The beef i have with bli$$ (as a f2p) is that they're misleading on purpose (with all their ID's not only HS) and they put in the minimum amount of effort (at least that's how it seems to me) but demand more and more $$...and for all those who come in here and shout there's nothing wrong with a company making profit i say yes, there is nothing wrong when the profit is within decency, otherwise in the real world they are put in place, checked in and whatnot by specific authorities who's role is exactly that, to stop companies from being/becoming too greedy...
How can you still complain about "minimum effort" these days? Two years ago, I'd have still agreed with you. But the game changed more in the last 12 months than it had in YEARS. And another huge change is right around the corner (for the better or worse).
Sure, the monetization efforts have gone up as well, and they are kind of getting out of hand now, but in all fairness, it's not entirely out of place either. It is kinda stupid that we see a new hero portrait and old card backs and another bundle every couple weeks, and several new portraits coming just with the next expansion, and everything always for limited time only. But it was equally stupid (if not more), that they never put new hero portraits or any other cosmetics in the store, after Magni, Alleria, and Medivh were introduced in 2015! That was all they offered in almost 4 years! And only a handful of exceptions added some variety, until they started adding hero portraits to large pre-order bundles regularly.
And by the way: No, there's no limit to how profitable or "greedy" a company can be. If there was, Google (and a few others) would have stopped growing years ago. Just now (and arguably too late), authorities start to take an interest whether the systematic (read: enforced) domination of entire markets could potentially be problematic or even illegal.
There are laws against certain practices, but from my understanding "greed" is more of a moral than a legal term, especially in virtue ethics. I'm no jurist, but as far as I know, greed is only considered as a motive in jurisdiction; greed might motivate actions which ought to be punished, but is itself not a crime. Either way, within the (sometimes stretched) boundaries of the law, companies are free to make as much money as the market sees fit to throw at them. And outside of lootbox controversies or some things possibly happening in the background, Hearthstone is not and most likely never will be a case for the authorities. If I want to argue against Hearthstone's business model, I wouldn't pick a legal approach. Especially when I know close to nothing about laws.
And instead of the same old moral debate, whether Hearthstone is "fair" or not, I'd suggest discussing it from a technical point of view, whether it is the best system for whatever it tries to accomplish, if only because it filters out a lot of moral arguments, which I got sick of reading and responding to a long time ago.
2) the experience system is calculated in such a way that the average player will reach level 50 nearing the end of an expansion cycle, so you'll have one week, maybe two, to grind those extra levels like crazy, how much do you think you'll be able to grind in that short timeframe? not much.
Where are you taking that from? It wasn't in the OP in the reddit thread and taking a quick look through it, I couldn't find anyone revealing anything regarding the exp/level curve.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only thing we know for sure is that level 4 requires 1200 exp, isn't it?
It's entirely hypothetical, of course, but one possibility would be that level 1 requires 1000 exp, and then it's a 50 exp increase per level. Considering the amounts of exp you'd get for daily and weekly quests, you'd be done with the reward track after something between roughly 60 and 70 days. Then again, they said that the exp numbers for quests were not final either.
Either way, I would be surprised if the reward track was mapped out in a way that it could barely be completed within 4 months. If player progress is supposed to be related to time spent playing (exp for quests and most likely wins or played games), you should have an influence on how fast you progress. If the amount of exp you can make at most is barely more than the minimum amount of exp you need, just to make significantly less gold in a 4 month period, it would be a pretty terrible system for everyone. Even the Tavern Pass would hardly even be worth it.
Of course, it's possible that this is exactly what they are going for, but it seems kinda unlikely to me. I mean, going through such great lengths just to make a significantly worse system that people would catch on rather quickly, and fabricating a very predictable and very severe backlash and drop of player numbers, would seem really stupid to me. A bit too stupid for so many people working on it. Even IF they want to push players into spending larger amounts that badly, and effectively kick a significant portion of their playerbase out the door, there would have been way easier ways to do it, like limiting the amounts of packs you can buy for gold, or cutting daily quests in half or whatever. You don't need to change your entire system, just to make your game less attractive.
That's not to say that the new system won't be worse than the current one after all. It might still be, depending on the exact numbers we don't know yet. But I can't imagine that the reward track would indeed cover 90-95% of the gold you can realistically make during an expansion cycle.
And even in the absolute worst case, there's still Battlegrounds.
It all depends on how the new system exactly works and how much stuff you get within a given period of time. The main factor will be how much exp you can expect to make in relation to how much you'll need per level. The main way to make gold, as it seems, is that every level past 50 awards 150g. But there's no comment on how much exp you get through daily/weekly quests, how much exp you get per win/game (if any), how much exp you need to reach Lv 50 and how long it would normally take to get there, and whether exp requirements go up with each level.
