You missed a fatal flaw. With the exception of DoD, the “3 adventures” did not give collectible cards, when they used to.
You don’t need everything to play competitive.
One of the best decks right now, face hunter, don’t use any legendarys and only x2 epics, other powerful deck the priest control ignore entire expansions and remain competitive.
The only thing behind a pay wall is the full collection for all classes, but that is not needed to play the game.
I’m stilling waiting for someone who keeps saying things like this to put their money where their mouth is and pay some random nobody to be the next HS champion almost entirely if not entirely relying on money.
For the record, me saying the above isn’t defending Blizzard. I’m honestly wishing one of you people to actually produce some evidence. You can call the defenders “no-lifers” and other school yard names all you want, but that obviously hasn’t shut them up, nor made Bliz change their ways.
I actually want the game to improve, but you don’t get that by insulting people (or Blizzard). You need evidence.
And since one of the things the defenders love to do is post F2P accounts making to legend, the best way to combat those is to produce an “P2W account” - an account that is played by like the dumbest player ever, but still reach legend/win tournaments through the power of money.
The dumber the pilot of the account, the better. Maybe switch the pilot every once in a while just to show the pilot doesn’t matter as much as how much $$$ you threw into the account. One day you can ask your grandma with Alzheimer’s. Other day some hobo you picked off the street. A cat is fine too.
I’d just opened my 30th Uldum pack without legendaries and, what do you know, it also took me around 10 packs each to open both of my epics. Still no 3rd epic on the horizon. Game really is expensive and there is no denying that. That and that bs excuse they made up for limiting daily 100g holds no water any longer; it’s Blizzard dragging their feet and make the players suffer along for no conceivable reason other than to prevent players from having substantially better in-game finances than they deem necessary so as to coerce them into spending more for the upkeep of the “increased cost of the game making” in 21st century.
I personally would love to keep my coin for the coming adventure but it’s extraordinarily difficult to maintain a healthy balance of gold in the bank and remaining relevant in the game. You cannot have both unless you spend money in the game and that is true. Neglect all those who claim otherwise because their math fails to check out. Tried and true method of staying relevant and not having to stick to just 2 classes in most past metas has been purchasing somewhere around 60 to 110 packs and -depending on the archetype in a given meta- accumulating 7000 to 10000 dusts for making from the ground up. If one were to account for players’ collection of cards that they already had, especially their classic set relevant cards, free cards, rank chests and so forth, they’d cut the cost in half in most cases.
Homebrew is something that doesn’t work for the vast majority of people. I personally have had many successes with my own decks and still somewhat achieve greatness but we all know that having lackluster collection of archetypical card choices (e.g. not having Muerte in your res priest) severely cripples the win rate and makes the climbing essentially running against an almost straight incline or a mountain; very very tough.
A personal advise for those who are upset with the current state of affairs in the game and feel as if Blizzard is forcing players’ hands -and their wallets- to remain relevant in the game with more content than most are willing to pay for: don’t listen to those who miraculously happens to have thousands of golds in their account prior to every expansion/adventure and claim they are f2p. For some of us who don’t get to have frequent breaks in-between or have to work overtime and hard it’s a struggle if you’re not willing to open your wallet to dirty dirty Blizz. Those players either have literally no life and grind to max every day, they spend money in game, they play arena consistently or they don’t work in as busy a workaday environment as most do.
Fret not and don’t go hard on yourselves. If the game doesn’t feel fun anymore, allow me to remind you that you may be suffering a deluded thought process known as sunken cost fallacy. Stop making excuses to keep hurting your soul and just move on from hs.
battlegrounds, literally the most cost effective and fun mode in the game right now.
you don’t have to buy cards, you don’t get matched against the same stat cheat, casino, aggro or hunter over deck and over and the best part the monetization is mostly cosmetic!
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battlegrounds is a different game all together mate. its an additional game mode and still doesnt justify ridiculous prizes of packs or the bs blizzard is doing in game
Quests don’t count towards the 100g per day.
