Hearthpwn

Hi there,

I define myself a daily-yet-casual player. I've played at least 30 minutes every single day since the beta, even on holidays or while abroad. I was recently concerned about that addiction to be honest. But the tripling of the Weekly Quest Chores might be about to cure me of my addiction.

Maybe I'm slightly off topic but I sense there are a lot of converging facts happening, in addition to that tripling of the Weekly Quest Chores.

First, I LOVED playing Duels, much more than regular Hearthstone actually. To me, Duels was a way to finish those grindy achievements without dropping too much in Hearthstone Ranked (I hit Platinum once. I was shocked). 

It was a way to get that weekly Quest faster, too – the one where you had to win 5 [now 15] Brawls, Battlegrounds or Arenas [or Duels, in the good old days]. 

So without Duels it's possibly harder to get achievements rewards XP and Quest XP, right? Which means less Gold at the end of the season.

Secondly, the latest expansion has very few achievements (albeit more rewarding) as compared to the previous ones (hence less XP to gain, hence less Gold to get).

Duels had no paying option: you had to play with regular Hearthstone cards. No avatars or anything to spend real money on. On the contrary, Battlegrounds is all about cosmetics and Battle pass and such, and I can only guess a lot of people do pay to enjoy all that (to me, at least) insignificant stuff. Even Regular Hearthstone sells avatars and diamond cards and cosmetics.

So in my opinion killing Duels is a way to reroute players to Battlegrounds and Ranked Hearthstone, whether they like it or not, while rewarding less and less Gold to casual players. One stone, two birds.

The tripling of the Weekly Quests chores is another example. Such a shitmove can only drive casual players away from the game. How will that help Blizzard getting even more money though? I do not know. Most non-hardcore players now have a choice to play for fun and for climbing the ladder OR play to finish those gawddamn Quest chores in time. 

To me, Blizzard was a genius company once (I've been a hardcore solo Warcraft 2 and 3, Starcraft 1 and 2, Diablo 1, 2 and 3 player) which died when Activision/Vivendi and most of all Micro$oft bought the dream away.

So maybe it's time for me to abandon Hearthstone for good. There's never been such a nice Conjunction of the Spheres.