The Midsummer Fire Festival - Will We See It Again This Year?
Warning: Opinions are expressed below. If this isn't something you're looking for, why not check out some decks!
Last year, the Midsummer Fire Festival event Ragnaros brought to us gave us some amazing content, but will we get to see it again this year? We don't currently have an indication that tells us we're going to see Ragnaros come back with double gold for completing quests, but it would certainly be a great followup to the current Taverns of Time event.
Let's take a look at the Midsummer Festival's history and if it makes sense to see it again.
Humble Beginnings: World of Warcraft's Midsummer Fire Festival
In World of Warcraft, the Midsummer Fire Festival is a holiday that takes place during the end of June and beginning of July.
The event is based on the real-world holiday of Midsummer, a celebration that takes place in many different parts of the world in their own special ways. Residents of the Warcraft universe enjoy visiting bonfires, melting frost elementals (ice stones too!), ribbon dancing, and tossing flaming torches during the in-game event which comes loaded with plenty of swag to collect. Players collect Burning Blossoms that they can redeem for toys, pets, and miscellaneous fun.
This image is from 2007. There's Hearthstone players younger than that!
Unlike in WoW, Hearthstone took the flavor of the event and let Ragnaros decide how to run it.
BY FIRE BE PURGED: Hearthstone's Take on Midsummer
Ragnaros took over the Tavern for a couple of weeks last July with a bunch of awesome.
- A special Tavern Brawl.
- Double gold earned on all daily quests.
- Special firework animations for your wow emote, based on how well you did in the brawl.
Objectively, it still remains one of the best events Hearthstone has ever had and it lead to a wonderful holiday called the Frost Festival which had tie-ins to the Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion. Why would the Fire Festival be a good follow-up event for the Taverns of Time though? That's the question we need to answer!
A Timely Follow-up
Blizzard is no stranger to reusing events in Hearthstone, with the player base expecting it, but are they generous enough to keep that gold flowing? Looking specifically at dates, the Midsummer festival of last year took place on July 5th, which is around the same time the Taverns of Time ends (July 2). Going from one event into another would continue to keep Hearthstone spicy and still falls in line with the historical record which has allowed for back-to-back events. Totally possible then!
Honestly, I think they are generous enough to give us that sweet gold. There has been quite a bit of negativity within the community when it comes to how hard it is to get into Hearthstone, so giving out extra goodies to everyone improves morale and may even bring us some new players in the long run. That could just be the shard of optimism of optimism within me talking, but many studios out there these days are always doing new, scheduled content in their titles which makes for quite a competitive scene -- something Hearthstone should desire to be in front of.
It would also just be nice to see some holidays that we can rely on. If there were always a couple of scheduled events between expansions, it would go a long way to reducing that mid-set fatigue many players talk about. This is especially true should the meta not swing much around that point and the team over at Blizzard HQ doesn't have any balance changes to make. Gold injection events would help us prepare for the upcoming set, or finish up the last few packs we want from the current one to complete that pity timer run.
If we don't end up seeing Midsummer come back though, I fully expect something this summer to tie into whatever that new Tempest Keep / Ethereal expansion ends up being, so don't frown! As Dean Ayala said last year, they now have a dedicated team that works on events and they have a "bunch of other things in store for the future [we] will all enjoy" so there's likely still new things in the pipeline for us to enjoy.
The Frost Festival on the other hand, at least for now, may not make much sense to return. We've already had a recent arena event with the Taverns of Time so it may be too soon to shake up the Arena again. There's also not much of a reason to give out Frozen Throne packs again which was a large part of the Frost Festival tie-in to the Frozen Throne set, so that may be the final nail in the coffin - at least for now.
Overall, more new events for the game are welcomed, seeing old events return so we can have some familiarity and rewards is awesome, and having content spread out throughout the entire year and not just limited to sets is a huge win for the game in my book. Midsummer makes a ton of sense to return to the game to have a dual-event summer happy-fun-time and to once again shoot those fireworks off your emotes.
What About You?
