Update: Blizzard already announced that they are partially backing off from those changes. We still don’t know the new numbers, but they will be somewhere between the original and the current ones. Extra XP will stay. Learn more here.
Every once in a while, a small bullet point in patch notes turns out to be a big deal. Yesterday, in patch 29.2, Blizzard made just such a major change that players could not properly prepare for.
The relevant part of the patch notes reads: “[Progression] Some Daily and Weekly Quests have been adjusted to be harder to complete but will grant more XP. ”
So far, it appears that only Weekly Quests are affected, and they have ALL been changed. You get 500 XP more from each Weekly Quest, but their requirements have been tripled or worse! The most basic Weekly Quest of them all, winning games in Ranked, now requires 15 wins instead of the five wins it used to require.
This change has been met with unprecedented outrage on social media, and in this article, I will try to quantify its effects in some more detail. Has the change been blown out of proportion? Or did Blizzard make a major mistake? Let’s look at the numbers.
Improved Rewards from Weekly Quests
Improved rewards are always nice, and the changes have a tangible effect on your Gold if you can complete all the new Weekly Quests.
The main Quest has been improved from 2500 XP to 3000 XP, and the other quests have been improved from 1750 XP to 2250 XP. Each Quest has had 500 XP added, which adds up to 1500 XP per week. A Hearthstone expansion (I’ll call it “season” from now on) lasts either 17 or 18 weeks, which means that you can get 25,500 or 27,000 XP more each season from the Weekly Quests.
For example, if you previously managed to reach level 90 on the Rewards Track, you can now reach the full 100 and get 1350 Gold more during the season. If you reach the bonus levels, you get one more bonus level for each week in the season. In a 17-week season, that adds up to 850 Gold.
This comparison showcases how the rewards are front-loaded. While the XP you get from Weekly Quests has been improved by 25% overall, the improvement in rewards depends on how far on the Rewards Track you have been climbing. For an active player who gets well into bonus levels, the 850 additional Gold is a 7-9% increase to the overall season rewards. The best-case scenario would be a hypothetical player who completes the Weekly Quests, but only a few Daily Quests, and has previously reached level 90. They would now reach level 100 – if they can complete the new Weekly Quests – and receive around 20% more rewards over the course of the season.
In raw Gold, the improvements are less than in XP, and for active players, much less. And this all comes with triple the effort!
Increased Effort to Get Rewards
Most Weekly Quests now require triple the effort.
To start with the big one, the main Weekly Quest to win games in Ranked Mode now requires 15 wins instead of five. Assuming an average game length of 8 minutes and a win rate of 50% – I know many of you will think that you will do better, but the ladder is a zero-sum system where the average win rate is inevitably 50% – you will need to play 30 games each week and that will take four hours with the average meta deck. If you play Hearthstone for half an hour every single day, you will not be able to complete this Weekly Quest in a week. That’s rough. If you enjoy control decks… Oh, good luck with that.
But it can be worse. The Quest to win Tavern Brawl, Arena, or Battlegrounds is roughly the same amount of time if you do it in Arena or Tavern Brawl, but if you have completed this one playing Battlegrounds, you need to be ready to play a lot of Hearthstone. Again, assuming a 50% “win” rate (top-4 in this case) and an average Battlegrounds game length of 20 minutes, you need to play 10 hours of Hearthstone Battlegrounds in a week just to complete this one.
The Quest that was changed the most is the Quest to play Miniaturize or Mini cards. In a way, this makes sense because the Miniaturize keyword always gives you a Mini card, so you get two cards in one. Still, increasing the goal from 16 cards to 60 cards is a pretty hefty increase. Even if you built a deck specifically for this Quest, the most Miniaturize cards you can put in your deck is 13 with Paladin or Shaman, and this includes cards like Factory Assemblybot, which you are unlikely to actually get to play. You are also unlikely to win, so you cannot complete the main Weekly Quest at the same time if you go for a dedicated deck. If you try to complete the Quest with a regular ladder deck, you will run a single pair of Miniaturize cards at best, Window Shopper in Shopper Demon Hunter that was just nerfed or Sleet Skater in Rainbow Mage. If you manage to play an average of two per game, that’s four hours for this Quest alone.
