🆕 Arena Update

Community Discussion
1

[Update June 30th]

A new Arena season has been announced, and it will bring an updated reward system.

Dev Comment: After listening to player feedback, we’ve updated the rewards for Underground Arena, with a focus on making it easier to earn back your entry costs through deep runs. By further streamlining the reward structure and reallocating some of the Crowd’s Favor, we were able to provide better gold and ticket payouts, bringing back more of that “infinite run” feeling that’s been a hallmark of the classic Arena experience. We’ll be monitoring how things play out and will continue to adjust as needed.

Please read the full update here (towards the bottom of the article).

[Original Message]

It’s been a few days since our big Arena update, and we have been closely monitoring your feedback since then. We’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm for this mode, but also a number of improvement requests.
Our teams are actively working on a few quality of life updates to better align with how you love to play the mode, and this includes changes to the reward system. We want this mode to feel more rewarding and exciting to play, and we’ll share more details with you in an upcoming update.

Thank you for your patience and your passion, Arena Champions!

6 Likes
3

Why have you doubled the cost to participate?

7 Likes
4

Let’s see how “rewarding” the arena will be. I just can’t get myself to play Arena atm, but the feedback is more then welcomed and encouraging.

3 Likes
5

So the Draft formats were honestly the only thing keeping Hearthstone interesting. The meta has gotten so denial heavy that games take forever and most of the time it’s just who gets to their mega-combo first.

With Duels I always felt interested in doing another run and trying something new, I hated when they dropped it.

Arena wasn’t as good but at least it provided variety. The new reward system CHEWS through gold/runes just to get more dust/cards which means that you can’t even play the mode anymore without feeding runes into it, no thanks. If all I wanted was more booster packs I wouldn’t even bother playing, I would just use Gold/Runes for them.

But hey, that Mercenaries Mode is Free to Play!!

3 Likes
6

I would prefer it if we avoided using “decoy” strategy in the future, where the original version offers a defined set of standardized rewards, then a second iteration introduces reduced rewards (although this comes along with other positive changes), and finally, after player feedback, the system re balances towards something better than the second version but still not the same as the original.

This strategy(?) (whether intended or unintended) may come off as manipulative to players, as we’ve seen this at least once before with the original tavern pass before it was improved, and some players speculated that the rewards and subsequent changes were an intended business strategy. I understand that there has to be a balance between company profits and player experience. Respectfully, I think a more direct and transparent approach would lead to greater trust and player retention, and allow greater popularity and long term profits across the player bases.

4 Likes
7

You can still play the Arena for 1 ticket/150 gold. The Underground version gives greater rewards, so it has a larger cost. However, people are rightfully upset about 1) no gold rewards in the Arena and 2) a very top-heavy distribution of rewards in the Underground. Less than 6 wins is super rough.

8

absolute Joke of an ‘Update’ blizzard should be ashamed with the money grubbing way of ‘updating’ arena. All i see is a change to force people into putting real money down to play the game how it should be played instead of the cookie cutter decks you see in Ranked play!

3 Likes
10

as a non-F2P player, and not a fan of previous arena, I’m really enjoying this release! thanks for all you do, and keep up the great work

11

They only cater to the paying customers. It’s self-destructive, because about 80% of the players at least are obviously F2P and you need them to have numbers…

I’m exaggerating the number, the regular F2P players (not paying for months at least or years) are probably 95%.

12

I’ve always been able to maintain my gold with my performance in arena. I’ve lost it all with this new arena mode and I’m not paying for more. Things like this are what cause players to stop playing. I’d like to see a free arena mode with no rewards but just used for casuals, fun, and challenges. That would keep me coming back over and over.

6 Likes
13

I’m still not able to play arena at all since I’ve started playing again this week. The screen completely freezes when I click the arena button.

14

Are you playing on an old device?

My iPhone 8 Plus was starting to have some issues before the last patch. I ended up replacing that phone, because it was having charging port issues, and it could no longer get new updates. My new phone is an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which has made me very “open-mindu,” and now, the only Arena bug that I run into is that it sometimes will not show or give access to the deck list during drafts.

15

No, we can not ‘still play the arena’. The old arena for 150g is dead atm. You mean we can still pay 150g for the new (mini)arena with less than half the appeal of what was before.

Everybody unhappy about the change already know this in and out.

3 Likes
16

Whatever that isn’t recovery the average or more gold per victory is just PR stunt.
Bring back old arena and you nail it.

