Perma Free Heroes

The gold price has it reasons. When I first started the game, I was impressed by many heroes. But after looking at their price tag:

Abathur? Out of my reach.
Zeratul? Out of my reach.
Nova? Out of my reach.

So, after the first 3 weeks, I was ultimately lead to Raynor, Muradin and Malfurion. Which are currently among my top 10 highest level and win rates heroes.

With all that said, the current system is fine. The price tag will be the guidance and prevent the new comers from trying outrageous stuff like drafting Abathur as their first pick.

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Free? You can play the game free. You get a variety of heroes week to week. You get enough gold at the start to buy the discount heroes easily.

Muradin probably isn’t a good choice since he’s already one of the three heroes you get to choose from when you first start (the others are Jaina and Tyrande).

Actually, maybe just starting everyone with Muradin, Jaina, and Tyrande is fine.

They could also reduce the cost of some characters.

The percentage of them at 10 000 gold is huge.

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Oh I didn’t see there was already a thread about this. My bad for making one

We could also just make all heroes free to play and lock Experience Gain behind owning the hero/being on Free Rotation. That’d make the game way easier to get into and make “you can play as characters from the blizzard universe” an easier sell.

Yes, everything is free if you grind. Yes, I grinded all the Heroes.

But do we want to raise the chance of the joining of new players or not?

The discussion is not about how easy/hard it is to reach a point where you have most the roster but about how can we make the game more appaeling to those who never played it yet.

I think that’ll be too much power in smurf hands.

I would had said fur ball of joy or happiness but then again i know nothing of her lore xD

As for the free hero, some of these heroes are super cheap and given the rewards for leveling any hero which is very easy for low lvl characters plus the daily quest .
Lets say they only had 300 gold quest …
300gold x 7 days = 2100 gold.
From that if they bring 1 or 2 charavter to lvl 5 they also get 500 gold for each which would be around 1000 gold.
Then the match itself provide about 35 gold i think when you lose ( i may have the wrong number so please correct me if i am )
35 gold x 3 games for each quests x 7 days = 735 gold ( if they lost 100% of all they matches )

Quest : 2100 gold
Levels : 1000 gold
Completing game : 735 gold
Total : 3835 gold

With this amount it would be easy to purchase raynor or any other 2k gold heroes.

But i do like your idea of a free hero, what if after completing the turorials they had the choice of picking an easy character from all universe ? ( raynor, lili , valla , lucio ) while avoiding giving them a tank for start as they might not know when to engage or leave a team fight .

That way they get one hero for free and like you said they would had time to learn the basic before moving on to more complex characters.

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^ I was just gonna say; between easy player/hero levels and heroes for 2&4 k. They practically give you three.

Hoku (Artanis main). Obvious why she dislikes Lili :smiley:

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i have seen these complaints a bit too and have commented on this one before. my idea is like this …

  • remove the new account starter hero choice
    – when you first start a new account you are given a choice of some heroes to pick from for your first hero. i believe there is something like 9 preset choices that are a possibility here… but im not sure anymore.

  • remove starter gems/gold etc. ok, so another thing that some ppl may not think of imediately is new accounts are given gems. im not talking about tutorial rewards its just a given thing. that would be so you can spend it on another hero or whatever when you figure out what you might want to do. this idea gets rid of that need.

  • take all of the 2000gold tier and make them FREE.
    – How many heroes? 8
    – Who does this include?

    • Diablo
    • E.T.C
    • Raynor
    • Valla
    • Li Li
    • Malfurion
    • Azmodan
    • Gazlowe
  • How would that affect a new account?

There are multiple ways this would affect a new player.

First off the gold issue since one of the things players often complain about is not having any heroes and steep prices of 10k heroes. They will be starting off here with 8 heroes already which is half the number required for ranked. This is already a good thing! Leveling these heroes to 5 will return 4000 gold. That is enough for 1 hero. Combine that with quests, and free rotation and you could have your first 7k or 10k hero soon even! The important thing though is that you are starting with a fairly balanced roster to begin with and that helps you to get through things.

