This is probably not how Blizzard envisioned the birthday of its game. The community of Hearthstone is furious, as it now requires much, much more time.
It was supposed to be a reason to celebrate. Hearthstone is currently celebrating its 10th birthday and has a quite loyal community. However, the festivities have likely gone completely awry, as Hearthstone drastically changed how players earn experience points with a small patch right in the middle of the season.
What has changed? Without much explanation, Blizzard has drastically altered the weekly quests in Hearthstone. The tasks are now significantly more difficult to complete, requiring much more time. Here are a few examples of the changes:
- Spend a total of 750 mana (previously 500 mana, +50 %).
- Win 15 games in Hearthstone’s ranked mode (previously 5, +200 %).
- Play 100 cards with Battlecry (previously 30, +233 %)
Weekly quests are the primary source of experience points used to progress on the reward path – essentially Hearthstone’s “Battle Pass”.
What does this change mean? Depending on which weekly quests you receive, this increases the required playtime in Hearthstone by 100% to 200%. Those who previously completed their weekly quests in about 3 hours now have to invest 6-9 hours to finish the “Weeklys”.
For some quests, such as those requiring wins, it can take even longer.
This is quite a significant time investment for a card game that many see as a “casual game,” where one might play 2-3 matches a day.
This is how the community is reacting: “Angry” would be an understatement here. If you look at the Hearthstone subreddit, you’ll see that nearly 90% of the topics are directly or indirectly related to the changes in the quests. Just from the titles of the posts, you can see this well, but see for yourself:
The main criticism is that Hearthstone has implemented these changes to drive away Free2Play players. For rewards like gold – which leads to card packs – you now need to play much more than before.
A particularly cynical post lists what Blizzard has delivered for Hearthstone’s 10th birthday – a total of 7 points that are generally seen as negative:
Many are threatening to turn their backs on Hearthstone until these changes are completely reversed. Others say they no longer care – just the implementation of this idea has already led to them uninstalling the card game.
Of course, it’s hard to determine if all players really dislike this change. But if you browse through the Hearthstone subreddit, you’ll find that it’s not so easy to find a positive comment about these quest adjustments – and even then, it’s likely sarcasm.
Blizzard backtracks, players suspect “door in the face” tactic
The outcry was indeed so great that Blizzard quickly issued a statement on the Hearthstone website. In it, they assure that they wanted to make the quests more rewarding, as they have also increased the XP received. At the same time, they express gratitude for the feedback and will change the quests. The goal is to create quest tasks whose “value lies between the old and the new design”. Quests will still take longer to complete than before in the future.
The catch is that this very behavior from Blizzard was suspected in advance. Many suspected that Blizzard would use the “door in the face” strategy. In this, someone is first confronted with something they will completely reject to then offer the real goal as a compromise afterwards.
Exactly this has now happened, which is why there are many posts in the subreddit demanding that Blizzard completely reverse the changes and not “a compromise that they had aimed for from the beginning”.
For many long-time fans, the 10th birthday of Hearthstone seems to be the moment where they draw a line under Blizzard’s card game. And we aren’t even talking about the German translation, which is just nonsense.