It's all speculation for now, but I'm more than a little concerned too. At the very least, as someone already said, I expect the launch day experience to become significantly worse for F2P moving forward, especially with mid-expansions.
The new system might be as rewarding as the current one, but instead of obtaining gold only, you'll get a mix of gold, packs, cards (random legendaries) and cosmetics. until you maxed the battle pass, and exp are translated into gold. I expect that you'll end up making less gold numerically, but get a similar aount of packs out of it. So, you'll make maybe 5000-6000g, and then you can earn another 30-40 packs.
But since you'll (probably) need to save 2800g every time for the mid expansion, it sounds unlikely that you'll have the resources to buy 60-100 packs on launch day without missing mid expansions. If it's even sustainable in the first place. If the system doesn't compensate for that, you might have to decide case by case, whether you even want to get something from the mid expansion.
With the current system, Galakrond's Awakening was already a problem for me, and I eventually decided to skip the last wing, even though I already bought less packs than normal on launch day. 80 packs + 4x700g was more than I could make in 4 months, so I had to cut it to 70 packs + 3x700g.
We'll see how it plays out. It's possible that the new system makes grinding easier and more rewarding than ever. But it's also possible that it could pressure you even more into planning out your resource management and only get the things you absolutely need. F2P will probably always be viable to make it to legend and stay "competitive", as long as there's an affordable deck of 30 cards that you can do well with. Whether you can maintain a decent collection, or get invested in Duels, is another question though.
EDIT: Went back and rewatched the essential parts. Ben Lee said about the 35 cards mini expansion: "we'll be adding them directly to card packs" (of the same expansion, I assume), and they can be crafted on launch. Guess I missed that bit yesterday.
Anyway, if the rarity distiribution is the same as Galakrond's Awakening, it would mean that 27 of 35 cards are 15 commons and 12 rares, and if you wanted to get 2 copies of those (as the budget option), you'd get them within roughly 18-20 additional packs, though it's a lot less if you factor in the ladder rewards (7 rares for Plat 5, extra packs) as well. If you are willing to wait a couple weeks after launch for monthly rewards, you might actually be able to get all the budget cards without purchasing a single extra pack after launch. This would fit with the statement, that you could get the cosmetic expansion coin (for 135 unique cards) without even owning a single legendary (though you'd probably need most epics).
So, the mini expansion isn't quite as demanding as I thought for getting a good amount of cards out of it, and isn't a huge deal for the "budget" version. However, given that distribution of rarity, we'd go from 25 to 29 legendaries per set, and since legendaries are ultimately what turned adventures into very good deals, the prize for a full collection would go up significantly. From a F2P perspective, it's just more legendaries you carefully have to chose from, which is a bummer, but we are already past the point where you can realistically hope to get all of them.
How can you still complain about "minimum effort" these days? Two years ago, I'd have still agreed with you. But the game changed more in the last 12 months than it had in YEARS. And another huge change is right around the corner (for the better or worse).
Sure, the monetization efforts have gone up as well, and they are kind of getting out of hand now, but in all fairness, it's not entirely out of place either. It is kinda stupid that we see a new hero portrait and old card backs and another bundle every couple weeks, and several new portraits coming just with the next expansion, and everything always for limited time only. But it was equally stupid (if not more), that they never put new hero portraits or any other cosmetics in the store, after Magni, Alleria, and Medivh were introduced in 2015! That was all they offered in almost 4 years! And only a handful of exceptions added some variety, until they started adding hero portraits to large pre-order bundles regularly.
And by the way: No, there's no limit to how profitable or "greedy" a company can be. If there was, Google (and a few others) would have stopped growing years ago. Just now (and arguably too late), authorities start to take an interest whether the systematic (read: enforced) domination of entire markets could potentially be problematic or even illegal.
There are laws against certain practices, but from my understanding "greed" is more of a moral than a legal term, especially in virtue ethics. I'm no jurist, but as far as I know, greed is only considered as a motive in jurisdiction; greed might motivate actions which ought to be punished, but is itself not a crime. Either way, within the (sometimes stretched) boundaries of the law, companies are free to make as much money as the market sees fit to throw at them. And outside of lootbox controversies or some things possibly happening in the background, Hearthstone is not and most likely never will be a case for the authorities. If I want to argue against Hearthstone's business model, I wouldn't pick a legal approach. Especially when I know close to nothing about laws.
And instead of the same old moral debate, whether Hearthstone is "fair" or not, I'd suggest discussing it from a technical point of view, whether it is the best system for whatever it tries to accomplish, if only because it filters out a lot of moral arguments, which I got sick of reading and responding to a long time ago.
Where are you taking that from? It wasn't in the OP in the reddit thread and taking a quick look through it, I couldn't find anyone revealing anything regarding the exp/level curve.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only thing we know for sure is that level 4 requires 1200 exp, isn't it?