2 Likes
17

Please add gold rewards to lower level arena so I have a chance to win enough to play underground. Otherwise the best I can do is go almost infinite in low level arena. Adding gold to underground would also be nice.

18

I used to love hearthstone BECAUSE OF ARENA. I would grind standard to legend because i loved arena so much. I would preorder all expansions because i just loved arena, and saw value in gaining access to cards in standard when I wanted a focused mode outside of draft.

but then blizzard decided to stop investing in arena and instead prioritized battlegrounds and auto battler etc. Chasing trends. At that point, i just quit the entire game. I’ve been looking for a reason to come back to hearthstone, for arena.

This update doesn’t feel like they really care about the Arena community. Instead, it feels like they are trying to once again funnel everyone into this mode. Just let the players have a choice.

Additionally, reducing the rewards for Arena kills it. It’s high risk, high reward. Arena is very hard and when people go 12 wins, they deserve the gold and free runs they earned. Trust me, they are not taking money away from your business.

Looks like i wont be returning, and instead will throw my energy at mtg until that wanes as well. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

6 Likes
20

Good. Any idea on when we will hear about the changes?

The rewards need to give more gold (and less packs). Its as simple as that.
People play arena because they want to play arena, not to collect cards that can’t even be used in arena.

Anyhoo, it would be nice if anyone from Blizzard is reading this, and will reply to it. There’s too many “post and run” topics where Blizzard basically make an announcement, but don’t stay for the discussion. This is a message board, its supposed to be for discussion.

4 Likes
21

The arena rewards have become very cool. Now you don’t need to farm the arena for 3 months to complete the collection. People who don’t know how to play have nothing to do here. I am very happy with the changes. In a week I farmed 6 legendaries, got a new portrait, looted 6k gold. And as a result, I came out at 0 in terms of gold costs.

23

Yeah, its now a lot faster to turn arena tickets into resources… except of course, the one resource that arena players desperately want: gold.

But while it generates rewards faster, it uses up arena tickets faster too. And that is the problem… Some players just want to play arena for fun, rather than to expand their collection, meaning they would rather invest their resources (gold) back into the arena, than take it in packs.

The only way you could have done that is to win the “Crowd’s Favour”, 3 times.

6000 gold buys you 40 arena tokens, which is 20 underground runs.
To get the crowd’s favour 3 times out of 20 means a 15% success rate.

Since the maximum chance of getting the crowd’s favour is 13% (for a 12-0 run with no re-drafting), if this happened, you were extremely lucky.

Of course, there are also small amounts of gold that can be won (excluding the crowd’s favour) but they barely touch the 300 entry fee.

Anyhoo, here’s the table showing average “re-run value”, which is the amount of gold you can expect to recieve on average:

  • 0-3: 120 gold collection value, 9.17 gold re-run value (1 pack; one of 25-30 gold, 25-30 dust, and 1 common)
  • 1-3: 123 gold collection value, 10.83 gold re-run value
  • 2-3: 129 gold collection value, 11.25 gold re-run value
  • 3-3: 150 gold collection value, 37.5 gold re-run value
  • 4-3: 179 gold collection value, 62.5 gold re-run value
  • 5-3: 197 gold collection value, 72.5 gold re-run value
  • 6-3: 222 gold collection value, 97.5 gold re-run value
  • 7-3: 275 gold collection value, 162.5 gold re-run value
  • 8-3: 391 gold collection value, 182.59 gold re-run value
  • 9-3: 420 gold collection value, 212.13 gold re-run value
  • 10-3: 480 gold collection value, 251.30 gold re-run value
  • 11-3: 531 gold collection value, 302.30 gold re-run value
  • 12-x: 617 gold collection value, 353.78 gold re-run value

As you can see, you need to go 11-3 (on average) to break 300 gold per run, meaning you break even on gold, and can “go infinite”.

Basically, the odds are stacked against anyone breaking even on gold over a number of runs, because the crowd’s favour just doesn’t happen often enough.

TLDR: I suspect you used more than 40 tickets (20 runs) to win 6000 gold.

2 Likes
24

[Update]

A new Arena season has been announced, and it will bring an updated reward system.

Dev Comment: After listening to player feedback, we’ve updated the rewards for Underground Arena, with a focus on making it easier to earn back your entry costs through deep runs. By further streamlining the reward structure and reallocating some of the Crowd’s Favor, we were able to provide better gold and ticket payouts, bringing back more of that “infinite run” feeling that’s been a hallmark of the classic Arena experience. We’ll be monitoring how things play out and will continue to adjust as needed.

Please read the full update here (towards the bottom of the article).