I did a post after just a few weeks in Hearthstone back
at the beginning of the Beta over at Cold’s Gold Factory: Play HearthstoneOverview & First Thoughts and now that we are in Open Beta I wanted to
close out my thoughts. What have they been doing right, how I think the opening
will do, and other random musings?
I did a post for beginners back in October (Hearthstone:Philosophy for Beginners) that may be of some use as the advice is relevant
even if the cards or the ‘meta’ [means what is popular right now] have changed.
This post now will not be a preparation style post or anything for the new
players coming into Hearthstone.
Once Open Beta started I got my wife to run through “Day
One” activities on her Battle.net account getting a perspective from a
non-gamer. My views on the tutorial and mode layouts remain mostly unchanged.
The tutorial is adequate only lacking in areas such as targeting (hitting the
wrong thing with damage or a buff is common for beginners) and had enough ‘story’
elements to it to keep interest. Of course Ranked mode in proper has been added
to the game now and while there are no direct rewards for what rank you reach,
there is at least an incentive built into the system to continue playing and
the effectiveness of these little ‘carrots’ (ranking up) cannot be understated.
Continued after break..
“Pay to Win” is still a big debate in the little community
that has formed mainly lead by an influx of decks relying on Epic and Legendary
cards. I want to say now that I do not see a problem with spending money to
progress further or faster in a game; it all comes down to striking the right
balance. “Pay to Win” to me means that you hit a wall early on and have to drag
out your checkbook to continue having fun. Taking this definition I don’t
consider a game like ‘Candy Crush Saga’ to be Pay to Win, even though you can
literally pay 99c to win a stage and it is one of the top grossing games on
mobile devices. An example of Pay to Win for me is ‘Plants vs. Zombies 2’ when
it was first released. The problem wasn’t the units you can purchase with real
money; the problem was hitting the ‘Paywall’ too early in the game. You got
about 4 hours of content then everything else was behind literal walls (I saw
the irony in this) that you either paid for and it wasn’t cheap, or you
endlessly repeated the same levels over and over until you eventually could put
10+ hours into opening just one of the doors.
I say ‘when it was first released’ because they saw the error in this
strategy and quickly redesigned that entire game from the ground up to change
this.
That being in my mind, I do think Hearthstone is leaning
towards Pay to Win but not for the traditional reasons that people whining on
forums give. I have no problem with the price of packs or an Arena run. Going
through now two ‘Day One’ experiences, I can tell that there is a little too
much “Paywall” pressure early in the game. Once you go through tutorial, beat
all of the practice modes, and try both Play mode and Arena mode you haven’t
gotten enough packs to really get that “I’m getting stronger” feeling and while
you do start with many basic cards most of them are filler you’ll quickly not
want to use because it is not fun getting murdered over and over in Play Mode.
Many are left almost directly after the practice games with “Wow, now I have to
buy packs” or if they enjoy Arena “Now I have to start shelling out $2 wow”
since newer players will not often fully recoup so they can endlessly chain
Arenas. Like I mentioned in my first impressions you don’t want this massive
wall that stops people because they’ll just turn and walk away. They have to
balance it where people are still having to climb the wall (pay $ to Blizzard) but
don’t feel it all at once.
I have a few ideas I’ve bounced around. One is changing
how basic cards work so that it isn’t just a list of cards at the beginning
hitting you. You can prolong this section of the game and give new players a
sense of “getting stronger” without having to get packs by gating basic cards
in a fun fashion so that there is a progression there and it doesn’t have to
work exactly like they gate class-specific basics. This method doesn’t affect
paying customers in the least since the free players aren’t getting anything
more. Another idea is to have the first quest reward packs only be semi-random
and guarantee either certain classes or certain rarities show up. Maybe at
level 10 with each class you get a pack that has mostly cards from that class
in it, or is guaranteed to have the rare be from that class. In the large
scheme of things you are only giving them maybe one rare or a couple of commons
from each class and it would make a world of difference in new players getting
that ‘epic’ feeling for the class and wanting
to continue buying out packs.
Either way, I don’t see Pay to Win as being an
insurmountable problem. The other thing to consider is whether Blizzard has
what it takes to make a long-term enjoyable and expandable card game
experience. I think that might be determined with their first major content
patch. They’ve said that the constant card balancing is Beta-only and in the
future they’ll create small sets with interestingly designed cards so that the ‘meta’
of the game can adjust itself against cards perceived as powerful when they become
overused instead of those cards having to be nerfed to stop their use. This
will be great for the game if they can do it and on the correct timetable. This
is very apparent in the Beta at the moment as it had stagnated and this post was going to be about
kind of how the ‘meta’ worked out in Beta and predicting how it will play out
afterward, but now I see Blizzard making a change (like the first major content
patch) right as the game officially opens which would invalidate that post and
if they don’t push for this change or at least get the game onto mobile devices
quickly it will stagnate anyway I guarantee it.
---
You can reach me here in the comments, on Twitter @formerruling, and on my YouTube channel FormerRuling
You can reach me here in the comments, on Twitter @formerruling, and on my YouTube channel FormerRuling
I agree that it's pretty daunting for new players. I think it would be great if they somehow grouped the newer players with each other for a while, say the first 10 PvP matches you win are against players who are also playing their first 10 PvP matches. Of course even then you could have people buying 80 decks :-P.
ReplyDeleteReally liked your idea about a sort of predetermined or at least strongly weighted in a specific class pack. Would definitely feel like an increase getting some of those class relevant cards off the bat, and give you some customization options and choices very early on.
It would be nice if there was some sort of extra bonus for your first big purchase.
ReplyDeletee.g. if you spend $50 in one go on packs you get 5-10 arena entries free "Combo deal"
I have paid for a arena entries but dont really want to drop the equivalent of $150+ to get enough cards to be able to try to rank up in a reasonable time frame.
I'd also like it if there was some bulk discount for arena entries, like pay up front for 10 entries $20 and get 1 extra free or pay slightly reduced amount like $15.
i think they mentioned they might add monk / DK classes later on. However if when these new classes are added it will take "even more" packs to get these cards because in a pack you might get cards for all classes and might not get any "new" cards in a pack. Unless they make a new type of pack for "new" cards.
Thanks! That was what I was thinking. Right now you already get 2-3 "freebie" packs, but you are pretty much at the mercy of what it gives you. If you get stuff for classes you aren't interested in then you are stuck with the basic card for awhile which isn't fun because you aren't progressing.
ReplyDeleteWhy I think that even a little progression through the basic cards would add some appeal to the start of the game instead of handing you 100 cards right off and obviously you just pick the best ones.
^That was to Phat lol,
ReplyDeleteAs for DK and Monk I heard a lot of talk about whether that was really being worked on or not. I would assume the cards for a new class would be baked into the next expansion set of cards (so you'd only be pulling cards from the new set and not current cards) but I wonder how they'll do that since they have already stated that they dont want to do like MTG where you get a ton of new cards in each set, if the sets are smaller then your chances at each "new' card is better than they are now.