Very long time player here. Been playing since the beta.
The new Arena seems made to make you quit playing Arena and I believe it shows.
You used to need about an average of 7 wins for perfect replay ability and stick with the mode for ever while making gold. In reality perfect replay-ability could be acheived with less because by playing one would also complete quests and gain gold that would balance out to more rewards and feed into the game economy.
5 wins or 6 wins often gave you about 100 gold, which by itself almost gave you enough to start a new arena run (2/3 of the way there). Lower wins often got you 1/3 of the way to another run.
So You could get away with it and keep playing the mode without paying or paying sparsely.
As it stands now you absolutely must get to 6 wins otherwise you contribution to the next run is laughable. Beginning At 6 there’s a chance you get back your tickets(50%? maybe). The 5% to gain 2000g is ridiculous as a system. if one were to remove the % out of the equation it’s about 100 gold per more or less 20times you hit that amount of wins (scaling with your wins at 100 per 10 wins on average once the chance gets to 10%) Not only does it scale poorly and varies wildly, but it makes it purposefully harder to estimate rewards by making the game mode even less readable. This is maybe because if one does the math one finds out how bad it is.
It gives many packs. Many packs that many arena players don’t really care about otherwise they’d be playing standard. Sure I sometimes play standard but giving me 2 packs almost everytime is NOT what I am looking for. Give me 100 Gold as I don’t like to be taken by the hand towards another game mode and would like the freedom to chose how I spend it and I would chose to spend it in the game mode I find more fun.
The new system also makes the game harder. Across my 20-something underground runs except at the very beginning when the pool of players was larger I at most got 8th place. and now across my last attempts I arrive at an average of about 4. The median is 3rd and I never saw beyond 8th place (early in this meta). My winrate was better before though I didn’t keep stats because I wasn’t expecting this changes. Enough to make plenty of gold as I played arena.
The fact you get to change your deck when you lose and that you start with a more reliable decklists tend to push your chances to win/lose closer to 50%. That kills the “luck factor” as you pretty much always get a decent deck but so does everyone. A strong deck may be fought against at 7-0 but people are just as strong at 3-2. That fact would be fine and maybe even desirable if all the rewards were not stacked between 6 and 12 wins which implies winrates that are pretty much insane and unlikely with close to equal-strength decklists. The systems pushes hard towards the 3-3 ratio. With such a system it would be more fair to go back to a 8-9wins maximum with better rewards as it was in the early days of hearthstone. However … I would hate that as that was a good changes back in the day and I would rather see other solutions.
By both lowering rewards for low wins (compared to the price of entering the underground) and making such results more likely it feels like being swindled. And I say that as one of the lucky ones who got the luck to get the 2000 gold first try. I, like a gambler at a casino sit now with a deficit of around 2000gold compared to before this patch. That gold won surely went by quickly. This arena is too pricey to play and even my stash of gold I had amassed across the years cannot sustain it for long. and playing 400 runes every 2 runs is NOT acceptable.
Also, like before, all classes are not equal and you tend to see the same 3 classes almost every game once you go beyond the first win.
Therefore, this arena is unrewarding to play, and the maybe-fun mechanics don’t justify the upfront payment especially when they contribute in making the game unplayable as a main game mode.
It seems the devs want arena to be a resource sink that players will once in a while play or pay for while having constructed on the side as a main game mode. This sucks. It feels like people tried to destroy the arena player base and lead us to spend all our ressources so maybe some of us would spend more cash. This is a bad feeling regardless of how true it is and is reason enough for me to quit despite my obvious love for the game.
I hate this especially since I cannot go back to the old arena, I still enjoyed A LOT. This is terrible I would rate it 1/5 stars. And would pretty much actively recommend to keep away from this game mode until they fix it. I am afraid they won’t however. This further makes me angry at how the game is handled as a whole and leads me slowly but surely to want to withdraw my support for anything Hearthstone related. Yes, It’s that bad. I will probably be suspicious of anything that comes out of the same company too. How did that go through ? It’s insane. I could say more but that’s plenty enough for now and I don’t want to make it longer. It is kind of a rant but a rant is kinda what’s needed.
Very disappointed.