Guess you missed where I’m agreeing with the OP’s point about why they need to leave at all. I’m “complaining” because strongly dislike creating artificial scarcity. you’re free to like this type of thing I guess?
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I’m betting they will rotate back in at some point. OP just sounded certain, where as official statements have been along the lines of “um, they might come back, but take advantage of this mediocre sale that we’re pushing!” Wasn’t really advertised they were going away on the launcher that I saw, you had to do some digging to see that these were going away from the store.
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Then it’s a good thing I never advocated giving the pre order heroes away for free, just for a reasonable price since they knowingly priced most of their playerbase out of being able to buy them. For a company that has a core value of “playing fair” and so on, that runs counter to that stated value to intentionally: A) have a currency exchange system that places the burden on the customer (not like actiblizz can’t afford to do what steam does); and B) have them locked behind such a massive paywall.
Having heroes for sale? Sure. Having to essentially pay what it costs to buy and entire new console game for them? Not so much, especially when most of the global playerbase can’t afford it. You even admit that those are for “whales,” not for the average player. Further indicating it’s intentionally exclusionary, when they pretend it’s available for everyone.
The wording strongly implies it:
Otherwise, they would have said “get them before they are gone forever!” or something like that.
Same thing with the new hunter hero in the shop: why such a short window for availability? Is the new artificial scarcity mindset something that is part of team 5’s business model going forward? Because it makes zero sense in a digital format. If hearthstone were a print card game with limited runs, this makes sense: only so many cards and special items like heroes are produced, therefore they can only sell so many of them. Same with physical collector’s editions of games. But for digital product, there are literally infinite numbers of them, which is why if you had a billion dollars, you could buy as many packs as that would get you from the store. Since there’s no secondary market, no one would even know you had done it, until the next quarterly report was released and hearthstone showed a crazy amount of transactions.
Long story short: Artificial scarcity on a digital product makes zero sense.
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FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) has been a driving force behind a lot of high profile publishers’ actions over the last decade or so.
It’s unlikely that Team 5 has the final say in how the store and promotions work, the most likely scenario is that they’re going able to suggest to the higher ups how things have been proven to work in the past. For the money counters it’s a balance between keeping the largest amount of players contented/engaged and maximizing the profitability of the game.
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“Everyone else is doing it!” Was a bad excuse when we were kids, and it doesn’t stick when we’re talking about multibillion dollar companies. Additionally, team 5 can’t wash their hands of it either, because they have a responsibility to point out such moves have a negative impact on their playerbase, as it did with the Tyrande fiasco (which intentionally discriminated against most of their playerbase).
Then they should consider dropping “play fair” from the motto. Because when decisions are made that price most people out of being able to purchase alternate heroes, that’s the opposite of “playing fair.” The “poor, struggling indie company” is used often as a bad joke, but in reality they aren’t any of these, so they don’t have to intentionally make choices to exclude their global playerbase for no reason.
In fact, moves like these only serve the opposite effect as people see that unlike a physical print run, digital goods have no expiration date and there’s no reason to pull them other than to try and push sales. Which shows they value profit more than their customers. These two ideas shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but for some reason, actiblizz seems to believe they are. Of late, this has been impacting what goes on at team 5 and the decisions with hearthstone.
Which brings us full circle to the heroes and their availability.
Guess the thread already died huh? It’s going to take more dedication than this if you want heroes like Khadgar, Maiev, and Lunara to come back.
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I guess so. Can’t be everywhere. At least they gave away nemsy for free.
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Yes, at least that one.
Still waiting for heroes to appear in store.
… How much longer
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That’s the 5000 gold question. The card backs are slowly making their way back into rotation, at least so it’s something. But I haven’t seen anything on the heroes.