It's entirely hypothetical, of course, but one possibility would be that level 1 requires 1000 exp, and then it's a 50 exp increase per level. Considering the amounts of exp you'd get for daily and weekly quests, you'd be done with the reward track after something between roughly 60 and 70 days. Then again, they said that the exp numbers for quests were not final either.
Either way, I would be surprised if the reward track was mapped out in a way that it could barely be completed within 4 months. If player progress is supposed to be related to time spent playing (exp for quests and most likely wins or played games), you should have an influence on how fast you progress. If the amount of exp you can make at most is barely more than the minimum amount of exp you need, just to make significantly less gold in a 4 month period, it would be a pretty terrible system for everyone. Even the Tavern Pass would hardly even be worth it.
Of course, it's possible that this is exactly what they are going for, but it seems kinda unlikely to me. I mean, going through such great lengths just to make a significantly worse system that people would catch on rather quickly, and fabricating a very predictable and very severe backlash and drop of player numbers, would seem really stupid to me. A bit too stupid for so many people working on it. Even IF they want to push players into spending larger amounts that badly, and effectively kick a significant portion of their playerbase out the door, there would have been way easier ways to do it, like limiting the amounts of packs you can buy for gold, or cutting daily quests in half or whatever. You don't need to change your entire system, just to make your game less attractive.
That's not to say that the new system won't be worse than the current one after all. It might still be, depending on the exact numbers we don't know yet. But I can't imagine that the reward track would indeed cover 90-95% of the gold you can realistically make during an expansion cycle.
And even in the absolute worst case, there's still Battlegrounds.
It all depends on how the new system exactly works and how much stuff you get within a given period of time. The main factor will be how much exp you can expect to make in relation to how much you'll need per level. The main way to make gold, as it seems, is that every level past 50 awards 150g. But there's no comment on how much exp you get through daily/weekly quests, how much exp you get per win/game (if any), how much exp you need to reach Lv 50 and how long it would normally take to get there, and whether exp requirements go up with each level.
It's all speculation for now, but I'm more than a little concerned too. At the very least, as someone already said, I expect the launch day experience to become significantly worse for F2P moving forward, especially with mid-expansions.
The new system might be as rewarding as the current one, but instead of obtaining gold only, you'll get a mix of gold, packs, cards (random legendaries) and cosmetics. until you maxed the battle pass, and exp are translated into gold. I expect that you'll end up making less gold numerically, but get a similar aount of packs out of it. So, you'll make maybe 5000-6000g, and then you can earn another 30-40 packs.
But since you'll (probably) need to save 2800g every time for the mid expansion, it sounds unlikely that you'll have the resources to buy 60-100 packs on launch day without missing mid expansions. If it's even sustainable in the first place. If the system doesn't compensate for that, you might have to decide case by case, whether you even want to get something from the mid expansion.
With the current system, Galakrond's Awakening was already a problem for me, and I eventually decided to skip the last wing, even though I already bought less packs than normal on launch day. 80 packs + 4x700g was more than I could make in 4 months, so I had to cut it to 70 packs + 3x700g.
We'll see how it plays out. It's possible that the new system makes grinding easier and more rewarding than ever. But it's also possible that it could pressure you even more into planning out your resource management and only get the things you absolutely need. F2P will probably always be viable to make it to legend and stay "competitive", as long as there's an affordable deck of 30 cards that you can do well with. Whether you can maintain a decent collection, or get invested in Duels, is another question though.
EDIT: Went back and rewatched the essential parts. Ben Lee said about the 35 cards mini expansion: "we'll be adding them directly to card packs" (of the same expansion, I assume), and they can be crafted on launch. Guess I missed that bit yesterday.
Anyway, if the rarity distiribution is the same as Galakrond's Awakening, it would mean that 27 of 35 cards are 15 commons and 12 rares, and if you wanted to get 2 copies of those (as the budget option), you'd get them within roughly 18-20 additional packs, though it's a lot less if you factor in the ladder rewards (7 rares for Plat 5, extra packs) as well. If you are willing to wait a couple weeks after launch for monthly rewards, you might actually be able to get all the budget cards without purchasing a single extra pack after launch. This would fit with the statement, that you could get the cosmetic expansion coin (for 135 unique cards) without even owning a single legendary (though you'd probably need most epics).
So, the mini expansion isn't quite as demanding as I thought for getting a good amount of cards out of it, and isn't a huge deal for the "budget" version. However, given that distribution of rarity, we'd go from 25 to 29 legendaries per set, and since legendaries are ultimately what turned adventures into very good deals, the prize for a full collection would go up significantly. From a F2P perspective, it's just more legendaries you carefully have to chose from, which is a bummer, but we are already past the point where you can realistically hope to get all of them.