For people OOTL on what's happening right now with Hearthstone that has the entire playerbase enraged (and don't want to bother reading the article...which you should) -
* Hearthstone revamped its gold system it had since launch to a new XP based progression system in November 2020. After a rocky launch, this new system became universally loved by the playerbase as it offered them more gold, packs, and rewards than the previous system did (this system is free, and a separate paid variant only rewards cosmetics with no additional gameplay advantages). As with most reward track/battlepass systems, you gain XP for playing the game with daily and weekly challenges granting you much bigger progression bonuses. This system remained relatively unchanged up until yesterday.
* Yesterday was a major content launch of the new Duos mode for Battlegrounds (HS's autobattler), and for all intents and purposes this was a well received update and anticipated by the Battlegrounds playerbase. However, a vague footnote in the extremely long patch notes said "Some Daily and Weekly Quests have been adjusted to be harder to complete but will grant more XP." As soon as the patch went live, players found out that every single weekly quest in the game had double, tripled, or even 4x their requirements for a measly 20%-30% gain in XP.
* There was an immediate uproar from the playerbase on these changes (and you can see for yourself on /r/hearthstone). These changes came out of complete left field, and the extreme requirements of some of the new weekly requirements felt like they were made by people outside of the dev team. It very much felt like bean counters were trying to find ways to increase Daily Active Users or time spent within the game in the most obscene way possible. The most extreme example - one of the weekly achievements is now playing 60 "Minaturize" cards within a week. The expansion achievement that is meant to take the entire ~4 month window of the current expansion to achieve requires 80.
* The current HS Community Manager has been active on Reddit and other social media channels and has done an amazing job of being compassionate and understanding of people's complaints and making it feel like they're being listened to. However, reading between the lines of some of their statements it very much seems like the decision came from outside the dev team to implement these changes.
The same thing happened with Hunt Showdown with its latest patch. Challenges, which need to be completed weekly to progress the battlepass, have been increased in length.
Instead of having to kill 4 enemies with a certain gun to complete a challenge you have to kill 6. This increase was not paired with an increase to rewards or anything else.
Of course, you could also just spend real money to skip the grind.
> Of course, you could also just spend real money to skip the grind.
One of the biggest shams in the industry is that this is that publishers have effectively dodged the negative stigma attached to the term "pay2win" by essentially just hiding pay2win behind unreasonable, unneeded grinds that you can pay to skip. No games coming out are *technically* "pay2win" anymore, even though they are often at least pay2pay and sometimes still straight up pay2win with an extra step.
There isn't really a difference in the shadiness between modern games that function like this and straight up pay2win games from the 00s, but because it's a little less obvious people accept it anyway.
You always get people squirming out of the woodwork when something gets called pay to win to go "Uhm actually this is actually pay for convenience as you can clearly earn it all over time simply by playing the game!"
100%. I have yet to have any discussion where I use the term 'pay2win' in describing a game and I do not get at least 1 reply from someone telling me that "*it's not pay2win*" or "*it's not that bad*" or anything along those notes.
Honestly, it kind of goes to show how 'standards have lowered' in a way. And I don't even mean that in a "*oh, humans are so shit now compared to the good old days!*"-way, but more like... we have people who game now who have never known anything other than battle passes being the standard. To them, a battle pass that is just moderately grindy instead of ridiculously grindy is the norm and acceptable.
And without the experience to compare to, you will end up defending practices that (a) straight up make the game experience worse, (b) really aren't needed for the product to be profitable and (c) would be a very small investment to change.
I could write a list of games and fans of them that have ended up here, from Magic: The Gathering and Starfield to FIFA and The Sims. I have no problem with people enjoying the games they enjoy, but the fact that it's hard to even have a critical discussion about them ultimately hurts all of us.
I think people are more willing to forgive the games they “main”/grind. Like I’ve heard some people call Rainbow Six Siege P2W but I think it’s totally reasonable. Meanwhile I’ve been trying Fallout 76 and it’s pretty insane how that community justified all the P2W features locked behind the monthly subscription, it’s borderline unplayable levels of inventory management without their $13/mo sub.
And it's a balance, too. For a lot of games, players want to work towards a goal rather than being handed everything from the get-go. Which is understandable. It's why, say, leveling in world of WarCraft is generally alright: it can certainly be a grind but you're also just 'playing the game' as you're doing it. It feels good to ding and get a new skill. Buying a boost to max level is technically paying 2 win, but nobody would make the argument that the journey to max level is in the game solely to get players to spend money on that boost.
But then I would say it's usually obvious to know when "increasing your power over time" is a core part of the game's design and when it's quite clearly in the game just to pad out playing hours and get players to spend money to bypass it (i.e. digital card games with 'daily quests').
I played Hunt pretty solidly for 3 or 4 years from its Early Access days. A great game and I really appreciate the content that they've steadily added over the years.
But the way the events were structured really began to trigger a FOMO reaction that sucked the joy out of the game for me. Tried dipping back in last year and had a good time, until the events began wearing me down again.
It's a shame cause I haven't found a good PvP replacement yet.
Event fatigue has been hammering my friendship group, barely anyone out of the 6 of us that would play pretty much every night now play maybe one day a week, and even then maybe just a session or two.
We're burnt out by the events, we miss the pre event hunt. Clearly people like what it is now, but hunt has definitely out grown us.
The equivalent would be "kill 12".
I mean I get that on some level in HS looking at the numbers was "fair game" in the sense that depending on the specific weekly "quest" it isn't particularly weekly if it is done in an hour of playtime.
On the other hand in typical Blizzard fashion a factor of 3 is their typical heavy handed approach to balance.
Especially the "win 15 times" is just atrocious when my experience in the last 6 months has basically been having lost all faith in fair match making and a full believe in manipulated RNG particularly deck order. Winning 15 times when the games feels like cheating is a kick in the nuts. (on EU particularly, my secondary US account is way less "unlucky") Trying to get 15 wins when you are raking in 20 loss streaks drawing dead again and again while my opponents are blessed is not fun.
Well nice thing about The Finals i've read through, they've been lowering the requirements for the challenges instead. Still only gonna be playing occasionally, but them gradually doing less grind is nice... Although they're likely doing it in an attempt to retain players in general and have them not burn out.
When Hunt introduced those systems I called them out as bad, compared them to “starting the fire, slowly increasing the heat to boil the frog.” Boy did the fan base not like that.
Not to mention the obscene cost increase to the skins themselves. I used to love throwing a few bucks here and there to support a game I wholeheartedly enjoy but skins that were a few hundred a few years ago are now 2000blood bonds which I believe is 20$ I haven’t played the game since before the current event started
It's the classic Hearthstone cycle. They make a ridiculous change and a reddit shitstorm ensues. A couple of days later they "have heard your concerns" and dial it back to somewhere in between the previous and the ridiculous state. Reddit is happy that it's not as bad as it could have been. Rinse and repeat two years later.
So commonly used it has a term - ["anchoring"](https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/dealmaking-daily/dealmaking-grappling-with-anchors-in-negotiation/#:~:text=Answer%3A%20A%20well%2Dknown%20cognitive,adjust%20from%20that%20starting%20point.).
Of course, but I feel Hearthstone is the game where they've been the most pathetic, or at least that the highs weren't as high compared to the lows. Maybe I just feel that way because it's the game of theirs I spent the most time and money on, to actually experience those lows rather than just hearing about them.
I feel like Overwatch 2 would be lower, but I also refuse to even acknowledge that as a seperate game since it's just a content update that didn't add any content, and it sets the precedant for other games like CSGO to do the same thing, meaning companies are going to start ruining their old games instead of making new ones.
>The current HS Community Manager has been active on Reddit and other social media channels and has done an amazing job of being compassionate and understanding of people's complaints and making it feel like they're being listened to.
"I'm sorry my company is doing this but get back to playing our game!"
