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.
Spent a lot of money on this game over the years. Gotta say with Diablo, Overwatch and all the other Blizzard Activision BS the past few years I’m out!
good-luck to everyone still feeding these people money, hope your justifications keep you warm.
Haven't played much this week, just logged in..... WTF is this nonsense. I can't believe how much this game has changed for the worst over the last few years.... it feels like every update is making me want to play this game less and less until ultimately I just never come back.
I miss the good old days..... Ben Brode and particularly the era of Whispers of the Old Gods through to Frozen Throne.... now it just feels like any other free to play cash grabbing garbage game.
Unfortunately this is standard practice nowadays. Add more and more "currencies" to make players lose sight of the real monetary value of a thing, or to spread out free rewards even more.
40 arena matches for £69.99. Imagine paying 70 quid for game that brakes within a week. You would return it and expect to be refunded.
This is parasitic.
Notice how adventures that were purchasable with gold, are not ANYMORE!
So you actually save money on Runestones if you buy the small 4.99 $ item
Once you decide to buy anything else you lose 0.01 $ * <the item value> / 500.
Any company out there interested in making games just for the sake of making games?
No? Okay
Very interesting, this is an ambiguous comment. Are you bashing Blizzard or bashing the bashers?
You find a bunch of developers willing to work for free, then you can start making games for the sake of making games.
Oh, I absolutely agree, I'm confused about how are you getting upvoted though. Since you seem to legitimate the monetization system, and this is forbidden here. To be honest, I feel like most of the people complaining are like entitled kids. "Why is this thing that I use to get for free no longer free?" "They want to rob me of my money!" "They are so greedy I don't want to play anymore" "They should cut management salaries instead". C'mon, go and make a video game, create tons of content regularly, and give it away for free, then maybe you can have an opinion about a company's economy worth hearing.
Well if that model worked so well then why isn't it still around? Oh wait let me guess because of greed? The model worked so well that people paid $5-$10 a game and just kept buying hundreds and hundreds of top-notch games released one after the other from the same vendor so much that they thought it would be prudent to switch to a model that gave away the game for free and charged you to play it? I guess you never stuck quarters into an arcade machine before huh?
I can't wait until you kids get the tax bill for everyone who was smart enough to never pay their student loan debt back...hahahahah have fun paying for that. Keep on complaining about mobile gaming and how much you are just ripped off because that's really important.
I can't help but laugh at the comments of children
I remember when the App Store launched in 2008 - what a glorious time for mobile gamers. Everything was $5-10 and the games were fantastic. Then came the race to the bottom, but even those 99 cent games were some of the greatest mobile games created.
then came the free to play… couldn’t just be a demo like PC games did forever - it was the full game… FOR FREE! This is awesome!
just like everything in life that is “free”. Someone is going to pay. Here we are. In app purchase hell.
iOS was great as well back then (before jobs kicked the bucket) was some seriously good games out on the iOS appstore.
Ofc greed always finds a way though. My ex used to rip me because I used to say that iOS and android were the future of handheld gaming... I honestly thought it was though, it was great when it first started.
There was even a WoW clone called "order and chaos online" which was a great game, absolutely loved it.
So if I want to buy something between your two rune bundles, I have to overshoot it to get it and then wait till I have enough leftovers to use all the excess?
Yet people still spent a lot on Diablo Immoral and are going to do the same on HS. Until someone is able to prove, in court, that these practices are taking advantage of weak customers (like trying to sell an ounce of drugs to a junkie), there will be no laws that prohibit them.
Go to law school guys and do your best to f.k over these greedy bastards.
Yes. This is sad and true. Anyway, consumers have the power, and they have to punish hard companies like this. Blizzard broke a boundary that had to remain intact. Now consumers must punish, we must prevent this crap from contaminating video games.
I don't want to be ripped off, and I don't want to constantly open my wallet to play. A game is not credit card swiping.
Take a wild guess why DI is banned in the Netherlands and Belgium. As far science is concerned, these practices do take advantage of people who are emotionally unstable or more impulsive than others. Whether the laws written by men recognises that is entirely another matter.
Free-to-Play: developer benefits from large user base, players benefit by playing… for free. To be competitive in Free-to-Play you need to grind more in almost all games.
Pay-to-Play: Mario, Madden, Horizons, etc. you literally pay to play.
Pay-to-Win: The only way to win is to play. I cannot even think of one F2P game where this is the case. Grind-to-Win would be more accurate.
Pay-to-save-time: this is what people are actually wanting. “I don’t want to pick from 2 heroes, because I might only have 2 bad choices. This means I have to do more games to be successful. I don’t want to pay $5 a season, so I’m upset I have to grind more.”
Not sure what a lawyer would actually do here. Just because players are not using accurate terminology doesn’t make it true.
(side note: I hate the IAP model… but most people complaining about the price of HS never played MTG. That was 1,000 times more expensive than HS to be competitive.)
Your definitions are not wrong per-se, but you missed the essence of F2P. Someone has to pay for the game, right? So where should we draw the line? I don't care if it's a whale or not, but no company should take advantage of the "compulsion" or other mental instabilities that weak people have with respect to gaming.
The pandemic made us stay home and lonely even more. It is as if someone knew it's the perfect time to release a virus so that people got more enganged online and towards only having a life there. And it's not important that the target audience for this was 12-30 year-olds. Companies (online ones especially) had even more reasons to push boundaries and extract money from the increased number of depressed and newly antisocial people (+ existing ones that got even more involved in online and retreated from real life).
There's no surprise that these practices came during or after the pandemic. Should we embrace them? Definitely not. The problem is there are not enough psychologists around to make people realize certain things...
Companies exist to make money. I'm sorry they are trying to make money.
You get a group of developers who will work for free and you can start making free games without needing to make money.