A new skin is causing trouble for Hearthstone. Because Blizzard has never asked so much money for an “animated image”.
That Blizzard’s collectible card game Hearthstone has a rather “creative” understanding of pricing is no longer new information. However, how high the prices would actually go was something no one expected. Because now you can spend a whopping 60 euros to have your hero become Ragnaros and take over the battlefield. A pretty fiery price, which elicits many reactions from the community – and hardly any of them are positive.
When Hearthstone introduced the Death Knight, the world was still fine:
What kind of skin is this? The Ragnaros skin can be used by both shamans and warriors. As the first “mythical” skin, it is at least visually opulent. Instead of a 2D animation, Ragnaros is completely 3D animated and extends beyond his own portrait. When he attacks, he bursts forth from a lava lake. Upon victory, he engulfs the entire battlefield in fire while the opponent explodes.
The lower half of the battlefield is also completely taken over by Ragnaros, replacing the actual game board with frying pans, volcanoes, and lava.
Visually and technically, this is definitely the most impressive skin Hearthstone has released to date and a real eye-catcher.
As an additional bonus, there are 3 card packs each for warriors and shamans.
However, there are also clear drawbacks that people criticize. A popular little feature of Hearthstone is the game boards that can be interacted with – you can click on small things, trigger different animations, or even find little puzzles. If you have the Ragnaros skin, none of that exists. The battlefield taken over by Ragnaros has no interactions, as streamer Rarran pointed out without surprise:
Whether one is willing to pay 60 € for this – the cost of a new full-price title – is of course another matter. At least the community has a clear opinion.
This is how the community reacts: It is not surprising that the community shows almost no understanding for this skin and is clearly upset on social media or in the Hearthstone subreddit:
- “I really don’t understand why Hearthstone skins have prices like skins in League of Legends, which I already think are too expensive. They are already expensive at $20 with voice lines, a set of animations, taunts, dances, interactions, and so on.
For [60 $] you still have to create a whole deck for one of these two classes to at least be able to use [the skin]. The least they could do is include a current meta deck that changes every few months.” – Refelol - “60 $ for a non-interactable battlefield and the normal hero ability. Blizzard has seriously cheated the community with this.” – The_Bridge_Guy
It is also criticized that the latest expansion did not receive its own game board, which many see as a sign of doom, even if Blizzard denies it. Many are even more annoyed that this missing new battlefield apparently now came into the game in the form of an expensive skin. Therefore, Elune_ writes:
- “Expansion game boards and cinematics are dead for that.”
Currently, it seems that the developers of Hearthstone are not good at making the community happy. This leads to many concerns that they are only trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of Hearthstone before Microsoft “shuts the game down.” However, this is only an unconfirmed theory, which continues to gain traction through such offerings.
On the other hand, it must be said that this is a completely optional expenditure that brings no benefits at all – except to let the whole world know that you apparently have a lot of money to spare for video games. The “wrong” spending of money seems to be a generational problem anyway.