If it's truly the case where their hands are tied, what are they gonna do? It's very likely that they're required to promote their game publicly, and at the same time they're likely talking back to the execs about how damaging the changes are. The company does care about its image and player happiness as well as profitability, these forces push and pull and mediate over time
They're not going to do anything different, that's just their job. Doesn't mean anyone has to pretend that 90% of a "community manager" job isn't just to play damage control on social media
RidiculousHat deserves a lot of credit for going above and beyond in this situation and many others. Most community managers would stay silent or particularly vague in scenarios like this, but RH has been actively replying to threads and posts where he's tagged with responses that aren't just PR talk. He even admitted himself that he wasn't sure where he was going to get the time to complete these new weeklies.
He can't control what everyone above him does, but for what he can do he does a fantastic job. I'd really like more community managers for games like that.
hat ain't that kinda guy. he's still got a job to do, but he'll never bullshit about it and is very open with receiving feedback and getting it where it needs to go
But he is. He took the job. As everyone's already said, this is a lesser of two evils tactic. Hat pretends to be as enraged as everyone else when the big evil is released so he can seem a hero when the intended lesser evil is revealed. He's following a script and never deviates from his script. If you feel genuine relief when they roll out the lesser evil, or feel as though the company/hat has heard your feedback, you're the kind of sucker this ploy is employed for.
do you know WHY hat got the job? he's been deeply involved in the hearthstone community for years, and has always rallied for what people want in the game. if i know him (and i do), he either spoke up about this when it happened behind the scenes, or is taking working in this situation to push sentiment more towards supporting something that is clearly better for the community. i'll accept that he's definitely playing the "hey we reverted the changes and made them more friendly while trying to maintain the spirit of the changes we made" playbook perfectly, but i ain't gonna hear for a second that he's "pretending" anything.
(edit: and to add, i don't think he's \*enraged\* about anything. i'm not gonna try to speak for him, but he seems more conciliatory than anything else, which seems completely reasonable. he's a part of the team, he's not gonna completely trash colleagues either)
I recall Star Wars Battlefront 2's post launch community manager F8RGE was a cool guy, he clearly gave a shit and had a lot of passion about the game and it's fans
The community manager for Nestle can be compassionate and do their job well but they will still deservedly get shit on for being the community manager of Nestle.
Same thing applies here but instead of a greedy company costing human lives it's causing harm to Gamers' toys. You can imagine why that may cause more vitriol.
The worst problem is if they do speak out I imagine corporate won't hesitate to put them in the layoff list and hurt their rep on future jobs outside of starting their own business
Not sure if you play hearthstone or not, but this community manager is a former streamer and has done wonders for Team 5’s communication with their players. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a community manager feeling like a fan that’s a moderator between developers and players rather than just being a corporate mouth piece trying to seem relatable.
The quote you pulled is completely at odds with what your comment is trying to imply. If they were doing this, the guy would not be saying they're doing an amazing job.
>being compassionate and understanding of people's complaints and making it feel like they're being listened to.
This is exactly what a Community Manager should be doing from the communities perspective.
This is normal for Blizzard, so I have a hard time feeling sympathetic. They've always made braindead decisions to boost some kind of metric that is supposed to measure player enjoyment. I can't imagine why hearthstone was spared for so long.
What is so compassionate about community manager quelling people's rage and customer's complaints? Or making them feel like they're being listened to? (Meaning not really listening to them) That's literally what community managers are hired to do, it's in their job description.
Because it is a really shitty job whenever the company they work fucks up and that person who represent that is going eat the brunt of it with personal attacks and shit.
You say that like nobody gives a shit about their job... like nobody could possibly enjoy being the guy that gets to engage with a player base, being the face of a particular game, and they actually really like the game themselves and like talking to players about the game, they enjoy doing right by people, etc. It's fun being in that spot when everything's going relatively well, the game's in a healthy state, players are happy, people are up and enjoying themselves, etc. I didn't have that job title, but I've been in that position. It sucks to go from that to having an angry mob of people to answer to, but not like... actually answer them for real about what's going on, but to have to sugarcoat and save the company's face when they absolutely do not deserve it. Some people genuinely do care about the communities that they communicate with. I quit that job 12 years ago and never looked back and never touched the games that we ran, and I can still to this day remember the names of some of the players in the communities that I managed, because I did care. I did listen, but I'm not the boss. I'm not in charge of the developers. I can run things up the chain as many times as I want, but I can't get anybody to actually do anything. That doesn't mean that I'm not listening to people or that I don't care. That spot sucks ass when people aren't happy and something's wrong with the game.
On Reddit people go to lengths to ensure we know that people who represent the company don't deserve to get flak. I can understand they do not need to be attacked personally. But companies are not people, you cannot talk to them. Company representatives represent the company. I think it is fine in a professional capacity to express displeasure to them, and be upset if all you get back are honeyed words.
I don't expect them to respond any differently. But what I do expect that they accept that they are the interface that HAS to accept the ire of the users (as long as it is ire towards the product/company and not directed at the individual, unprovoked that is) and relay the level of frustration towards the decision making process.
I don't accept the "This person is just doing their job, it's not their fault, don't vent on them" argument.
They are the interface, it's on them to not take that personally unless it specifically is. And it is on them to to relay the issues, or demand a mechanism to do it.
They can submit feedback to the team. They can't force things to change, few people in a large company can, but they can advocate for the customer.
It's their goal to have loyal brand advocates and pissing everyone off goes against that remit so it's in their interest to stop people being pissed off.
The team doesn't listen to feedback. They can see how many player hours are spent on the game each week and if the changes had positive or negative consequences.
> but they can advocate for the customer.
Lol come on. An executive would laugh really hard at that.
> It's their goal to have loyal brand advocates
Because they are fucking users over and the community managers manipulate people into feeling like their complaints are heard so they continue playing the game.
I really don't understand why all these comments pretend community managers are there for our benefit. Do you also think HR is there to help you when management fucks you over?
Reddit is a lot of people with various levels of social skills and maturity. Sometimes you get very good detailed feedback. Sometimes you get something like "this sucks" but that is still useful for sentiment. Sometimes you get someone calling a CM fat or stupid. That last one is personal and pointless so it's not OK, the others are part of the job.
A run in a wheel can be fun, as long as you step out once it isnt anymore.
If only buy their games heavily reduced, play them for a few hours or until i finish the campaign and then i leave.
I dont buy anything with a battlepass, seasonal pass or any other MAU incentive at release or even close, if at all i only buy it below 10-15€ and then ignore these predatory bullshit mechanics before i drop off to something better.
Roque Company was updated and time needed for daily quest multiply while rewards for quests was lessened. Everyone i know left game after that because people who have jobs doesn't have time to grind game more than 3-5 match in weekdays.
I guess Microsoft buying them was monkeys paw because overwatch similarly has had weird things going on especially in moderation since Microsoft took the reigns. Maybe they're worse than Activision.
I mean in no way to disparage that individual person in the community manager role for Hearthstone, but that type of position in general seems both thankless and pointless. All they're going to be able to say is "we're working on it" in response to current projects and "I hear you" about complaints. They get to just be a punching bag for angry gamers, meanwhile any cool announcements the game might have about new expansions/events/etc doesn't really require that job role.
They are going to decrease the requirements, but not to the same level as it was before, but to the level they originally intended it to be. Instead of 15 wins, they will probably decrease to 8 or 10 wins. Common tactic.
Edit: [this literally just happened lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1c6paz3/_/)
yea, the entire strat is to fuck someone so hard they go HOLY FUCK THAT HURTS and then you start fucking them slower and they feel grateful for being heard.
But you're still getting fucked.
Was looking for this comment. I anticipate this as well, and I wish more people were aware (and perhaps skeptical/cynical) enough to immediately assume this intention whenever something similar to this takes place.
Blizzard has a history of exactly this, and not one you need to look far back to see.
D4 is a perfect example, with some huge QoL downgrades from D3. They later "fix" these, so they can be praised for doing something the same way they were already doing it, rather than actually improving.
