I have been playing Hearthstone for a few months, and as a chessplayer, I find a lot of charm and depth in the game. There are combinations similar to chess tactics, there are not so obvious ways to play a hand to squeeze the maximum potential, there is the meta with a lot of strategic thought and mind play, and there are of course the wonderful players like Kripparrian who selflessly share their deep insights and observations about the game with the community.
However, each times someone introduces you to a great game, but refuses to give you all the pieces to play, something fishy is to be definitely expected. The hearthstone business model, similar to lotteries and scams of various kinds, hooks up people to hope and expectations, and then keeps on selling them one balloon full of hot air after another. You see those legendaries being played in those top tournaments, and of course you want them too, you find a lot of cool decks on various websites and forums, and you want to play them, but of course you lack cards.
I bought both the adventure expansions (Naxxramas and Blackrock), and I had both a lot of fun and got valuable cards to start my decks. That is all fair and square - I knew what I was buying, I spent the money, I got what I expected back.
But I absolutely refuse to pay a single cent or penny for their card packs and here is why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tc9XDPmKpE
Everyone wanting to buy packs should watch this video, all 38 minutes of it. Kripparrian unpacks 120 GvG packs there, and he gets like 6 legendary cards out of them, while three of them is Troggzorr, and about two are Hemmit Nesingway. Yes, there are some useful epics and rares, but let's face it - substantial portion of Heartstone cards are garbage and intentionally so. If you purchased say 10 packs of cards, and got about 40 good cards, you could have enough to build several interesting decks (combined with good soulcards), and could be satisfied. However, the fact that so many Heartstone cards are garbage means you will never be satisfied. You save up coins from quests, or battle in arena, you buy and open your pack and what you get? On the average, 3 cards are either total garbage like Recycle or Salty Dog you will never use or cards you already have. One is like okay new card, and one is usually good. That's my average pack. Of course, I got very lucky and have about two or three legendaries in about 30 packs or so, and that's very lucky.
But on the average, it will take insane amount of money (or time, which is money too, sort of) to obtain all the cards for even one fine-tuned deck. I for example play Grim Patron Warrior deck, but I lack cards like bouncing blade - it's an epic, so saving the dust will take some time.
Note that Blizzard won't let you buy dust. Dust, even expensive, would be much more fair business scheme. Totally fair would be to let you buy any specific card you wish. But Blizzard won't let you do that. In MtG, at least, you could trade the cards with fellow players. But Hearthstone does not allow that - you don't even own the physical cards. Such a scheme, to me, is a borderline scam.
So sorry, Blizzard, I won't buy your card packs, never, ever.
There is one more interesting video from Kripparian, called "Bad card does not need to exist", where he makes a great argument - he proposes to buff the useless cards, so that terrible cards become at least below average cards, that could have come situational use:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHCExQcR_Qk
This actually probably struck a nerve, because Ben Brode from Blizzard dev team responded with a video of his own:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ioY1KO79A
If you play Hearthstone and most importantly, if you plan on spending some hard earned cash on the card packs, I recommend you to watch all the three videos.
Isn't that how all CCGs work? Other than the part about not actually having anything besides binary bits in the end, anyway. They're made to be money sinks.
Its really not that bad - Hearthstone is quite a bit better than say MtG.
You have constructed and limited formats (limited being Arena in Hearthstone).
The bad cards that you are complaining about have a purpose - "limited filler" as they are called. That is, you don't use them in a constructed deck, but you do use them in limited formats. I happen to be mostly a limited player and like the lower power curve of Arena over constructed.
Now there are some crap cards which are bad in both Arena and constructed, but it really isn't that bad.
Anyway, the Hearthstone economy works not by direct buying packs so much, but by giving you gold in Constructed, then doing Arena runs. If you are reasonably good at Arena, you can get quite a few packs for your gold since you are winning enough Arena games. In the early days of Hearthstone (when people were bad), I was basically holding even in gold in Arena, so I could get all the cards that I wanted without having to pay. People quickly got better at Arena (or more likely, the bad players dropped out of Arena) so this is more difficult now, but if you can keep up a good win %, converting Constructed gold to packs is reasonably efficient.
