“For many players, Battlegrounds has become their main way to play Hearthstone”
You literally say that this mode is the main way to play hearthstone for many players then you go and say “Oh yeah you can’t progress to get rewards by playing it anymore. screw you”. I mean what was the logic in this. Admiting that for many players that this is the only gamemode they play only to screw them out of the progression on the main track.
I will NEVER pay to play this game. I used to way back when standard mode was fun but not anymore. Removing the ability to buy the perks with gold is a catastrophic mistake and seriously fire whoever suggested that one.
This game used to be “THE” free to play game but over the years the greed of the company roots itself in making it more pay to win than most minecraft servers.
After this update drops i won’t stop playing but i WILL be insta conceeding to re-roll on the hero i can play as i will only have 2 options. As someone said before enjoy 4 player games in this 8 man mode 
I’ve been playing hearthstone since naxxramas, when battlegrounds rolled out it was so much fun for me I abandoned standard and wild and started only playing battlegrounds daily. I’ve invested a good amount of money in hearthstone and I’m not doing it anymore after this. Pay wall for an in game advantage, no thanks, this game has never been that. I’m uninstalling the app after 8 years having of hearthstone being part my day to day.
I’ve been a blizzard fan since I started playing wow in 2008. With the direction they are taking their games, clearly making them p2w, I won’t be purchasing anything else. I knew Diablo immortal was just the start. Your greed is shameful blizzard. I will not play a p2w game, or support a company that creates them. This is the stuff that ruins gaming.
I highly doubt u will get a refund now. Their arguement will be “you can complete it in other game modes” and leave it at that. Blizzard are just a greedy company that only wants one thing.
Okay the patch is cool, there’s a lot of cool stuff. But they did all this to mask that now to be able to choose 4 heroes it will be necessary to pay.
While choosing four heroes at the start of each match is now a paid feature, all players can still play Battlegrounds for free. We are committed to balancing heroes and gameplay so that choosing between four heroes involves options, not being able to
This excuse that they will commit to balancing the heroes smacks of a lame excuse, why didn’t they commit earlier? If it were not relevant to have this option, many would not even bother to purchase the game mode’s “benefits” package with gold.
And it still has content created that can help the community by passing cloth for it.
Battlegrounds is the only way I play, and if it stays that way. Unfortunately I’m going to stop playing, the same thing happened with wow (with this unrealistic price policy for BR) and now they’re doing it with HS… Want to charge skin, charge new emotes and finishes, fair enough. Pay whoever you want, now limiting an essential feature of the game which is having more options to choose from, and that interferes with the overall result, that’s already too much.
Ah, but you’re complaining without even seeing the changes as a whole
In all the time I’ve played HS/BG, a really balanced patch has never been applied, and that’s not going to happen now. At which meeting and who came up with the brilliant idea of 90000+IQ that this would be beneficial to the community? The company needs to profit, yes it does, but not calling its consumers suckers.
Keep your Runestones, we won’t accept such a BS excuse to squeeze more money out of us. It’s obviously an attempt to force us to buy extra currency for every actual purchase we want to make. Stop trying to bleed your customers for being loyal, we won’t take it anymore.
I’m not putting a single cent in this game ever again if Blizzard implements this change.
friendly reminder that TFT and Runterra are f2p without any p2w restrictions.
Anyone who sticks around can look forward to lobbies like they were when Diablo was an available hero. You may have more than half a lobby filled up, but I’d expect the majority of games to have less than 8, which destroys the point of a damage cap, too.
Keep this mode off my quests for Hearthstone. I won’t touch it again after a move like this. Or just give it its own platform already.
PS With the rumor of Death Knights being added next expansion and this news coming out, I’m starting to think the class will be behind a paywall, too.
If runestones are only purchased with real money and there’s no way to ever earn runestones in-game, there’s absolutely no reason to have them be a primary currency other than forcing players to purchase ‘incorrect’ amounts of runestones to get the things the want.
