Oops, they did it again. Blizzard played with the Hearthstone rewards systems by changing the weekly quests to be more rewarding but also to require multiple times the effort in patch 29.2 on April 16th. They reduced some of the requirements a little in a hotfix on April 19th, and promised more changes after they gathered more data. Well, now they have data on the mini-set sales, and as of yesterday, May 23rd, weekly quests are officially good again!
This debacle closely resembles the introduction of the original Rewards Track in 2020. The new rewards system started out much worse than the previous one, but after community outrage and many unspent dollars, Blizzard changed the Rewards Track to be better than the previous system. Their monetization department may not always have the players’ best interests in mind, but complaints and boycotts do work. We got three good years after the last one, and hopefully, we’ll get another three good years after this one too.
The new Weekly Quests are actually an interesting mix. Some of them are better than they have ever been, whereas others are more work than they were before April. Overall, I think the players won this round. Let’s take a look at all the details.
The Weekly Quests
There are currently seven possible Weekly Quests that you can get. The first slot is always to play Ranked mode and gives more XP than the other quests, although you can reroll it into one of the smaller quests if you really don’t want to play Ranked. The other two are random from the pool of six Weekly Quests. You can reroll one Weekly Quest per day to find a better one if you don’t like what you see.
The current Weekly Quests are:
- Play 10 games of Ranked Hearthstone
- Play 5 games of Arena, Tavern Brawl, or Battlegrounds
- Play 10 Miniaturize or Mini cards
- Use your Hero Power 30 times
- Play 75 Battlecry cards
- Deal 400 damage to enemy Heroes
- Spend 650 mana
Compared to what Weekly Quests were like before the changes in April, three of them are now easier to complete and four of them are now more difficult to complete. If we take a simplistic approach and calculate the average change, the entire quest pool is now 20% more difficult to complete for 25% more XP. Because of the front-loaded nature of the Rewards Track, this translates to +5% to +20% more rewards, depending on player progression. In reality, it is better than that for players though.
The main Weekly Quest is the big one. It is currently Play 10 games of Ranked Hearthstone. Originally, the Quest required you to win 5 games of Ranked Hearthstone. It was changed to win 15 games of Ranked Hearthstone in the initial patch, and then to win 10 games of Ranked Hearthstone in the hotfix. Because Hearthstone is a zero-sum game – someone has to lose for someone to win – the average win rate is always 50%. Playing 10 games is essentially the same as winning 5 games. However, it is not the same. Playing games instead of winning them means that you can play whatever you like. It also means that you are no longer vulnerable (or can benefit from) cold or hot streaks. Winning is typically one component of fun in Hearthstone, but you can now play experimental or off-meta decks and still progress your Weekly Quest, and this is a huge improvement. This is also the main quest that gives more XP, so when it becomes better, the entire system becomes better.
Another huge one is the modes weekly. It is now Play 5 games of Arena, Tavern Brawl, or Battlegrounds. It went through the same iteration as the ranked quest, but ended up with only 5 games needed in the end. Battlegrounds games are a lot longer, so this is a welcome change. Arena runs can be quite short, but you need to pay for them, so this change also means that you will complete the quest in a single Arena run most of the time. This used to be my least favorite Weekly Quest, but it looks warm and welcoming in its current form. A major win for the players.
Finally, the expansion-specific Weekly was made a lot easier! You now need to play only 10 Miniaturize or Mini cards. This quest originally required you to play 16 of them, and was then increased to a whopping 60 cards! At 10 cards, it does not take many games at all, and casual mode can finally be saved from two players both trying to spam Miniaturize cards.
Not all quests were made easier. The spend mana quest is still slightly more tedious than before as it requires 650 mana spent now compared to 500 mana it used to require. The quests that were made much more difficult are use your Hero Power (30 times instead of 20 times), play Battlecry cards (75 cards instead of 50 cards), and deal damage to enemy Heroes (400 damage instead of 200 damage).
However, this is where the reroll option comes in. If you get one of the more tedious Weekly Quests, you can try to reroll it into one of the easier ones. And with the main Ranked mode weekly now much better, that’s one slot that is guaranteed to be a good one each week right from the start.
What Did It Cost?
These latest changes are not a full revert. The slightly improved rewards remain, and on average, they are now matched by slightly increased requirements. However, with the main quest made easier, the new quest set does not feel anywhere near as punishing as the original changes did.
Blizzard did not back away from their goals, at least not entirely. They have never really stated what exactly they wanted to achieve with the Weekly Quest changes, but it does not take a lot of imagination to think that increasing player engagement was one of the goals, and giving players who will not play more additional incentives to spend money was another.