Things are not much better with the Quest to use your Hero Power 40 times. With an appropriate deck choice for ladder, you are still looking at couple of hours of gameplay, or you need to go to a friendly game to complete this. Friendly games look a lot more attractive as a way to knock off your Weekly Quests after the change, but they do not advance the main Quest to win Ranked games at all. So, you end up needing to spend more time on the game and be more careful about your deck choices instead of getting the Weekly Quests completed passively during your regular gameplay throughout the week. Even a consistent player who spends a full hour a day in the game has to pay attention to deck choices to be able to complete the new Weekly Quests.
To make things worse, if you fail to reach the new Quest criteria, you will get less rewards than you did before, even if you play more! If you miss 8 big Weekly Quests or 11 small Weekly Quests during a season, you will have earned the same amount of Rewards as you did under the old system. And to get there, you must have worked a lot harder than you did before. You cannot afford to miss even one Quest per week, or you will already be worse off than you were under the old system.
There are winners in this system, too. People who play Hearthstone for two hours a day or more should still see their Quest progress largely unaffected. But even they can be affected, unless they can keep playing every week. If you have a busy week at any point, you will notice the tripled requirements to get your Weekly Quests done, as you cannot get them done in a single evening anymore. Catching up on the weekend will be much more difficult.
Is This a Reasonable Change?
It is difficult to find any positive aspects of this change. The more I look at the numbers, the worse it looks. Casual players lose. Players will be forced to play specific types of decks for several hours instead of maybe one hour to complete their Quests, so if you don’t particularly enjoy them, you lose. Anyone who has an inconsistent schedule and some busy weeks loses. The stereotypical winner of the changes is a player who plays at least a couple of hours every day, enjoys all types of decks, and never has other things going on in his life.
As it happens, this hypothetical winner has already been hurt by Blizzard during the current expansion. Remember how we lost the Diamond Legendary card from the Legendary collection achievement? It was replaced by Signature Toyrannosauruses and Lab Patrons. That Diamond Legendary was used by players with large, but not full, collections, to get another Legendary card. The replacements are Rare and Common cards, so they are purely cosmetic. The Achievement rewards were also reduced by 4,900 XP, another hit that affects these highly active players the most. They lost around 600-1200 Gold worth of rewards in those changes, depending on how much you value the Legendary card. Now, they are getting 850 Gold back.
The improved rewards are not even that great. If a casual player manages to complete as many Weekly Quests as before, they may get as much as 20% more rewards. But those casual players did not have that many cards in the first place! The difference between 50 packs and 60 packs for an expansion that requires 200 packs to fully enjoy, is nothing groundbreaking. A dedicated player gets 8 or 9 packs more over the course of the expansion – and is still actually experiencing a net loss when you take into account the changes from March – but that is a difference of a few percent only.
Try as I might, I just cannot find the upsides of this change. Not for the players, and not for Blizzard either. In fact, considering the effects of the changes made in March, Blizzard could have just made this change to increase the rewards without changing the requirements at all. That would have been a worthwhile celebration for Hearthstone’s 10th anniversary, and in the grand scheme of things, it would not have cost Blizzard much of anything. If they want to turn this into a PR win, they still have the option to revert the requirements change and leave the improved rewards in the game.
I think the 50% winrate for casuals is severly overestimated. A lot don’t play meta and at a certain point on the ladder they will get stuck and just keep losing.
As someone who plays (close to) only battlegrounds, this is a really bad change!
With the way the (re)rolling of quests works, it can take up to 3-4 rerolls before you have weeklys that *can* be completed in battlegrounds! So you maybe only have 3-4 days for one of these, if it’s the “win 15 games” one, have fun trying to squeeze about 30 games in the remaining few days.
And they still haven’t changed the “spend x mana” one to “spend x mana or gold”, which would be a trivial change to make this work in battlegrounds. 🙁
This is ridiculous. They activly take down the entire game… Just for fun.
Where they live? They have a conextion to reality?
I’m really angry and deeply sad as F2P player with +9 years active.
I play A LOT of Hearthstone. At least an hour every day. I think this change stinks. I will get my quests done regardless. Before, I was done with my weeklys on Monday after about an hour of play. And casual players will be taking a huge hit. I still love HS after 10 years. I would like Blizz to make sure I still have opponents to play against. This change is going to turn a lot of people away from the game I fear.
I was surprised how they tried to sneak such a hefty change into a single line at the end of the patch notes.
They could have listed the quests before and after, but likely knew this would backfire, so better hide it.
I play a lot, but this change is such a slap in the face for everyone, they better revert most of it ASAP again.