Assuming you play the same amount and have the same quest completion rate, you shouldn’t earn less gold or non-gold in the new system. In nearly all circumstances you should be earning slightly more gold and more non-gold (packs, etc).
Our plan is to remove rewards from quests, though the experience you earn per quest on average will net you as much or more rewards as quests give you now.
Something that has come up a lot is the idea that you will no longer be able to obtain the packs you want on day 1, and instead will get a ‘drip feed’ of packs over the expansion. While you will receive rewards as the expansion goes on, the gold you earn per expansion should remain relatively flat from what you earn now. This should make your ability to buy packs on day 1 similar to what you get now, but with more non-gold rewards added on top.
Our intent with the system is for it to be upside for all players. We’ve done many checks on different player segments to try and make sure that is the case no matter how you play. Despite all this, we’re making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions were incorrect. We can push legendary quests or give out additional rewards during events as well.
[Source: Countless hours spent staring at an excel sheet trying to get this right.]
I keep seeing a lot of vague words in this. It also doesn’t match up very well with the little we’ve seen of the path thus far with most of the rewards being not gold despite him saying it would be mostly gold. I see lots of “should” and lots of “gold and non-gold”.
I still worry that they’re gonna say stuff after like “well you’re getting a lot more packs and older cards now so that compensates for the lesser gold haul” or “we said gold AND non-gold” .
I also don’t want to take his word on it because he has a vested interest in me thinking things will stay the same or better. I also don’t know how fringe my behavior is. Do I play a lot more than average? A lot less? He says most a lot so does that exclude me. It leaves too much vaguery and until the numbers are all out in the open to be tested and measured I’m not gonna just take his word for it
They say it is more player-friendly, which is not, but I will give a small benefit of the doubt because we don’t know how much time you will need to invest to level to the max. Knowing Activision, I can assume that it is going to be a grind fest, barely finishable if you play casually. BP might make me retire from HS completely.
But that won’t be the case if the mini set uses the same packs like they indicated will probably happen. At that point, you bank the packs post-day 1 until the mini set, and when the mini set drops, they will have value for you, given the duplicate protection.
While we haven’t seen the full track, there are some images for about half the track available that can give us some idea of what is coming. Here’s a list of the rewards shown for levels 1-25 and 41-50:
Legendary Card
Darkmoon Faire Pack
Darkmoon Faire Pack
Darkmoon Faire Pack
Epic Card
100g
100g
Scholomance Pack
100g
Cardback
100g
Ashes of Outland Pack
100g
100g
Tavern Pass
100g
Year of the Dragon Pack
100g
100g
Darkmoon Faire Pack
100g
100g
Scholomance Pack
100g
Legendary Card
…
41. 200g
42. Ashes of Outland Pack
43. 200g
44. 200g
45. 300g
46. Darkmoon Faire Pack
47. 300g
48. Year of the Dragon Pack
49. 300g
50. Hero skin
So, for the 35 levels covered by what I could find, you receive:
2 Legendary cards
1 Epic card
5 Darkmoon Faire Packs
2 Scholomance Packs
2 Ashes of Outland Packs
2 Year of the Dragon Packs
A Tavern Pass (for Arena or Duels)
A hero skin
A cardback
2700g
So it looks like cards packs may be more front-loaded in the reward track, while gold increases over time.
We still need to see how much experience is needed to go through the levels, and how fast you can get it. From the listing here, it seems like players who play pretty regularly may be expected to go a good distance past level 50 if they are intended to receive the same amount of gold as they doo currently.
The images for levels 1-20 I found through the Blizzard Press Center:
The pages for levels 21-25 and 46-50 are each briefly visible during the Hearthstone Chat video that they did for the announcement (the section about the Reward Track starts around 3:20 in the video):
Here’s the image for levels 41-45, from Out of Cards Reveal Stream post:
Assuming those numbers are legit 46-50 has 600 total gold in it. So what we’ve seen so far is 4200 worth of gold with only the 36-40 range not known. Say it gives 1000 which is probably an over estimate
I’d need to get to around level 58 to get the same amount I’d normally get. How long does it take to get there? How much XP between levels there’s still a lot that’s unknown
There was one very blurry image of either levels 26-30 or 31-35 in the Chat video, which I could only make out enough to see that there were three rewards of gold. (They might have been 200g each, but it wasn’t really clear enough to read.)
