How much money is enough to pursue a passion for Hearthstone?

When will players lose their temper with Hearthstone?

Hearthstone’s next expansion, Rise of Shadows, is out April 9. Blizzard will rotate three expansions – Journey to Un’Goro, Knights of the Frozen Throneand Kobolds and Catacombs – from Standard to Wild. This is the biggest rotation in game history.

Hearthstone has long been a business problem, and Blizzard needs to sell packs of cards to make money. But they also need a community of players who feel that investing money in the game is well worth it. Now, there are signs that the high cost of staying strong in Hearthstone is driving players away from the game.

HIGH COST TO JOIN

Blizzard’s Standard format only includes sets from the current year and sets released from last year. Cards released from 2016 will be ‘rotated’ in April 2018, and this year, cards from 2017 will follow. We’ll soon have cards left in the unbalanced and nearly unsupported Wild from Blizzard.

Many important cards in current strong decks will no longer be used in Stardard. That forces gamers to either buy more cards from recent expansions to create new meta-appropriate decks, or use cheap stable decks like Warlock Zoo or Face Hunter. Decks that don’t have strong or rare cards can still be strong, but they’re just too boring.

And Standard mode is where everything is taken care of. The Wild includes all of the cards so far in the game, so that’s where things get very messy, with the presence of cards that aren’t allowed in the Standard. Wild’s meta often has the presence of buggy OTK decks (which end the opponent in a turn without allowing the opponent to react), and the balance for wild changes is rare. If you’re willing to play with these decks, you can climb the ranks and reach Legend in the Wild, but Standard is by far the most popular format, and is the mode used in most professional tournaments.

That’s why card rotation is so important, and why price has become such a headache. You need to buy cards continuously if you want to play well in the most popular format. And that will cost quite a bit.

Blizzard Releases Expansion Rise of Shadows with two bundles:

• The first bundle costs $79.99. It includes 80 packs; a new hero avatar for the priest class; one card back and one random golden Legendary card from the new set.
• Bundle two costs $49.99. It includes 50 packs; card back as above and a random Legendary from the new set.

For the two bundles mentioned above, you can only purchase each account once. In addition to those two bundles, Blizzard’s best price is currently $50 for 40 packs. Hearthstone gamers can save 15 to 20% off the above price when paying with Itunes or Amazon Coin (or through a dealer) to buy cards. In general, you pay $0.8 to $0.85 per pack in a newly launched bundle and then $1 per pack if you want to buy more.

If you continue with the daily quests, you can earn extra in-game currency over the four-month period between expansions to buy 60-70 more packs. So, a player would shell out $105 if they wanted to get 70 packs for free and buy both bundles for 20% less through the App Store or Amazon Coin. That’s 200 packs, plus two Legendary cards. Blizzard usually gives people a random Legendary from the new set when logging into the game during the new expansion, and on average there will be a Legendary drop in every 20 packs.

As for the specific probability, for every 5 cards of a pack, we have a 1% chance of getting a Legendary. and the game has a “pity timer” mechanism that ensures you get a Legendary card every 40 packs opened. That means on average you get 10 Legendary from opening 200 packs, with the worst case scenario getting only 5 legendary.

A current Hearthstone set has a total of 23 legendary: 2 per class and 5 neutral cards. If you have 10 legendary from 200 packs, one for free when the game comes out, and two from the bundle you bought, you will be missing 10 Legendary after spending $100 on the expansion. Chances are you’ll get the same common, rare, and epic cards, then use dust to craft two or three more, and hope that’s enough for everything you need. But you are still missing a few cards, even though you have spent a large amount of money.

Blizzard now releases three expansions per year. Two Rise of Shadows bundles allow you to buy 130 packs at a discount, which is actually more profitable than previous sets’ launch discounts. For example, Boomsday Project as of July 2018 there are 130 packs plus extra Legendary cards. Meanwhile, the Witchwood set of April 2018 has only a 70-pack bundle for $49.99. And December 2018’s Rastakhan’s Rumble only gives players 67 packs for $69.99 with no Legendary added.