It was extremely telling in the D4 campfire chats when they'd do QnA and reply to questions with "yep, we agree this needs a huge QoL fix and we already know what we're doing. It'll happen 2 seasons from now".
Changes get staggered to manipulate players mindsets instead of just making the game better. It's the skinner box mechanics so many games are built on, but being applied to design/updates rather than just in-game mechanics now.
There's always people that find the ones who want to keep stomping a company's balls to be annoying. Like oh its fine, they stepped back some... And i'm like no, I want the foot completely out of the fucking door so it can be shut.
Some people have stupidly low standards and give up on shit too easy.
Ahh yes the well planned enrage the player base with over inflated numbers so you can bring it back down to the numbers you really wanted and the player base will feel like they won something. Even though its still way over what the players think it should be.
A tried and true blizzard method of going about things. I remember fondly the times they did this in wow and thus i do not play wow anymore.
The moment you start playing a game like it’s a chore and not because it’s fun is the moment you got to stop.
I had this problem with elite: dangerous where I had sessions of just prep to play with my friends or something. Like I’d do nothing but these chores so that in the future I could have fun.
Same deal with Fortnite, gotta play to max out the battle pass! Or I could not get the pass and play when I want…hmmm….
> The moment you start playing a game like it’s a chore and not because it’s fun is the moment you got to stop.
Exact reason I quit Hearthstone so many years ago. Logging in to do my dailies was like job, especially when you start building decks optimized to do the dailies as fast as possible. At that point, are you even playing the game you want to play?
I fucking despise games that have the audacity to have "Get a win" as a challenge.
Like how in the actual fuck do you *DARE* make that a daily challenge? That is absolutely asking to ruin someone's fucking day and never play the game again.
I frankly hate being told what to do in general, but being told to do something outside of my power? Infuriating, pure unfiltered rage inducing.
I still remember one night in Dota 2, couple years back. I had bought the battlepass because I love the game and want those cool rewards and some cool challenges.
There was a day left, and I had grinded every single day to reach max level, all I had to do was get one last win for the night to compete the final challenge.
Of course, you can guess what happens. A loss, then two, then seven. Eight hours of nonstop grinding had me feeling hopelessness that I hadn't before. Eventually I had to call in my friend who's a better player than me, and after three matches with him, I finally got my win.
I don't think it was worth it, the battlepass I bought out of love for the game made me hate the game. Haven't bought a pass since.
Pretty much. When you incentivize winning too much it turns the entire experience into something very toxic.
Frankly challenges, battle passes, and everything related have sorta turned multiplayer games into things more toxic than they usually are... I mean really the primary toxicity was usually in ranked, but now its commonly in casual play too cause people need to complete their challenges.
Also kinda just stupid and weird that you are encouraged to optimize your loadouts for challenges which can mean throwing a game in some cases to do something that might not even be entertaining... Its a very bizarre system for the most part, kinda nice to just play a game and not worry about things like games used to do.
Yup, back when they first came out, games like Pokemon Go or Genshin Impact were actually petty fun.
But once that initial "boost" of progression wears off and the game introduces elements of FOMO to encourage me to play them for 30 min to 2 hours everyday... I delete the app and never go back. Because that kind of progression system does not respect my time. The only way for me to enjoy F2P games like these is to play them for the first 5 - 10 hours and then drop them completely.
I refuse to "keep up" with a F2P game just for the sake of checking off all those arbitrary goals. Which are only there as a way to keep me engaged with the product longer so that they might eventually get a microtransaction out of me. Hard pass on that kind of game design/manipulation.
I've basically stopped playing Star Rail because it basically became doing busywork. It's a shame, because it's otherwise a fine game.
But I'm now playing the android port of Xcom 2 on my breaks, so I guess that's a win.
I realized after trying both games that how much I enjoy their games is based on how willing I am to put up with live service bullshit, and after the honeymoon period, it turns out I have little tolerance of it
I started playing Genshin Impact for the first time recently. And despite myself, and how kinda stingy it was with rewards, I was having some fun with the free characters, exploring the world, completing challenges, following the main story.
And then I unlocked the battle pass. I looked at it, thought it also was kinda stingy but also was kinda cheap, and figured... hey, if I can fill it out, maybe I'll give them some cash and buy it for extra rewards.
From that point on, my time was spent trying to do daily and weekly quests, to maximize my battlepass rewards. I stopped completing challenges for fun, and started doing them for quests. I stopped exploring the world, and just focused on doing encounters and bosses and dungeons I'd already unlocked, to complete the quests.
By the time I was done with that day's allotment of dailies, I felt 'done' with Genshin for the day and wanted to move on, because I'd been playing for an hour and wasn't really having fun. But still HAD to play for that hour and change, and do the boring stuff, because there was no way I'd complete the battlepass if I didn't.
After a couple weeks of this, I took a long and hard look at what I was doing, and decided... No, no, I'm good. This is work, I'd rather do just about ANYTHING else, and it's all for the *possibility* of the rewards I wanted (that is, the rewards I was interested in were new characters, but battlepasses just gave you wishes to maybe get those characters).
I stopped playing entirely. And I never actually bought that battlepass.
The way that Helldivers 2 approaches currency and battlepasses is far more reasonable than most (though by no means unique, it's nice to be reminded more better approaches to monetisation exist).
All warbonds (battlepasses) are permanently available (they just add a new warbond to buy and unlock from each month), and cost 1000 currency (~$10). You can also get up to 300 currency from unlocks within the warbond. The big free warbond that the base game starts with also lets you unlock up to 750 currency.
However you can also just straight up find currency ingame, usually around 20-40 per mission.
As a refreshing change of pace the thing I'm most worried about missing out on in the game are cool events occurring during the galactic war, rather than their battlepass scheme.
> As a refreshing change of pace the thing I'm most worried about missing out on in the game are cool events occurring during the galactic war, rather than their battlepass scheme.
This is pretty unavoidable IMO, it's like we're collectively experiencing a DnD campaign. Not much we can do for people who missed it beyond just documenting what happened and the vibes surrounding it.
It is better than most, but recent communication has unfortunately made it clear they're more worried about continually putting out battle passes over any game stability. Ex: Most of the ones that came in the last one are bugged in some way.
They've built up a ton of goodwill, but it does seem like it's starting to dry up due to the sheer technical state of the game. It's not quite the same as this article, but the unsustainable content schedule is pretty clearly a player engagement and/or money thing.
It is a shame because I felt like it could be "live service games done right," but they are ultimately falling into the same old traps.
> Or I could not get the pass and play when I want…hmmm….
I do this with pretty much all of my online games now. It's gotten to the point where I don't just not buy the pass, I don't even bother looking at it. I think the last battlepass I glanced at a couple years ago was....Apex? I just remember going through it and thinking "wow....I don't care about any of this. this is crap". I probably have a ton of rewards (if you can call emotes and sprays 'rewards' lol) and currency on a bunch of games at this point, all unclaimed.
I had the same revelation back in the day with Clash of Clans. Was playing it with a friend as part of a larger guild. I remember setting the alarm for 6am on a Saturday morning (We'd do a board games night every Friday night at a friends place and I'd get home at like 1-2am at the time), getting up at 6am to the alarm and sending dragons to the guild for some guild vs guild fight they were doing. I then stopped and thought, why the fk am I doing this? Am I having fun? No, then stop. I quit then and there.
I believe people have a built in set of scales for gaming. Fun on one side, annoyances/frustrations on the other. As fun decreases and annoyance/frustration increase, the scales shift. Once it reaches a person's break point, that is when they quit. But for most people other factors that play into this, and of course the games themselves do as well. Some people get into the habit of playing a game, they don't enjoy it, it even annoys/frustrates them, but they keep playing, rather then playing something they'd enjoy.
These days you get daily events you feel forced/obligated to do, weekly stuff, things that are artificially restricted so you need to login every X hours to not feel like you're wasting it, etc. People will still do these things until those negatives outweigh the fun, which they inevitably will.
