Blizzard just posted another update on the progression system in Hearthstone. If you’ve been playing the game earlier this year, you certainly remember the Weekly Quest debacle. They made Weekly Quests much harder to complete, sometimes even 3x as hard, while only providing about 20% extra rewards on average. And all of that was done with a small footnote in patch notes. Of course, players didn’t appreciate it and they had to quickly walk the decision back.
Since then, they made a couple of changes to the Quests and I would say that they are overall in a better place than they were before the changes were made. Some of them were a bit easier, some a bit harder, but the extra rewards made up for it. I haven’t seen anyone saying anything negative about them anymore. However, for some inexplicable reason, they have now decided to go back and… do a full revert. We will be back to where we were before the whole drama in terms of weeklies.
On top of that, they have decided to improve the rewards track a bit. Five of the early 50 Gold pickups will now turn into card packs from the latest expansion – so players will be getting ~250g more in value from that. Four packs are also added to the Tavern Pass (paid rewards track), so if you’re one of the people who buy it, a few free packs certainly won’t hurt.
Finally, Tavern Brawl will now offer packs from the latest expansion instead of Standard packs. This is kind of a mixed change – it will certainly benefit more casual players with smaller collections. For them, the latest expansion packs are generally worth more than Standard packs (for example, they can open cards that are about to rotate out in Standard packs and that’s not very helpful). But for example, it’s going to hurt me a bit, since I have most of the cards from the latest expansion already and I’d rather get Standard packs and save them to open when the next set releases. That said, I don’t have a strong opinion about it, since it’s not going to matter that much in the grand scheme of things. I have pretty much a full collection anyway and if it’s going to help more casual players than I don’t mind.
If we add up all of those changes, it means that we’re ultimately still in a better place than we were after Patch 29.2 (the update that messed up with the Quests), but… we already were in a better place. So I have absolutely no idea why are they doing it. Heck, if anything, it seems like a downgrade compared to what we have right now – but I’ll have to do some math to confirm it. The justification is that they “need to return to baseline to build from for future adjustments”. But when players were demanding a revert months ago, they said that they want to upgrade the new system instead of reverting it back.
Those are the kinds of changes I expected them to do as a response to the whole drama shortly after it happened. Not months later when no one was talking about it anymore because everything was fixed.
Anyway, sorry for rambling, but I’m genuinely baffled as to why are we even going back to it. You can read the full blog post below:
Hi, everyone!
Before we blast off into The Great Dark Beyond, I’m here today to share some information about our next progression adjustments, coming in Patch 31.0. To better understand where we’re going, let’s first go back a bit to see how we got here.
Earlier this year, we made some adjustments to our Weekly Quests. Our initial changes in Patch 29.2 were aimed at rewarding our most committed players while encouraging others to play more. But after the changes went live, they didn’t reward players for their time in-game quite like we had hoped. On the contrary, we saw that some players gave up on those harder quests and played less instead of more. Those who did work to complete the Weekly Quests told us they saw them as a chore.
An important part of design is acknowledging when a change doesn’t work, learning why it doesn’t work, and then adjusting in a different way. So, starting in Patch 31.0, we’re making three changes to our progression systems, aimed at giving players more accessible goals and getting them to new content faster:
- Reverting Weekly Quests (completion requirements and XP grant amounts) back to what they were prior to Patch 29.2;
- Improving the Rewards Track by swapping out five of the early 50 Gold grants for five The Great Dark Beyond Packs and adding four The Great Dark Beyond Packs to the Tavern Pass; and,
- Updating the regular Tavern Brawl reward pack from a Standard Pack to a pack from the latest expansion!
Some of you have been asking for this quest reversion for some time, or liked the changes we made, so I want to give some insight into why we’re making these changes now.
Our goal is for Quests to be achievable and rewarding for everyone – in order to work towards that, we need to return to a baseline for us to build from for future adjustments. We’re making the change now for two reasons. The first reason is that we wanted to see how our 29.4.2 changes impacted a full expansion cycle to make better-informed decisions. This took us through Patch 30.4 and gave us time to evaluate a plan for this next expansion. The second reason is that making the Weekly Quest change at the 31.0 patch meant that we can also make the adjustment to the Rewards Track at the same time—these systems are intertwined, so updating them both simultaneously helps allow for a better overall experience for you.
Looking forward, we plan to continue monitoring and tweaking these systems. Rewards Tracks are trickier to adjust while active, so changes there will probably be made only once every expansion or two. Quest adjustments are more flexible, so please continue to send us your feedback as we keep iterating on them. Other aspects of our progression systems, like the Tavern Brawl rewards, might fall somewhere in the middle.
More details will be shared in our usual Rewards Track Refresh blog with all the new Rewards Track details, coming closer to launch. I’ll also be back next week to share some details and insights about the unique Pre-Release Tavern Brawl we’re doing this expansion. Until then, we’ll see you in the Tavern!
– Tyler
Hate the changes to quests, also unrelated but the event tracks have been way too difficult to complete lately. Feel like it’s been going downhill. Hopefully they’ll fix it up soon.
I’ve noticed that game devs tend to disfavour making things too easy for players. One major perk of the currently refreshed weekly quest design is the fact that you don’t have to win Standard laddering games; you only have to play them. This was a huge improvement on the original, and especially so after the controversy, because having to win 10 games is an absolutely miserable experience on your worst day, particularly when the current format is incredibly unenjoyable. (Watching entire fields die to Sickly Grimewalker over and over again made that climb one of the most banal, repetitive experiences I’ve had in Hearthstone.)
The problem for devs is that if people don’t need to win games, it means they spend less time on the game. Playing 10 games is not nearly as time-intensive as having to win 5 of them. In the same way that Niantic jacked up the cost of Remote Raid Tickets to force players to physically go out and do Pokemon Raids, Team 5 wants Hearthstone players to spend more time and/or money – they just haven’t found the perfect balance of stick and carrot to do so. At least to them. Meanwhile players are absolutely not going to like this decision, and the fact that the team has chosen their 10th year anniversary celebration to do all these player-unfriendly decisions has been nothing short of baffling.
(Side note, has anyone else felt how un-10th anniversary The Great Dark Beyond has felt so far? No playful references to beloved characters, just a brand new project to reference major aspects of Warcraft lore. No complaints, personally, the theme and art and direction feels suitably epic – it just hasn’t got the same feel as the last two sets attempting to celebrate 10 years of heritage. Then again… the way Whizbang’s Workshop and Perils in Paradise have felt somewhat insipid and uninspired to the point of being lazy, which is not something you want for your 10 year anniversary. We might not get any references or call-backs at all this set, and I’m fine with it being that way. The 10th year has not felt like much of a celebration.)
I agree about the 10th Anniversary stuff. I think they fumbled it pretty hard. I know it’s subjective, but I don’t think that Whizbang’s Workshop was a great tribute. And the year should be packed with fun events and NEW things. But so far they’ve mostly been taking things away and making them worse this year.
An online game surviving for 10 years and still doing pretty well after all this time is a great result and it should be an amazing reason for the whole community to celebrate. But if we don’t count the reopening of Chinese servers, I bet that the game lost A LOT of players this year.
I have been dropping the new weekly quests like one every month because they are too time consuming. I’m glad they will revert it. (I have played every single week since launch 10 years ago)
They are doing it because the actual state of things let you get much more gold than before with a litle more playing. Its obviously a way of hurting de free2play experience, pure greed.
Its either this or a plain stup1d decision. I hope its greed, i prefer that than stup1d1ty.
Excuse my english and greetings from Argentina! Thanks for all the good work Stonekeep!