Evolution of expansions (more money, elaborated discussion)

Community Discussion
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So I am playing this game for a couple of years now, been buying the 49.99 pre-order bundles up until 2 expansions ago ( decided to stop until I see standard improving).
I’d like to argue that HS is getting ridiculously expensive to play, and I know it was already discussed but the subtle changes make it even worse.
Would love to hear everyone’s take on this.

Objective thoughts (obvious to all?):

  1. Compared to the standard 49.99 bundle, full pre-purchase options per expansion now includes: a 79.99 bundle, a 49.99 bundle and a 19.99 adventure- summing to a whopping 150$ ( 450$ a year to get 80-85% of the cards, a T-shirt or any other small memorabilia giveaway would have been nice Blizz).
  2. Overall move from neutral legendaries (old gods=12, late expansions=5) to class legendaries mean you have to buy more packs in order to play less decks (less versatility in deck building).
  3. Moving from 2 expansions a year to 3 expansions a year thickens the collectible card pool.

Subjective thoughts (Subtle changes that make it worse?):
4. Compared to class legendaries from KFT or Ungoro (death knights/ quests) the recent legendaries feel mostly useless (I subjectively count 6 playable class legendaries out of 16 in rastakhan, compared to KFT where I count 11).
5. Feels like you have to open 30-40% more packs in order to get the same amount of epics/legendaries you got 2 years ago (pity timer in my experience feels a lot higher)

No other game out there is remotely as expensive: you could literally buy Xbox One pass, EA Access, Utomik for 2 accounts and still be left with some change compared to HS.

P.S
ppl who say they are F2P and have an awesome collection: sure why not.
IMO a 49.99 bundle would be worth the alternative cost in gold (which reflects the real life time spent to earn it, i’d rather work for 2.5 hours than grind 5K gold for a month).
But even 80 packs don’t really mean much with the current pity timer, do they?

P.S2
What’s up Delfunk :smiley:

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Four expansions per year? Wut?

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Edited :sweat_smile:

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Well It is a free to play game as the game itself doesn’t cost anything to download. I’ve been playing since naxxramus and GVG. With new expansions as far as i can remember there has always been the $49.99 prepurchase deal that also granted the expansions card back as well.

In recent expansions you now have the option to get a 79.99 bundle as well as the 19.99 one. The two pricier once give a $1:1 card pack ratio. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy all 3 options. The cheaper one is a great alternative to people who don’t want to drop 50$ on an expansion but still get a few packs to open. The $80 option is great for players who want to get more than just 50 packs but still want the same buying power per card pack. Plus you get the bonus hero portrait if that’s something you would like.

It takes roughly 70-100 card packs I believe to get every card in an expansion. I remember in previous expansions I would always pre order then drop another 20-50 to finish off the collection. So the $80 option would be great for me.( I’m not spending that kind of money on this game anymore but this option would have been great back then.)

As for the 3rd Point you made That is definitely something that I never noticed. I would definitely love to see more neutral legendaries. That just makes more deck options for me. You always get a few bad legendaries and a decent amount of good ones. However the neutrals in RR definitely didn’t impress me too much. Oondasta and Hakkar can fit decently in some decks but the other 3 aren’t anything special or even useful.

As for the 4th point you make, the power level of KFT was highly overtuned. The deathknights have been dominating the standard and wild meta since they were released. I will be very happy to see them go but I don’t want anything to be anywhere near that strong again. As for quests, Rogue’s was broken and required more than one adjustment but the other ones weren’t anywhere near as strong as they could have been. They were good, but not broken.

AS for your 5th point i’m not sure what the numbers are.

You can easily gain 50 G per day Just by doing the quest and not even getting 3 wins for 10 gold. So over the course of 4 months thats about 6,000 gold or 60 packs from the new expansion. That’s without even grinding. Just play a couple games a day.

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Well I’ve been getting well over 100 packs per expansion and didn’t even get all the epics, I would assume i’d need probably 200 packs to afford the dust to have all the major legendaries each expansion (NOT all the legendaries, just the ones that are ladder worthy)

When I think of a legendary card and what it takes to get one (1600 dust) it makes sense that most of them should be powerful.
Might be just me but what’s the point of having 23 legendaries if 15 are as good as 400 dust and never see play?

That’s absolutely true, but given the rewards you get for 60 packs (2-4 legendaries, probably 1 is playable), i’d argue they must start rewarding dust as well.

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oof unlucky. How close to the whole expansion do you get? Keep in mind it is possible to buy 1,000 packs and still never open a certain card. But Thats what all the extra dust is for.

Legendaries are supposed to be strong but not to the extent where they completely dictate the pace of the whole meta and every meta. A legendary minion has an answer. Board clear, single target removal. Dont matter. But Deathknights have hero powers that can be used over and over again.

Is 60 packs worth? Maybe, Maybe not. But 60 is pretty much the bare minimum for only spending the minimum time on the game. Why should blizz reward players who don’t want to put in any effort.

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are you sure ?
not even artifact ?
(remember this is a f2p game)

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Only real problem here are those that buy into them. Can’t expect the game to develop further if people feed a company’s bad habits.

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I think for those familiar to games of this genre would have recognize that there is a cost involved.
What the dev does is to expand the revenue potential, much like any other business in concept.

What most players here may not understand is the economics involved that made the game running to date?

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@RedSpade: What do you think, Blizzard would do, if no one pays anymore? I guess they would shutdown the servers, so maybe people should pay, if they enjoy the game and feel inclined to buying packs?