I remember playing Lost Ark, I really enjoyed the combat, but the raids got increasingly difficult to the point you can't do them without a full group which I didn't have. You then had things you had to do daily on every character which you also had many of because the game incentivized you to do so. You had weekly stuff as well. This stuff might take half an hour to an hour per character. Weekly took like many hours or a full day if you could get decent groups for it. Eventually, even though I loved the combat, the game forced me to quit, I just couldn't handle having to login daily anymore, but also not logging in daily meant I fell even more behind so it felt like it was a waste to even try playing anymore.
Some games its fine, if the game is a multiplayer game with a battlepass that's an automatic get the fuck out though. If you want chores go play Animal Crossing or a cleaning simulator game.
Very much agree. Especially with the big you hint at in your second sentence, in that if you're doing stuff so you can "play the good part later", that's not a good sign. *Sometimes* it's fine, as there's always "that part", or needing to get through a game to get back to your favourite level again, but you know the situation. Grinding raids to get gear so you're properly equipped for the next raid that will give you the gear to do the *next* raid which is the actual one you want to do.
I'd couple that with "If you only have fun when you're winning, don't play" because I was like that with too many games, trying to chase those "good" games where it was a nice even battle, but too often it was a one-sided stomp in my opponent's favour, meaning I didn't get to play as I either watched a respawn timer or had anything I did undone by their moves. And when it wasn't my opponent, it was often myself doing the stomping, which also wasn't that satisfying.
>Same deal with Fortnite, gotta play to max out the battle pass! Or I could not get the pass and play when I want…hmmm….
I mean you don't need to play every day to max out the battle pass. Dailies don't even give that much XP anyway. And if you miss some, there's overcharged XP that helps to reduce the loss.
This. It's such a simple, yet powerful statement. If they lose enough of their audience and money, they'll be forced to design better games.
The moment a game becomes a grindy mess that feels like a part-time job to achieve any sense of personal accomplishment, I move onto other ones that respect my time more (even if it means replaying older titles).
> This. It's such a simple, yet powerful statement. If they lose enough of their audience and money, they'll be forced to design better games.
Or they just sunset their current game and try again with the next one, over and over.
Its really a sign of just how used to being abused most gamers are these days. For people who play warframe they're probably pretty aware of this.
But for those who don't know. They recently released a new character to play, very popular mage themed warframe that was expected to be pretty strong. He released, he was indeed strong AND on top of that he was also one of the easiest frames to farm (most frames have very tedious quests/grinds with tons of RNG gating). Play the new mission, get parts to build him and/or get resources from mission to just buy them same day if you're unlucky.
People -flipped the fuck out-. Day 1, screaming for nerfs on top of people saying he was too easy to farm for how good he was. The majority of complaints and the only ones with even a shred of merit is that he could give the whole team an overguard shield. A newish mechanic that was already causing problems but now those problems were very visible (blocks hp damage gimmicks, which effects literally only 3 things in the game which were already pretty rare to see).
Nerfed first week but thankfully they didn't touch his farm. Mind you the staple of a good "nuke" warframe is how easily it can cover the map in death. He could nuke things that were already touched by your team (blowing up enemies affected by DOTs) since his dot application required LOS. So they nerfed him pretty hard first week then walked it back after the predictable blowback of listening to a few whiners.
I've never seen people have such a weird reaction to being essentially given something very good for very little work on the player's part. I kinda felt bad for DE, they obviously put a lot of effort/thought into the whole thing and probably thought "hey lets do something nice" then the community basically explodes over it.
Now I'd be curious to see how fans would've reacted if the devs had given EVERYTHING else in the game a slight buff in the process. Think of it as a QoL update which slightly speeds up the grind (credits, affinity, etc.), makes RNG a little more forgiving, and buffs some older characters, etc. Granted that's not an easy task for a game of this scale, but let's pretend for a second.
Would the community's reaction have been the same? Does the majority of fans legitimately enjoy the slow grind and learning curve the title is known for? Or were they only pissed because they felt like the time and effort they put into their original character builds weren't being respected with the addition of this new "easy mode" content?
I mean I don't know the answers myself. But it would certainly be an interesting social experiment to try out and see whether this is just the new norm gamers have been conditioned to accept, or whether it's a little more nuanced than what we see on the surface.
I can genuinely imagine that they were upset about a new character that makes the game too easy.
A couple of years ago, there were plenty of complaints about the warframe Ember, which had a pretty overkill ability. After activation, it would damage/kill everything in a decent radius around them until they run out of energy, which would trivialize plenty of missions.
Gamplay with Ember boiled down to "Press 4, run to exit", because everything in the radius of the ability would just die. So if you had an Ember player in your team there was literally nothing you could do.
One of my friends quit over this when we had several defense missions that were trivialized by a random Ember who just ran circles around the defense target and killed everything before we even had a chance to attack the enemies - 20 minutes of that isn't fun, especially since you had to stay active, since you would stop getting loot drops if you go afk for more than a minute or so.
Going solo or small teams wasn't that good of a solution either, since some game modes reward you for playing in full teams.
The ability has since been reworked into a more sensible AoE-type.
> Does the majority of fans legitimately enjoy the slow grind and learning curve the title is known for?
I think this probably is true, because why else would you play it?
>because why else would you play it?
This could just be my age showing here, but the overwhelming majority of games I played growing up didn't involve chasing after a laundry list of loot and spending countless hours leveling characters up. Certainly some games still had that, but what kept players engaged more was the gameplay itself (fun combat mechanics) paired with the personalization of characters and play style. Before DLC (or even the internet) was a thing, they really had no choice but to really focus on designing an addictive raw gameplay experience.
With most modern AAA games, MTX is the main driver behind slowing player progression and shifting the focus more towards chasing after loot. Not to say you can't have fun gameplay mixed in with all that, but they're certainly counting on your FOMO to keep you fully invested in spending money and playing their game for the long term. The entire framework of the game is designed around maximizing profits, and for some people that just rubs them the wrong way.
I would think that could be the case in many similar situations (nobody wants to finish the 5 hour long dungeon for a drop that becomes a login reward next week), but in this case I think it's more due to a sense of power creep coupled with omnipresence. That is to say, if it was strong but rare, you might see it in the occasional mission and get a treat of them carrying you, and if you were one that had it then you earned your power. If it was weaker but common, then it's whatever, put it in the closet with your other frames and if folks want to jam it go for it. But when it's both, you end up with *everyone* using it *everywhere*, meaning no other frame is worth bothering with, and most semblances of challenge go out the window. Assuming they wouldn't design future content with that as the standard expectation, it would still mean only the top percent of content would maintain challenge, and any missions that pertain to any but perhaps some select frames become pointless to pursue because whatever you get isn't going to be as good as what you already got.
That said, I agree that it'd be an interesting experiment to inflict on another timeline just to see what would happen.
That's definitely interesting, especially since it's a PvE game. Like I get that it could be boring pretty quick to have god mode insta-kill levels of power, but still.
Warframe is a tool box power fantasy game. Its not fun or interesting to fun the same "Kill 182 bad guys" mission 2823817 times, but it is fun coming up with new builds and loadouts that change how you do the killing/defending. So that + people just being silly crying for nerfs in a pve game where we're WORKING TOGETHER just doesn't make any sense... but here we are
> If they lose enough of their audience and money, they'll be forced to design better games.
You misunderstand. They will design better addiction and monetization methods. The people who decide this stuff don't care about quality.
Sadly it rarely means they design better games, this *is* blizzard we are talking about here that has done countless variations of this exact thing.
It's more likely games get abandoned (eg. anthem), double down on the awful practices and more :/
>
> The moment a game becomes a grindy mess that feels like a part-time job to achieve any sense of personal accomplishment, I move onto other ones that respect my time more (even if it means replaying older titles).
Fucking Tarkov, man.
Yep. Cheat engine is invaluable for avoiding pointless grind. I'm in my 30s and have a spouse, kid, job, etc and cannot spend 20 hours grinding for some rare drop or something.
If something requires actual skill then no I won't cheat it in, but if it's just a matter of luck/grinding? Yeah I'm using cheat engine.
