I’ve thought about it lately and here what I came with - if everything that makes you want to play a game (not hs alone) is rewards, then the game doesn’t worth your time.
For example, I didn’t buy BP in Fortnite and now I don’t feel I losing chances of getting seasonal skins. But when I want to play it, I log in.
So to people who are upset about quests - yes, you are being manipulated to waste more time in the game. And clearly, 10-15-20 wins per week is not something impossible. But you must want to play it, not just log in to pick up rewards.
Rewards makes games bad
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Preach brother!!!
The thing is rewards are meant to make you want to sign in. They are using psychology to decide that your time is better spent playing the game than doing some other recreational activity. For example I play MTG Arena until I get 1 win everyday guaranteed because your first win is 250 gold guaranteed. Every other win is progressively less gold. So I will play past the first win if I want, but if I’m busy I won’t bother. But that first win is valuable enough that I want to do atleast 1 per day.
However, if you look at hearthstone. The rewards are non-tangible. I get X amount of Xp which gives me a random reward based on my battle pass experience. Which is likely something useless that doesn’t even give me progress. This also means even if I play for 1 win a day, I will be only 7/10 for completion. So playing the whole week didn’t even give me a weekly reward. This is basically the long form of what you said, you have to want to play hearthstone for the fun of it now, and not the rewards which has thus decreased player engagement rather than increased it.
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Blizzard said so in a statement released 3 days ago: “to reward our most engaged players”.
If that’s their take, it’s pretty insulting. I too play Magic Arena, and I feel like the rewards system is not only rewarding and fair, but it allows the gameplay to be casual and fun at the same time. I don’t have to be constantly preoccupied and distracted with tracking down how many wins I accumulate. It doesn’t feel like a job.
Why do you need rewards? Game itself should be fun alone. If game isn’t fun, then why? I know its stimulation of dopamine system, that, overall, completely ruins it eventually
Well, cosmetics doesn’t affect your ability to play the game.
But the reward in HS does affect your ability to play (and thus enjoy) the game itself in future expansions.
If you can’t build up sufficent pack/gold reserve, you won’t be able to enjoy the game itself without spending money.
So those are not equitable comparisons.
Edit: It is also worth noting what constiutes “playing the game” differs for different players. If all you want is to be competitive in standard and have one or two good deck for that, you don’t need much and can dust most old cards to “fund” it. But if you enjoy playing crazy decks in brawls, wild or single player content, you need to keep a signifiant portion of your old collection and will run into resource issues long term if rewards ia lacking.
I, for example, find many wild constructed brawls to be hilarious. But a lot of player hate them because they are unable to properly play the mode due to limited collection. So resource limitation very much affect the game play experience. (On that note, i really hate the fact that they fixed the bug on the half&half brawl where it used to let you put in more than 2 copies of a card… I still have 7-10 copies of the cards I used in those. I found the bug to be hilarious, but only because I had the card pool to support it)