Blizzard quickly responded to the community outrage on social media by issuing an official statement, indicating that they will reduce the requirements for "most" quests while maintaining the XP gained. They plan to release the first hotfix this Friday, although it's unlikely to include changes to these quests. Is this a good step in the right direction?
Quote from BlizzardYesterday, Patch 29.2 went live with some changes to Weekly Quests, making them harder to complete but grant more XP. We had seen that many players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system. Our aim with the adjustments was to give all our players goals to play towards, and to reward our most engaged players (who would likely still complete the Weekly Quests without too much difficulty) for their commitment to the game.
But we’ve heard your feedback and it's clear that we pushed too far.
We want to reward players for their additional efforts, not make those rewards outside of their reach. That’s why we’re putting together an unscheduled hotfix patch scaling most of the Weekly Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now. We’ll keep the additional XP where it is. We’ll have more information on the timing of this unscheduled hotfix soon, but it will be in addition to our first scheduled hotfix that is already planned for this Friday.
There might be some weird effects of this scaling down of Quest requirements. When you login, for instance, you might see a Weekly Quest over 100% completion. If that happens, it should get cleared up after you play a game and progress that particular Quest once more.
Thanks for your feedback on this update. We look forward to hearing how the changes feel after these adjustments.
Started in 2014, stopped playing in 2018, came back in 2020. It's 2024 now and the game is slowly getting even worse. Battlegrounds was the only thing keeping me engaged but this quest change is the final straw. There so many other games/movie/tv series/ that can keep me occupied that playing bad or mediocre games that with each passing day draining our wallet and/or time is becoming so atrocious that it's better to just leave and never look back because there are still great products that we can pay for and spend our time with. Good luck to Blizzard, maybe one day they can release something akin to Warcraft 3 or Diablo 2 instead of what we have now.
The problem still is they are increasing it at all.
They went super hard on the increase, to begin with, so when they "decrease" it by 20-30% (to the actual goal amount that they wanted to increase it to) you will think it's a fix when it's still a bad change to a non-gameplay, purely financial, management-instituted objective.
I find it odd that this change with initially a monumental increase in requirements comes a few weeks before the heroic tavern brawl/miniset announcement. Moreover, the ASAP timeline basically says nothing. Does it mean that players will have to forgo a couple of thousand XP this week/next week because Blizzard is still working on it?
To me, it has a slight scent of trying to pull money out of players' pockets. Oh, you missed one/two weeks of weekly quests because of the high requirements and now don't have enough gold for the miniset? Well, too bad. Looks like you have to spend money for it after all.
I know that it might not be intentional, and maybe I'm reaching, but hey, that fits into a usual pattern of screwing up parts of gameplay/monetization for seemingly noble causes.
Just like everybody was saying from the beginning, it's a bait and switch.
It's the biggest mask-off moment I've seen from them regarding this game since the last mask-off moment.
Blizzard wants to take another piece of my game that I've played for 10 years away, or make it otherwise less than it used to be. They try to crap it up, then offer to crap it up less when I get upset because the initial crappening was a low-ball offer, as if I were in a some kind of negotiation or tug-of-war.
I'm gone. Time to nuke ten years worth of cards and to uninstall. That's the only message they'll understand, but by the time they get it, I won't be around and won't be able to return. The sky used to be limit when it came to the potential for this game. It was a delight in the early years and it felt like there was no reason for it to not keep expanding and getting better, in perpetuity. Comparing those years with what HS is at the moment makes it disturbingly clear just how much fun Blizzard restricts in order to squeeze us into the shape and play-style that makes them the most money.
I rarely interacted with the folks here but it was a pleasure to have done so when I did. I won't be back because I have to 100% erase HS from all habit and memory lest I tempted to come back (or rather, visit the smoldering remains of my collection). It's unfortunate I won't even be able to reminisce, but a decade of great, to good, to OK entertainment must have SOME value. I hope things get better for the people who choose to stay.
Take care, good luck, have fun, everyone!
The outrage is making sense. it's enough that they keep trying to press the limit higher and higher. People has been fed up numerous times.
The miniset outrage, that made people realize they have to spent money again to buy the cards
which is supposed to be included in the expansion.
The runestone currency, where they try to monetize HS in a different way,
and now Quest outrage.
even though I still kinda upset that players still don't have access to full expansion when they spent $80 (AAA premium price).
whats up with that?
This is such an obvious manipulation attempt.
Just smells to me like "Baby's first political move".
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it this time.
Not gonna settle for anything but a full revert and/or 1:1 ratio of requirement-reward
And besides, them saying their goal is to increase engagement with quests?
That's an absurd lie. If they want to increase engagement they would increase the reward by 200% as well.
Look at the tone of people's responses.