I do my quests every 3 days, unless an event with legendary quests is coming up. and don’t miss out on any gold.
Hearthstone is no more (or less) expensive than any other established dCCG. It is not ‘expensive’ unless you are making illogical comparisons such as trying to equate the price of a dCCG to a hamburger or to Halo.
dCCGs are games that have a price RANGE rather than some sort of fixed price. That’s because dCCGs generally have a F2P economy (dust, gold, gems, kegs, or whatever) which players can use to obtain content without paying cash. Instead, players can exchange their time for these free resources and obtain larger collections for free at a slower pace.
This allows any player of a dCCG to effectively CHOOSE how much money they want to spend on a dCCG. If a person is tight on funds then they can with only a small amount of patience have a very robust experience playing entirely for free. Or if a person has a moderate amount of free assets then they can spend SOME money on packs and the rest for free. And if a person is a Whale then they can dump as much money into the game as they want. It is entirely up to the player how much they spend. There is no required or minimum amount. The player picks how much of a target spend is comfortable to themselves. In many ways, it is an ideal system.
THE RESPONSE: “But but but but PAY TO WIN…!”
BZZZT! Wrong.
Players can achieve the highest level of competitive play that is possible in a dCCG without paying a single thin dime. Anyone who believes that they must pay cash to get anywhere in a dCCG is simply, factually, and absolutely wrong. Money does not purchase success in a dCCG. Money purchases VARIETY … and variety in a dCCG is not required for success. Variety is a luxury. Not a necessity.
So anyone who complains “Hearthstone is expensive” is a victim of their misplaced expectations. They only THINK the game is expensive because they believe they should have more content without having to expend either (A) time or (B) resources to obtain them. If these people will simply abandon their misplaced expectations and learn to deal with dCCGs as they actually are (rather than as they wish they would be) then they will quickly find they can accomplish anything they want while not having to spend a penny more than they wish.
The best of both worlds there for the taking … the only “price” to pay is to stop whining, accept reality, and have fun.
Well, it’s unfortunately necessary that it becomes more expensive. If not for you it has to come from someone else. Otherwise it wouldn’t be profitable for them to continue. Nevertheless you don’t have to be hopeless. I don’t know if that’s your thing, but you can just have friendly matches against friends. You can even borrow decks there! You only need one legendary for 18 different decks that change every expansion: Whizbang.
Actually, at the risk of oversimplification:
You can make 1billion players spend $1 every 3 months = $ 4billion in revenue.
Vs
You can make 1 million players spend $100 every 3 months = $ 400 million in revenue.
This is because demand for this game is elastic. A 10% decrease in cost will definitely bring in more than 10% paying players. A lower cost will definitely also signal to paying players who are on the fence, to jump in and invest, as they now know the game is sustainable in cost wise for them.
So, I have to say that I disagree with your suggestion that the game has to be more expensive. Rather, the correct statement is: the game has to keep getting in more revenue, which ironically means making the entry fees / ongoing price of expansions, lower for new and existing paying players!
Oh yes, from that perspective you’re right of course. I just thought about “overall” cost (like for the entire community). And for that it has to get more expensive… for “us”, taken collectively. That’s what I meant.
This is not a confrontational question … but on what specific economic facts is this claim based?
If lowering the price of an item by X% created an equal +X% increase in paying customers (which then resulted in an increase in +X$ of profit to a company) then all any company would have to do is lower prices to increase profits. Clearly the marketplace is not quite that easy a nut to crack or everyone would be doing it.
The truth is that decreasing the cost of a product does not axiomatically result in an increase in paying customers or corporate profits. I.E. If Blizzard lowered the price of packs by 50%, it would not necessarily result in a 50% increase in paying customers or profits.
Ok, since you asked for an economics-based explanation,
The more discretionary (edit: link
(Investopedia . com/terms/d/discretionary-expense.asp) a purchase is, the more its quantity will fall in response to price rises, that is, the higher the elasticity.
