Yea i realized what i wrote made no sense afterwards… i meant the average player… meaning mostly a casual player
The dust ratio is awful, and I often do not feel like I’ve gotten good value out of my packs, especially with ths nonsense filler legendaries like Duskfallen Aviana/Dr. Morrigan floating around…
I get it, Blizzard are out to make money and are pushing the market to what it can bare. If paying players leave, they forfeit their collection.
I don’t see the direction of the monetization model changing, or more dust, or no repeat epics. But something will break…more than likely the goodwill of paying customers.
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Highly unlikely. Hearthstone is actually priced quite fairly, and every other dCCG in the market is priced similarly. Price Whiners at some point are going to have to accept that the dCCG market is priced correctly and that their whining isn’t going to change anything.
What do you base this claim on though? “Priced correctly”. Apart from Hearthstone there isnt any massively successful card collecting games out there. Its allways beena niche, until Hearthstone came along. And Hearthstone massive success came before they started asking 80$ each expansion. 3 times a year. Before it was less frequent. 2 a year i think. And they charged 20$ for all the cards in half of the expansions.
Hearthstone has become more expensive. So it was either priced incorrectly when it massively took off. Or is incorectly priced now. What is it?
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Magic says “hi”
Digital is priced roughly equal to HS if not a tad lower just because of the ‘starting decks’ that Magic has and there are enough trade-offs between digital convenience and physical asset value that I think they wash out decently well.
In my view the Expansions were priced correctly from a CCG standpoint. I did the breakout prior for physical MtG vs. HS and (essentially) box sets were equal in price. Adventures were, overall, an amazing value in HS originally as their density of impactful cards had tended to be high and the content was pretty good. The only really underwhelming adventure, if memory serves, was ONiK because it just made Shaman better, lol but medivh was a fun excellent card and Warden (4/6 taunt with draw) saw use but it wasn’t like LoE, BRM, and Naxx as far as usefulness.
I’ll quote Mand’s rather brilliant summary of this whole issue…
Hearthstone - and by extension all other dCCGs - are correctly priced because they are successful. If they were incorrectly priced, then they would not be successful. The fact that you personally disagree with their pricing does not mean they have been incorrectly priced. It means that you are viewing the pricing structure incorrectly. You need to abandon your wrong opinions about dCCG pricing and accept them for what they are. There are plenty of Free to Play tools and options available to you with which you can either mitigate or entirely ignore the price.
No - it hasn’t. Your opinion on this is entirely incorrect.
When Hearthstone was released 5 years ago, players could buy packs for the exact same price as they are today. The price of a pack of cards has remained exactly the same. Hearthstone has not gotten more expensive. You simply have an incorrect opinion about how much you think you need to spend on it.
FALSE
new sets didn’t come out so often and they alternated with SP (buy SP have all new cards) now is only 135 new sets but must buy LOWest RND pack
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Only, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Buying 80 loot boxes.
CCG doesnt have to be using this loot box pack system.
We already have RnG in gameplay. Please dont use RnG in purchasing system.
We like to build a deck and play card game, not gambling out money to open loteries.
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The adventure days make cards less of a luxury though.
Hearthstone revenue is down 52% year over year according to a recent study.
I guess it’s not priced correctly
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Allways funny to me when people with opinions, think im having an opinion, when i actually are talking about facts. Lets do some math shall we?
Before: 2 expansions a year. Where 1 of those cost 20 bucks for all the cards. Lets say the other one cost 80 bucks. Even though you would need a hell of a lot more spendt if you want all the cards. Just for the ease of it. That equals 100 bucks a year.
Now: 3 expansions a year. Lets value them at 80 bucks each. What does that equal in your mind? 240 bucks.
And you think the price hasnt changed?
You can allways argue the F2P model for people who have the time to play 12 hours a day on this cardgame. Most dont. But that doesnt change anything. It only means you spend less before. And spend less now. The price of cards though has still been raised.
One could allso argue that there are more cards released now. But take away 1 of the 3 expansions, and the price is still higher for 2 now, than 2 before.
Now lets hear the opinion of the opinionated Riddler.
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Sure. But the time of the “lootbox games” are over. There simply are to many of them. And it makes the game worse. People before could perhaps afford buying a few packs now and then from a game. But now every game is becoming a RNG pack opening game. I think the people are getting frustrated.
Hearthstone would do themselves a huge favour if they opted back to the previous model. They can still make 3 expansions a year, but should be purchasable for 30 bucks or so. As any expansion in any genre of any game previously has been valued at. They are not working any harder. They are not releasing any more content. They are not offering a special deal of any sort. They are only greedy. And i think people are starting to realize it.
Not for me, because I don’t go around with the silly (and incorrect) belief that I have to pay $80 bucks for every expansion.
