Anyone else really disappointed by the challenges we’ve been getting for the events recently? It seems like every set of challenges we get is just “Complete 10/15/20/30/50 games” etc. We hardly ever get actual achievements anymore and it just makes them feel really dull and lifeless. This year we didn’t even get the Endless or Challenge modes of Junkenstein back to play, it really seems like we’re getting less and less with every event.
The challenges aren’t there to be challenging, they’re there to be time consuming and make you feel like you have to play the game every chance you get. Consider the profit model.
Blizzard doesn’t actually benefit from you playing the game. That actually just costs them money. They profit from you visiting the store or the hero gallery and having something there to convince you to spend money. So really, it’s better for Blizzard for you to sit in the app paging through the menus than to actually queue up and play the game. As far as the company is concerned, the game is there to get you to open the app and then the store. The challenges are designed with that in mind.
Complete x games is the perfect sweet spot of incredibly easy to implement and nicely time consuming to get players to keep coming back. It does exactly what it’s meant to.
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You weren’t around when the challenges were actually “challenging”, and the whiners complained that it was too much effort for them to complete specific tasks in a videogame a low number of times per day/week, so the devs dumbed it down for them not once, but twice or even three times.
That’s why they are basically participation “challenges” - and believe it or not, we STILL have some that are complaining about playing three matches per day to unlock these participation challenges. These whiners are always the first to say the devs don’t listen to the community by the way.
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They do actually, even without visiting the shop.
If people are frequently playing, then the servers are full and the game is alive.
A popular game is all it needs for the spenders to spend money, for people to “flex” with their skins (for whatever reason).
F2P is usually about a simple social principle: people showing off and flexing their muscles.
For that, you need a bunch of “poor and irrelevant” people and a few of “wealthy and healthy” ones.
people complained it wasn’t fair that they couldn’t get the challenges done and they would miss the rewards. so they changed them to be boring busy work that you cant fail at.
Server cycles cost money to run. Even just sitting logged into the app browsing their menus costs them a small amount, but being in a game hosted on their servers and making those servers do lots of calculations is a lot more expensive. And they get no income from that directly. Hosting a game is pure cost on their end. But if they didn’t have the actual game, no one would buy any digital assets for the game, so it’s worth the cost.
Obviously they’re not going to do anything to intentionally discourage playing (hence challenges that say play more games, spend more time in game) because that would inevitably drive away paying customers along with the freeloaders.
But financially, burnout is a desirable outcome. Provided, of course, that the player burning out has an unhealthy relationship with the game and will keep logging in. An exhausted player who logs in, sees a chore list for minimal skins, wants to play but also not really, is a player highly likely to decide to just spend money on impulse.
Essentially, while they don’t want to drive away players, they will happily degrade the experience for freeloaders if it can convert some fraction of those into customers. You said it yourself, those who won’t/can’t pay are irrelevant.
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Not only that, but the current challenges are designed to be completed over a week or more, yet people act like they have to finish them in a single day. 
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