Hearthstone has a real problem with cosmetics. The sad truth is that they just aren’t compelling enough to monetize to the extent that other games do.
Think of it this way: The current battle pass provides TEN cosmetics for only $20. (3 Mage skins, 3 Shaman skins, 1 Warrior skin, 1 card back, 1 coin, and 1 golden card.) In most games, that would be an incredible deal. In this one, no one even seems to care. The discussion about whether the pass is worth it always focuses on how much extra gold it gives you.
I’m not sure what it is, exactly. Part of the problem seems to be that most people don’t need to keep buying new cosmetics. At least one free card back comes out every month, and once you have a preferred hero portrait you probably won’t buy any more for that class. (We’ve gotten 5 alternate Jaina skins this year. Is anyone disappointed if they missed one?) Blizzard seems to have missed some of the opportunities that were really profitable for other games - Custom emotes or boards would be difficult to implement at this time.
The new alternate Coins are a great idea, though the implementation seems lacking. We only have two so far, and a casual observer would already have trouble telling them apart. By the time there are 10 available, will anyone be scrambling to collect them all? (I hope they add some themed Coins related to each class or to events. I’d definitely love a coin ringed with Felfire in a Warlock deck or one that looks like an egg to use during Noblegarden.)
I think that when Hearthstone was new, a lot of foundational decisions were made without understanding what was going to be profitable in 2021. That will be a hard thing to correct now. And even if you don’t care about cosmetics, this is a problem. If cosmetics brought in more money, the cards would probably be cheaper.
I don’t think Blizzard will agree, but I’d say that we don’t need a new card to replace this one. Rogue has lots of great core cards already, and that’s why it’s so consistently strong. My build of Miracle Rogue is over 1/3 Classic and Basic cards. (Edwin and 2 copies each of 5 other Rogue cards. Plus Questing Adventurer, but he’s neutral.) That’s a lot of power in the Rogue toolset, and they’d almost have to make the new Legendary weak. Why bother
Good points, but it is worth noting that Riven has a lot of support to help her get the 3 cards she needs to level up. It looks like Aphelios will need to generate most or all of his cards himself. So you'll hav to keep L1 Aphelios alive for a few turns.
(FWIW, I think Riven and Aphelios are both really fun champions, even if we still have to find the best decks for Riven.)
I think we need a new approach to ranked seasons. Recently, they have been 2 months long and required you to grind out a decent number of games in order to advance. But with the changed schedule, our current season suddenly increased to 3 months. That will be followed by a 2-month season, and then a 1 month season!
I look forward to reaching a new high before March, and I hope that they streamline the 1-month season when it arrives.
UPDATE: I saw some calculations on Reddit which predicted that the expansions would hit on March 10th, May 5th, and June 30th. If so, we’ll have even 8-week seasons like normal. Our current one will still be a month longer, though.
The deal page has a schedule that shows there will be one epic wildcard offered every month in 2021. The February offer will go up on the 5th (the same day the current one expires). The rest of them just give a month without a specific day, but it’s likely that they’ll all be around the 5th or 6th.
Thanks. I had a lot of fun with Riven in Expeditions and was looking for a good deck to try her in. I’ve actually never played Draven seriously, so this will give me a lot of new experiences.
Getting Shaman right will be tricky. I think that Boggspine Knuckles was just a mistake. The card gives you TWO full-board evolves, AND you can tutor it, AND you can later re-equip it for another two evolves. On most of your games, you can evolve all your minions every turn starting in the mid-game.
That's not just OP, that’s BORING. As much hate as last year’s Evolve Shaman got, it was at least an interesting deck to play and the mirror matches were very dependent on skill. You had to think about what minions you and your opponent had in order to decide whether it was time to use one of your limited Evolves. I wish a balanced version of that had stuck around for a while
Thanks. The more I think about this from my perspective as a software developer, the more it seems like a problem. A process that I assume is high-priority can be disrupted for a month or two because one key person takes a week off. That should not happen in a mature software development process.
Either they don’t actually consider balance to be a priority, or they don’t have the staff to deal with predictable interruptions, or they have an inflexible process that depends on key people despite having a large staff. All of those would be concerning for different reasons.
They give every impression that balance changes are a priority, but maybe they aren’t. That would come as a surprise to me and most other people who read news and comment online, though maybe the game has a silent majority who don’t care as much about that. I’m not sure. It would certainly change my opinion of the game if I learned that balance was an afterthought, though.
