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People talkin bout money be broke.
1. How is this thread still going?
2. What is with all of the toxicity and vitriol?
3. Number 2 aside Both the OPs supporters and critics make good points.
4. Back to number 2, many of you should be ashamed of your self. Both for your bad manners, and for your poorly constructed and fallacious arguments.
Wait you can unsub from threads?
Praise lord jebus.
The OP has a couple of demons they want to flog and the trouble is they're all getting stacked up in this one topic.
The anti-preorder agenda: There is actually a good argument for this, but it just doesn't apply to Hearthstone. Preordering was an artifact of minimizing loss in the gaming industry when games were physical. Companies don't want to print too much more than they sell. Afterall, you could have the best selling game in history, but if you printed twice as many copies as you sold, you might still take a huge hit on those profits. In the publishing industry big name publishers have actively lost money on best-selling novels, because they over-estimated the market and made too big of a print run. Preordering gives the company real numbers on which to base their print run, while at the same time giving players insurance against their game selling out before they get it. Now that games are largely digital, there isn't as much of an incentive for players, though the company still benefits from being able to assure shareholders "our numbers are up x%" even before the game has sold. More data means more refinement of product, and happy investors means more money to get the next project out. But since the players no longer need the assurance (in business terms it is acronymized as FOMO, Fear of Missing Out), companies chose to add additional shinies to motivate sales. If you preorder you get this exclusive Halo skin, or this exclusive Warcraft mount and minipet. If those shinies have in-game impact, those with anti-preorder agendas decry it as a p2w scheme and elitist, but if it is only cosmetic, then the same nutjobs cry that they're using cosmetics as a mindscrew to divest the weak willed from their money.
The real problem comes when you setup preorders on a crappy game or a product that is largely a bait and switch. The shady company has their money and can bail and the players are just screwed. If they'd waited they could have seen reviews and shoddy games don't get the chance to get any money deceitfully. (Granted, that is assuming that consumers would do their due diligence prior to buying the game anyway, and that just doesn't hold up to reality. If preorders were suddenly outlawed, the same people would just buy on release day, and exclusives would likely be tied to that day. The only change would be the lack of early information on consumer interest.)
Why it doesn't apply to Hearthstone. Hearthstone's pre-orders aren't a gamble on content. All cards are released to the public before the cutoff date, and the game is already established. This isn't buying something and hoping that your 50$ is going to get something playable. This is like buying the latest expansion of Dominion. The vast majority of consumers buying the expansion already have the game and know what they're getting. And while Hearthstone does have cosmetic shinies in the form of cardbacks and alternate hero skins, their draw is also intelligent spending from a fiscal end. If you're going to drop 50$ on the game this expansion then you can do it before the launch and get 50 packs (plus perks) or after and get 40. The fact that the OP says 'you're an idiot for preordering' is like telling someone they're an idiot for not buying their packs 2 at a time "because you could get really lucky and get all the cards you need before you open 40 packs" even when the price per pack is significantly higher. If you're spending the money, get the most value out of it as you can. If anything it is idiotic to pay more for less.
The OP is interesting in that they state that the mega bundle would be better with 3 golden legendaries instead of 1 (implying that paying players should have more in-game advantages than the f2p players) while pointing at the cosmetic and crying foul. So they seem to be wanting more benefit for the paying player while claiming to have never preordered anything. Which means either they are working against their own interests, lying somewhere, or they are regularly paying more for less and not exactly someone who should be advising anyone on their spending habits.
The anti-lootbox agenda: Again, there can be actual, rational reasons for being anti-lootbox as a supplementary monetization scheme. One need not dig too far to find examples of companies jumping on the bandwagon and trying to milk collectors and completionists for all they're worth. You'll find claims of it tapping into gambling addictions, but the only peer-reviewed studies I've seen on the issue came up wanting. If anyone has any I'd love to see them. Personally, I could see there being something here, as there is assuredly a rush when opening up the unknown, and a dopamine release when getting something above the norm in value thereby. Apparently the lack of payout being able to buy back in is an issue that prevents it from being the same, and there are other technicalities that differentiate lootboxes from true gambling. Either way, being anti-lootbox can be perfectly rational.
Why it doesn't apply to Hearthstone: For all their similarities, cardpacks aren't lootboxes. They aren't peripheral content being sold as a supplemental monetization model to a game. The cards are the game and buying the cardpacks is the only monetization of an otherwise remarkably f2p game. If you're playing the game for free you're getting ~70% of the game's content for free. If you drop real money on it, you get the option of switching between decks easier, while paying for the developers and the server uptime that everybody shares.
As for the megabundle and all the hoopla about it, different people value things differently. From a non-gold completionist's point of view, the Boomsday preorder and the Witchwood preorder came out about the same. It would take ~150$ plus an expansion's worth of in game gold to get a complete set for either. The bonus dust from 2 golden legendaries plus the chance to buy 130 packs at a discount instead of 50 and the 20 extra packs from Witchwood come out exactly even. You get 100% of cards for your 150$ either way.
