An attempt to solve HS being pay to win

Community Discussion
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So i am getting tired of having to pay or play a lot of arena to get packs. And i hope a lot of people can agree with me. But i’ve been thinking about how to make the game F2P. Why not make people pay for the expansions (for golden cards) and update the store to hold reskins of cards (with better animations). Now this could maybe be a bundle of reskins (let’s say yogg, n’zoth and y’shaarj) for 5-10€. Honestly i don’t care about microtransactions if they are not pay to win, like card packs.

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remove the price of all packs and solo adventures and put a monthly fee lets say 15$ a month ^^ sounds good :slight_smile:

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Would make me stop playing. I like collecting cards.

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One thing many of these threads simply fail to grasp is this:

Blizzard is a business. Businesses have expenses, paying developer salaries, artists salaries, server equipment, data center space, power and cooling, marketing and advertising, customer service salaries… you get the idea.

The more immersive and impressive and complex the game is the likely these costs are to be higher.

This is RL … “things” cost money. The nicer those “things” are typically the more they cost.

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I know but the way blizzard is profiting is downright gambeling and overly costly. A sub fee each month (like in wow) would be better than this. You can’t defend these shady business pratices behind the ‘‘it cost money to run the game’’ argument. There are better ways to monitize from this.

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Last time I checked, the game is free to play. It’s your choice if you decide to spend RL cash; no one is forcing you.

As for you pay to win statement; an RNG slogfest of cards packs wins you nothing whether it’s cash or gold. Playing the game, having any form of skill/time to play is what wins games.

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Well no, because it would shut out everybody who currently plays the game while spending less than $15 every month.

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Yeah okay, i can see that it’s not really P2W since you can stay competitve without spending. What i was thinking about is that the amount of time i have to spend grinding ladder or arena to get card packs is ridiculous. Now quests and brawls are awesome, but i wan’t to play different decks and strategies without having to spend hours and hours on the game or paying loads of cash :frowning:

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It’s basically one or the other…grind your time for gold/packs or cough up the cash and shorten the grind. And for me, personally, it comes down to available time to play and how good I am in the current me (or overall). I’m a fairly good player, but don’t have the time to invest anymore (not to mention it seems like they’ve shortened the time between expansions).

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I have another solution.

You log in every day and you complete your quests.

Boom, I just blew your mind, right?!

Did you know that if you log in every single day and you complete your quest every single day, in between expansions and you save your gold, every single gold, by the time the next expansion comes around you will have enough to get around 80 packs.

And 80 packs for each expansion, regardless of how many legendaries you pull, or not, is more than sufficient to keep a player competitive in the evolving meta year round.

Can you imagine if you invest the dust from duplicates? You could craft meta cards that you did not get, which then leads to more wins, which leads to more fun and more gold for the next expansion.

It’s crazy, right?!

But yeah, no, they haven’t. Every release still happens on the same day of the same month, three times year, year after year after year.

For instance, the next expansion after this one will happen on the first Tuesday of December, just like last year and year before.

This expansion is happening on the first Tuesday of August, just like it has been for the last 5 years straight.

If the time was getting shorter we would eventually have had 4 expansions a year, then 5, and so on.

But don’t let facts and historical record get in the way of your feelings or anything.

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Yeah i agree. its not really a card game if you’re not collecting cards. Ive never paid a day in my life for this game but ive never felt priced out. just do your quests, save your gold, and use your dust wisely

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I made a reply in a different topic that I think is still relevant to this one, so I’m just going to link it:

TL;DR: CCGS will always be inherently unequal as in practice players have unequal access to the cardpool. While other types of games can put all players on equal competitive footing and make their money exclusively off of cosmetics that do not affect gameplay, history has shown this does not work for CCGS as the few cosmetics that are available to them do not bring in much money as they aren’t in high demand. The only way I can think of to give players equal access to all cards while still turning a profit would be to move to a subscription based model, but of course this would likely be met with a significant drop in the player base.

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Historical Facts…feelings hurt. :frowning: :wink:
Just joking. :slight_smile:
Am wondering though. Every three months the expansions come out.
I think the base price without the hero has always been around $49 ? Then $80 if you wanted the special hero?
Curious…would it be smarter to have an option to do a monthly fee for $5? Like most of us are currently doing for local news papers or Internet news? I know this next expansion I’m not purchasing…just got caught in financial stress so I have to give up an expansion but still would like the hero ya know !? Used to play WoW until they moved the GPU requirements…lol…so that monthly fee went to Hearthstone expansions for a while.
So back to topic… Would the option of $5 a month or $10 a month as an option to pay service, While, still having the free to play service be a real smart move?

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I would say $15 for all the cards per expansion for one month is fair.

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After reading this and thinking for myself I have four solutions. But first I want to get something else out of the way: Every cardgame is Pay to Win. I am also playing MTG at my local games workshop and trust me, I only play there on the casual days with people who have their casual decks. Cause their ‘tournament decks’ are usually decks with handpicked cards worth $300+.

After having that out the way, I do agree that a video game should not feel like this. So I have four solutions that are based on an increased customer experience without the company losing money. More in the sight of re-aiming the customer investment and because of this attracting more new customers.

1: Split packs up in class packs and minion packs. Make special deals like a guaranteed legendary for a specific class, 5 class packs and 10 monster packs.
2: Subscription for full adventure access and a monthly gold reward. See elder scrolls online for reference.
3: Double the amount of dust you get from disenchanting cards. And add a stabilizer (priced at 100G) to the store which gives you a full dust refund for a specific card.
4: Offer an extra quest each day (thats not counting towards the 3-cap) which rewards a booster pack. (so having a chance to have cards from any class and monster).