Do you think Midsummer will return? Do you want Midsummer to return? What other kinds of events would you like to see in Hearthstone? Let us know how you feel in the comments below!
“This is the festival of meeee.”
Favorite quote from last year’s Midsummer :)
i wouldn't mind 2x gold ;p
Some people don't understand that the majority of people who use gold to buy packs are f2p. Blizzard giving out more gold does not mean loss of revenue since f2p don't spend real money anyways. The people who spend real money buys packs during the first week of expansion. What this does is just get more people to play more.
Just remember that nowadays expansions come out every 4 months and take well over 10 thousand gold to get all the cards for if you play for free. That means even if every player got like 200 gold every day they wouldn’t even get close to collecting everything (they’d have roughly 10 legendaries) so it’s safe to say they can afford to run these kind of events, even if they ran them all the time people still would need to buy packs to keep up with the meta.
Actually. 200 gold per day is ~73K gold per year. Well over 20K per expansion.
You are correct, my apologies. So this gives 240 packs per expansion - still only enough for just over 10 legendaries
They could even merge Midsummer and Ahune from Frost Festival, exactly as it happens in wow (with Ahune as arch-enemy).
Tbh, when summer kicks in, i prefer to see refreshing snowflakes on my screen.
But we definitely need the festival to happen yearly.
I wasn't playing at the time so it would be nice
I think blizzard is trying to improve the new player experience by giving taverns of time event and lately they are giving more free stuff than even before. So it's highly likely that we will see if again.
Since NERF weren't rewarded and were called as bug fixes or adjustments or whatever name you wanna give them has caused a lot of unhappy users. So they might try and compensate for that like they have is on going event.
At the end of the day, it doesn't harm them by giving double rewards because they might bring a deal similar to get in here bundle and trust me, there are a lot of f2p players who will be willing to make use of such offers and p2w players too as there is no such thing as too much dust :)
I welcome recycling the past events and midsummer fire festival was a fun one indeed. Afterall those special effects are already loaded into the client. so why not?
I'm sure Blizzard lost a lot of money because of the double gold event last year so I don't expect it to return.
Ofc... because of these peanuts they givin us... lol...
You can't be serious. A multi-billion dollar company like Blizz wouldn't give a shit about a two week long extra gold event.
I'm willing to bet large sums of money events like this generate them more income than they would have normally received. Without a doubt, people come back and play more Hearthstone when the rewards are higher. If you get enough gold from an event to buy 10 packs and you end up getting some sweet cards, you're probably going to play the game some more even after the event is over. Happy, playing people means more chance someone is going to buy stuff.
There's a lot of psychology behind free stuff in games that makes for an incredibly interesting topic. While it may not have an effect on you, there's a lot of people that are baited in to spend some money. Look at the recent ~40% off 10 packs deal or other mobile games that offer you deep discounts on something for a limited time when you level up. Everything is targeted to bring in a customer that otherwise would not have spent money. There's a reason why those pack discounts were taking place during the Taverns of Time event.
Haven't played WoW since a long, Time. Do they have events / festivals every single month now? That's cool.
Almost every month we've got something big, but yeah as L3VIAIR has said, every week they have rotating events now. You'll see things like bonus honor in PVP, extra XP for your pets in pet battles, access to special timewalking dungeons, bonus reputation from world quests, and more! They also now have micro holidays which are 1-3 day events that don't reward anything crazy but they encourage people to get out into the world and check them out.
I wish Hearthstone would do the same thing and have a calendar. Even if that calendar was just on their website, having a nice event schedule for people to refer to would be killer. They are doing a very good job so far this year with events though, so fingers are crossed this continues!
Now we just need a proper achievements system or more one-time quests for doing interesting stuff. There are so many easy options to give players a pack of cards or some gold, it would go a long way in retaining happiness.
I get legit orgasms when I see challenge a friend and both players get 160 gold. Gud sheet.
Neckbeard detected
Better check your neckbeard detector, it’s probably set to “Nearby”.
The mid-summer fire festival brawl was the best of all time. Honestly, I would love to see any event because I am always welcoming free shit.