If balance IS a priority, then they should be able to do something about issues like this. My company has handled several emergencies during the holidays, even though normal development has slowed down significantly. I would think that balance decisions like this need a team of several people, and in a pinch decisions can be made by any two of them. Of course, they’d USUALLY want most of the team (including the lead) involved, but they could have a process for a skeleton staff to still tweak a card at this time. Maybe one lead is involved most of the time, but for the other people this would be 8-10 hours a week alongside their other responsibilities. That means that in the budget, the balance team requires about 2 FTEs.
If they can’t afford 2 salaries to balance a competitive game, then I worry about the viability of the genre. Sure, I’d understand a small indie company responding slowly over the holidays, but if one of the biggest online CCGs can’t afford it, then the hobby may be in trouble.
Maybe they DO prioritize balance and DO have the budget for enough staff, but they just don’t have a process that allows them to do anything when Steve Rubin is out. That’s an understandable situation for a newish development team to find themselves in, but I hope that this serves as a wake-up call. Being overly dependent on one person can lead to huge disasters.
I suspect that that last possibility has a lot of truth to it. When Bastion’s balance was off, Rubin said “[The things] I’m working on make it a bit hard for LoR Live Design to keep up... patch day is incredibly stressful for me.” If I were the manager of a key employee who felt the need to say that publicly, I’d certainly do something about it.
EDIT: Here’s the source for the quote above. That article does confirm that it’s just two people (Steve Rubin and Dave Smith) making balance decisions.
I’m torn. I do believe that game developers deserve a good work-life balance, and I want to play games that promote that. But does this mean we have to go two months without balance fixes? I work for a software company that manages a good work-life balance, and there are still enough people in the office around the holidays to keep support and sales working like normal. I suppose the difference is that we have a large enough staff to allow us to maintain critical processes even while most people are vacationing. I get the impression that LoR’s team is actually pretty small.
So, is the size of LoR’s team appropriate, or are penny-pinchers in management keeping it too small? I would like to believe that a game as successful as this could handle basic balance changes, etc. around the holidays without overworking their employees
Thanks. There are a lot of good ideas in here. Some are ones I’m used to seeing (I came up with almost the same Weapon Rogue on my first Duels run), but a lot of them look new.
The money I put into Hearthstone works out to about the same as a Netflix subscription. With that, I’m able to play with 4-6 decks every expansion, and I definitely get more out of it than I do out of Netflix.
The price is enough that I’ll have to drop the game as soon as it stops being my favorite. Runeterra’s price may work in its favor in the long run, because you don’t lose much ground if you stop playing for a while and then come back.
A lot of people say they HAVE to spend $300+ per year on Hearthstone, and I’m not sure what they’re doing differently than me. Do they feel like they need to build more decks than I do?
Anyway, I always feel bad for the people who seem to be paying lots of money and not enjoying it. I want to assure them that it’s worth it for me but not for them, and it’s ok for them to quit and find a game they’d like better, but it’s hard to say that online without sounding snarky.
Thank you for your reply. You figured out much more about how I play Hearthstone than I thought I was saying in my post!
I am generally ok with Hearthstone’s randomness. As someone who’s played a lot of board games, I’m comfortable with a wide range of randomness and strategy in my games, and I can see the pros and cons to different levels. I can go play Caylus or Terra Mystica when I want a strategic, RNG-free experience, and I think of all CCGs as fairly random. It always sounds strange to me when Magic or Runeterra players imply that less randomness is automatically better, because apparently they don’t know that Go is an option.
I appreciate that Hearthstone embraces the randomness and that skilled playing involves anticipating or responding to the random events better than your opponent. Some games will be outside my control, and maybe if I was gunning for top 50 Legend that would be an issue. But the games are 5-10 minutes and playing well means that I win 55% of the time, so it works great. Hearthstone games give me a lot more variety even when I play the same deck over and over. Every evening, I’ll end up with a story I want to tell a friend about. That never happens in Runeterra.
(That also helps to justify - somewhat - the “bad” cards that Hearthstone includes in the game. I’d never put Generous Mummy in a deck, but I still need to find a way to get some value out of it every day or two. On the other hand, She Who Wanders never appears in my Runeterra games.)
Your point about building off-meta decks in Runeterra is a good one. I’m not good at deck-building - my strengths are mostly in efficient, tactical play - so that may be one area where I’m not suited for Runeterra.