For example:
Using some arbitrary but logical values - I want something that costs 100 runestones, but the packs available are 25 for $1, 75 for $1.50, or 200 for $2.50. The obvious answer is to buy the 200 pack, but now I’ve got extra. Except the next thing I want is 150 runestones, so I need to buy the 75 pack, but I’ve still got some leftover. So on and so forth. A subtle but effective manipulation to drive future purchases. The post mentions that bundles will come in sizes for ‘major’ features, but that’s not where the issue occurs.
It doesn’t make any sense to say that you can offer “offer additional smaller-scale items” by changing to this currency. You could do this with real money, it’s as granular as you want it unless you were somehow offering items for less than a single unit of the smallest real world currency available.
If runestones were somehow earnable in-game, it would make sense to have a consolidated currency virtual currency. But according to this post, there are no plans to ever do so.
There are concerns about locking features behind paywalls, but really the core issue here is this system is being setup purely to manipulate and trick players into purchasing more than they truly want.
This is disappointing, as the overall content/shop offerings for Hearthstone up until this point have been largely positive. This really sours the experience.
Yet another great game ruined by the marketing team. I feel bad for the developers who have to sit and watch as their hard work is “rewarded” by predatory monetization that ruins the experience for their player base and minimizes the reach that their product has. And worse, the idiot suits that don’t know a thing about game development won’t care. They’ll gladly slash the player base by 50% if it means 1% more profit, even if it makes the play experience worse and ultimately kills the game. Short term profit over long term growth.
what if the smaller scale items…is this currency
What a joke this has become. You guys can take my 16k gold that I have earned playing nothing but BGs, and planned to use for nothing but BGs, and shove every last piece up your greedy asses.
I seriously hope you lose such a large portion of your player base than your entire company fails. F you.
Congrats to Blizzard for destroying any goodwill people had left. Battlegrounds is now explicitely pay to win. Time to uninstall Hearthstone and the Battle.net client.
I sincerely hope this is the final straw for people and this kills the game. You should all be ashamed.
Well, this is quiet upsetting.
I was looking forward to purchasing my Season Pass with gold as I did last time… something I am able to accumulate for free… but now I have to pay for it with Runestones which is something I can’t even collect in game?!
I guess I will not be getting this season’s pass. I can very easily afford it but its the principle.
I had even mentioned to my husband not more than a week ago that Hearhstone did a good job of making it to where I don’t have to spend real money in game like he did with Diablo… I guess there goes that!
Hearthstone was the one single somewhat consistent game that I played since it came out, made friends from it, gone to new places because of it. I was always amazed how long hearthstone has lasted, this will be its downfall. This is it, no more coming back. Its been a nice 8 years guys. Pay to win with bullsh runestones predatory behavior. Cant wait to be frustrated about not being able to be resourceful with my runestones and need to buy excess or always have less then necessary. This is the single worst thing that happened to this game. Can even top Patches, Tunnel Trogg and Flamewaker combined.
I pick this game up ever year than quit for a year or two to come back and find it has the same problems or worse. They are making too much money off the asian market and 1st world whales to give a crap what the bulk of players think.
And its not just Blizzard. There are an endless number of these types of games. Even the South Park creators who created an entire episode of their cartoon about these maniplulative F2P games are now cashing in with South Park Phone Destroyer which is even more manipulative than HS with its every few hour timers. It makes more money to release a turd for whales, fanboys and 3rd world countries than to put effort into making an actual game now.
Pretty sad been playing since release, mostly bg’s anymore. I know blizzard is a company and they need to make money but this is just blatant greed. They were making money from whales and skins and finishers but it just wasn’t enough apparently. I’ll be uninstalling.
Well this is just a huge disappointment. I really enjoyed BGs and now I don’t think I’ll play it. Why would you make it pay to win in such an overt way? It’s obvious that some heroes are far superior to others (as shown by the armour tiers even being needed and they don’t really do much).
Is it not obvious that this will negatively effect the game as many players just will leave. It’s sad that people will pay them money to keep playing this game because it’s clear what they prioritise over all else is money and not the player experience if this is how they want to “improve the game”
Uninstalled the game. Thanks for ruining.