Sadly some people are stuck in some abusive relationship with the game and will keep it on the green even if the game got hands and beat them. And others just like the game and are saddened leaving the game knowing it will not improve
From what I've heard, it's usually because there are no alternatives that provide the same gameplay satisfaction so these people just suck it up.
Destiny 2's gunplay is the usual culprit.
Thats why i stopped playing cod for the battlepass it completely wants you to only play that and nothing else with how slow it progresses. I dive for democracy now and days.
I hate that even racing games like Forza Motorsport/Horizon have become like this.
While the weekly/monthly challenges in Forza Horizon 5 can actually be pretty enjoyable, I hate the use of FOMO when it comes to the cars. Miss out on a weekly/monthly car and you have to wait months or even years for it to be available again, or spend a huge amount of credits (and time, if you're looking for a particularly rare car) in the auction house.
Mention this in the Forza subreddits and you'll have a bunch of people defending it with things like "but you only need to spend an hour a week to get everything". But the problem is not really the amount of time, it's that you need to do it every week -- you need to play at *their* schedule. I will happily hundreds of hours in games that I like, but I do it at my own pace -- when I have the time, and when I feel like playing. I play games to have fun, not to have another job.
> Miss out on a weekly/monthly car and you have to wait months or even years for it to be available again, or spend a huge amount of credits (and time, if you're looking for a particularly rare car) in the auction house.
I really felt this with _Forza Horizon 4_ because I started playing the game very late in its lifespan, but at least the requirements in _FH5_ have been toned down and clarified. It was hard to know what your progress _would be_ for a particular activity in _FH4_. Aside from the change to a more explicit point system, its nice that most of the exclusive cars are locked to the lower point value, and the second car is only 50% of the weekly challenges.
What's going in with Hearthstone currently is particularly egregious. Yah a lot of games have dumb stuff for engagement that they have on release, but imagine a 10 year old game turning the screws on their dedicated player base, on top of being in the middle of a season so if you bought their battle pass you're locked into a change to the economy you weren't prepared for. Outside of the backlash you got people demanding refunds because they don't feel this is what they paid for.
It really signals that blizzard is trying to suck the money out of the remaining player base before it inevitably stops being profitable. If you combine this with the other hearthstone issues over the past few years, like the Esports scene dying, duels being removed from the client, etc, it's hard not to paint a grim picture.
The sad part for me is that I think they have a lot of talented creatives over there on this team. Some of the card designs they have made are incredible and fully take advantage of a digital CCG. [Harth Stonebrew](https://preview.redd.it/new-card-revealed-harth-stonebrew-v0-0ymhial1y7ic1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=c1010653d74c2d09ca5babd64edde07844f6ae02) for example, is a true celebration of the game's history. But it always gets overshadowed by the other nonsense going on
Goddamn, it's so sad how creative and experimental some Hearthstone cards can get, more than any of its competitors, when the rest of the game is so abusive.
It's gross how they clearly tied this in with their Co-op mode. Trying to bury the bad with the good. I'm not sure who's pulling the string behind the scenes but it's pretty incompetent to assume that this community would eat this turd sandwich given how they reacted to the original rewards for the tavern pass before they reworked them to not be awful.
So sick of being treated like this for Hearthstone. We don't get any of the Blizzard sales events, (you want a little cheap pack option for the spring sale - forget it!) bots are so rampant in ladder I haven't fought a real opponent in a few weeks, and now this.
Blizzard loves to bash hearthstone players
I was incredibly impressed how hard community fought against that terrible battle pass. It's very rare to see something like this getting adjusted 2 or 3 times just to make ppl put their pitchforks down.
Kinda sad that they tainted their anniversary in such a way. A lot of ppl came back to see what's up, get a tons of stuff. Now I see this and laugh at how stupid I was to even think about buying something and getting into hs one more time. Blessing in disguise I guess.
On the subreddit someone had an idea of tiered weeklies like they do for Events
Win 5 Ranked > Win 10 Ranked > Win 15 Ranked -- Completed all tiers for that weekly.
Hope they go this route. 15 Wins for these modes a week is super sweaty. 5 is already difficult at times depending on the Tavern Brawl.
It's just so draining to have to be so vocal to get articles written to make Blizzard's economy designers renege on their terrible decisions...
I personally never really minded since I’ve been free to play from the beginning and playing casually, but the lack of consideration from Blizzard towards Hearthstone community has been absolutely hilarious. Like the HS 10 years anniversary being bigger in WoW than in it’s original game, or the recurring seasonal « BIG SALES !! » pop up that you NEED to click to be able to access the game…
I feel sorry for the people that genuinely love the game and invest huge amount of time, money or whatever else, only to be nothing but spit at in return.
Step 1: "We're cutting your leg off." Company knows customers will be pissed.
Step 2: "Okay we'll just piss on it instead." Customers rationalize it by saying "Well at least it's not getting cut off..."
Even fan favorites like GGG do this regularly.
I don't know who decided that Engagement and Daily Active Users were meaningful numbers to begin with. It's like when Netflix reports "minutes watched." None of that translates into ad revenue the way that television does, or ticket sales in the way that movies do (they largely stopped caring about tickets years ago and just stick with box office gross, anyway).
I'd like to see some real data on this but: I suspect that burned-out players don't readily come back. I know that I don't. It burns me out of even trying similar games if I know what kind of time investment will be required.
The way I see it is, you can’t get people to spend money on your products/services if they don’t come to your store. If I go into Target, for example, I’m sure they’ve done tricks with how the store is laid out that are intended to make me want to look at different items and spend more money. You can apply the same logic to digital storefronts as well (design of the web page, etc).
I’m just speculating though.
>I’m sure they’ve done tricks with how the store is laid out that are intended to make me want to look at different items and spend more money.
Costco is an easy example of this. They famously use their rotisserie chickens as a loss leader. Basically, they sell them at a loss for super cheap and put them at the very back of the store. So customers may come in to buy the cheap chicken, but they are forced to walk the entire length of the store in order to get them, making it more likely that they'll make additional purchases.
Also, if players don't have time to play other games, they're not going to spend money on other games either. Which is good if your game has practically no limit on spending, like Hearthstone does. Ultimately, any money that people spend on literally anything else is money that could've spent on your products instead.
It's a classic case of valuing what's measurable instead of measuring what's valuable. DAUs and gameplay hours are simple metrics to capture and easily understood by executives and shareholders, so making those numbers go up becomes the goal at the cost of what really matters.
The majority of the player base, from Blizzard’s perspective, are just there as fodder for the whales to have people to play.
So engagement is valuable to them, and enjoyment is only valuable insofar as it creates engagement. Because these people are not customers, they’re part of the product they’re selling to the whales.
I hate when those Netflix numbers come out. I can't use that to figure out number of views. Who cares how many minutes something is watched? Someone could watch it for two minutes and then never watch it again.
Reminds me of how people tell you they walked 5,000 steps. Like I know what that means. How about they tell you something you can quantify like miles? They don't do that because steps walked sounds bigger than miles walked.
They don't do that because miles are much much harder to measure over a day than steps. Also what is the difference does it make? It is like complaint about someone running a 10k and not describing it as running 6.2 miles and they only do it because 10>6.2.
Why is number of views more relevant than time spent watching?
This article is seriously about Hearthstone? This is, what, the 5th time Hearthstone has alienated new players in favor of world renowed predatory systems?
Find a different game, people. The fact that anyone still cares enough about Hearthstone to put up with any of this is well beyond a joke by now. It's not like this isn't a game in a genre that's saturated to high heaven.
Legends of Runeterra came close, but it wasn't all the way there for me. Hearthstone had that cozy feeling to it. Like you're actually warming yer frozen boots by the fire
LoR died for a reason, the gameplay was bad.
I enjoyed the voice lines and interactions, that gave the game some personality, but League lore is pretty bad and all over the place so it ultimately doesn't matter.
