Announcing Runestones - With Usage and Frequent Questions
After announcing Runestones there were quite a few questions about how they will work and what you can and cannot buy with them and your hard earned Gold. Blizzard has provided some graphics that should make this all a little clearer.
Quote from BlizzardQ: What are Runestones?
A: Runestones will be replacing real money purchases for nearly every product in the Hearthstone shop. Some products, like Pre-Purchase Bundles, the Hearthstone Tavern Pass, and Packs (purchasing more than one at a time) will be able to be purchased with money or Runestones. A few other select products, like packs and cosmetics crafted in the Collection, will remain purchasable with only Gold.
With Runestones we’ll be able to offer additional smaller-scale items, such as the individual Battlegrounds Hero Skins offered in the shop with this patch. Runestones will be available in bundles of various sizes, including quantities that correspond to our major products (like the Battlegrounds Season Pass), so you can buy exactly the quantity needed for that product or you can stock up on more for later. No product costs are changing with this conversion—all prices are staying the same, just converted to Runestones.
Q: Can I earn Runestones in-game?
A: No, there are no plans to earn Runestones in-game.
Q: Is there anything I can use my Gold for in Battlegrounds?
A: No, there are no plans for Battlegrounds to use Gold in any way. Players who don’t want to spend real money or Runestones will still be able to enjoy the free rewards from the Battlegrounds Track.
BUY ALL PAST ADVENTURES FOR GOLD BEFORE ITS TOO LATE
There is a slight benefit to players, I think - provided you can purchase Runestones on the online blizz store, you can do foreign currency purchases on everything that uses runestones.
Right now, foreign currency purchases aren't available on in-game shop bundles that don't appear in the blizz store.
What's the point of this? Confusing players to spend more money because it feels like they're using an ingame currency?
The point is so they can offer scam currency bundles like every sleazy mobile game.
"200% value!"
"Costs 1000 crystals but oh no you can only buy 985, guess you'll have to buy even more!"
So that they can offer a bunch of, let's say, 100 Runestone (1$) purchases, while only paying one transaction fee.
What does this mean for amazoncoins?
Coins are treated the same as real money for purchases. As a result, they're the same as real world money in this chart.
So this means I could buy the miniset only with gold or have to spend money for runestones to get this. This means more Money, if I didn‘t have enough gold or don‘t want to use it for Miniset f.e..
Good thing I have some packs from brawl, rewardtrack aso and some dust. Otherwise I would take my gold. Don‘t wanna spend money for runestones, if I already have some amazoncoins left.
So this is really a confusing and unnecessary system imo. For future minisets you better save some dust and packs if possible. Hart times for f2p.
china always has this
full circle back to Xbox Live Points
Wait so no bonus runes when you buy the bigger bundles... so no benefits for the players nice Blizzard. its kinda weird that you can save 15 cents by buying the smaller bundle 16 times then buying the biggest bundle.
For now. Once the system is in place expect the sleazy manipulation to come.
There's literally nothing here that benefits players. No extra runestones for buying the expensive bundles, nothing. This system is literally only for Blizzard to price shit awkwardly so players have to buy multiple bundles and have excess runestones. Corporate could suck a dick.
I mean, the communications from Blizzard EVERYWHERE and by every dev and community person has been that the excess Runestones thing is something they explicitly want to prevent. And if you look at the last graph, they have priced the rune packes in such a way that any usual purchase you would make can be done 1:1 with a common package of Runestones.
So, this is not an issue right now, unless you get suckered into buying an emote for whatever small amount of Runestones. but then you are asking for this problem with your purchase behaviour, not by some big evil corporate plan.
I dont want to be rude but it is still BS because you can sell the one emote or whatever for a smaller price right?
I don't see any good reason whatsoever for these to exist. If Blizzard wanted to avoid some flat transaction fee that some platforms may have then there is already a virtual currency that they could have used, it's called Battle.net Balance.
This currency only serves to disconnect you from how much you're actually spending by making you go through an intermediary currency with different values, and will undoubtedly at times leave you with spare change that you can only use on Hearthstone, not even on other Blizzard products.
There are several negatives for the consumer and absolutely zero positives. Purely a douche corporate move.
After Diablo Immortal I don't see how anyone could trust anything these people say.
Remember the whole "Don't worry, you won't be able to buy equipment with money"? Yeah, right. Because while technically true, they knew that equipment wasn't the important part of the game's itemization, runes were. And those were massively made P2W.
These people are liars. You can't trust anything they say.