Below this post you can find more information and depth about my solutions. If you need more convincing of course. I hope I could have encouraged some inspiration by some people.

Sorry if my grammar is off point on multiple locations, I am very tired at the moment heh. Its about the thought that counts right?

Best regards,

First solution would be the pay to win feeling of cards. I think the reason for ‘feeling’ this more than it should is because it has classes, a small meta to work with and a weird crafting system. So when you open 15 packs and the cards get spread over 9 classes, and 1 monster tab. You obviously wont be even near a decent meta deck. And you cant just disenchant a legendary cause its worth is the same of a single epic.

My first solution would be as followed: Split packs up in class packs and minion packs. Make special deals like a guaranteed legendary for a specific class, 5 class packs and 10 monster packs. This is how MTG and Yu Gi Oh and even pokemon for goodness sake do it for years.

This way blizzard would still get enough money, cause its peoples same investment but more aimed. And people who usually wouldnt pay for packs might give it a chance now. Cause they feel more confident in their purchase.

My second solution is about the adventures. I would advice a subscription system as elder scrolls online has. You see, elder scrolls has a base game for 10 bucks. And offers additional content as DLC content. You ‘can’ buy all DLC content and pay it infinitely. But you can also get a subscription and play it all as much as you like as well, for as long as the sub goes. I think this would go very well with hearthstone. Lets say you sub for hearthstone. This would allow you to play every adventure. As much as you like. You even get the cards from the adventures, No problem. And as an addition you get 3000 gold reward. So you can buy one of the adventures and even two booster packs. If the subscription ends, you lose access to the adventure exclusive cards (if you didn’t unlock the adventure with gold or money).

The way this would help people is because now: people pay full price for Xpac one and then they have to pay ‘again’ for Xpac two. But with this system they can pay for Xpac one and with the gold they get they can pay for Xpac two. But and maybe they enjoyed the xpac one so much and its still in the meta so they will pay for xpac one anyway. You see? Win win. Own choice. This also wouldnt set sub-players on a different level then non-sub players. In comparison with how it is now.

My third solution is changing the crafting system abit. I dont think its fair how you get a legendary for a class or playstyle you would never play, and so it kinda just sits there. Cause heaven be damned if you disenchant it to buy a single epic. I do understand tho that it would be abusable. Because players could just disenchant and recraft decks on the fly. So I would suggest adding disenchant-stabilizers to the store for 100 gold. Which would ensure that the target card gets a full dust-refund. I would also suggest increasing the dust gained by double. So legendaries give 800 dust, epics 200, blues, 50 dust.

My final solution is regarding the free players. And so the base game. Offer more types of quests and start offering two quests per day. One to earn 25/50/100/150 gold. And one to earn a booster pack of the latest Xpac. This would also solve ahell lot of things.

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I’d suggest a trading system, in physical card games like MTG I remember times when you might trade your spair blue or white for black or red or visa versa and it gave players more identity, where this might not fit hearthstone is that the identities always seem a bit less defined, every class seems to have board wipes seems to have damage spells etc. So it is really just on a patch by patch basis where people tend to form their preferences. Then this also kind of goes against having quests, because you’d not be able to complete half of them. But I remember back in the good ol MTG days where I traded off my counterspells for black kill spells and hell it is time consuming kind of weighing up your opinions on which cards better and who’s getting screwed over more and theres always one kid who seemed to be better researched into regards with cards that seemed kinda janky or ambiguous. But I think a lot of people would trade RNG cards for non RNG cards, you’d see people trying to own every card of one set, might make some pretty sweet deals. Sometimes people are desperate for that one really really powerful card so they might do 1 legendary for 3 legendaries.

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I think they’ve done a pretty good job of having lots to do that doesn’t require having lots of cards. You could get many hours of casual entertainment out of this game without ever spending a dime. They’ve also built a lot of luck into the game, plus there is skill involved, so that card superiority alone is not guaranteed to be the dominating factor.

The trick is managing your own psychology. If you feel you must have every card to enjoy the game, you’re going to be disappointed even if are willing to throw money at the problem.

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Its allready F2P… You dont have to play a lot of “Arena” to get packs. You get gold ingame wich does accumulate upwards of 80 packs each expansion cycle. Wich is enough to get a competative sample of the expansion in question… Thats where i dissagree with you…

Here is where i agree though… Its to expensive, and many people have aired the same concern… I have a good collection, but i allso have spent aprox 1000 Euros on the game since 2015… But iv come to a crossroad where i simply cannot defend spending 80+ Euros every 4 months… It simply isnt worth it for me personally… It would be if each expansions where priced around 40 Euros… But i doubt Blizzard will do anything about the prices…

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Lol, you arent very bright are you? probably a fanboy. did you know EA was sued for false advertising for disguising a game as “free” but bogging it down with so many microtransactions you essentially HAD to pay even though the DOWNLOAD was free? Bethesda also could ruin loot tables if you hadnt payed for a certain amount of time

But don’t let facts and historical record get in the way of feelings or anything mobydick, blizzard loves a good whale.

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None of the facts you presented have anything to do with Blizzard though (and the Bethesda one is less a fact than a hypothetical). Unless your argument is “well, everyone else does it!” bringing up other corporations’ bad deeds seems like a pointless aside.

If your argument is that because EA is a crappy company, all other game distributors are crappy, well… why play any non-indie games at all?