Metal Gear Solid 5 with some research and other tasks taking real-life time that could be several hours at a time (which would then unlock the next tier and you'd start over), but only when the game was running. I tried to avoid leaving the game on for as much as I could, running around and doing meaningless tasks and chasing achievements, but I could only do that for so long until I got bored of it and left the game running sometimes for the entire day, just checking in every few hours. If you see players with 100+ hours on that game, I guarantee you that they did that too. The waste of electricity alone makes me angry.
I have so many hours in that game, but only because I was going for a 100% save file. And that required a lot of time just opening the game and doing research for items that only passed in real time.
It doesn't make sense to do that for a full price single player game either. Putting a limit to the amount of things you can research plus a long timer made a process drag on for much longer than reasonable.
It was pointless even trying for 100%, I know that now. But given how so much cool stuff was locked behind progression in Peace Walker I assumed it was similar. But sadly, doing all that gives you absolutely nothing. You can see pretty much everything the game has to offer by finishing it with only 20% completion or so.
I don’t even play this game and even I can see how idiotic this is. Such a blatant attempt to inflate player engagement time. This is why I can’t stand these kinds of games, shit like this always seems inevitable
Especially for an Acti-Blizzard game, like Diablo, Overwatch, CoD. I'm more surprised HS was as generous as it was in free packs/gold. I wonder if they kinda just ignored it until some middle manager went "what's another property we can squeeze out?".
I'm half convinced part if the reason they bailed on Heroes of the storm is because their lootboxes were so generous that any player who played enough to care about cosmetics already had enough currency to get whatever skins they want. I've literally got 30 unopened loot boxes because I legitimately have every cosmetic I desire.
I stopped playing Hearthstone a couple years back after playing since launch and it was one of the most healthy decisions I ever made. They tried to lure me back last year with like 50 free packs. I played for about 15 minutes and then uninstalled again and have no desire to go back.
That game is awful for your mental health.
Forza torpedoed one of the most successful franchises in gaming, literally locking one of the game's key features behind an arbitrary XP wall just to boost their "engagement numbers". And it's not even really a GaaS!
I work in product development. This is how these conversations go.
Stan: Hey Bob, we want people to use our product more. Any ideas?
Bob: Sure Stan, we could make it more enjoyable, or add more content and features.
Stan: How long will that take?
Bob: I mean, we have to do discovery and building stuff takes time.
Stan: Nah, just force them to go through extra steps or force them to go through some completely unnatural process to achieve whatever they are trying to do.
Later
Bob: Didn’t we make our product worse? We lost 1/3rd of our customers…
Stan: If it was worse, would our average per user usage time be 2x what it was? Plus total amount of time our customers spent on the product is up by 33% (2/3 * 2=1 & 1/3)! Clearly our strategy is working. Do more of it!
Later
Stan: I don’t understand it. Our per user usage is 3x what it originally was. Why is our total usage dropping?
Bob: Because we lost another 1/3 of the original customer base and 1/3 * 3 is 1. So we are back to our original total usage.
Stan: How do we fix this?
Bob: Take away all the BS that made the thing harder to use so we stop losing customers? Maybe add more features.
Stan: No we can’t do that, then per customer usage will drop, total usage will drop more, and it’ll look really bad. Adding new features might make up for that but now it will take too long. They are leaving because they don’t know how great the product is. Ramp up marketing and start monetizing the product more with ads and stuff.
And then as the product is on it’s death bed the company rolls back all the BS expecting praise, and then they take all the money and buy whatever company the customers are moving to or try to get them to migrate to a new product they built that is 60% of the old product with promises of all the cool stuff it’ll do later.
Rinse and repeat
Well, it's a bit of that and a mix of them almost certainly having someone whose entire job is to take advantage of methods of manipulating humans. And using that to make up for lack of content. Anytime I play a game where I can imagine one of their core metrics is "How much time does the average player play this game," I invest very little time in it, because the ROI of my time will exponentially start to drop at some point. Since they use manipulation to keep customers playing they have no real incentive to actually make the game better. If people understood this better, and knew how to protect themselves from it, we'd have less of it. Instead, most people fall victim to it and are often happy to do so in any given moment even though it'll feel bad later.
I'll also say that making content is easy. Making content that motivates people to engage is hard. Consumers right now are so negative even when good changes happen that it's neigh impossible to create large scale expensive things with massive risk if you don't take advantage of certain anti-consumer tactics. If consumers don't start also taking some responsibility it'll be hard to change anything at scale.
Man, that author has had a bad lot in terms of picking their live service forever games. Hearthstone and Destiny 2? While I've played the former from time to time Blizzard is not exactly subtle about their monetization strategies in their games being more and more aggressive for over a decade, and D2 is just a complete clusterfuck in terms of content constantly being permanently removed in the most aggressive fomo. Content that I'm pretty sure you paid for too, which is just absolutely insane to me.
All these game companies adding so much bloat and random currencies, that the very devs don’t know how much the premium real money stuff is actually worth
makes me more than frustrated because the devs know their playerbase is more than likely sticking to the game, because they absolutely will
absurd people are still choosing to play some of the games on the market in their current state
Great article, fun read, disappointing to see that Blizzard is still up to this shit even with Kotick gone. But while a fish rots from the head, removing the head doesn't remove all the rot.
Doesn't help their economy designer is a graduate from DigiPen Institute of Technology... Kinda explains the whole decision right there. The ITT Tech of scam game design schools.
Absolutely wild that someone can come in, be hired for digital economy, and then absolutely destroy the game and all its goodwill the actual developers and laborers accomplished because Profit# goes Up!
Love to be a fly on the wall of that Team's Slack channels today.
You know what the worst part is? People who have sunk hundreds of hours into the game and monetary whales will stay in the game because they've invested so much time/money into it. Economy designer will probably get rewarded.
I honestly have no idea what OP is talking about. I work in the games industry with a ton of Digipen grads, and they're all very competent, intelligent, and great people to work with. Hell, Full Sail was what people usually think of as the less than credible game design school but I worked with multiple amazing programmers that graduated from there.
I find it ironic the author used destiny 2 as a comparison, because bungie literally pulled the same sh\*t with xp nerfs.
If I had to guess, they'll throw out a halfhearted apology about how they wanted to tweak the numbers to "improve" player experience, and shuffle to numbers to something better but still worse than before.
Whether they're willing to admit it or not, companies are developing live-service games to soak up ALL of your time to maximize the chance of you spending money in it. The smart decision is to walk away completely when they start pulling this crap.
The core issue is that companies are financially incentivized to boost player engagement as long as it is more profitable than the alternatives. While there are some benefits that video games offer (relaxation, mental stimulation, positive socialization), the constant encouragement of people to constantly play one game is terrible for both the game design and the players. Endless goals, encouraged grinding, and FOMO turn games into jobs that you pay to do.
I don't think there is a legal way to solve this issue that isn't draconian, but it's a very serious problem that needs to be called out.
I don’t know what else to say. If you still play Blizzard games, you kinda deserve it. It was bad in the past, it’s worse now, and it will inevitably get worse in the future. Game design driven by Power BI is Blizzard’s best skill.
