i paid 99c for bob bartender upgrade… was on sale.
what a rip off. 
shoulda googled the voice lines before i clicked.
I carefully chose the word “significant,” because I understood ahead of time that no matter what word I used to characterize the type of advantage the Season Pass offers, it would be challenged for a variety of reasons.
In Hearthstone’s ranked modes, there are times when a class achieves a win advantage above around 3 percent, which can trigger players and devs to start scrutinizing that class’s decks to see if any nerfs are warranted.
Just how much of a win percent advantage do you think the season pass provides a P2W player over a F2P player of similar skill? And once you can quantify an answer to this question, would you find the win percentage difference to be significant?
I never bothered to weigh in on this topic before, because F2P players use to be able to buy the Season Pass with gold—something I never did, because I preferred to spend my gold on other modes. The Season Pass is clearly a P2W advantage in BGs now, but it was not always so.
I get it. The problem does not impact you, and I do not fault for not caring. Point #2 is for the devs and mobile players to consider. There was a time (mostly when the Chinese market was wide open to Blizzard) when the devs were looking to greatly increase revenue by expanding the mobile player-base.
Slow animations are an addressable problem that not only impact BGs for Mobile players, but other modes as well. I played against Nazmani Mage in Twist this week, and the first minute and a half of my turn was waiting for my opponent’s plays to finish displaying all his actions, before I could make any actions of my own.
Nazmani Mage would be a poor deck choice to play as a mobile player, because mobile players would limited a fraction of the plays a computer player can make in a turn.
I am not looking for computer vs. mobile experiences to be equal, but am looking for it to be less lopsided than it is now for BGs and deck strategies that require lots of actions in a single turn.
That’s just a math problem.
The probability of drawing one of the top x heroes out of n total heroes, with two choices, is
1 - (n-x)/n * (n-x-1)/(n-1)
With 4 choices it’s
1 - (n-x)/n * (n-x-1)/(n-1) * (n-x-2)/(n-2) * (n-x-3)/(n-3)
So all I’d need is the data for the average placement of every hero. Could spreadsheet it from there in a matter of minutes. But um I’m not paying for HSR Premium so anyone wanna lend a hand?
1 Like
False.
Below is a chart showing the probability of getting a “good hero” assuming that there are whatever number of good heroes in the game.
| # “good heroes” | 2slot | 4slot | chance increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.13% | 4.26% | 100.00% |
| 2 | 4.23% | 8.37% | 97.84% |
| 3 | 6.31% | 12.36% | 95.70% |
| 4 | 8.37% | 16.21% | 93.58% |
| 5 | 10.41% | 19.93% | 91.49% |
| 6 | 12.42% | 23.53% | 89.43% |
| 7 | 14.41% | 27.01% | 87.38% |
| 8 | 16.38% | 30.36% | 85.36% |
| 9 (top ⅒) | 18.33% | 33.60% | 83.37% |
| 10 | 20.25% | 36.73% | 81.40% |
| 11 | 22.15% | 39.74% | 79.45% |
| 12 | 24.02% | 42.64% | 77.52% |
| 13 | 25.88% | 45.44% | 75.62% |
| 14 | 27.71% | 48.14% | 73.74% |
| 15 | 29.51% | 50.73% | 71.89% |
| 16 | 31.30% | 53.22% | 70.06% |
| 17 | 33.06% | 55.62% | 68.25% |
| 18 | 34.80% | 57.93% | 66.47% |
| 19 (top ⅕) | 36.51% | 60.14% | 64.71% |
| 20 | 38.21% | 62.27% | 62.98% |
| 21 | 39.88% | 64.31% | 61.27% |
| 22 | 41.52% | 66.26% | 59.58% |
| 23 | 43.15% | 68.14% | 57.92% |
| 24 (top ¼) | 44.75% | 69.93% | 56.28% |
| 25 | 46.33% | 71.65% | 54.66% |
| 26 | 47.88% | 73.29% | 53.07% |
| 27 | 49.42% | 74.87% | 51.50% |
| 28 | 50.93% | 76.37% | 49.95% |
| 29 | 52.41% | 77.80% | 48.43% |
| 30 | 53.88% | 79.16% | 46.93% |
| 31 (top ⅓) | 55.32% | 80.47% | 45.46% |
| 32 | 56.74% | 81.71% | 44.01% |
| 33 | 58.13% | 82.89% | 42.58% |
| 34 | 59.51% | 84.01% | 41.18% |
| 35 | 60.86% | 85.08% | 39.80% |
| 36 | 62.18% | 86.09% | 38.44% |
| 37 | 63.49% | 87.05% | 37.11% |
| 38 | 64.77% | 87.96% | 35.80% |
| 39 | 66.03% | 88.82% | 34.52% |
| 40 | 67.26% | 89.63% | 33.26% |
| 41 | 68.47% | 90.40% | 32.02% |
| 42 | 69.66% | 91.12% | 30.80% |
| 43 | 70.83% | 91.81% | 29.61% |
| 44 | 71.97% | 92.45% | 28.45% |
| 45 | 73.10% | 93.05% | 27.30% |
| 46 | 74.19% | 93.62% | 26.18% |
| 47 (top ½) | 75.27% | 94.15% | 25.09% |
So it’s twice the chance to get the most powerful hero. Singular. As soon as you pluralize hero, it becomes a false statement.
