by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

As of late there has been a lot of discussion about Hearthstone Ladder System, but most of the effort seems to be focused on its Reward System. How are players being rewarded for their participation in Hearthstone? This is what leads us to today’s question, why are we playing this game?

The answer is rather simple, this game is quite fun. It’s also simple and has an awesome User Interface. But is fun enough in this reward based world?

Despite watching, researching, and crafting a LOT of Hearthstone content every week; personally, I don’t play as much as I could. Normally, I just log in every day to reset quests, and play enough games to make sure I’m not at the quest cap. My collection doesn’t feel strong enough to be making a serious push to Legend, and just by questing on Rank mode I get enough bonus stars at the start of each season that the Monthly card back is an auto-get for me.

You’ll immediately notice that I’m playing just enough to get all the goodies that Blizzard hands out. Investing just enough time for the bigger rewards that come with quests is the most efficient use of my time, and I’m in no rush to really jump ahead. I mean, unless you are fighting it out at the top of the Legends and trying to qualify for the World Championship there’s no point really in playing Hearthstone. The only big reason to play a lot of Hearthstone is to have fun with it, to enjoy it, to have a good time. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of different ways to enjoy something. Constantly improving and testing  yourself is a completely valid way to enjoy this game. Seeing how far can you climb each season and quantifying your progress can be just as rewarding as getting a chunk of a gold, but that’s not for everyone, at least not for me.

I mean, we’ve looked at the Free-to-Play vs Pay-to-Win arguments, and we can all pretty much agree that until you reach a certain breaking point, having a bigger collection will give you an advantage in constructed play. With that in mind it is easy to be frustrated by hitting a wall where it appears that people are out carding you rather than outskilling you. And since at the higher ends of play the evaluation of skills is more subtle, maybe you can’t even tell why you are losing. Do you need a better deck? Do you need to make better plays? Need a better mulligan strategy? It is really hard to tell.

Now the obvious answer would be to buy some packs with Real Cash so you can even out the playing field, right? Sure, if you feel like you have the spare money go for it so you can make sure that your progress is all about your skill (and luck), but what are you getting out of it? Perhaps if there were bigger rewards for players as they climb up the ladder you’d have a bigger incentive to actually get the cards you need to excel, you’d have a bigger incentive to hone your skills to the point where you can dominate your opponents.

But this isn’t just my personal complaint. You can tell that a lot of people share this sentiment just by checking prominent content creators on youtube, threads in dedicated forums, or just seeing what people say on reddit.

So lets look at and analyze the different types of rewards that Hearthstone can give us, and see if we can come up with a reward system that makes sense.

Card Backs as Rewards

This is the main existing reward, and to be honest I’m not happy about it. The Card Backs themselves do look good and are a pretty cool to have, but they are just a cosmetic reward. I like cosmetic rewards as much as the next guy, but one of the keys in customization is standing out. Getting to Rank 20 is almost trivial, thus getting the Season’s Card back doesn’t make you special in any way, it is mainly a token that you were actually active during that month.

If Card Backs were achieved by performing well in the Ladder they would become a token of respect, something that proves that you put some time into the game and actually succeeded.

But the issue is that no matter how much sense it can make, taking stuff away from people is never easy, and often sees severe community backlash. Rank 20 Card Backs is a staple by now and I think it might be too late to remove them. A better option would be to add a second Seasonal Card Back for those who get high on ladder, perhaps a palette swap or a straight up clone with a golden border.

Golden Cards

Golden Cards are the second cosmetic option that Hearthstone has implemented. Golden Cards offer no mechanical advantage over their normal versions, but they do look very pretty. What if players who got higher on ladder got the chance to turn some of their normal cards into Golden ones? It might seem like a silly proposition, but there’s an argument to be made to keep rewards Cosmetic. Golden cards are one of the few options that Hearthstone provides at the moment. This reminds us that a Golden Card can be disenchanted for extra dust, so the cards that you turn Golden via this reward would have to become Soulbound or something that prevented you from disenchanting them.