Second… the roster itself. The 2000 tier isnt made of a bunch of junk heroes. Actually its quite the opposite. Most of the heroes are very favorable to have and learn to play. Its also, as said, a balanced roster. It has 2 of every role for the current 4 role system (Tank, Assassin, Support, and Specialist).

Last, the heroes in that tier arent ‘hard’ to learn and play. Something that has to be considered would be you dont want to send a new guy in with a niche hero or something that may be complicated. The 2000 Tier of heroes is pretty easy for the most part its not going to give someone a whole lot of trouble.

I totally agree with you on this one !
Saddly a large majority of this generation of gamers rarely like to put effort in anything.
" if i cant do it at first , its bad "
" i have to improve ?, its bad !"
" it needs efforts … From ME ?!, its really bad !"
" im always the best player ! If not then this game is bs !"

I hate this mentality but its just has spreaded so much every where now its insane lol. I grew up on the old nes, snes and sega , then n64 , ps2/ pc .( megaman , megaman x , sonic , zelda ) back then the games were all about that feeling of accomplishment when you finished a game.
Internet wasnt a thing yet so we had to make sense out of what we noticed and figure things out , and we did lol now many games are taylored for people with no reasoning skills.

But now , feeling of long term accomplishment seen like an out dated concept thats very few people stilll care for and replaced by low effort/short term gratifications :confused:

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The benefits would outweigh the drawbacks. HOTS needs new players, and a lot of them.

It may be an attractive option to help boost the game’s population. They’d need to figure out another way to monetize this game though. I’ve already spent the time to grind out almost all of the heroes (I don’t own any after Whitemane, as I took a long hiatus) I’m not opposed to grinding them out either. Still, I think making the game more accessible would be beneficial in the long run. I’m confident the game could run on cosmetics alone.

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Just 3? Should have at least 4 of each role. Reduce the amount of heroes per free week rotation and add a trial system for you to try heroes for X amount of matches or time for something like 200 gold or so.

the way the game is set up now? no, cosmetics alone couldnt hold it up. if this was heroes 1.0 that would be different. you didnt have all the loot boxes giving away cosmetics essentially for free. given time (the grind factor) anyone can have enough shards to get whatever they want if they dont get it sooner through a loot box.

this is why i proposed above a similar option to the OP which is partial unlock. all of the lowest gold level heroes become free. that still leaves over 75 heroes and all the cosmetics for them to make money on and it helps new players not feel so overwhelmed with not having anything.

They ought to free up more heroes during the roster rotations at the very least if they don’t do this. Or reduce prices on heroes during these rotation periods.

But that’s easily remedied.
Heroes you’ve never played before level up faster, which grants you gold quickly. After a few rotations you have enough gold to buy the heroes you found most appealing during that time.

A better solution I think would be to drop the price of more heroes.

First hero I bought.

Games like that still exist.
But you do also have to realize that games were designed with kids that have lots of free time in mind, while now they’ve realized that there are adult gamers who simply don’t have that much free time. So there are both types of games.
And looking things up is an individual’s choice. I’m in the middle of a long break from La Mulana 2, because that game’s puzzles are more convoluted than Castlevania 2’s… you need a notebook and screen shots to beat that game.

That would be a bad idea ImO.

It would create a pool of heroes that are overplayed, and that too many players will fight to pick in drafts. Every unranked draft will start with “First pick Raynor” then “A player you were matched with has disconnected from the service”

In addition to or instead of this, how about revisiting hero price? Almost every hero to release since the game launched is 10k? I think if we had more options around the 2k or 4k price it could help out.

Moreover, how about adding on to that a gold reward (maybe 2k) for completing a new revamped and far more comprehensive tutorial. Might as well fix a bunch of problems new players face if we want the game to grow.