2 Likes
It very much is a pay to win.
It’s double the chances to get a good hero. Literally two more rolls at getting something that works.
1 Like
I get that Neon has me on ignore, but Zee liked this post. Despite the lie I just debunked.
Casting pearls before swine and getting not a pork chop in return.
Two more gambles at it. Rolling 1 four times is not any better than rolling 1 two times. Its calling snake eyes, “four eyes”. So a nerdy snake wearing glasses is the result lol.
Scr0tieMcB, I appreciate your contributions to this thread, and your willingness to apply a mathematical treatment to shed light on the matter, but I also get why Neon holds to his opinion that the Season Pass doubles his chance of getting a better hero than he might otherwise get.
The # of “good heroes” is dependent on how that is defined. Are they the best heroes from Tier 1 or S tier (depending on who’s tier system is being used), or is good a hero one is performing above average, or is it somewhere in between?
As a casual mobile player without a Season Pass, I am not interested in playin a match with the majority of the 78 (are there more than that now?) different heroes, because I think they are bad and not fun to play, but that’s me.
If I am interpreting the table that you provided correctly, with a definition of about 20 “good heroes, “ it would give a player with a Pass a 62 percent better chance of getting a good hero?
That’s a very compelling difference. Even with a definition of 31 good heroes, the player with a pass has a 44 percent better chance to get good hero. Sounds like a significant advantage to me.
1 Like
I don’t even understand why anyone cares about hero selection in battlegrounds anyway. It barely has any weight right now. I can make literally any hero work.
What minion types are in the lobby? I care about that.
What quests get offered? I care about that.
What minions get offered in the shop? I care about that.
What hero gets offered? I could not care less.
Now, if this topic was made in Season 3, I would be agreeing with you. That season was all about what buddy you had. The season pass was 1000% pay to win there.
Season 4 hero’s aren’t worth thinking about.
2 Likes
So you want the BG’s to be dumbed down in order to accommodate people trying to play BG’s on a phone? So why stop there? I guess every game out there should be playable on a phone now instead of other platforms.
Unfortunately you are wrong. Many of the heroes offered have powers that accelerate a large portion of the quests offered. Just go back and watch last weekends lobby legends and you will see they were picking some jank heroes to play with because they knew they accelerate quest completions.
Even so realizing there is a certain lobby being presented with a specific hero in your pool that can exploit that lobby is a key skill to ranking up.
1 Like
Not winning is a skill issue
You just suck at bgs
Like me!
Not at all. I want the devs to improve the time it takes to resolve actions and animations for mobile devices. I not asking for anything that’s hard to accomplish.
I want to do more during my turns than waiting for a lot of slow BS to resolve before I can make an action.
Sometimes, I have to wait through 7-10 “slow-@$$“ da-dings as minions get auto buffed other beginning of turn auto-effects resolve before I can even start my first action.
which are the jank heros?
I didn’t think about it until just now, but my calculations above aren’t perfectly accurate. For example, Patches is removed from possibility if a lobby doesn’t have Pirates, etc, so the actual number of heroes on offer in any one lobby is a bit less than 90 because of tribal exclusions. Despite this, I calculated it at a flat 94. But whatever; it doesn’t change the result much, and what I posted above is close enough for a decent estimate.
