This change in Hearthstone seems to have backfired. Instead of engaging fans more with the game, many people have stopped playing.
A few weeks ago, there was a small change to the quests in Hearthstone, which caused quite an uproar. Because Hearthstone changed how much time you need to spend on daily and weekly quests. The intentions behind it were quite obvious; they wanted to increase the playtime per player. The plan did not work out, as they now admit somewhat sheepishly.
One of the coolest Hearthstone cinematics is reminiscent in style of Arcane:
The Hearthstone team changes two things
What happened? A while ago, Hearthstone adjusted the quest system in the game. In summary, the changes can be described as follows:
- Weekly quests now give significantly more XP than before.
- Weekly quests take much more time to complete, as you had to fulfill more tasks per quest.
For frequent players, this would theoretically be a good thing. Since weekly quests are only offered once a week, an increase in XP is advantageous here. However, the community quickly noted: It becomes work and is not fun. Hearthstone and the quests were good as they were before, because you could also complete the tasks “here and there for an hour.” Now one has to specifically take a lot of time to complete the missions.
What has Hearthstone done now? The developers of Hearthstone published a blog post on the official Hearthstone site regarding the changes to the game’s reward systems. There they admitted the mistake:
With our first changes in Patch 29.2, we wanted to reward our most diligent players and motivate others to play more. But after the changes were implemented, players were not rewarded for their time in the game as hoped. Quite the opposite: Some players quit these difficult quests and ended up playing less instead. Those who completed the weekly quests told us they were arduous.
In other words: It has been recognized that the community was right, and apparently, fans’ time in the game has drastically decreased, prompting Blizzard to admit the mistake.
What will be changed now? Blizzard is completely reverting the changes to the quests in Hearthstone with Patch 31.0 and resetting all quests back to their state before the changes.
At least there are a few more improvements related to the rollback of the changes that everyone can look forward to:
- On the reward path, there are now more packs earlier. 5 of the “50 Gold” rewards will be replaced with packs from the latest expansion.
- Additionally, there will be 4 more packs in the Tavern Pass going forward.
- In the Card Chaos, one will now receive a pack of the latest expansion and no longer a standard pack.
Blizzard further states that the changes to the systems are an ongoing process and they will be looking in the future at where they can make further improvements. We can only hope that these “improvements” will be received much better by the community than last time.
Finally, Hearthstone made headlines with an expensive skin, as one player angrily commented: “60 € for having fewer features!”
