Hearthpwn

Quote from ZherJ jump

Wow, thanks a lot guys. Almost everyone has been really insightful.

However, I disagree to some who say that nothing will change because of money. In fact, it would work the opposite.

Let's say I am a new player 2 years from now, and I am somewhat willing to pay a certain amount of money. When I go and calculate the amount of money I would need to pay to get the adventures, if the prices don't change, it would be around $100 or 13000 gold, which would be ridiculous as some sort of "entry fee" for a decent collection. This would actually scare of new players rather than attract them, hindering potential customers.

They will eventually have to scale the prices of old content sooner rather than later, but not to a drastic degree. Look at what they are doing in HOTS. The price of some heroes gets reduced when new heroes are introduced. 

 I really doubt we'll ever see a reduction in gold price of adventures. They're clearly designed to encourage players to pay real money - as the 700g : $5 ratio is much worse than the 100g : $1.50 or 100g : $1.25 (40 bundle) for packs. I fully expect them to discount the real money price on older adventures eventually though - likely through some sort of bundle.

I really don't expect to see a lot of change in regards to free gold/pack acquisition or pricing - and I don't blame Blizzard, they want people to spend money on the game. A couple of minor changes I'd like to see, however - would be allowing the purchase of any individual wing of an adventure, instead of forcing people to buy them in order - and allowing arena players to choose their pack reward. Neither change actually increases the speed of card acquisition, just allows players to better focus which cards they're acquiring.

I do think that we're overdue for some real-money price adjustments. I'd like to see something like a "first buy" discount on pack bundles, where on your first time buying 40 packs you get $10-15 off or something - maybe just for classic packs at first then incorporate GvG and other expansions later. Also, maybe whenever the next adventure hits - I'd like to see a bundle of Naxx and BRM for a discounted price - $35 for both seems reasonable.

You won't ever get anywhere with this game if you keep telling yourself your decks and plays are always optimal. The best players don't just luck into top 50 legend every season. They're constantly analyzing, adjusting their decks, figuring out how they could've played better - absolutely anything to get even the smallest of edge on the opponent.

If you really have a 30% winrate, not only are you making mistakes - you're making a lot of mistakes. If you can't figure out what they are, consider asking a more successful player to coach you - watch videos/streams of players using a similar deck - or record your games and post them here along with your decklist. There are plenty of ways to get help with the game, but nothing will work if you won't acknowledge that you need to improve - that it's not just RNGesus screwing you over all the time.

Has anyone done both the android tablet and android phone one-time quests? I did the tablet one last year and now can't get the phone one to pop - are they definitely two different quests?

Frustration is the greatest obstacle to reaching legend. People don't just win streak their way from 20 to legend. You will lose games, you will drop ranks. You need to be able to keep analyzing your deck and your play and making the adjustments necessary to improve and compete with whatever is happening in the meta. It's super easy to just shrug off losses as bad luck or bad matchups - and that will certainly be the case some of the time. You always need to look for things you could've done differently to give yourself a better chance of winning, even moreso when you're losing - otherwise you're just wasting your time, accomplishing nothing.

It does seem anecdotally weighted toward legendaries. It's been fairly unspectacular for me, played it like 5 times and got one legendary - sylvannas. My opponents, on the other hand, I've seen it played like 10 times and seriously 8 of them drew legendaries. The first two times I saw it played it drew neptulon - also seen dr. boom, illidan, stalaag, foe reaper, harrison jones and king mukla. Obviously this isn't outside the realm of possibility if it is truly random - but initial impressions are that it seems a bit fishy.

That seems like an odd choice to me. Personally, I'm fine with it since I already have all the vanilla cards I want, but arena is the place where free-2-players build their collections - and it won't be nearly as effective at that for newer players after the expansion. Seems like a system where arena rewards a "free pack ticket" or something that can be exchanged for a pack of your choosing would work better. Since they've already said that vanilla and GvG packs are going to cost the same amount, both in gold and real money - I don't see why you shouldn't be able to get either one from arena.

The ceiling for arena rewards is much higher than constructed. Even if you farmed the maximum 30 wins a day, you would only net 100g plus the daily quest. With arena there is no maximum limit, it's just how much time you have to play and how well you do.

The break-even point vs 100g packs is 3-wins. Keep in mind, though - that's break even for card acquisition, not gold acquisition. http://www.arenamastery.com/sitewide.php shows average rewards for 3 wins at 41g, 6 dust and 0.2 cards. An average pack nets something like 80 dust worth of cards - giving that 6 dust ~7.5g worth of value at a rate of 100g/pack. So that's ~48.5g per 3-win run, plus throw in a free card 1-in-5 times and you're right about at the 50g break-even point.

Of course, breaking even is not the goal - especially if you're not particularly fond of playing arena. All things being equal, if you don't want to play arena - then you're better off buying 100g packs than you are playing if you're averaging 3 wins. Personally, I would never recommend arena to a new player who does not enjoy the format. They're unlikely to average more than 3 wins and would need to invest considerable time to improve to the point where they're more profitable than buying 100g packs. If they do enjoy it, then the time and gold spent to improve is completely worth it, as it's the only way to acquire cards at a reasonable rate outside of spending real money.

Yeah the buzzard nerf was pretty extreme. Blizzard essentially gave it +1/+1 for 3 mana - that's absolutely brutal. I think they would've been better served to leave it at 2/1 for 2 and rework the draw mechanic - like making it only trigger when a beast card is played from your hand. That'd eliminate the unleash, draw 5 cards, clear your opponent's board scenarios - but still leave Buzzard some usefulness as its was always a playable card even without unleash.

