Hearthstone
Theoretical question about the expansion's design.
Submitted 4 years, 10 months ago by
Gaido
Imagine that you have to design new Hearthstone's expansion.
The trick is, you know, that there will be no more packs. Each card will be available for a small amount of gold.
How do you design all 135 cards, so that every one of them will be cool to buy?
-------------------------------
I'm asking because I'm developer and Acivision wants me to make more money, but thay can't sell lootboxes anymore, and I don't know what to do with all 90 bad Uldum's card ...
------------------------------
...just joking. I'm no one. hehe. So funny. lols
------------------------------
But seriously. How to do that?
Leave a Comment
You must be signed in to leave a comment. Sign in here.
Imagine that you have to design new Hearthstone's expansion.
The trick is, you know, that there will be no more packs. Each card will be available for a small amount of gold.
How do you design all 135 cards, so that every one of them will be cool to buy?
-------------------------------
I'm asking because I'm developer and Acivision wants me to make more money, but thay can't sell lootboxes anymore, and I don't know what to do with all 90 bad Uldum's card ...
------------------------------
...just joking. I'm no one. hehe. So funny. lols
------------------------------
But seriously. How to do that?
The way I see it, cards are attractive if they either do something out of the ordinary or if they're powerful enough to see competitive play. It's rather unlikely to make every single card of an expansion attractive unless all the cards are of linear design. For this reason, there is probably not demand for all 135 of the cards.
An option in this way, is to avoid creating cards that aren't meant to see competitive play. Cards would have to be tuned, to be relatively equal to each other in terms of powerlevel, and those that are deemed a bit on the weaker side, can have more unusual effects, to make them more attractive in earlier parts of the expansion's life. A lot of cards don't see play currently in Hearthstone, not because they're bad, but because their synergy cards don't really work, compared to other decks synergies. If you want to make as many cards as possible attractive for the player, you could the different new synergies together into larger piles of cards, rather than supporting them with 3-4 cards. Noone ended up playing Freeze Shaman in the end, but the deck could likely have been good, had there been around 10 new Freeze cards, instead of 4.
The second option is to use the Rarity based system, like in MTG, where cards of higher rarities are stronger than those of lower rarities. You create a situation where cheaper decks and starter decks are easily attainable with a lower amount of gold, but they're overall weaker than those with cards from the higher rarities. This would create a progression system, where you slowly build towards a stronger deck, if you're free-to-play, that is.
Hello and welcome to the Tox Show!
Not sure if you want to consider the fact, that you would literally make zero money, if all cards would cost gold and were not possible to get from packs :o
~ Have an idea? Found a bug? Let us know! ~
~ Join us on Discord ~
I'm guessing that they would also introduce a system, where you could either buy the individual cards with money aswell, or be able to purchase gold for money.
Hello and welcome to the Tox Show!
Well, I'm guessing this is related to a certain bill that's running around.
If the question is specifically how to run this without lootboxes, Blizzard already has a mechanism: the Adventures. Simply dump all of the cards into different floors with a set cost. So long as it's not randomized it's not a 'loot box'. Meanwhile you can mix in good cards with not so good cards.
Boom, a system to have a mix of cards with without lootboxes.
If the real question is specific.. how to handle cards with set indivdiual prices... two ways:
1. F it, just put them up. Cards aren't exactly real merc that needs to be sold. So if they make some cards no one wants to buy who cares so long as they make enough sales overall. So they are free to have the card quality stay the same. They can also be a little more sneaky and offer pre-orders for 'the entire set' or 'an entire class' and have it be cheaper to buy the entire set than it would be to individually pick all of the 'good' cards.
(so if 80 of 120 cards are good, you just make sure that..say, buying 80 individual cards cost $75 and buying EVERYTHING costs $55)
2. Have the prices 'flex' in a market. Thus more in demand cards cost more than others.
Myself I would have all of the cards have a 'maximum' price that they start off in at the start of a set, then have the prices drop as they lose in demand. So wanting the cards early means you pay to access it now. If you wait, you get a discount. If the card stays popular though the discount will be smaller.
So yeah, there's ways.
Though note that the law also bans cash shops as well, so this would be illegal. So what I would do is this:
Realize that it's the game companies who make the rating system not hte govnermnet, so I'm free to change "M" to "18+" to avoid games going to "AO". Then require all games with microtransactions to be "M" only. Thus Hearthstone becomes an M rated game: 18 or older. All of the systems are open to use after that.
Why trade with minions when you can face for...billions?