In any case, you don't need all the fancy legendary cards to do well in Constructed. There are a large number of reasonably strong constructed decks that work just fine without having too many expensive cards. These decks are good for new players. Some of them are also simple to play (Face hunter is cheap and stupid simple). But you can build something like Oil Rogue with 1 legendary card if you want and it is a fairly sophisticated deck and works reasonably well.
The ONLY thing that I really object to in Hearthstone is the fact that you can't craft some cards from dust (the Naxx and Blackrock sets). This means that you have to buy the expansions if you weren't playing at the time (and the gold cost is HUGE). There weren't that many cards in those sets, but some of the cards are quite powerful and needed to fill out decks. That is quite the money grab, so if you want to complain about that one...yeah.
I win about 5 times in arena on average, which makes my balance so-so. Last arena run I won a pack of GvG cards, 60 gold and 60 dust, which is not bad, since a pack is worth 100 gold, and admission fee is 150 gold, so the profit was 10 gold and 60 dust - and it's the dust that is valuable. Other time I won 5 times, but I won again a pack, and 110 gold in total, which is worse value - I would prefer the dust.
And yes, I prefer arena more too, at least it's a bit fair, though RNG dependent, in Ranked you always get owned by those that paid enough to get cards for the highly optimal decks.
hearthstone is about paying for variety
you can still win a lot without spending hundreds of dollars, but you'll be stuck with very few options for what you can play
i think most card games are the same way
it doesn't end up being too unreasonable because only the people who play the game a lot would need to spend a lot of money on it
Welcome to every single TCG in existence. (well, there's no trading in Hearthstone so... every TCG and... I think it calls itself a CCG?) If you think cracking open packs is a good way to build your collection, well, reality will sink in and you'll realise "nope, not happening". It's also unfair to say you can't buy cards in Hearthstone. You can, it's just expensive (crack a pack and just dust everything in it). Expensive, of course, is a relative term. The buy-in for basically every competitive deck these days that isn't control warrior (not that that sees a lot of play these days) is probably a few hundred dollars barring absolute dismal luck (like, not just no-epics/legendary bad like, brick-on-every-rare-as-well bad), which, well, is way better than MTG. The buy-in for LANDS ALONE in standard is like a thousand. LANDS. You know, that stuff you need to actually do interesting things in MTG?
Think it costs a lot to craft an epic? 4x Thoughtseize will run you 80-100 pretty easily. If you totally brick on every hearthstone pack, it costs about 10 bucks to make an epic. Also on that note, don't run bouncing blades in Patron Warrior, it's pretty bad. (primary problem being unless you reduced the cost of it and a few other spells there's very little else you'll be able to do on that turn unless you just yolo'd out the patron and it's often not enough on its own to win the game ESPECIALLY consistently)
I think it's like 500 on average to get EVERY card in hearthstone (that includes all the hot junk like Flame Leviathan/Hemet/Nat Pagle/Milhouse). To get every card in MTG standard is probably like 10k.
Kripparrian, while he may be very good at exploiting flaws in a system, that doesn't make him a good game designer. He's utterly wrong when he says there doesn't need to be bad cards. In multiple ways. What Ben Brode really wanted to do was to tell Kripp to type in "bad cards mtg" into google and come up with http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr5#summary and http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/164 but, well, for obvious reasons he couldn't. The issue has not only been studied extensively, it's been done so for AGES. "Bad" cards need to exist and for good reason. Kripp would then backpedal and say he meant more to buff complete trash cards... of which there are actually surprisingly few, mostly legendaries (which are amongst the hardest to design so a good portion will be trash, ask anyone's who tried to design actually viable TCG expansions based on other IP. For the other end of design problems see Dr. Balance whose stats don't make sense at all but they can't really be "scaled down" because something that spawns mobs like that can't be cheap). How far down the list in http://www.heartharena.com/tierlist do you have to go for each rarity to see mostly really bad arena cards? For legendary, it's around average/below average. For the other rarities it's in the bad/terrible range. Fiddling around with anything else has an actual effect on the balance of arena beyond any doubt. (which was Kripp's likely actual motivator, a shakeup in arena since that's what he plays mostly)
There's plenty to rail on Hearthstone for sucking at (not actually solving many of the problems it's attributed to "solving" like mana screw probably being at the top), but compared to its largest competitors, its monetization is not really one of them. If you want something similar with a more fixed cost you can try a living card game.... Not sure if many people play those, though. Or scrolls, I guess, if you want to get in on a dead game. MTG Duels might be good if it weren't for the fact that it's run by WOTC and, well, their horrendous track record for anything online. (which was seen on the phone launch... then the steam launch. Not so sure how it's doing now.)
