So with the latest update it seems the devs have thought that changing how Reward XP is earned will reduce the bot problem on ladder. Personally I feel this change won’t do much to affect that issue, merely just make more people that run bots to run them for longer to get the same rewards.
But that’s not why I’m making this topic, I’m making this topic because this change has had a rather bad effect on Solo Adventure play. Usually I could have a match on my second monitor against a boss from say Naxxramas to somewhat test out a deck of mine while also gaining a nice 120 XP for the reward track while doing work on my main monitor assuming the match lasted about 30 minutes. With this recent change to reward XP also affecting Solo Adventures, the reward XP earned from such adventures has been reduce heavily, down to around 40 - 50 for a match of the same length. This even affected matches I played when I was focused on the game itself, such as with the now patched final three fights of the Book of Mercenaries Mage story. My XP rewards from that after playing for about an hour? About 60 or less XP.
I understand they want to try to address the bot problem in Ranked, but could they please revert this XP change within Solo Adventures? Or better yet, since challenging a friend still has the usual time and turn limits as playing against a random opponent, let us earn some reward XP there. I personally don’t want to play ranked because I don’t enjoy it and I prefer being able to leave the game for a bit so I can do work alongside making progress on the reward track. I love Hearthstone and the gameplay, but this recent change I feel has been done without fully thinking about the ramifications to the entire playerbase as well as much it would actually affect bots on ladder.
You want a solution to bots on ladder that just AFK? Add an auto-concede timer. Someone skips enough of their turns it just auto-concedes them. Reduces their rewards that way, or even make it that if the auto-concede triggers it just eliminates all rewards you would have gotten. Yes it may affect normal players that disappear mid match to deal with IRL stuff, but this reward XP change already does that and to a much worse degree from what I can tell.