A simple breakdown of reward systems

Multiplayer Discussion
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disclaimer: this thread is for informational purposes regarding the reward track offerings for players, a comparison between the old system and new, and discussion thereof. If you want to talk about how “Hearthstone is still too expensive!!!” then you’re free to go make your own thread about it and I’ll happily contribute my own wishlist of things I think should be done to make the game more F2P-friendly. This, however, is not that conversation.

Edit: Because apparently I’m a doofus and suck at manual counting FAR more than math, I misrepresented the 1-50 reward track gold as 5,050. That’s wrong, it’s 5,650. The rest of this post has been edited to reflect as such. I blame Evo Shaman for reducing my overall sanity level.

I’m going to post my observations regarding the most recent version of the reward track in terms of raw earnable gold in comparison to the old system that we had. To do that, we need a baseline “average Joe” player that can serve as our test dummy for playing both systems and give us our assumed values. Obviously no one example can cover every archetype of player, this is just my attempt and finding a reasonable baseline average.

Since the roughly “hour a day” experience seems to be widely talked about, we’ll go with:

  • One hour, or 400xp worth of playing done per day.
  • 50% winrate
  • 8 minutes average match length with queue time included in that
  • All daily/Weekly quests completed
  • Four high-value dailies (60g/1000xp) and three low-value dailies (50g/900xp) completely per week.
  • Usually most folks can reroll better than that, but other times if you want to play, you reroll into something like draw 30 cards and can’t play for an hour without doing it, or get loaded down with low-value quests.

Some values will be fractional. You cannot play seven and a half matches, but remember that this is serving as an average so fractional values still matter and add up.

This comparison ignores XP from achievements, as not everyone will have the same access to that.

Old system

  • 390 gold per week from quests. Pretty cut and dry.
  • 7.5 matches played per hour. 50% winrate means 3.75 wins per hour (assuming the above match length & winrate) which comes out to 12.5 gold per hour. Doing that for seven days gives someone 87.5 per week from wins.
  • the above values give us 477.5 gold per week, which is 68.21 (rounded) gold per day or 8,185 gold per 120-day expansion cycle.

New system

  • 6,000xp per week from weekly quests.
  • 6,700xp per week from daily quests
  • 2,800xp per week from play time
  • XP to level 50 is 156,960. That gets you 5,650 gold.
  • 50 gold per level after 50, but the level requirements are incremental. I’m going to use 1,500xp per level because I still see it as the safest conservative estimate.
  • 15,500xp per week = 2,214.29xp per day, = 265,714.8xp per expansion cycle.
  • 265,714 - 156,960 (to get to lvl 50) = 5,650 gold earned and 108,754xp left to level beyond that.
  • 108,754 ÷ 1,500 = 72 levels gained beyond 50. That’s 3,600 gold.
  • this totals up to 9,250 gold per expansion cycle, possibly more if the post-50 leveling averages require less than 1,500xp per level.

Given as close to the same circumstances as I can estimate for the “hour per day” player, it’s 8,185ish gold under the old system and 9,250ish gold under the new reward track.

Obviously plenty of us have seen different figures under the old system than is being shown, but just as your gold earned would be more by playing more each day, having a higher winrate etc. you’ll be earning more than 400xp per day and pushing yourself further beyond level 122 each expansion to earn more gold by having above-average time invested/performance in the new system.

Well, that’s pretty much it. I keep seeing it brought up so I figured I’d give a singular post to show the math I reference.

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I don’t doubt your math, but I would suggest 400xp would take more than an hour in any mode, and significantly longer in several of the modes that give less xp.

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I’m just going off the figures we were given to work with. Casual does earn a bit less as I understand it, but BGs players are making out like bandits compared to before now.

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I’m not sure I can trust 400xp per hour that the devs claim.

However, as someone who strongly favors control decks, xp per time spent is probably much more valuable than gold per win in most cases and something to consider.

You can consider as number of matches increases per hour basis time spent per game per hour compared.

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Even at 300 XP per hour, assuming everything else remains constant, you would earn slightly more gold under the new system, at 8250g per expansion compared to the 8185g of the old system.

According to data from the Firestone tracker, the XP rewards are pretty close to the initial claims of 400 XP/hour for Ranked and 300 XP/hour for everyone else. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/k5y9wu/xp_per_hour_across_game_modes_firestone/

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You literally JUST beat me to it as I was subtracting the quest xp from the required 120-day total necessary to hit 8,200 per expansion lol

400xp per hour beats the old system by the above-shown amount in my OP. Anything 300 or abover per hour beats it period, even if only slightly so.

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To be fair, I didn’t take out the 2500 XP bit, because I’m assuming even players who don’t play normally play Ranked would go for the quest XP. My adjustment is exclusively to the XP-per-hour numbers.

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Right, this assumes the same quest completion as stated above.