And it’s probably not quite equal to convert packs for old expansions directly to their gold cost, since a good number of the players who worry about this sort of gold income are those who will have filled out most of what they want from older sets.
If it’s 200 then I’d need roughly level 60 to get to similar gold totals. That’s a decent measuring stick for whether or not it works. It’s worth noting that because the expansion is so early this time and the next should only be in april this gap might not be typical. I do wish they were more stable in their release schedule for sets so this would be easier to calculate
I ignored all the non-gold rewards because they are basically worthless to me after the expansion launches and the old ones have long since become worthless
Not everyone is saying that. A lot of folks are simply saying, “We’ll believe it when we see it.” What’s wrong with that?
They could be trying to screw us. I don’t know. And neither do you. They could be genuinely trying to give us more gold like they’ve said. But with their track record, they haven’t earned the trust of a lot of people. They’ve earned our skepticism.
Thank you! It’s good to be back. I haven’t played a match so naturally I plan to break myself in with some Odd Paladin, haha!
Off topic: I’m settled into my new position and a couple months later the problematic coworker left for a different job…and 2 other full timers left. I’m so happy to be where I am - I feel like I’m in a much better state of mind.
With the numbers seen I’d need to get to around level 60 in 4 months to still be earning gold at a comparable rate to what I was earning before then it depends on when they release the next set. This set was pretty early only 3 months and 10 days since the last set. If I get to level 60 in that 4 month window there could then be anywhere from 0 days to 3 weeks until the following set releases in which case each level would still need to be doable in at most 3 days to continue at a 50g per day cadence.
I’m kinda skeptical that this kind of progress will be possible under the system they presented
“4200 worth of gold with only the 26-40 range not known”
So of the 50 levels, 36 of them will give 4,200 gold. Hm … it seems unlikely that the remaining 14 levels betweem 26 and 40 would give 4,800 to 5,800 gold (which is what they’d have to do to give me the same amount of gold I typically get between sets). If that’s the case then it represents a downgrade in gold capacity. Of course, they’re throwing in a bunch of packs and other stuff … but for those trying to just buy packs with gold when a set drops it might lessen the earning power.
Slightly more gold and more non-gold. Not slightly more (gold and non-gold). That clearly says we will earn slightly more gold. I expect to have slightly more gold at the end of the next expansion than I have earned in the last bunch of expansions, approximately 9000 gold. I’d say my expected value is around 10,000 gold. But if it’s only 9,500 or 9,200 or even 9,100 that’ll be fine and I’ll sing a praise to the new system. Hell, I’ll even give them the win if it just matches my current 9,000. But if they come in low, like 8,500 or 8.000, I’m gonna call them out as liars and cheats.
There are also additional levels past 50, and from what they’ve said, you’ll receive an additional 150g for each level from 51 onwards. So, if you reach level 60, that’s an additional 1500g on top of what you get from levels 1-50, and so on.
The big question is: How much experience can players expect to get and thus how far will each of us expect to go?
From what is available about the current rewards, I’d expect that a player who is currently earning 10k gold per expansion would need to be able to reach around level 80 or maybe 90 to keep up a similar rate.
We’ll need to see how the experience gain and the leveling process works.
I don’t like see the words “should” and “most” as well as “gold and non-gold”. For me the phrase “gold and non-gold” within the context of hearthstone means as much as the phrase “gold and unicorns” or “gold and happy thoughts”. I very much worry they’re still gonna try to “most” their way out of it and use the non-gold rewards as a way to justify the discrepancy
Neither have I, and I found that interesting. It seems that one might be able to farm xp differently than the current model that limits gold per day from wins.
True, but for example if folks like BGs or Duels, they can play Standard to knock out specific quests, then just go mess around in other modes for fun and rake in passive experience. You didn’t really get that in the old system very well.
Obviously it remains to be seen how much XP can be earned from plain matches, but I’m fairly optimistic.