Honestly MTG bans are a way bigger slap in the face to the player than Hearthstone nerfs. Imagine spending a bunch of money building a deck only to have a key card banned from most competitive play. At least with Hearthstone if you just crafted Leeroy you can get full value for disenchanting after the nerf. With Magic you can't go trade in your banned card for something else of quality, the resale value will be crap. You can still use it in casual play, sure - but personally I'd much rather just swap it for something I can use wherever I might be playing the game.

Quote from evilcat »

I am not sure about Starcraft or LoL comparison. Especially Starctaft requires some micro skills, build knowledge, map awareness. And starting point always same. In SC2 every player have same tools. The issue with HS is that new players have far less tools than dedicated. I am not bashing game for that, it is just something to acknowledge. And thinking of this game as "free" is not fully correct. I would not recomend it to casual friend (no casual, CCG fan probably knows anyway). The best introduction for friend would be gifting 40 packs (for money), so after initial tutorial, they could jump streight into this fun part.

Hearthstone only gives a competitive advantage to paying/long-time players in the sense that they have more deck options. It's very possible for a new player to quickly construct a deck that can compete at the highest level of the game. 

The question is, where is a new player's enjoyment of the game coming from? If it's from opening packs and getting new cards, then yeah, buying 40 would be a nice place to start. If they only get enjoyment when they're winning games, then unfortunately even buying a bunch of packs is unlikely to provide this. There are players with large collections that still don't win 50% of their games. I regularly encounter extremely expensive decks on ladder helmed by players who still don't understand all the basic fundamentals of the game.

The best way to get good at the game is by deriving enjoyment from learning about it. Since there is no mechanical skill-set necessary in Hearthstone, information is king. The player who knows the game the best, and is able to utilize that information as effectively as possible, is going to be more successful at it. The informed player will learn to win with a limited collection, the uninformed player will lose with all the cards in the game.

You know Blizzard doesn't run this site, right? Their forums are over here ----> http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/12492997/

Are there really any established, competitive, online games that are friendly to totally new players? Look at DOTA and LOL, they don't give any competitive advantage to paying players and they're notorious for being extremely unforgiving for newbies. People are able to successfully jump between different online shooters - but that's because the knowledge and skill sets for those games translate extremely easily. If you've never played any shooter before and jump into an online game of Counter Strike, you'll get crushed.

The fact of the matter is, like anything - Hearthstone requires a certain amount of dedication to become successful. Learning the game is much more important than building your card collection. There are very cheap decks that could be thrown together after a couple of days of questing and disenchanting packs that will take you all the way to legend. Of course, that's assuming you know how to play the deck. Knowing what cards to play and why, what your opponent is likely to play, what's popular in the meta, etc, etc.  If you don't get any enjoyment out of the process of learning about these aspects of the game - even when you're losing (often when you can learn the most) - then the game probably isn't for you. 

I'm primarily an arena player so I never saw much reason to buy packs. I bought one arena when I first got into beta to get the golden gelbin and haven't spent any money on the game since. When I would run out of gold to play arena, I'd just wait until I got enough from daily quests. Eventually I got good enough to "go infinite" in a sense. I actually only average ~6 wins, but generally only play 2-4 arenas a day at most so with the daily quests I'm not losing any gold.

When Naxx was announced I wanted to pay for it with gold so I opted to give arena a rest to build up a stash. I'd already acquired a nice collection of cards and was doing quite well in constructed. I often found myself wanting to play more after finishing my quest, so I took the opportunity to make a run at legend. I got to rank 3 in my first season trying, then hit legend the next. Not knowing how much gold I'd need for Naxx yet, I stayed with constructed - and built up a stash of ~8k by the time pricing was announced. Lately outside of finishing up Naxx and the heroics I've mostly gone back to arena. I'm doing better than ever and my gold stash is rising. Even after spending the 2800 on Naxx I'm back up to ~7k.

I don't have anything against spending money on the game, I just never really had any great incentive to do so. I'm not someone who just wants to play all day everyday, so when I couldn't play arena I'd just take breaks. Constructed used to be just a means to get gold for arena, but by the time I actually wanted to make a run at legend - I'd already opened so many packs from arena that my collection was big enough to put together some nice decks.

Every run? No. Even the best arena players go 0 wins on occasion. It's absolutely possible to average 6-7 wins though - meaning if 1 run I go 3 wins and the next I go 9 - I've averaged 6 wins for those 2 runs. I've played over 250 arenas and average just about 6 wins. I'm not the best player - many others average 7+ - but I've improved immensely since I first started playing.

I recommend using a site like arenamastery.com to track your results - this will help you determine which classes you're best with and which you struggle against. Posting your drafts can certainly be helpful - but remember that drafting is only the beginning - you still have to play the games and the correct strategy can vary greatly based on what cards you got and what your opponent is doing.

Bad luck runs will happen. You'll get terrible drafts and bad matchups and sometimes there's nothing you can do. However, those runs are the exception - if you're playing correctly and valuing your cards correctly you should go 4+ wins in a majority of runs. If that isn't happening, you need to reevaluate your strategies. That process starts with the draft, what are your favorite cards, least-favorite and why? What do your curves look like? Are you getting enough draw? Enough removal? How are your games playing out? How are you losing? Are you getting rushed down with a flood of minions? Is your opponent getting too many value trades and depleting your hand?

After I draft a deck I like to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the deck before I start my first game. Does it lack board clear? I'll trade more to maintain stability. Is it heavy with early-game minions? I'll go for the face more and try to end the fight before my opponent can respond. After a game I'll evaluate what worked and what didn't - whether I made any mistakes and how to avoid them. While it's easy to blame losses on luck - and sometimes it is the case - it doesn't actually accomplish anything, you won't get any better from thinking about that. Always look for things you could have done differently, if you determine that no options were better than the plays you made - just move on to the next game, but never just dismiss a loss as bad luck without looking at it closely.