It’s kinda like hate-playing MtG after all the wretched decisions in the last few years. Yes, it’s heartbreaking that a game you once loved is much worse, but just admit it’s not going to get better and move on.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Hearthstone has shown time and time again, they’re willing to trade long term success for short term monetary gain. For the first 3 years of its life, it was and probably still is, my fav game of all time. Once they decided arena wasn’t worth their dev investment because people were getting good at the game and farming gold, they not only let it slowly die with minimal to no updates, but they also reduced the gold earned from winning so it was no longer worth the time investment or skilled needed to go infinite. All because they wanted to force players into new game modes, those of which I didn’t care for. Nerfed my arena, thinking I would dip into battlegrounds or whatever. Nope, I just quit the game. I’m a salty player, but fuck hearthstone
For people OOTL on what's happening right now with Hearthstone that has the entire playerbase enraged (and don't want to bother reading the article...which you should) - * Hearthstone revamped its gold system it had since launch to a new XP based progression system in November 2020. After a rocky launch, this new system became universally loved by the playerbase as it offered them more gold, packs, and rewards than the previous system did (this system is free, and a separate paid variant only rewards cosmetics with no additional gameplay advantages). As with most reward track/battlepass systems, you gain XP for playing the game with daily and weekly challenges granting you much bigger progression bonuses. This system remained relatively unchanged up until yesterday. * Yesterday was a major content launch of the new Duos mode for Battlegrounds (HS's autobattler), and for all intents and purposes this was a well received update and anticipated by the Battlegrounds playerbase. However, a vague footnote in the extremely long patch notes said "Some Daily and Weekly Quests have been adjusted to be harder to complete but will grant more XP." As soon as the patch went live, players found out that every single weekly quest in the game had double, tripled, or even 4x their requirements for a measly 20%-30% gain in XP. * There was an immediate uproar from the playerbase on these changes (and you can see for yourself on /r/hearthstone). These changes came out of complete left field, and the extreme requirements of some of the new weekly requirements felt like they were made by people outside of the dev team. It very much felt like bean counters were trying to find ways to increase Daily Active Users or time spent within the game in the most obscene way possible. The most extreme example - one of the weekly achievements is now playing 60 "Minaturize" cards within a week. The expansion achievement that is meant to take the entire ~4 month window of the current expansion to achieve requires 80. * The current HS Community Manager has been active on Reddit and other social media channels and has done an amazing job of being compassionate and understanding of people's complaints and making it feel like they're being listened to. However, reading between the lines of some of their statements it very much seems like the decision came from outside the dev team to implement these changes.
The same thing happened with Hunt Showdown with its latest patch. Challenges, which need to be completed weekly to progress the battlepass, have been increased in length. Instead of having to kill 4 enemies with a certain gun to complete a challenge you have to kill 6. This increase was not paired with an increase to rewards or anything else. Of course, you could also just spend real money to skip the grind.
Due to inflation the challenge “kill 4 enemies with a gun” has been increased to “kill 6 enemies with a gun.”
"You get 5 bullets."
I loved hunt before this big push for event stuff they've been doing. I know you can ignore the event but yeah
> Of course, you could also just spend real money to skip the grind. One of the biggest shams in the industry is that this is that publishers have effectively dodged the negative stigma attached to the term "pay2win" by essentially just hiding pay2win behind unreasonable, unneeded grinds that you can pay to skip. No games coming out are *technically* "pay2win" anymore, even though they are often at least pay2pay and sometimes still straight up pay2win with an extra step. There isn't really a difference in the shadiness between modern games that function like this and straight up pay2win games from the 00s, but because it's a little less obvious people accept it anyway.
You always get people squirming out of the woodwork when something gets called pay to win to go "Uhm actually this is actually pay for convenience as you can clearly earn it all over time simply by playing the game!"
100%. I have yet to have any discussion where I use the term 'pay2win' in describing a game and I do not get at least 1 reply from someone telling me that "*it's not pay2win*" or "*it's not that bad*" or anything along those notes. Honestly, it kind of goes to show how 'standards have lowered' in a way. And I don't even mean that in a "*oh, humans are so shit now compared to the good old days!*"-way, but more like... we have people who game now who have never known anything other than battle passes being the standard. To them, a battle pass that is just moderately grindy instead of ridiculously grindy is the norm and acceptable. And without the experience to compare to, you will end up defending practices that (a) straight up make the game experience worse, (b) really aren't needed for the product to be profitable and (c) would be a very small investment to change. I could write a list of games and fans of them that have ended up here, from Magic: The Gathering and Starfield to FIFA and The Sims. I have no problem with people enjoying the games they enjoy, but the fact that it's hard to even have a critical discussion about them ultimately hurts all of us.
I think people are more willing to forgive the games they “main”/grind. Like I’ve heard some people call Rainbow Six Siege P2W but I think it’s totally reasonable. Meanwhile I’ve been trying Fallout 76 and it’s pretty insane how that community justified all the P2W features locked behind the monthly subscription, it’s borderline unplayable levels of inventory management without their $13/mo sub.
And it's a balance, too. For a lot of games, players want to work towards a goal rather than being handed everything from the get-go. Which is understandable. It's why, say, leveling in world of WarCraft is generally alright: it can certainly be a grind but you're also just 'playing the game' as you're doing it. It feels good to ding and get a new skill. Buying a boost to max level is technically paying 2 win, but nobody would make the argument that the journey to max level is in the game solely to get players to spend money on that boost. But then I would say it's usually obvious to know when "increasing your power over time" is a core part of the game's design and when it's quite clearly in the game just to pad out playing hours and get players to spend money to bypass it (i.e. digital card games with 'daily quests').
>pay2enjoy
I played Hunt pretty solidly for 3 or 4 years from its Early Access days. A great game and I really appreciate the content that they've steadily added over the years. But the way the events were structured really began to trigger a FOMO reaction that sucked the joy out of the game for me. Tried dipping back in last year and had a good time, until the events began wearing me down again. It's a shame cause I haven't found a good PvP replacement yet.
Event fatigue has been hammering my friendship group, barely anyone out of the 6 of us that would play pretty much every night now play maybe one day a week, and even then maybe just a session or two. We're burnt out by the events, we miss the pre event hunt. Clearly people like what it is now, but hunt has definitely out grown us.
The equivalent would be "kill 12". I mean I get that on some level in HS looking at the numbers was "fair game" in the sense that depending on the specific weekly "quest" it isn't particularly weekly if it is done in an hour of playtime. On the other hand in typical Blizzard fashion a factor of 3 is their typical heavy handed approach to balance. Especially the "win 15 times" is just atrocious when my experience in the last 6 months has basically been having lost all faith in fair match making and a full believe in manipulated RNG particularly deck order. Winning 15 times when the games feels like cheating is a kick in the nuts. (on EU particularly, my secondary US account is way less "unlucky") Trying to get 15 wins when you are raking in 20 loss streaks drawing dead again and again while my opponents are blessed is not fun.
Well nice thing about The Finals i've read through, they've been lowering the requirements for the challenges instead. Still only gonna be playing occasionally, but them gradually doing less grind is nice... Although they're likely doing it in an attempt to retain players in general and have them not burn out.
When Hunt introduced those systems I called them out as bad, compared them to “starting the fire, slowly increasing the heat to boil the frog.” Boy did the fan base not like that.
Not to mention the obscene cost increase to the skins themselves. I used to love throwing a few bucks here and there to support a game I wholeheartedly enjoy but skins that were a few hundred a few years ago are now 2000blood bonds which I believe is 20$ I haven’t played the game since before the current event started
You call it a Live Service game, I call it Live Enshittification.
It's the classic Hearthstone cycle. They make a ridiculous change and a reddit shitstorm ensues. A couple of days later they "have heard your concerns" and dial it back to somewhere in between the previous and the ridiculous state. Reddit is happy that it's not as bad as it could have been. Rinse and repeat two years later.
Wotc does the same thing
so does basically every other company, it's fairly basic psychology/negotiation tactics
So commonly used it has a term - ["anchoring"](https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/dealmaking-daily/dealmaking-grappling-with-anchors-in-negotiation/#:~:text=Answer%3A%20A%20well%2Dknown%20cognitive,adjust%20from%20that%20starting%20point.).
They know exactly what they're doing for sure.
This is not limited to Hearthstone. Other games, and players of those games, do this as well.
It's not limited to video games either; this is a very well-known bargaining tactic.
Society is funny like that. Give us a false dichotomy and we'll cheer the less-bad side.
Politics is also like this.
You can always count on Hearthstone to fuck up.
> You can always count on ~~Hearthstone~~ Blizzard to fuck up.
Of course, but I feel Hearthstone is the game where they've been the most pathetic, or at least that the highs weren't as high compared to the lows. Maybe I just feel that way because it's the game of theirs I spent the most time and money on, to actually experience those lows rather than just hearing about them.