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While a cool comparison, perhaps you can add this is one exact specific scenario comparison for players who only do 1 hour.

Hopefully you’ll get thank you’s from the 1 hour players.

As for the other scenarios, which there are a few, we can say this post does not cover:

Players who spend an hour to complete a couple of dailies at once. (not every day). So, maybe a few hours per week, tops.

We are also not counting 80g shared (I don’t know what the XP share is, I’ve only seen it shared with me once, I have not received it).

We are not counting players who play only single modes (again, this comparison only generalizes and doesn’t take into account ‘forced play style’).

The 10 g per 3 wins is hard to ‘generalize’ as there are players who like a certain style and probably do decent and don’t track that they’re averaging 50%. This game tries to ensure a slightly more favorable win streak, but of course, this can’t happen with every deck. Logically, those who don’t like the feeling of getting beat down will play less of the under performing decks in whatever style they’re playing.

Also, quick question, but are these numbers for the recently updated version? Or the previous/release version of the rewards track? (this is also important to make sure you note; so the audience can be more informed about what you’re trying to compare instead of just arbitrary commentary about a specific exact scenario describing whoever Joe is (I know, fake player at the hour a day).

In closing, if you were simply pointing out that the recently changed new system is better for a daily-hourly player, then cool. I thought the update Blizzard released explained it was better pretty clearly (considerably, when you look at the numbers they modified and bonus XP generation reward and the gold/packs they just handed out).

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The Challenge a Friend quest gives 1500XP, which is more XP compared to the amount of gold it used to give when you compare it with normal quests (150% the XP of a “hard” quest vs. 133% gold of a “hard” quest). But in contrast, the “Win 5 games” quest (also 1500 XP) gives less (150% the XP of a “hard” quest vs. 166% gold of a “hard” quest).

Also, the spectate quest no longer grants Classic packs, but rather 1500 XP. Whether that’s an improvement or not would depend on how much you needed Classic packs, I guess.

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Already included that in my into :slightly_smiling_face:

It seems pretty equivalent, but I deliberately left those out because not everyone can count on those, just as not everyone can count on the achievement XP that’s specific to the new system.

Unless the single mode is Casual, I’m fairly certain all other modes benefit. I believe Arena earns XP whereas it didn’t get gold for wins before, and as I said, BG players are making out like bandits compared to before.

True, and this is why I use an incredibly average rate. There are also folks who play 15-20 minute decks in Casual with like a 35% winrate, but they aren’t very representative of the average.

This is all based on the most recently-available information, as stated with:

There are a great many who doubt Blizzard’s wors on that, and I don’t blame them after Blizz tried defending the initial iterations of the reward track and this same math proved that they had in fact not upheld their promises regarding the new system vs the old.

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Yah - that last quest would require more math and not be good for an exact scenario like this one.

You’d have to generalize dust/gold/time value.

EDIT: and not just generalize for a specific scenario. This is an important yet maybe challenging concept when framing ‘use-cases’.

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And that’s a tricky thing to do, because the conversion changes depending on time invested, value of a Classic pack to the individual notwithstanding.

Personally, I didn’t know they changed that one and I’m happy to see it. I had started rerolling them under the old system.

We can use the above math as a frame for pretty much any scenario you’d like. Just gotta plug in winrate, match length and time invested for the old system, and time invested in the new system. It’s a bit difficult in one aspect though, because I don’t know what the win bonus multiplier is to modify the 400xp figure.

I did this one because Mr hour-per-day is the most often brought up player archetype by people discussing F2P, relatively casual players.

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Very well written comparison. Will be interesting to see the rarity distribution the cards in the mini expansion, so then we can compare the full equation of rewards /cost of old system vs new system

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So with this information, a plan of action to compensate for slow reward system should be made for next Battle Pass. It’s hard to make any long term plans given how easily they can adjust Battle Pass for better (or worse), but with current adjustments I would say to maximize saving your gold as much as possible. This way you can open up enough packs to reach the point of diminished returns on day 1 of the expansion, leaving the extra gold for cosmetics, future expansions, Arena, etc.

At this rate there are many people who are going to far surpass their previous gold goals, and for many that was more than enough to sustainably play for the season.

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Does time spent playing while challenging a friend count for accumulating experience?

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You can progress quests against one another, but I doubt you can gain time-based XP. It would be just as abusable as if you could have gotten 10g for three wins against friends in the old system.

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As a friendly reminder - this analysis also does not include any of the so-called “special events” that Blizzard claims they will be having in a season. Such events would be additional to the totals. But since those events are undefined, unannounced, seemingly random whims of the development team they cannot be reliably counted on by persons who are seeking to have a known amount of gold.

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So, same as the old system, then.

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They said they were doing the 20% reduction instead of the events that were going to boost XP.

We’ll just be getting the normal events as we always have, so that’s a wash.

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