I also think it’s weird that people accuse Hearthstone of being too focused on finishers. My decks may have win conditions, but most of the time the winner just outmaneuvered the other player by gaining board control or chipping away. Runeterra decks are much more dependent on specific Champions or Epics to close out the game.
Anyway, I’m off to try Cosmic Creation this evening. Wish me luck!
Well, based on the way you worded it, I’m not sure if you actually want to know. But answering for myself, I’ll say that Hearthstone is fun and still feels fresh. I’ve only been playing the game for 2 years, so I can’t blame anyone who has been playing for 6 years and has decided that they’re bored. I’m sure I’ll be done with the game long before then! But the key thing is, if I enjoy the game for years and then eventually move on, I’ll consider that to be a success. I won’t stick around on Reddit to complain that a years-old hobby got boring.
Runeterra is a very cool game. In theory, I feel like I should enjoy it more than Hearthstone. But in practice, it’s started to feel like a grind for me. I’m not sure whether it’s because the game demands more time than Hearthstone, or because the archetypes feel more repetitive, or if the XP-based rewards system is just less compelling, or what. (If it’s the XP system, then Hearthstone is in trouble, too.) But whatever the reason, I burned out after completing the Spirit Blossom Festival and never really got into it again. The last time I played was 2 weeks ago - By any objective measure, it was an exciting game, with both sides taking the advantage multiple times before the end. But I realized halfway through that I just didn’t care. I haven’t played since, though I’ll be giving the new expansion a try. Hopefully it’s fun for me again.
I know this probably isn’t a satisfying answer for you. I can’t put my finger on why one game stayed fun and the other didn’t. But I’m glad that so many people are enjoying Runeterra. I want everyone to find the games they like, whether or not they match my tastes.
Maybe, but Star Power was the K/DA lab, and the patch notes describe all three as “old” labs. I think it will be reusing the decks that were available back then
Also a great way to earn them if you don’t plan to spend money on it. I think this is a cool system. (I’m not sure if I like the appearance of the cards yet, but I definitely like the way they can be earned.
Hearthstone has a real problem with cosmetics. The sad truth is that they just aren’t compelling enough to monetize to the extent that other games do.
Think of it this way: The current battle pass provides TEN cosmetics for only $20. (3 Mage skins, 3 Shaman skins, 1 Warrior skin, 1 card back, 1 coin, and 1 golden card.) In most games, that would be an incredible deal. In this one, no one even seems to care. The discussion about whether the pass is worth it always focuses on how much extra gold it gives you.
I’m not sure what it is, exactly. Part of the problem seems to be that most people don’t need to keep buying new cosmetics. At least one free card back comes out every month, and once you have a preferred hero portrait you probably won’t buy any more for that class. (We’ve gotten 5 alternate Jaina skins this year. Is anyone disappointed if they missed one?) Blizzard seems to have missed some of the opportunities that were really profitable for other games - Custom emotes or boards would be difficult to implement at this time.
The new alternate Coins are a great idea, though the implementation seems lacking. We only have two so far, and a casual observer would already have trouble telling them apart. By the time there are 10 available, will anyone be scrambling to collect them all? (I hope they add some themed Coins related to each class or to events. I’d definitely love a coin ringed with Felfire in a Warlock deck or one that looks like an egg to use during Noblegarden.)
I think that when Hearthstone was new, a lot of foundational decisions were made without understanding what was going to be profitable in 2021. That will be a hard thing to correct now. And even if you don’t care about cosmetics, this is a problem. If cosmetics brought in more money, the cards would probably be cheaper.
The recent deck guides for Runeterra and Hearthstone are great! Thank you for all your work.
I don’t think Blizzard will agree, but I’d say that we don’t need a new card to replace this one. Rogue has lots of great core cards already, and that’s why it’s so consistently strong. My build of Miracle Rogue is over 1/3 Classic and Basic cards. (Edwin and 2 copies each of 5 other Rogue cards. Plus Questing Adventurer, but he’s neutral.) That’s a lot of power in the Rogue toolset, and they’d almost have to make the new Legendary weak. Why bother
Good points, but it is worth noting that Riven has a lot of support to help her get the 3 cards she needs to level up. It looks like Aphelios will need to generate most or all of his cards himself. So you'll hav to keep L1 Aphelios alive for a few turns.
(FWIW, I think Riven and Aphelios are both really fun champions, even if we still have to find the best decks for Riven.)