You read correctly, although mind the caveat above. It is compelling. It’s just not double.
Slight hyperbole there. I think if we look at the percentages we would see some differences. But again, I don’t have access to the data myself. All HSR gives out for free is the popularity data, which means absolutely nothing as far as I’m concerned.
But I agree with you that the differences probably aren’t that big of a deal.
2 Likes
So, I’m guessing we just have different definitions of P2W at this point. To me, P2W means a guarantee at performing better than others at all times when I’m up against anyone who didn’t vie for the P2W whatever that is in “X” game.
In this case, we are talking about multiple factors. We are talking about what minions are available, what quests are provided, other heroes in the lobby, how well Bob treats you in his shop, how Bob treats the other players in lobby, and most importantly, what is the average mmr of the lobby. I could have the pass, for example, and I could be offered the absolute best hero every time, but it wouldn’t matter if I’m not a good player.
As I said, the higher the mmr of your lobbies, specifically those in the top (at least 6.5-7k is where I notice a difference in players), is where you will have an advantage as everyone has a good idea of the game and how well they may do with “X” hero with the minions in the pool, thus more choices is seemingly more so a P2W than a purchase of cosmetics.
I’m not 100% disagreeing with you. I just think there’s so many factors to consider in a heavy RNG game to label the “P2W” significant.
Baz Lich lady. Bigglesworth, AFKay, the pirate orc all come to mind. Basically any of the heroes that effectively dont have a power at all or dont help scale or increase survival of the board turn after turn. AFKay isn;t alone with a once per game power, Reno shares this but his power is strategic and obvious as to why it is limited. AFKay i would improve by making her power repeat itself after going 2 turns of not doing anything (including refreshing). But Lich lady power makes zero sense to me as I dont want anything to affect my health without it being undone like with the one demon minion. but that’s highly lobby dependent. Orc pirate essentially doesnt have a power other than saving up gold slowly to tech a tier level twice in one turn. And then what? lol. I dont see the board getting any better turn after turn, nor increasing my options in hand by gifting me a couple of minions or anything of significance. Basically all the heroes that have neither an active or passive power. and even the once per game powers are limited in good ones.
My definition of P2W is not my own, but rather this commonly found one:
“P2W is used in gaming with the meaning “Pay to Win ,” to refer to games that allow players to purchase items or abilities (e.g., more powerful weapons, additional health points) that give them an advantage in the game over other players.”
Of course, skill and RNG (even which heroes are offered, whether is 2 or 4 choices is still determined by RNG) play a greater role in obtaining victory, but you appear to making a case that twice as many heroes to choose from is irrelevant to win performance in battlegrounds by not acknowledging that it’s a significant advantage.
If the primary reason why most players buy the Battleground Season Pass is for the advantage of the two extra hero offerings—meaning that without the two more heroes choices, they probably would not buy the pass for just cosmetics—then it means plenty of players see the advantage as significant enough to pay for it.
Here are some quotes from an article, which pointed out the P2W shift when the pass became no longer purchasable with gold:
“But other than the cosmetics, you also get what is arguably the biggest reason players will want to get the pass: the ability to choose from four heroes each game, rather than just two.”
“That feature has been present in the game for a long time, but it used to be obtainable with either real money or gold — which gave players the possibility to earn it for free, just by playing the game. Sadly, that is no longer the case. If you want the advantage of having those extra hero options — which is not irrelevant — you need to pay for it with real money only.”
“ Is it worth it to pay for the Season Pass?
If you’re a more competitive player who wants to have the edge of being allowed to select four heroes rather than just two, the answer is yes. Hero selection can sometimes make or break games, and doubling your chances to get a good hero — or at least one you’re familiar with — cannot be underestimated.”
https://blizzardwatch.com/2022/09/15/hearthstone-battlegrounds-season-pass-2/)
I see Cramer still doesn’t appreciate sky captain kragg. Literally easy 1st or 2nd places for me when I get him. Too bad Cramer doesn’t see how.
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Well, I think you need to back track. I have said it’s an advantage, and getting back to my initial point, it isn’t a SIGNIFICANT one. It’s not small, but it definitely isn’t SIGNIFICANT. Unless you can point out to me in a lobby every person who did buy the BP without cosmetics specific to the current pass, I’m sticking to my argument. -shrug-