Non-Cosmetic Rewards

But what about non-cosmetic rewards. You could always give extra dust, gold, and packs depending on how a player ended up his season. What’s the big problem with that approach? Well, imagine you gave really good gold rewards for people who end up in the top 5 ranks. Don’t we always complain that a lot of those people already have good collections? That is hard for newer players to get there? By giving card rewards to high ranked players you are theoretically widening the gap between newer and older players. That exactly the opposite to what we want to do, we want to give newer players a chance to close the gap and try to get on an even playing field.

If you were to give Card Rewards, you would have to make the increments really slow, and as you reach a certain point, which could be considered easily attainable with Free-To-play accounts, you would then stop giving more dust/gold and instead add the Cosmetic Rewards as an incentive for the players to distinguish themself by grinding to the top.

But first things first…

How Many Free Packs do we get a Month?

Without getting into heavy and accurate math, lets say you get 45 Gold on average everyday by completing the daily quest. Lets say you need to win 2 games in average to complete that quest. So every 30 days, you’d get 1350 Gold on quests, plus 200 gold from winning 60 games. That’s about 1550 Gold if you don’t miss a quest. Now, this puts you at about 15 packs. But how much dust do you get per pack? Well, lets take a rough estimate of about 80 dust pack and multiply for the number of packs. This would leave us at 1120 dust per month.

All you need to figure out now is exactly how much you can give as extra monthly rewards without devaluing the option to buy real money packs.

A Mock Reward Structure

Here’s a set of rewards I came up with, this one is extremely conservative and might even seem meaningless to you. While the actual numbers are open for discussion, I think I came up with a very strong foundation that mixes Cosmetic and Non-Cosmetic Rewards, while also avoiding to be a win-more rewards system that continues to splits the power level between paying and non-paying users.

Rank 25-21:

Loot Bag Containing Random Common Card

Rank 20-18:  The Basic Season Card Back, Loot Bag Containing 35 dust and Random Common Card.

Rank 17-15: The Basic Season Card Back, Loot Bag Containing 35 dust and a Random Rare Card.

Rank 14-11: The Basic Season Card Back, Loot Bag Containing 80 dust and a Random Rare Card.

Rank 10-8: The Basic AND Improved Season Card Back, Loot Bag Containing 80 dust and a Random Rare Card.

Rank 7-4: The Basic AND Improved Season Card Back, Loot Bag Containing 80 dust and a Random Rare Card, an item to turn a common card into a golden one.

Rank 3-1: The Basic AND Improved Season Card Back, Loot Bag Containing 80 dust and a Random Rare Card, an item to turn a rare card into a golden one.

Extra Observations:

• While dust is equally good for all types of player, gold might be a better reward when it comes to bringing the F2P users back to speed. While disenchanting a pack will give an average number of dust, new players are more likely to get useful cards that are still missing from their collection. Then the effective Dust that newer players get out of each pack is higher for newer players. Think of it this way, I’m missing a Sylvanas so I want to craft her for 1600 dust. If I get her in a pack then that Sylvanas was worth 1600 dust. Instead when my P2W friend gets his 3rd Sylvanas, that’s only 400 dust for him. So instead of giving 35 and 80 dust, perhaps that reward should be 50 and 120 Gold instead.
• As I mentioned earlier, perhaps the rewards need to feel more significant so people really want to put in the work to succeed at the ladder.  I think now that we have quite a few sets released, you could give up to 300 gold without disturbing the balance. I mean we do need a way for newer players to tackle that entry barrier, don’t we?
• Is Rank 10 high enough for an improved Season Card Back? I originally wanted that to be a Legend only reward, but perhaps getting to Legend is enough of a reward on itself. Maybe it is indeed to hard and would end up discouraging a lot of the players that really wanted that cool card back. Maybe what we really need is something to push us towards the single digits so we can see that grinding it up to Legend is a real possibility and not just a wild dream. I’d love to see what everyone thinks about this. Perhaps a more in-depth analysis of how many players get to each rank every season would be a good indicator.
• A lot has been said about this subject and I’m sure a lot of the things I’m suggesting here have been originally presented by other people. All Credit is due to whoever came up with the ideas, but since I’ve seen some of them floating around so much that I’m not even sure who was the first to come up with them. To be fair, there’s not many realistic options around so people are bound to come up with similar suggestions.

What do you think about this subject? What kind of rewards would push you to actually trying to complete your collection and become a competitive player? Let me know using the comment section below.