A beautiful Wednesday, isn’t it? The hot summer is finally coming to an end and the time when you can sit in front of the computer without a guilty conscience and perishing from the heat is starting again. It’s just a shame when the games take away your motivation to keep playing. Which game has managed to do that again with the latest patch? Hearthstone of course! But let’s start over: What has actually happened?
The new design of Arena rewards: Frustrating
For me, the Arena mode of Hearthstone has always been the best part of the game. For 150 Gold, you could create a complete deck and play with it until you lose 3 rounds or win 12. Depending on the number of victories, you receive some rewards at the end of the round: Always guaranteed a card pack and then some dust and gold – sometimes more, sometimes less. The great thing about the card pack: It always belonged to the current expansion. While in “Classic” you received normal packs and in “Goblins vs Gnomes” only cards from that set, they have now changed the system. From now on, the player will receive a random pack. What sounds like a sensible innovation at first glance, but significantly dampens the mood for “old hands” like me.
If the game doesn’t motivate me
Before an expansion, I always farmed a lot of gold. When The Grand Tournament was launched, I had gathered about 3,000 gold. That means in the worst case, 20 Arena rounds, thus 20 card packs. To shorten the story: the actual yield of packs at the end was 8 classic, 11 Goblins vs. Gnomes and 13 times The Grand Tournament. Sure, one could now say “you can disenchant the old cards!”, but that only slightly alleviates my discontent. To put it bluntly, I spent 3,000 gold on 13 new card packs. I would have been much better off just buying 30 packs in the shop, at least regarding the pure yield. And thus Hearthstone reaches exactly one conclusion with me: Arena (= actually play the game) is significantly more effective, rewarding, and fun compared to the shop (= just throwing away gold and money).
Paywall to have fun again?
Hearthstone has achieved something I never thought was possible. Although the new cards are grandiose and promise a lot of fun, I don’t want to play anymore. Such a small change has caused neither Arena nor the Ranked mode to bring me joy. In Ranked, I can only have fun again when I have new cards from the Grand Tournament. In the Arena, the enjoyment has significantly decreased because the invested gold does not guarantee a pack from the Grand Tournament. So there’s only one thing left for me: to manually buy card packs. And I don’t want that.
What do you think? Do you like the new reward design in the Arena? Am I overreacting again? Could this have been solved more elegantly? Let me know in the comments!