Hearthstone is not a necessity, and is by that classification, an elastic good. Try increasing the cost of packs by even just 50%. See if more than 50% of paying players will cut down their purchase. And see if the monthly entry of new players will drop by more than 50%. It isn’t that hard to see it, really.
And in economics theory, price elasticity definitely works in favour of discretionary purchases when the price goes down.
I’m glad I paid attention in economics class!
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How many years now have F2P been told “just play face hunter”? How is that a sign of a healthy, affordable, fun game?
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…until the price elasticity of demand becomes 1, then any further decrease in price will actually reduce profits.
Link: look up wiki on price elasticity of demand
In other words, no, you can’t just blindly decrease price indefinitely and expect better results. Sales is not the same as profit.
And there is more to elasticity than saying something is or isn’t a discretionary purchase. Necessity is just one factor. From the wiki, it mentions other things like brand loyalty and availability of substitute goods.
If we’re talking about any odd CCG or even more generic any freemium game, there are lots of substitutes to HS. But if you want a CCG with specifically a Warcraft theme or with Blizzard’s brand behind it, well we know there aren’t a lot of substitutes, and in that sense HS may be a very inelastic good.
I mean, I don’t know of any other game that could satisfy people with a Murloc fetish quite like HS (and WoW, but AFAIK murlocs aren’t a playable race… yet…)
Play MTGA better rewards, and friendly F2P.
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Apparently, you never met a MTG paper player trading or selling cards for money.
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You also missed a fatal flaw, it used to be 2 expansion and 1 adventure for the year.
No, I mean 3 adventures (ToT, DH, and all the Dungeon Runs, so actually 5 if I’m counting right) did not give collectible cards.
Ideal system I just lol @ that, like… a system that drives any new player away, that’s just a fact. It ain’t even about that particular person having $ to spend or not but the way that it is presented to them.
Most of the community can argue has hard as they want giving examples like “Face Hunter is a cheap deck and get’s you to legend”, well yea… I actually tested that for myself on my other server account and puff, easy af. BUT, did I enjoy it? Does anyone enjoy it at all? I would say most don’t becouse it doesn’t let you interact with the game enough like you see on youtube/twitch videos that actually brought you here.
Regarding the expectactions part I guess you can’t leave that aside but why the hell would you even play this game then? Lolol, so you can be the meat that is beaten on ladder? That might make sense for a casual mobile player that picks HS every time he goes to the toilet but for competitive gamers? Hell no.
I agree on the part of accepting reality but not the one of having fun. The cards/packs/offers could be as expensive as they are and I guess it would make some sense so that you would be “forced” to buy stuff from the store but what about the disechants?
Look at some of my WoW friends and even myself, crafting Gala Shamans/DR rogues/other decks and then when they get nerfed the only refund you have is of that particular card but… blizzard rendered the entire deck completely useless, the months you invested into making it and excelling at it have now been broken and you will have to remake everything and struggle like you are back to the 1st day of the game with a T2/3 Deck… Meeh I think the WHOLE system is flawed, 0 thought about new players or potential buyers due to this greed.
Thing is, most of the white knights do oblige to it and waste 500$ per year on this game so it definitly works, that’s for sure.
Even the other day I was reading some discussions and had to laugh a bit with the comparisson but basically an OP was saying that HS is so ridicolous that even Pokemon Online being as big as it is still offers you a lot of packs/decks/cosmetics for free. 12 daily rewards + weekly rewards + ingame tournament rewards and so on.
OFC it’s a TCG but I wonder how much other games like LoR will affect this CCG model that has been around for almost a decade. An absolutely disgusting model.
P.S: Even Tyler, one of the greatest HS players that constantly hits rank1 on any server but particulary EU sed that if he had no money and was f2p he wouldn’t touch the game. This comes from a top streamer that actually plays high level and in real prize tournaments lol. Stop being delusional about this “f2p” idea guys, the game simply isn’t.
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