This latest version of the system may end up achieving Blizzard’s goals, if enough players return back to the game. You will not have to grind your teeth to push through the Ranked wins, but you may end up spending extra time on Hearthstone while using your Hero Power or playing Battlecry cards. This new system is less obvious about increasing your play time than the last one, and may not meet the same backlash either. Most importantly, it is not as inflexible. With a good main quest, you can opt to reroll some of the side quests and make it through with less overall effort than before. Or you may end up spending more time in the game without even noticing it.
Perhaps, you may even end up not completing a Battlecry quest or one of the other more difficult quests some week, and end up with less XP and opt to spend some more money to compensate for it. Either way, Blizzard improves some metrics, be they engagement or revenue.
It may not be a complete win for the players, but the new system averages out to +25% XP for +20% effort, and some smart rerolls move that average to the players’ favor.
The key takeaway from this is that the reroll button really matters now. It is the difference between working more for your rewards than before April, and working less for them than you did before April. Blizzard wanted people to engage with the Weekly Quest system, and now, through rerolling the worst quests, you can!
Should You Come Back to Hearthstone Now?
Sure! You can now keep up with Hearthstone with a similar effort as before April, so the reward system is no longer a medium-term concern. You may make some more use of the reroll button as compared to before, but that will quickly turn into a habit.
In the long term, will Blizzard try to change something so that it hurts their players again? At some point, maybe. However, the Hearthstone community has succeeded in preventing bad changes before and they succeeded again. We also had a number of non-controversial years in between, so it’s not like Blizzard has an evil lab where they constantly brew anti-player policies.
Blizzard is not the only game company to face controversy recently, either. Remember when Escape from Tarkov tried to sell a new $250 edition of the game with features that should have been included in the previous $150 edition, but then suddenly were not? Or when Helldivers 2 tried to get all of its players to create PSN accounts? Or how about Marvel Rivals content creator agreement prohibiting any negative comments about the game? (Blizzard’s Creator Program for Hearthstone also tried to get those terms through, but the creators fought them and won, and now we can be all cozy with Blizzard and still call their products bad if we so choose.)
It’s always about the money, isn’t it? Whether it’s the legal department or the monetization department, somebody in large corporations tends to make decisions that seemingly will help the game make more money, but actually end up hurting it because they destroy the trust between the company and the players. Blizzard has no monopoly on anti-player decisions. They do make some on a semi-regular basis. And the Hearthstone community has managed to fight and defeat each one of them as they have come. If that track record is good enough for you, Hearthstone is now playable again.
Much like Microsoft/Activision/Blizzard has done with WoW, it is all about the developers/”higher ups” fear that players will “run out of things to do” get bored and unsub (or in the case of Hearthstone, uninstall the app). Thus, they create these tedious ‘chores’ to keep the players engaged. However, this backfires when the chores are so tedious the players end up leaving anyway.
I think it is a step into the right direction to reward players for playing games, not winning them.
Because if the reward is only for winning, you a loss is doubly frustrating for falling down one step of the ladder and also not advancing your quest. When playing is rewarded, a lost game at least gives you some progress on your quest as a consolation price.
What’s even more important: If a quest requires you to win, you are pushed to play the most efficient (net-)decks to complete that quest. This punishes “experimental” decks with lower win rates by denying them quest completion and also pitting them against a higher rate of decks people copy from the net to get the wins for their own quests.
So hopefully this new style of quests will lead to a wider variety of decks on the ladder.
As for monetarization in general:
The basic dilemma imho is, that the company wants the players to spend more money on the game, while the players understandably would like to keep their money and go on playing the game for (almost) free.
Finally a good change. But why they did so atrocious changes in first place? ._. We never know…
It’s not unheard of for developers to plan for some changes they want, but preface it by pushing out some drastic, player-unfriendly changes that cause massive backlash, and then offer a compromise by “meeting players halfway” – they won’t be as nasty but some of the changes the dev team wants are still going to stick. It’s something that, realistically, people across a lot of walks of life will do to get what they want. Parents don’t require their kids to eat all the vegetables on the plate. Students and teachers bargain over assignments. Bosses and workers argue about how many hours to work in a day. And so on.
These were good changes. Requiring people to win matches is something that is absolutely brutal especially if you’re having a bad run, even more so if you’re having a bad day. Which is also strange because Blizzard already realized this way back in the day with their class specific quests. Perhaps they chose to gamble by dipping their toe in the water to see how much they could risk – and chose poorly.
Yes, they put a toe and got a frozen leg. And of course, went so badly… Doctors cut it trying to save them. xD
BTW, today I played and completed last weekly quest. And felt amazing playing for truly fun. 🙂