Here are some interesting topics found on reddit which answer the question :
To sum up, to those who still think it’s possible to get all the content as f2p, it’s impossible, even if you quit your job and play 24/7 to get the 30 wins everyday
13 Likes
Whether or not you can get a full collection without buying packs (probably not) is an independent issue from whether or not the game is pay2win (it isn’t). Conflating both doesn’t help whatever argument you’re trying to make.
26 Likes
Kinda pointless debate because people are working with completely different definitions of F2P and P2W.
I will say that I think the F2P experience is awful, and I wouldn’t recommend Hearthstone to someone who wasn’t willing to buy in for money. It’s simply terrible trying to complete dailies without a good collection. Have fun playing pirates when your collection has 3 pirates. Win 3 games with Druid with no UI, DK or spreading plague…good luck.
16 Likes
The game is more like pray to win.
21 Likes
But those are only for a full collection, aren’t they?
Whether or not you hit legend doesn’t rely on the presence of Boogeymonster and Millhouse being in your collection, and we’ve already established that the 30-Legendaries deck sucks.
It’s not that I do not disagree that it is difficult for an f2p player to join — trying to piece together cards from 3 or more expacs, plus trying to gather dust for individual legendaries is a pain — but the bar for getting one legend-level deck or multiple decent decks is much lower than the bar for getting every card. In some cases, just one legendary can enable multiple decks, like Baku allowing both Odd Paladin and Rogue without needing other legendaries, or Keleseth enabling Zoo decks.
No, you can’t make a Shudderwock Shaman right away (deck needs at least two legendaries, and the ideal list would have more), but that doesn’t mean you need a full collection to do well, or that a different deck is not possible.
10 Likes
If you actually needed all of the content to win? Sure. Pay 2 win, and has only gotten worse with adventures gone and every set running 2x class legends.
But you really, really don’t need a full collection if winning is your only goal. There are plenty of decks with relatively low crafting costs and high win rates.
Many decks don’t change much between expansions and remain strong once the core is established, and quest gold returns are higher than they were in the past.
So yeah, it takes a long while to establish a baseline collection, but once you have it, it isn’t hard to stay competitive for free.
Also, if you get good at arena, that’s near infinite pack generation.
13 Likes
An important aspect of pay-to-win is that you need to have weak players face off against high tier players to incentivize people to pay in order to win more.
The whole point of the ladder system is to get everyone down to a win rate of approximately 50%, if your collection is prevents you from winning then you’ll face against worse players until you lose as many stars as you gain.
5 Likes
Those posts missed a whole bunch of extra ways to get gold and dust though. Even so there are a bunch of just terrible cards you will never need in your collections that you can use to create useful cards. Having a full set and a playable set are two different things. I cannot imagine anyone FTP wanting to own every card just because.
3 Likes
I liked the video, thanks for sharing.
Even though the analysis has some limitations (which they recognized), it was interesting to see how much of a collection a F2P player can amass (dust wise, which is the correct count), playing everyday, re-rolling quests, getting 20g from victories and reaching rank 5.
According to their chart, a F2P player can get 52% of the resources of a given expansion, which is a lot because one can focus those resources on the best cards.
Sure, one might have to wait before crafting, meet the level of play of the analysis etc, but I would say HS is far from a P2W game.
5 Likes
Since the term “p2w” is talking about winning not having the biggest collection, I’d say that it sits comfortably on the “f2p” side of things. There ARE upsides to spending money, but a free player that is willing to invest some time can have a competitive deck up and running in pretty short order.
As has often been said:
- Have a massive collection
- Have one or more competitive meta decks
- Play for free
You can pick two of the above. As long as the option is there to win without paying, the game will never be truly p2w.
10 Likes
Okay, can you do well in the game while being free 2 play? Yes
Are you going to have a good time? Probably not.
There are not a lot of decks that are truly viable to be played to a high level that are cheap. More recently (like post Old Gods I’d say) the need for epics and specific lengendaries (due to things like quests, death knights, etc) have really gone up in a lot of decks. It used to be that epics were among the worst crafts overall, but now a lot of them are completely needed in a lot of decks.
I only spend occasionally and I can field about 4 or 5 decks right now. But because of how the card economy works if some decks suddenly become good that sucked in the past I just can’t play them because I had to dust those cards to play decks that were good currently. That, or just play the same 1 or 2 decks over and over for months.
2 Likes
I would imagine that starting out could be challenging, but once you are established it is fine, at least I have certainly enjoyed myself and I have never spent on Hearthstone.
6 Likes
Paying doesn’t make you win.
Winning doesn’t require paying.
10 Likes
The game is pay to win, whoever tells you otherwise is delusional. Are you guaranteed a 100% win rate? No, but it’s way above 50% compared to not buying packs.
3 Likes
You mean like by playing Odd Paladin, a consistently tier 1 deck with such a low dust cost that a new player could invest less than a month into the game and be piloting the full meta version? For the last year?
While I’d certainly say it’s more of a sliding scale than black-and-white f2p/p2w, if someone can f2p their way to legend with a tier 1 meta deck with only a month or two on the account, it’s pretty tough to call the game straight-up p2w.
10 Likes
Love when people make up statistics and just expect people to believe them. There had been a multitude of Tier 1 decks that are low cost decks.
Odd Paladin, midrange hunter, arguably zoo warlock, and more.
7 Likes
To be fair, we used to have actual budget decks with a 2k dust cost just a couple of years ago, now they are usually 4k+ and even MR hunter is over 3K dust cost (which is cheaper than the “budget” options prior to RR by a large margin).
Deck dust costs have been rising quite significantly over the last couple of years, to the point where some people now consider 6K dust decks “budget” options!
That said, I don’t agree with SrChatto either, just stating facts.
5 Likes
I would say no after taking a good break from the game twice.
I still use “outdated” decks like C’Thun Druid, Secret Mage, Quest Discolock etc. I even play a Murloc Paladin with anti-synergies when played with Anyfin.
Last month being when I returned, I managed to hit Rank 9 by doing only daily quests (from 20).
I feel these statistics are more for the collectors and maybe even experimenters who want to dive into Hearthstone than those who play casually.
For new players, I suppose it’s nice to get a feel to how much time/resources they need to dedicate to the game before they can be comfortable from a point on.
2 Likes
P2w is not the same as getting all the content. No one claims that you will be able to get all the content and play whatever meme deck you like at any given time as f2p, but that does not prevent you from having several meta decks and getting high results.
I for one reached Legend with zero cents spent. Had two meta decks at that time. Now I can craft like 5-8 meta decks every expansion depending on their cost.
4 Likes
But NoOoOoOoOOOoooOOOOoooo!!!
Y-you can’t reach legend or be competitive unless you can build literally every tier 1 & 2 meta deck, r-right?
4 Likes