All TCG's have useless cards and take a long time (and money) to acquire a reasonable collection of good cards. I played a heavy amount of Yu-gi-oh and Pokemon and these games are exactly the same way (except you can trade with friends or buy singles and the dust mechanic sort of takes that place). All I have to say is get used to it? There model is perfectly fine.
Imho the "problem" is the game launched with a certain F2P scheme, and as more collectibles have been added the scheme has changed over time to become more expensive. In a normal tabletop card game, this is to be expected - new editions etc. However, in a computer game, this is not a normal pay scheme. Hearthstone is in the grey area between those - obviously a computer game, but at the same time a card game that needs to output new collectibles to stay relevant.
That said... it's obvious that their pay scheme is working. The game is immensely popular and Blizzard have said that it is much more successful than they anticipated.
As for allowing people to buy dust directly for crafting, that's something you'll never see. It has two implications: first, you'll immediately know the cost of all the top decks. Second: as players are now paying for specific cards, altering the relevance of those cards in the future would result in an insane backlash from the community ("I paid 30$ for aggro deck, now I can't use it because you introduced 1 new counter").
Not all of them. Faeria in particular is a game that doesn't do this. (or won't do this- game is still in development). Faeria is probably my most anticipating game, and I've enjoyed every brief beta for it.
There's also 100% Orange Juice lol. (not a bad game- fairly cheap on Steam- has a smallish grind component and some DLC but no P2W)
Why doesn't Stardock consider say, a Fallen Enchantress card game that uses a fair pay once model?
That said, Hearthstone is extremely scummy and P2W. I'd really love to be into card games instead of fighting games for my competitive fix, but P2W is a huge turn-off. You don't have to worry about that with say, Street Fighter. (The only recent game that could be argued was P2W last gen was KOF XIII, and I suspect that was accidental overpowering of those characters)
double post delete.
How so? If I need a single card for MtG, I can buy that card. If I need a single card in Hearthstone, I have to buy packs and hope for the best, or grind.
Unless you were talking about the online presentation of the game, in which case MTGO sucks compared to Hearthstone's polish.
Or you can just craft it, a mechanic that doesn't exist in MtG and is really nice. It gives value to all the commons (which have essentially no value in MtG) since you can dust them, and the crafting cost for non legendaries isn't very high.
Oh, and the cards that do have highish crafting costs? You only need one of them anyway. And they don't rotate out of standard constructed so quickly (someday Hearthstone might do something like this, but its not even close yet).
So its a vastly cheaper system than something that essentially requires that you to buy 4-ofs that will rotate out of constructed regularly.
This sounds a lot like Yu-Gi-Oh to me. Not so different, except the cards are real, not digital.
Alstein - Heathstone is not "extremely P2W", I disagree.
Hearthstone offers the Arena. There is an entrance fee, true, but you can pay 150 gold you can collect on daily quests, and if you are good enough, you can win back much more - cards, dust, gold. Good arena players are able to maintain their gold balance while playing one arena round after another.
Moreover, you cannot pay to get advantage in arena even if you wanted to.
Constructed is another matter, yes, you need cards to be competitive, but again, once you have a decent deck, the opponent cannot pay to have advantage over you. You can stuff only 30 cards into your deck too.