For those interested golden cards or explicitly in a complete golden collection, (if they exist) TBP preorder was better. For those only spending 50$ and wanting packs, WW's preorder was better. Either is far better than any single expansion previously.
So anyone who doesn't sympathize with F2P players complaining about not getting a cosmetic are primitive and fanboys? Or maybe, some of us actually understand how FTP models works and why incentivizing promotes continuity with further game development. The business model of gaming has changed since the 90's. If you don't like a particular FTP game because of x, y, z then it's best to just move on. Complaining anout not getting cosmetics isn't going to bring Activision-Blizzard to their knees.
Y'all are going to have to take my word for it that if you go back to page 4 or so of this excessively long thread, ole Jaina here was accusing me of the same shit. I think I said something along the lines of "If you don't have $80 in disposable income, you might have bigger problems than the price of a preorder."
That isn't an insult.
That being said I'm absolutely a fanboy; in fact I'm an investor. I'll entertain opposing views all day, but so far I haven't heard a legitimate one and we're 37 pages deep.
I consider myself lucky that my favorite games are Blizzard titles. You see the shit going down with Battlefield V and how poorly EA has handled that mess and you are seriously going to tell me that we don't have it good playing for a company that gives a shit about quality and execution? There're plenty of things to be improved, but get some fucking perspective or go to bed, would you please?
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
I think the true "fanboys" are the ones outraged and upset they didn't get a cosmetic by being a F2P non-investor. Why get upset about something that doesn't affect game play? Maybe it's because as a fanboy they feel the need to "collect & own" everything. Never mind the concept of promotional offers as a marketing strategy, it's all about their needs and wants. lol.
I like you could pre-order twice for the first time ever, but also think every hero should be F2P obtainable at some point.
Free to try and find a game, dealing cards for sorrow, cards for pain.
The three purchasable heroes have been there and not F2P friendly AT ALL since they introduced them. They don't give you an advantage, so I personally don't care how they do the skins.
Hearthstone is an international game and average wages differ from country to country. 80$ might seem like a joke to you, but to million's of people that is monthly income.
No! That was my whole point of the entire fucking post! $80 isn't a joke at all.
I have lived in situations where $80 had to buy food for ten or twelve days, and if you spent it on something else, you went hungry. And even that is luxury compared to the living conditions of a sizeable amount of the world population. I know.
None of that changes the fact that computer games are a luxury. Premium skins in a game are so trivial to the hierarchy of needs, I don't feel comfortable calling them "luxuries". There should be a different word for how irrelevant that is.
All that being said, if you live in a situation where $80 is a relevant consideration to your budget, you quite literally have bigger things to worry about. Since I've lived it, I feel comfortable saying that people who are scraping to get by in a real sense aren't the ones bitching in a gaming forum about trivialities. They have bigger things to worry about.
Rather than acting like I'm a spoiled rich kid for suggesting computer game skins shouldn't be that high on the budget, maybe embrace the truth of the matter that people who make this game possible are or should be in a much better financial position than your average person in the world.
I have the luxury of the time to kill discussing this banality. If you don't and you're still here anyway, maybe it's approaching propriety to suggest you should readjust priorities?
Helpful Clarification on Forbidden Topics for Hearthstone Forums:
Enjoying Americans winning in the Olympics is forbidden because it is political. A 14 plus page discussion of state-sponsored lawsuits against a multi-national corporation based on harassment, discrimination, and wrongful death allegations is apparently not political enough to raise an issue.
Apologies if it was said before, you can't blame me for not reading through 36 previous pages of discussion. And apologies for taking it out of context, i just saw it and assumed you are a world class ahole.
Then clearly spending that money on a cosmetic is very irresponsible. Especially since it has nothing to do with game play.
I dont care about any preorder packages, because I wont pay any additional cent for this game. Ive already sunk like 100$ into it, far more than any full price title ive ever played. So much for free2play.
I dont play HS regularely anymore anyway and this is probably the last set i can keep up with.
Of course, the $80 gets you a slightly reduced price on buying packs, it's a promotional offer. The outrage is from people who feel slighted for not getting a cosmetic without financially investing in the game. I suggest to those people not to play ANY F2P game because that is how the business model works. Just stick to purchasing games that aren't F2P and you won't have to deal with F2P Marketing/business model.
How is it still going?
No idea. Butthurt people and their first world problems, complaining about a cosmetic that doesn't enhance their game play. Here's the world's smallest violin playing just for them.
Spending 80$ for a fraction of an expansion destroys any kind of reasonable pricing for pc games. Players who spend that much are idiots.
I agree. More than a full price game and you don't even get the full expansion. And an expansion != full game, not even close.
The increase in prices for (all kinds of) games will only escalate further in the next years, if this goes on. And if people keep buying and buying this will never stop. It's nice that you personally can afford your hobby getting more expensive, but some others don't.
EDIT:
Just because something is cheaper than it normally is, doesnt make it a reasonable price. 80€ for a RNG based portion of an expansion. Does not sound reasonable at all.
And for the second part I'll quote myself from this post: "It's nice that you personally can afford your hobby getting more expensive, but some others don't."
A digital CCG is not a PC game...smh