If you want to open 200 packs per set, you’ll need these launch offers with two 40-pack/$49.99 bundles. If you use Itunes or Amazon to save an extra 20%, it will cost you $120 for 150 packs of Witchwood and $138 for 147 packs of Rastakhan. Along with $105 for Boomsday’s 130 packs, opening around 200 packs for each of the 2018 expansions when they first come out will cost you $363.

But you don’t have to own all the cards to compete. In particular, many Legendary cards are completely unused in competitive decks. But no one wants to spend years playing only “low cost” decks, even though they are strong, but have no substance of their own. A lot of experienced gamers enjoy trying out new ideas in the first few weeks when the expansion comes out. However, once the meta is stable, if you play a deck that is too different from the decks of the pros, your win rate will almost certainly be reduced.

And here’s the big deal: You need to quit so many money in to enjoy Hearthstone.

PRICE HISTORY IN HEARTTHSTONE

In the first two years of its launch, Hearthstone wasn’t as expensive as it is now. Blizzard used to release “Adventure” sets that sold for $20 and made sure you got all the cards.

Adventure sets have fewer cards than expansion sets, but they have fewer useless cards, and rarely have junk. These sets enhance decks, allow for the creation of new archetypes, and change the meta without having to cost players huge sums of money. The time when playing the game was very fun.

In 2017, Blizzard discontinued the Adventure mode and began releasing three full expansions per year. Studio also applies a mechanism to avoid duplicate Legendary cards: increasing the probability of getting the Legendary cards you need in random packs. That means the amount of investment goes up, but at least the player is somewhat comforted by the mechanism to avoid duplication.

The in-game gold rewards of daily quests also increased, and Blizzard began adding in-game events to reward additional gold. In 2014, the author of this article earned enough gold to buy 125 packs. Currently, he can accumulate enough gold to buy nearly 200 packs.

However, you also need more packs than before, as the game now has three expansions per year. While you get 50% more free packs each year, the current number of expansions has tripled, and you can only earn at most half as many free packs as before in each expansion. That shows that games have become more expensive.

BUT HEARTHSTONE IS STILL CHEAPER than MAGIC, RIGHT NOT?

Hearthstone’s business model derives from the well-known title: the physical card game Magic: The Gathering – a card game where Wizards of the Coast has been selling cards in random packs since the early 1990s. Hearthstone pack, you easily think of Magic booster pack, instead of Star Wars Battlefront 2 loot box.

Veteran Magic gamers can shell out thousands of dollars a year on cards, and a popular format of the game requires creating decks from packs with seals intact, meaning you have to buy brand new packs. to attend the event. This format is actually cheaper than existing hand tournaments, as a strong deck can cost $500-$600, partly due to the need to buy back cards from the black market.

However, physical Magic cards can be resold. An extremely rare Black Lotus card printed in 1993 sold on eBay last year for $87,000.

Meanwhile, the Hearthstone cards are linked to the Battle.net account. How much they’re worth depends on how much you enjoy Hearthstone. You cannot sell individual cards or use them in any other way. In fact, they lose their value when rotated out of Standard.

PRICE UP, PASSION DOWN

According to Blizzard, Hearthstone is currently running fine. In November, the company celebrated the milestone of 100 million players.

However, some data paints a less bright picture of the game. Hearthstone’s annual sales seemed to peak in 2016, when Blizzard released Adventure sets. That means Hearthstone makes more money when the game costs less, because then more players invest in the game.

Hearthstone’s monthly player count also dropped in 2018, and according to its Q2 2018 revenue report, Blizzard blamed the Boomsday Project expansion, as it didn’t attract as much as the hugely successful expansion Knights of the Frozen Throne. – Set of extra powerful cards around the Icecrown Citadel theme from World of Warcraft. In February, according to a report, Hearthstone saw a 52% decrease in revenue compared to February 2018.

Rise of Shadows seems like a good idea – it features villains from the old Hearthstone sets, working together to attack the aerial city of Dalaran. But this is also a pivotal moment for Hearthstone. As the popular Frozen Throne cards change to Wild, will players invest more to keep their Standard collection strong?

According to Polygon