Arena isn't P2W. That said, to get good enough to be good at Arena requires experience, which has to be earned in P2W
Thankfully, Faeria beta next week- a game that isn't P2W. (a little bit of grinding advantage, but that's not as bad in my eyes if it's tolerable)
AgaresOaks - read your writeup, interesting insights, but while introducing the new TGT cards, Blizzards have clearly shown that rather than to buff the terrible old cards nobody actually plays, they release the buffed version of the old card as a new card, to make more money and to push the old garbage in card packs as a filler.
I mean - an old card, Magma Rager, a 5/1 card for 3 mana - absolute garbage, nobody plays it, ever. With TGT, they are releasing a new card, Ice Rager, which is a 5/2 card for mana. What is the reason for Magma Rager to exist now? None at all. It's just Blizzard's confession that Kripp was right (useless cards need to be buffed), and confession of Blizzard's greed.
Hilariously there's an art reason they can't change magma rager: http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/File:Moonfire_full.png Another terrible card references it, lol. (and there's basically no way to buff moonfire without breaking it) On a practical level, ice rager is getting printed as a common so if you're legitimately concerned about opening packs to increase your collection, you'll have a playset within about 30-40ish packs most likely, which is way lower than the average amount to complete the set (like 200-250 I think) and even if you don't the dust cost is not exactly onerous. The booty bay bodyguard upgrade is a better example, but once again it's common.
As for the reason for magma rager and its ilk to exist, there is an argument for them to dilute the arena pick pool and as a "bad result" for things like unstable portal or the piloted mechs (not that any piloted mechs give out a 3 drop, but a card like that may exist in the future), much in the same way that Majordomo was a nerf to Sneed's. It's a poor argument, but it does fall in line with Hearthstone's "design philosophy". I personally think being RNG BS is not a design philosophy, but apparently a lot of people don't. Well, that's not wholly true. 100% OJ is RNG BS that's well designed because they dial it to 11 and it being a 4 player format also helps.
100% OJ had a competitive tournament. A friend was actually in it.
I'd rather play that than HS any day of the week. Then again I like that dojin games circle as well.
AgaresOak - there are better ways to dilute card pool for arena, or to create crappy 2-drops to weaken cards like the shredder - I remember there will be a card from TGT (forgot the name) that is a 2/3 for 2, I think, and it creates a mana crystal as battlecry, and destroys on deathrattle. If this falls out of a shredder, and gets immediately killed, that would be a huge disaster.
Ice Rager from Magma Rager is poor power creep, and understandably, Kripparrian rubs the salt in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov4P8rSIPjw&list=PL3kmT1mmaRnGdkZGVJbcLfg_oGk32vk2v
On the downside, the "dialogue" with Ben Brode has probably ended before it really started.
Look, as much as I despise HS for being mostly devoid of interesting game play, their economy is not that terrible.
It's not good though either, in fact, pretty much every other CCG out there right now has a superior economy to HS, but that still doesn't make the HS economy 'bad'. Just worse.
The real issue with HS is that it's just too simplistic and the meta always turns into the same decks beating on themselves, because really, ti's just that bad. And fair enough, HS caters to a different crowd than other CCGs. I'm not going to claim any is superior to any other, that's all down to your own personal preference. For me, HS is too simplistic and 'dumbed down'. The mechanics don't allow for a lot of complex interactions, and the resource system is overly limiting. As is the card draw/deck size. But, it plays fast, and it's not that taxing on your mental faculties compared to some others out there.
Try some other CCGs if you want, they are all F2P, though of course P2W exists, though it's more P2W(faster). HS is also that, but the card gain is just slower.
A quick list off the top of my head...
MMDoC
Spellweaver
Infinity Wars
Magic Duels Origin
stuff I've not played
Hex
Scrolls
Dogs of War
A bunch of other 'tactical' games like Dogs of War
So many of them out there, if you don't like Blizzard or HS for whatever reason, just go play something else.
Scrolls is going to die in a few months.
Faeria was really, really good in the last beta.
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