Do you think Blizzard is trying to close the arena? By announcing that the mode is unprofitable and no one plays it. First, they raise the entrance fee by 2 times, well, because they wanted to. There are no real reasons for such moves. And now they are reworking the rewards in such a way that there is no point in them at all. Just think about it - you are offered to spend 300 gold to get 1-2 packs(for 9 wins you have 1 pack, if you think that you do 10+ wins everytime…well think again). At the same time, a pack in store costs 100 gold. Logic jump out.
Most who play arena don’t do it for packs, but to play the format, before the changes they could win at least enough to get the entry fee back and go again, Blizz noticed this and shut it down until the sheer amount of negative feedback and are now trying to give infinite runs back
One of Blizzard’s largest development strategies for most of their games is that they try to funnel all players into what they perceive to be the most profitable play patterns. For Hearthstone, that’s playing Standard. For WoW, they tried to funnel everyone into end game content.
The problem with their approach is that they slowly marginalize and eventually eliminate other modes of play by reducing the fun or eliminating other options all together. The end result is that many players leave the game, because what’s being pushed on them was never the most fun aspect of the game.
The problem with taking away Arena is that it would immediately open the door for competition as some other gaming company would step in to fill the void. I don’t think management really understands Arena’s importance in retaining a large player base, because;
1). When constructed sucks, which it often does these days, Arena provides an alternative, more fun, and more diverse distraction, while players continue to develop their collection with rewards, until a better constructed meta comes along.
2). A variety of different, fun play experiences helps to make a game successful. If a player does too much of the same thing, they are much more likely to quickly get bored and leave a game.
3). There are players, who do not care at all about collecting cards, but they do spend money on Arena. A monetization problem for Arena is that barcode accounts that come with botted gold are far cheaper to buy than spending money with Blizzard to get more runs. The initial changes harmed the gold economy for Arena so badly that most of the players that I have encountered in Arena during my last 20 runs have been barcoders.
I have close to 1500 unopened packs as I got tired of opening them all… You can honestly have them, all I want to play is Arena ;p
reading the forum it’s clear that the operation “with the new arena we at blizzard will make a lot of money and we will leave the players with nothing” is failing miserably… how I laugh