rewarded even if we aren't.  And we want to know we are getting everything we 'should' get, even if it means giving less than you could offer. 

Poeple are nuts.  We just are.