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After blizzard saying “best year ever” and laying off 800+ people they can surely piss off with trying to penny pinch us. I stopped buying into this game after witch wood. I have 14k dust and I only play wild at the moment for I ain’t falling for the scam that is standard. As far as I’m concerned bliz is not going to see money from me ever again unless I see some improvement to the old blizzard which has long been dead in my book. So thank you Activision for screwing over the gaming industry with your greed.

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Well, how about an economic phenomena known as “network effect”: the common belief of a revenue based economy model is already changing everywhere around us.

Take whatsapp for example- made billions of dollars not even selling or advertising for most of its existence, so where does the value come from?

There really is a lot more than revenue that could generate value in 2019, so trying to sell more when people are leaving and workers are laid off is not the best long term plan IMO

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Bringing in “network effect” into this topic complicates further discussion.
Taking the example of Whatsapp, what is the cost of development and implementation? where does the source of “income” comes from that sustain the service? What is it’s business strategy?

HS is marketed as a F2P game where it derives it’s main revenue from regular payers and whales. F2P players fits into the system to ensure a effective queue system, as well as a market for potential future customers.

HS has grown since it’s initial days, so does it’s overheads and related expenses. Thus, as like any business, it needs additional source of revenue (income vs expense) to ensure further growth.

Where there had been many suggestions on where such additional sources of revenue can be sources from, there is also a related cost and expense that may not be clear to the common players.

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Lower amount of powerful legendary will make metadeck cheaper.

Kinda contradicted with your complaint of “more money”

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Or less powerful legendaries overall means less chances of getting one when opening a pack, leading to a higher number of packs needed to build a powerful META deck.

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More legendary meaning more dust needed to craft.

I never count on my luck to build a deck.

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Just like Shuei wrote, it just means random f2p players that massed 6-7k gold for months would most likely not get a single tier 1 deck from pack openning and just need to dust mediocre legendaries and spend ×4 times dust to craft the right ones.

Given than there won’t be a deck around a single minion, it’s fair to assume a meta deck would require at least one more legendary.

I don’t think any F2P player has any chance of building more than 1 tier 1 meta deck using the standard 6-7k gold and assuming he/she has 1-2k dust, which is average.

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If you do not spend gold btw expansion. 10k gold is pretty easy.

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So much wrong here. It’s hard to know where to even start.

  1. Compared to the standard 49.99 bundle, full pre-purchase options per expansion now includes: a 79.99 bundle, a 49.99 bundle and a 19.99 adventure- summing to a whopping 150$

Or you could just pay $0.00. There is no need to pay cash for the bundles or Adventures. You can get upwards of 80 packs just with free quest gold. And - of course - you can get all the Adventure wings with free gold.

  1. Overall move from neutral legendaries (old gods=12, late expansions=5) to class legendaries mean you have to buy more packs in order to play less decks

Your statement that “You have to buy more packs” is factually wrong. Players don’t have to buy anything. Not only can they get packs for free, they also don’t need to get all the Legendaries for every class. CCGs are games that are designed to be played with incomplete collections.

  1. Moving from 2 expansions a year to 3 expansions a year thickens the collectible card pool.

Players demanded more cards because there weren’t enough. So this is what everyone wanted. Oh - wait - you wanted a lot more content but you thought they were just going to GIVE it to you. Well, there’s your problem…

  1. Compared to class legendaries from KFT or Ungoro (death knights/ quests) the recent legendaries feel mostly useless (I subjectively count 6 playable class legendaries out of 16 in rastakhan, compared to KFT where I count 11).

On the one hand, you are whining that there are class Legendaries. On the other hand you are whining because you DON’T need to get those Legendaries because they aren’t critical. Isn’t that a good thing?

  1. Feels like you have to open 30-40% more packs in order to get the same amount of epics/legendaries you got 2 years ago (pity timer in my experience feels a lot higher)

Your opinion is wrong. The average drop rate is still 1 in 5 for Epics and 1 in 20 for Legendaries. You should use facts to make arguments … not feelings. People who argue based on their feelings make terrible arguments and most of the time they are completely wrong about everything.

No other game out there is remotely as expensive

BZZZT! Every major digital CCG on the market is priced almost identically with Hearthstone. Spend $49.99 on Shadowverse, or Gwent, or MtGA and calculate the percentage of cards you get with it. Then come back and tell us how much cheaper they are than Hearthstone.

you could literally buy Xbox One pass, EA Access, Utomik for 2 accounts and still be left with some change compared to HS.

Hearthstone is a dCCG. CCGs have a pricing model that applies to themselves. Saying Hearthstone should have the same pricing as XBox Gold because they’re both ‘games’ is as stupid as saying a Tricycle should have the same pricing as a Ferrari because they both have wheels.

But even 80 packs don’t really mean much with the current pity timer, do they?

80 packs will get you all the Commons, most of the rares, 16 Epics, and 4.5 Legendaries … which translates to over 75% of the collectible cards in a set. That’s more than enough for a player to rank, or play casual with a wide range of options.

In short - many of the assumptions you are making are just plain wrong. You don’t have to buy all the bundles. You don’t have to pay cash at all. You don’t need all the cards to play the game. CCGs shouldn’t be priced based on products from completely different genres. Hearthstone isn’t charging more money. You aren’t getting less stuff now than you used to. Pretty much all of your complaints are the result of believing complete bunk which was invented from your biases and ‘feelings’.