This is very cool, especially considering that cosmetics seem to be LoR’s main income stream. And now they’re making a new type just to give away?
I think they meant that after evolving, your DCs turn into two 5-drops.
“The Sad Mummy”. This game really does have everything!
I think we need a new approach to ranked seasons. Recently, they have been 2 months long and required you to grind out a decent number of games in order to advance. But with the changed schedule, our current season suddenly increased to 3 months. That will be followed by a 2-month season, and then a 1 month season!
I look forward to reaching a new high before March, and I hope that they streamline the 1-month season when it arrives.
UPDATE: I saw some calculations on Reddit which predicted that the expansions would hit on March 10th, May 5th, and June 30th. If so, we’ll have even 8-week seasons like normal. Our current one will still be a month longer, though.
The deal page has a schedule that shows there will be one epic wildcard offered every month in 2021. The February offer will go up on the 5th (the same day the current one expires). The rest of them just give a month without a specific day, but it’s likely that they’ll all be around the 5th or 6th.
Thanks. I had a lot of fun with Riven in Expeditions and was looking for a good deck to try her in. I’ve actually never played Draven seriously, so this will give me a lot of new experiences.
Getting Shaman right will be tricky. I think that Boggspine Knuckles was just a mistake. The card gives you TWO full-board evolves, AND you can tutor it, AND you can later re-equip it for another two evolves. On most of your games, you can evolve all your minions every turn starting in the mid-game.
That's not just OP, that’s BORING. As much hate as last year’s Evolve Shaman got, it was at least an interesting deck to play and the mirror matches were very dependent on skill. You had to think about what minions you and your opponent had in order to decide whether it was time to use one of your limited Evolves. I wish a balanced version of that had stuck around for a while
The real question: Will we get the new cards added to Darkmoon Faire at this time?
Thanks. The more I think about this from my perspective as a software developer, the more it seems like a problem. A process that I assume is high-priority can be disrupted for a month or two because one key person takes a week off. That should not happen in a mature software development process.
Either they don’t actually consider balance to be a priority, or they don’t have the staff to deal with predictable interruptions, or they have an inflexible process that depends on key people despite having a large staff. All of those would be concerning for different reasons.
They give every impression that balance changes are a priority, but maybe they aren’t. That would come as a surprise to me and most other people who read news and comment online, though maybe the game has a silent majority who don’t care as much about that. I’m not sure. It would certainly change my opinion of the game if I learned that balance was an afterthought, though.
If balance IS a priority, then they should be able to do something about issues like this. My company has handled several emergencies during the holidays, even though normal development has slowed down significantly. I would think that balance decisions like this need a team of several people, and in a pinch decisions can be made by any two of them. Of course, they’d USUALLY want most of the team (including the lead) involved, but they could have a process for a skeleton staff to still tweak a card at this time. Maybe one lead is involved most of the time, but for the other people this would be 8-10 hours a week alongside their other responsibilities. That means that in the budget, the balance team requires about 2 FTEs.
If they can’t afford 2 salaries to balance a competitive game, then I worry about the viability of the genre. Sure, I’d understand a small indie company responding slowly over the holidays, but if one of the biggest online CCGs can’t afford it, then the hobby may be in trouble.
Maybe they DO prioritize balance and DO have the budget for enough staff, but they just don’t have a process that allows them to do anything when Steve Rubin is out. That’s an understandable situation for a newish development team to find themselves in, but I hope that this serves as a wake-up call. Being overly dependent on one person can lead to huge disasters.
I suspect that that last possibility has a lot of truth to it. When Bastion’s balance was off, Rubin said “[The things] I’m working on make it a bit hard for LoR Live Design to keep up... patch day is incredibly stressful for me.” If I were the manager of a key employee who felt the need to say that publicly, I’d certainly do something about it.
EDIT: Here’s the source for the quote above. That article does confirm that it’s just two people (Steve Rubin and Dave Smith) making balance decisions.
I’m torn. I do believe that game developers deserve a good work-life balance, and I want to play games that promote that. But does this mean we have to go two months without balance fixes? I work for a software company that manages a good work-life balance, and there are still enough people in the office around the holidays to keep support and sales working like normal. I suppose the difference is that we have a large enough staff to allow us to maintain critical processes even while most people are vacationing. I get the impression that LoR’s team is actually pretty small.
