Earlier today, Hearthstone Designer Dean “Iksar” Ayala was talking more about the upcoming rewards / progression system. We’ve already covered some early rumors and Ben Lee’s official statement here. Also, J_Alexander wrote an extensive article about what the community should expect from Battle Pass and to not settle for less than we currently have (you can find it here).
Now we’ve got more solid info, and so far it looks great for the players. You can find the full reddit comments by Iksar below, but here’s a quick summary:
- Players will no longer earn Gold directly from the Quests, but rather get XP, which will then translate to rewards.
- “In nearly all circumstances” you will be earning more Gold AND some extra rewards (like packs) on top of that.
- The amount of Gold you have on the launch day shouldn’t change, so you should be able to buy the same amount of packs you do now, the packs you will earn throughout the expansion are extra.
- No matter how you play, the new system should be an upside. And in case their predictions were incorrect, they will tune the XP gain or give out additional rewards through Legendary Quests / from events.
Given that both the Game Director and one of the most notable Game Designers have now confirmed that the new system will be better, I guess that it’s very unlikely to back out now – which is great news for the players!
Assuming you play the same amount and have the same quest completion rate, you shouldn’t earn less gold or non-gold in the new system. In nearly all circumstances you should be earning slightly more gold and more non-gold (packs, etc).
Our plan is to remove rewards from quests, though the experience you earn per quest on average will net you as much or more rewards as quests give you now.
Something that has come up a lot is the idea that you will no longer be able to obtain the packs you want on day 1, and instead will get a ‘drip feed’ of packs over the expansion. While you will receive rewards as the expansion goes on, the gold you earn per expansion should remain relatively flat from what you earn now. This should make your ability to buy packs on day 1 similar to what you get now, but with more non-gold rewards added on top.
Our intent with the system is for it to be upside for all players. We’ve done many checks on different player segments to try and make sure that is the case no matter how you play. Despite all this, we’re making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions were incorrect. We can push legendary quests or give out additional rewards during events as well.
[Source: Countless hours spent staring at an excel sheet trying to get this right.]
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Absolution2015: You mention that gold gain shouldn’t decrease; I will take your word for it since our calculations are probably not taking into account the full picture, as no one here has actually tested the system. I am curious of one thing – the Battle Pass seems very much tuned for Standard; with the lack of more ‘immediate’ gold gain quests provided, will this affect players’ ability to consistently buy Wild packs if they would choose to forfeit grinding the latest expansion?
Iksar: Quests give you experience, which helps you level up. Leveling up gives you rewards, most of which is gold. Gold gains should be roughly the same amount of ‘immediate’ in the new system as in the old system.
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DarthDave89: Seems more like a big upside for NEW players, while existing players used to ripping 50+ packs on day one of a new Expansion will have to wait ~4 months to get the same rewards
Iksar: No, the amount of packs you will be able to open on day 1 shouldn’t change much because your gold income shouldn’t change much.
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DMaster86: I don’t want packs instead of gold, i want the same gold (actually more, but at least the same) as before, and then i decide if i want the new packs or to open some frozen throne packs to flesh out some commons and rares. Or use it for arena, battleground perks, adventures or whatever suit my fancy.
But i want to decide, not you. If i want to save 100 packs worth of gold for a big opening day 1 of the new expansion, i should be able to just like i did before.
And i want the battleground perks be purchasable f2p.
Iksar: Great, we also don’t want you to earn packs instead of gold. As a result, you will still earn lots of gold you can choose to do whatever you want with.
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The online loophole I can see now (if they do not want to contradict themselves) is that you have to buy the battle pass to receive the same amount of gold as before. They did not stated explicitly that its on the free pass, did they? I mean, its implicated, but the progression chart form a few days ago was much stingier with the gold. I know its far-fetched, but Blizzard has become so terrible the last years.
BattlePass is given free to everyone because it will replaced the old system.
However, you could also buy the paid one and get a few extra gimmicks.
I don’t really remember all of it, but a few like Hero Cosmetics and Special Coin Card.
So, the thing is, you don’t lose anything at all. And maybe gain a few more on top of it.
At least that was Dean said above anyway.
“The amount of Gold you have on the launch day shouldn’t change” … I guess we’ll know if this is true only when it happens though. but this is the essentially the only thing that matters for constructed f2p players as myself.
I believe Blizzard took a look at Legends of Runeterra’s reward system. If the new system is anything similar to it those are great news IMO.
There are a lot of things that if blizzard would copy from LoR would be great news. Yeah, this is one of them.
Instead of power creeping to keep the game fresh, LoR adds creative keywords making the game more complex. (Plunder, nightfall, etc.)
Riot clearly stated that they want every single card to be at somewhat playable and they balance update every few weeks to make that possible.
There’s no deck built around one or two broken cards (hi, Ezreal).
And the list goes on…
Dumb question that has nothing to do with the new progression system:
Isn’t there any single player content for Scolomance Academy? Or did I miss that announcement?
Yeah, we’ll definitely have one, Blizzard said that every expansion this year will have free single player content. But it wasn’t announced yet.
Ashes of Outland’s solo adventure was announced ~2 months after the expansion and released shortly after, so assuming a similar timeline, it should be announced early in October. But they’ve been experimenting with release times for the last few expansions so it might be different again 🙂
All right. Thanks mate for the information!
I also noticed the new battle pass seems great (I always finish daily quest)
Don’t know why majority seems to whine and complain, it seems like in their nature or something..
no duplicate pack have significantly made it so that its much easier to get cards rather than if blizzard give us free 20-30 packs with the old system.
Hearthstone is improving at a great rate.
So with this, I can only assume two things
1. that they would continue this battlepass throughout the future expansion as well, by resetting every progress to zero every season
2. and that they would update the Hearthstone UI once more.
I get that daily quest will be replaced, but not for Legendary quest?
and can we keep progressing no matter if we keep losing the matches?
You are probably right – it should be reset every expansion, and yeah, they will have to do some UI update to incorporate the new system.
I don’t think that Quests will be removed per se – Quests will still be a thing, but they will give you XP instead of Gold. And that XP will progress you on the Battle Pass, which then will give you rewards like Gold and extra packs. Which means that Legendary Quests should work just like they do right now.
As for your last question – most of the current Quests allow you to progress even when you lose games (e.g. you need to deal X damage, destroy X minions, play X games with a class) so I imagine that it won’t change. If anything, I think that since the goal is to make the system work for any game format (so you can for example play Battlegrounds and still progress), they will rework the Quests and make them more “player friendly”.
I think that since they’re already talking so much about the system, we should learn more about it in the coming weeks or months. I expect some kind of blog post or official video about it quite soon.
Is there any info or educated guess on when this could be actually implemented?
they said it on the roadmap, that it’ll happened at the 3rd expansion year of the phoenix. exactly about 4 months within the expansion span.
I’m 99% that it won’t be this expansion, but it should be quite soon if they’re already talking about it and not keeping it a secret (plus it sounds like they already have the numbers – otherwise Iksar wouldn’t be able to say with such certainty that the rewards will be higher).
So I would say next expansion. And since, from what it sounds, the battle pass would reset with every expansion, launching it alongside the expansion’s release would make most sense.
In other words, my educated guess would be December 2020 🙂
I hope for the best for us. <3