There was a time when our relationship with Blizzard felt mutually beneficial, like we were all part of one team, trying to make Hearthstone better.
But now we have New Overlords and things are different. Their seeming disdain for us has caused us to mistrust and resent them.
People always bang on about "The end of the game". We're not there yet but this is how it starts. I've seen it many times before and I'm sure I'm not alone. I wish I could believe that the powers that be would have a change of heart and that things could get back to what they were before but my experience suggests this is nit going to be the case.
I suppose it's because what I consider to be a "good" system is one that's skewed in favour of the customer.
>> insert rant on the problems with capitalism here <<
If we are going to keep loving this game, I fear we're going to have to lower our expectations. There's no going back.
LOL when? I have been playing since 2015 and it was never like that. The game was always dying it was always Blizzards fault, yadda yadda faceless corporation, yada yadda Activi$ion, yadda yadda boycott blah blah blah
What? That made me chuckle. When was that? I’m not saying you’re wrong but I missed the timeline where players and Blizzard was just one happy family.
ofc the classic we listen to community, bam its 10 wins now and blizzard best company ever lol
Ok... first of all, this came faster than expected.
Second of all, it is a load of nonsense and I mostly agree with xskarma's comment that this is a fairly transparent case of pushing the envelope (and the quest system is indeed debatable from a design perspective).
But I have to point out one more thing about this.
So, this is the first time anyone ever said anything about why they actually did this. Feel free to insert your "the real reason was..." mentally, but I like official explanations to see if there's ANY merit to them, and mock them otherwise.
Aside from this sounding a little bit like EAs infamous "sense of pride and accomplishment" from Battlefront 2, and you probably shouldn't take inspiration from the most downvoted posting in all of Reddit's history, I'm sure Blizzard doesn't hire people who dropped out of high school, and I hope I don't insult anyone when I say that most people of average education and intelligence would have been able to spot that tiny little problem that quests affect everyone, not just "our most engaged players".
If that is their goal, mabye it would somehow be possible to "reward players for their additional efforts" without taking things away from players who do not want to put in additional efforts. Maybe you could add optional quests for people who want this kind of stuff, and let others ignore it.
Wait a minute, this sounds familiar! I think they already have those; insultingly grindy quests with lousy rewards only meant to be completed by the most obsessive minmaxing lunatics (like me). They are called "achievements".
And it just so happened, that in this expansion, just a month ago, you had severely reduced achievements and made them less rewarding overall. Now, isn't that a funny coincidence?
You know, I do and say a lot of stupid things (and I have my posting history here to prove it!). But I am not entirely confident that I could have my actions and words directly contradict each other to this digree if I intentionally tried.
everything goes according to their plans: they exaggeratedly raise the numbers, we make a fuzz about this, they reduce them with the "we heard the community" excuse, but leave them higher than before and then we get a false sense of accomplishment.
In a part of it their fault was not the patch itself but them not explaining anything about it. For example the weekly requiring 15 WINS(not games) on either Arena or BGs or Braws was absolutely disgusting if you mainly play Constructed because you'd effectively have to run lame Brawler runs if you wanted the XP. However apparently they turned them all at 2250 base xp so you could reroll that lame quest but they never explained anything at the patch notes.
"Most" quests? Reduce the requirements for them all, the community has spoken.
Am I wrong in saying this fast a turnaround implies they anticipated this response and planned around it? Sure, this isn't exactly a groundbreaking thing to predict happening. But it feels like it was planned - the numbers chosen were intentionally ridiculous because we'd riot no matter what. Then afterwards they change it to their desired endgame goal numbers, and we smile because "It's better now!"
Live service games like Hearthstone are the biggest victims of not respecting players' time. Hearthstone already somewhat did - you didn't need to log in daily for the maximum XP gain and weeklies were easy enough to complete. Not any longer...
We're going to need to see both reduced requirements and increased Experience gain at this point. I'm curious to see where they will land.
Even if they change it from 15 ranked wins to 10 for example, that little exp gain is still not worth it.
There are some weeks where I barely get to 5 wins in ranked, spending minimum time every month for that diamond 5 rank (optimal rewards & time balance).
Hearthstone is not a part time job ok, there are other games, other things in life, and a full time job is enough.
Totally agree, any increase in difficulty would suck, in my humble opinion. Some people do not have time to grind for hours, and quests are the main way to progress your account. The alternative is uninstalling, sadly.
I get that they are trying to force more engagement, presumably people are abandoning the game, or at least playing less (maybe that's why we have so many bots). But this is not the way.
10 ranked wins is going to be impossible for me since I prefer to play Arena. 5 was already taking a lot of time for me.
In that case I just might reroll the quest and completely abandon the ladder. Sucks because I like getting the rewards for reaching Diamond 10 or Diamond 5.