So, is the size of LoR’s team appropriate, or are penny-pinchers in management keeping it too small? I would like to believe that a game as successful as this could handle basic balance changes, etc. around the holidays without overworking their employees
Thanks. There are a lot of good ideas in here. Some are ones I’m used to seeing (I came up with almost the same Weapon Rogue on my first Duels run), but a lot of them look new.
The money I put into Hearthstone works out to about the same as a Netflix subscription. With that, I’m able to play with 4-6 decks every expansion, and I definitely get more out of it than I do out of Netflix.
The price is enough that I’ll have to drop the game as soon as it stops being my favorite. Runeterra’s price may work in its favor in the long run, because you don’t lose much ground if you stop playing for a while and then come back.
A lot of people say they HAVE to spend $300+ per year on Hearthstone, and I’m not sure what they’re doing differently than me. Do they feel like they need to build more decks than I do?
Anyway, I always feel bad for the people who seem to be paying lots of money and not enjoying it. I want to assure them that it’s worth it for me but not for them, and it’s ok for them to quit and find a game they’d like better, but it’s hard to say that online without sounding snarky.
Thank you for your reply. You figured out much more about how I play Hearthstone than I thought I was saying in my post!
I am generally ok with Hearthstone’s randomness. As someone who’s played a lot of board games, I’m comfortable with a wide range of randomness and strategy in my games, and I can see the pros and cons to different levels. I can go play Caylus or Terra Mystica when I want a strategic, RNG-free experience, and I think of all CCGs as fairly random. It always sounds strange to me when Magic or Runeterra players imply that less randomness is automatically better, because apparently they don’t know that Go is an option.
I appreciate that Hearthstone embraces the randomness and that skilled playing involves anticipating or responding to the random events better than your opponent. Some games will be outside my control, and maybe if I was gunning for top 50 Legend that would be an issue. But the games are 5-10 minutes and playing well means that I win 55% of the time, so it works great. Hearthstone games give me a lot more variety even when I play the same deck over and over. Every evening, I’ll end up with a story I want to tell a friend about. That never happens in Runeterra.
(That also helps to justify - somewhat - the “bad” cards that Hearthstone includes in the game. I’d never put Generous Mummy in a deck, but I still need to find a way to get some value out of it every day or two. On the other hand, She Who Wanders never appears in my Runeterra games.)
Your point about building off-meta decks in Runeterra is a good one. I’m not good at deck-building - my strengths are mostly in efficient, tactical play - so that may be one area where I’m not suited for Runeterra.
I also think it’s weird that people accuse Hearthstone of being too focused on finishers. My decks may have win conditions, but most of the time the winner just outmaneuvered the other player by gaining board control or chipping away. Runeterra decks are much more dependent on specific Champions or Epics to close out the game.
Anyway, I’m off to try Cosmic Creation this evening. Wish me luck!
Well, based on the way you worded it, I’m not sure if you actually want to know. But answering for myself, I’ll say that Hearthstone is fun and still feels fresh. I’ve only been playing the game for 2 years, so I can’t blame anyone who has been playing for 6 years and has decided that they’re bored. I’m sure I’ll be done with the game long before then! But the key thing is, if I enjoy the game for years and then eventually move on, I’ll consider that to be a success. I won’t stick around on Reddit to complain that a years-old hobby got boring.
Runeterra is a very cool game. In theory, I feel like I should enjoy it more than Hearthstone. But in practice, it’s started to feel like a grind for me. I’m not sure whether it’s because the game demands more time than Hearthstone, or because the archetypes feel more repetitive, or if the XP-based rewards system is just less compelling, or what. (If it’s the XP system, then Hearthstone is in trouble, too.) But whatever the reason, I burned out after completing the Spirit Blossom Festival and never really got into it again. The last time I played was 2 weeks ago - By any objective measure, it was an exciting game, with both sides taking the advantage multiple times before the end. But I realized halfway through that I just didn’t care. I haven’t played since, though I’ll be giving the new expansion a try. Hopefully it’s fun for me again.
I know this probably isn’t a satisfying answer for you. I can’t put my finger on why one game stayed fun and the other didn’t. But I’m glad that so many people are enjoying Runeterra. I want everyone to find the games they like, whether or not they match my tastes.
Maybe, but Star Power was the K/DA lab, and the patch notes describe all three as “old” labs. I think it will be reusing the decks that were available back then
Also a great way to earn them if you don’t plan to spend money on it. I think this is a cool system. (I’m not sure if I like the appearance of the cards yet, but I definitely like the way they can be earned.