Now - if a person is a dunderheaded fool who thinks they have to pay cash every time a set comes out, then yes for that person the ‘cost’ per year would go up. Why any person would possibly think paying cash would be necessary is beyond me, but I will allow for the reality that there are some people out there who are a few cans short of a six-pack.
Facts are facts though, and the price of a Hearthstone pack has not increased. The price you pay for a pack today is the price you paid in 2014. Those of you operating under the delusion that you have to pay more money because there are 3 expansions in a year are simply victims of your own bad planning skills or your own lack of self-discipline.
Wouldn’t you still be shelling out more gold in order to keep up with the expansions now, meaning it’s more important to organize your time and get the bonus packs qnd quests then it was before.
So a higher cost then it was before, just the players choice on whether its costing money, time, or effort.
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Its irrelevant what you do. Why do you think you are an example of what everyone else should or can do? Not everyone have the same ammount of time in a day to invest in the game as you do.
And without people buying packs, you wouldnt have a game to go to. So you can call these people duderheaded fools all you want, but you only look like a fool yourself.
The facts are facts regardless of your spending history on this game. Pack prices are the same. Iv never claimed otherwise. But the cards and expansions are more expensive then they previously used to be. Hence the game itself is more expensive. Its a card collection game. To collect the cards you either spend insane ammount of time, or spend money. If money spending is your thing, you where better off before then you are today. Wich is my point. And has been, regardless of your strawman argument.
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This is getting closer to the reality.
Generally speaking in the 4 months between sets a player can - without any ‘grinding’ - easily save up at least 8,000 gold by just doing dailies.
In the old system (1 Adventure / 1 SPA) a player’s pool of 16,000 gold divvied up 3,500 for 1 SPA and they had 12,500 left to spend on packs for 1 Expansion. In the current system the player has 16,000 gold to spend on packs for 2 Expansions.
Is the player “getting less” for free under the new system?
SPAs are undoubtedly a tremendous value for 3,500. However, they are small sets of only 45 cards or so compared to Expansions (135). So a person pays less, gets less, but gets 100% of that “less”.
Meanwhile that same player has 12,500 gold to spend on packs for the Expansion in the cycle as opposed to the current system where they’d have 8,000. That’s more gold for that Expansion, so aren’t they getting more? Yes, and no.
A player who spends 12,500 gold to get 125 packs in an expansion very quickly reaches a point (somewhere after around 70 packs) where the vast majority of the packs they open are turning into an average of 100 dust rather than adding to their collection. This isn’t a hard/fast number when it exactly happens, but when a player has all the Commons and all the Rares, the ROI on packs plummets to this 100 gold = 100 dust wash.
So - how much of an Expansion was a player getting for that 12,500 gold (old system) versus the 8,000 gold they’d be spending in the current system?
12,500 gold vs. 8,000 would give them 45 more packs. Since they’ve already got all the Commons and Rares at this point, those 45 more packs will (on average) give them 9 more Epics (with a fair amount of dupes) and 1 more Legendary. What’s the net return?
PLAYER WHO SPENDS 12,500 TO GET 125 PACKS (OLD SYSTEM)
98 Commons
72 Rares
25 Epics
6.75 Legendaries
81.4% of the collectible cards
About 6,000+ dust from duplicates
PLAYER WHO SPENDS 8,000 GOLD ON 80 PACKS (CURRENT SYSTEM)
98 Commons
72 Rares
16 Epics
4.50 Legendaries
77.3% of the collectible cards
About 2,000+ dust from duplicates
So yeah, the player under the old system has “more” … but the difference is very marginal. They will end up with a couple more Legendaries and a few more usable Epics and the rest goes into the crafting pool (which has the crappiest return in the game).
So they have 4,500 more gold to spend on packs … but they really aren’t getting much with it. Arguably, they are not much better off than the person who spent 8,000 on 80 packs. I’d argue that they’re wasting that gold and should just sit on it and wait for the next expansion when the ROI is better.
So in an 8-month cycle how much “more” does the player have in the old system versus the new system?
OLD SYSTEM:
Player average 154.89 collectible cards (45 SPA, 109.89 Exp) out of 180 possible cards for a total of 86%
CURRENT SYSTEM:
Player averages 208.7 collectible cards (104.35 for each Exp) out of 270 possible cards for a total of 77%.
Net Difference: -9% in the current system.
Quite frankly, I don’t see much to get excised about in that. It’s so marginal a difference as to be entirely negligible. And yet some people are acting as if the difference is some huge, insurmountable, Everest-esque, Sysiphusian impossibiility that they might as well just kill themselves over.
Meanwhile, people with even the most basic grasp of simple mathematics have long ago shrugged and adjusted to it so easily that we didn’t even notice.
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I agree that the game is expensive, especially for certain regions …
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No, you get 80 packs for $80.
And each pack has 5 cards. You get 400 cards for $80.
(Technically, you get the additional Leg gold card too, so 401 cards for $80)
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