kerzain
3645
A new patch arrives today that scraps the current gold & quest reward system and puts in a new Battle Pass system. There’s also a new deck builder that ActivisionBlizzard has put online so people can use cards from the upcoming expansion to theorycraft decks.
Here’s an edited cut & paste from some guy who broke it down for Reddit:
- Today Hearthstone is adding a Tavern Pass that provides rewards based on the XP you earn every season. There’s a Free Track available to everyone, and an optional Paid Track available for 19.99 USD. Unlike some other games with battle passes, you cannot spend in-game gold-currency to unlock the pass, and it is not bundled with any of the expansion pre-orders.
Aside from the new Tavern Pass, the overall progression system is being updated with new:
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Quests – New quest system directly tied to the new Tavern Pass. Complete most of these these in Casual, Ranked, Arena, and Duels. Some are completed in Battlegrounds or Tavern Brawls.
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Achievements – A bunch of achievements have been added. They can be earned by playing all the different modes Hearthstone wants you to play.
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Experience Rewards – You can earn XP in Casual, Ranked, Arena, Duels, Battlegrounds, Tavern Brawls, and Adventures – but NOT in Friendly Challenges. The Paid Tavern pass will boost how quickly you earn XP, starting with a 10% bonus.
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Battlegrounds Perks will be sold separately from the Tavern Pass. The gold price has been reduced to 2,000 gold, and the USD price has been reduced to $14.99 USD. Arena tickets are no longer included as part the Battlegrounds Pass.
I’m so glad I got myself out after Illidan. Demon Hunters made the game so un-fun I was able to quit cold turkey, after investing hundreds of dollars into cards.
What a awful money sink this game has turned into. Paid battle passes now, on top of paid single player adventures, paid battlegrounds passes, mid-expansion releases forcing you to buy more packs. Hearthstone costs like $50 a month now to play.
kerzain
3647
The (not at all) well received Tavern Pass is making gaming news headlines.
Blizzard said Hearthstone’s new battle pass wouldn’t reduce total gold earned, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Streamer J_Alexader_HS is one such number-cruncher. You can see his raw results here, but he summed it up in this Reddit post in which he said that earning 1500 XP per day over the 120 days between Hearthstone expansions will net him 5000 gold less under the new system than he would have pulled in previously—that’s 50 card packs.
Dekkster concludes his video by saying that the new reward system “looks great, and the achievements are fun,” but that the rewards it offers up are putting the game out of reach for too many players—precisely the opposite of what Blizzard promised in October.
This article has about 1/1000th the vitriol as the average Reddit thread about the situation.
pyrhic
3648
thanks for linking the story. I was gonna write up something similar - my back of napkin math showed there’s no way they’re comparable. Doing your dailies as they appear would net you around 1500g a month, and there’s only 4200g in the tavern. But the main difference is that once you get to around rank 20 or so in the tavern, the levels become noticeably longer. I think i’m at rank 18 now and they next one is 2000 away (so i need 2 daily quests to make it). In another few levels I’ll need 3 dailies and if it keeps up at that rate, i’ll need 5 dailies by rank 30. That’s a lot more playing to get less gold.
kerzain
3649
ActivisionBlizzard says stuff about Tavern Pass reception:
pyrhic
3650
it’s a good message, i’m curious how it fares on reddit’s bingo chit
pyrhic
3651
Wow, i really should have clued in as another deck was launched, but they want another $20 to play their beta mode. This $20 gives you access to emojis you had, 2 more heros at hero selection and…maybe some arena passes? I’m not sure, i’ll have to look. Does it give you access to the tavern pass or is that a separate $20?
Holy fuck, it is not the same thing. Battleground Perks costs $15(2000g) and allows you to discover 4 heroes(instead of 2), gives you early access to new heroes, ‘advanced’ stats and visual emotes. It no longer gives arena passes.
Tavern pass is $20(cant buy with gold), gives you a cosmetic coint, warriro hero, card back and 6 hero skins, as well as a gold legendary card(that i think they already gave everyone) and 10-20% reward track experience boost.
kerzain
3652
Different players are now being offered different card bundles in the shop. A Blizzard rep posted the following in response to players noticing they can’t buy the same bundle(s) as their friends.
Blizzard Community Manager:
Hi there! We’re testing some new types of offers in our shop, which will cause some users to see different offers. This is intended! Be sure to check the in-game shop and the web shop to see any offers available to you.
There has been a different bundle (available to everybody) in the shop each week for the last few months, but currently there are 3 different bundles available at once, priced at $10, $20, and $30. The $10 and $30 bundles are available in-game, but the $20 bundle only available from the online estore.
No word on how they determine which bundles are shown to which users, but one can assume all sorts of things relating to collected data on spending habits, current collection, or even straight up traditional Hearthstone-typical RNG.
kerzain
3653
It’s time to celebrate China with an all new hero skin bundle.
The Three Kingdoms skins are inspired by Romance of Three Kingdoms , an epic Chinese tale of war, heroes, and betrayal where three successor kingdoms rose to power after the collapse of the Han Empire and battled to reunify the country. The Three Kingdoms hero skins will be available in-game and on the Blizzard web shop from February 9 until February 19!
$24 will get you the following Chinese heroes:
The new heroes will be:
- Zhuge Liang Anduin
- Guan Yu Uther
- Diao Chan Valeera
- Lü Bu Garrosh
Hearthstone doesn’t have authentic Chinese (or Asian in general) heroes, so existing heroes have been tastefully adorned in traditional Chinese/Azeroth garb without going too far by changing skin tones or eyes. There’s no blackface here, and except for the orc everybody was already white, no white-washing. Though I’m not sure where this lands on the Cultural Appropriation spectrum.
Oh yea, and in other minor news they’re updating/rotating most classic cards and creating a rotating core set.
It always entertains me the exaggerated importance Diao Chan gets simply because there kind of aren’t any women in RoTK. I think Dynasty Warriors was the first to do it in earnest, but it’s really stuck.
This is fine: they’re just the regular characters playing dress-up. Also, this seems pretty straight forwardly intended for the Chinese market first, so we can let them decide how they feel about it, or if the give it the Disney Mulan treatment and drag it all over the net.