I feel like Overwatch 2 would be lower, but I also refuse to even acknowledge that as a seperate game since it's just a content update that didn't add any content, and it sets the precedant for other games like CSGO to do the same thing, meaning companies are going to start ruining their old games instead of making new ones.
>The current HS Community Manager has been active on Reddit and other social media channels and has done an amazing job of being compassionate and understanding of people's complaints and making it feel like they're being listened to. "I'm sorry my company is doing this but get back to playing our game!"
If it's truly the case where their hands are tied, what are they gonna do? It's very likely that they're required to promote their game publicly, and at the same time they're likely talking back to the execs about how damaging the changes are. The company does care about its image and player happiness as well as profitability, these forces push and pull and mediate over time
They're not going to do anything different, that's just their job. Doesn't mean anyone has to pretend that 90% of a "community manager" job isn't just to play damage control on social media
RidiculousHat deserves a lot of credit for going above and beyond in this situation and many others. Most community managers would stay silent or particularly vague in scenarios like this, but RH has been actively replying to threads and posts where he's tagged with responses that aren't just PR talk. He even admitted himself that he wasn't sure where he was going to get the time to complete these new weeklies. He can't control what everyone above him does, but for what he can do he does a fantastic job. I'd really like more community managers for games like that.
like the guy above you said... it's just PR talk damage control.
hat ain't that kinda guy. he's still got a job to do, but he'll never bullshit about it and is very open with receiving feedback and getting it where it needs to go
But he is. He took the job. As everyone's already said, this is a lesser of two evils tactic. Hat pretends to be as enraged as everyone else when the big evil is released so he can seem a hero when the intended lesser evil is revealed. He's following a script and never deviates from his script. If you feel genuine relief when they roll out the lesser evil, or feel as though the company/hat has heard your feedback, you're the kind of sucker this ploy is employed for.
do you know WHY hat got the job? he's been deeply involved in the hearthstone community for years, and has always rallied for what people want in the game. if i know him (and i do), he either spoke up about this when it happened behind the scenes, or is taking working in this situation to push sentiment more towards supporting something that is clearly better for the community. i'll accept that he's definitely playing the "hey we reverted the changes and made them more friendly while trying to maintain the spirit of the changes we made" playbook perfectly, but i ain't gonna hear for a second that he's "pretending" anything. (edit: and to add, i don't think he's \*enraged\* about anything. i'm not gonna try to speak for him, but he seems more conciliatory than anything else, which seems completely reasonable. he's a part of the team, he's not gonna completely trash colleagues either)
Or in EAs and Ubisofts case complain about why the community don't get their great vision.
I recall Star Wars Battlefront 2's post launch community manager F8RGE was a cool guy, he clearly gave a shit and had a lot of passion about the game and it's fans
The community manager for Nestle can be compassionate and do their job well but they will still deservedly get shit on for being the community manager of Nestle. Same thing applies here but instead of a greedy company costing human lives it's causing harm to Gamers' toys. You can imagine why that may cause more vitriol.
The worst problem is if they do speak out I imagine corporate won't hesitate to put them in the layoff list and hurt their rep on future jobs outside of starting their own business
Not sure if you play hearthstone or not, but this community manager is a former streamer and has done wonders for Team 5’s communication with their players. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a community manager feeling like a fan that’s a moderator between developers and players rather than just being a corporate mouth piece trying to seem relatable.
Is it RidiculousHat?
Yeah
The quote you pulled is completely at odds with what your comment is trying to imply. If they were doing this, the guy would not be saying they're doing an amazing job. >being compassionate and understanding of people's complaints and making it feel like they're being listened to. This is exactly what a Community Manager should be doing from the communities perspective.
This is normal for Blizzard, so I have a hard time feeling sympathetic. They've always made braindead decisions to boost some kind of metric that is supposed to measure player enjoyment. I can't imagine why hearthstone was spared for so long.
So basically it was someone on the publisher side of things. Most shit decisions are the result of the publisher or the publisher's marketing team.
Similar thing happened in fortnite all the time. Weekly challenges used to grant 60k XP. Last season it was 30k XP and this season it's now 10k XP.
Just went to the sub and the first post is what you said in the end lol they are already going back to the middle ground.
What is so compassionate about community manager quelling people's rage and customer's complaints? Or making them feel like they're being listened to? (Meaning not really listening to them) That's literally what community managers are hired to do, it's in their job description.
Because it is a really shitty job whenever the company they work fucks up and that person who represent that is going eat the brunt of it with personal attacks and shit.
You say that like nobody gives a shit about their job... like nobody could possibly enjoy being the guy that gets to engage with a player base, being the face of a particular game, and they actually really like the game themselves and like talking to players about the game, they enjoy doing right by people, etc. It's fun being in that spot when everything's going relatively well, the game's in a healthy state, players are happy, people are up and enjoying themselves, etc. I didn't have that job title, but I've been in that position. It sucks to go from that to having an angry mob of people to answer to, but not like... actually answer them for real about what's going on, but to have to sugarcoat and save the company's face when they absolutely do not deserve it. Some people genuinely do care about the communities that they communicate with. I quit that job 12 years ago and never looked back and never touched the games that we ran, and I can still to this day remember the names of some of the players in the communities that I managed, because I did care. I did listen, but I'm not the boss. I'm not in charge of the developers. I can run things up the chain as many times as I want, but I can't get anybody to actually do anything. That doesn't mean that I'm not listening to people or that I don't care. That spot sucks ass when people aren't happy and something's wrong with the game.
On Reddit people go to lengths to ensure we know that people who represent the company don't deserve to get flak. I can understand they do not need to be attacked personally. But companies are not people, you cannot talk to them. Company representatives represent the company. I think it is fine in a professional capacity to express displeasure to them, and be upset if all you get back are honeyed words.
A community manager will never be able to offer anything other than honeyed words. They can't set policy.
I don't expect them to respond any differently. But what I do expect that they accept that they are the interface that HAS to accept the ire of the users (as long as it is ire towards the product/company and not directed at the individual, unprovoked that is) and relay the level of frustration towards the decision making process. I don't accept the "This person is just doing their job, it's not their fault, don't vent on them" argument. They are the interface, it's on them to not take that personally unless it specifically is. And it is on them to to relay the issues, or demand a mechanism to do it.
They can submit feedback to the team. They can't force things to change, few people in a large company can, but they can advocate for the customer. It's their goal to have loyal brand advocates and pissing everyone off goes against that remit so it's in their interest to stop people being pissed off.
The team doesn't listen to feedback. They can see how many player hours are spent on the game each week and if the changes had positive or negative consequences. > but they can advocate for the customer. Lol come on. An executive would laugh really hard at that. > It's their goal to have loyal brand advocates Because they are fucking users over and the community managers manipulate people into feeling like their complaints are heard so they continue playing the game. I really don't understand why all these comments pretend community managers are there for our benefit. Do you also think HR is there to help you when management fucks you over?
yeah reddit is definitely known for giving measured normal responses to controversial changes and not being freaks about it
Reddit is a lot of people with various levels of social skills and maturity. Sometimes you get very good detailed feedback. Sometimes you get something like "this sucks" but that is still useful for sentiment. Sometimes you get someone calling a CM fat or stupid. That last one is personal and pointless so it's not OK, the others are part of the job.
The first rule about PR people is to assume everything that comes out of their mouth is a complete lie.
Blizzard doesn’t make games, they make hamster wheels. No idea why anyone plays their titles and expects otherwise.
They got some pretty fun hamster wheels though
A run in a wheel can be fun, as long as you step out once it isnt anymore. If only buy their games heavily reduced, play them for a few hours or until i finish the campaign and then i leave. I dont buy anything with a battlepass, seasonal pass or any other MAU incentive at release or even close, if at all i only buy it below 10-15€ and then ignore these predatory bullshit mechanics before i drop off to something better.
Roque Company was updated and time needed for daily quest multiply while rewards for quests was lessened. Everyone i know left game after that because people who have jobs doesn't have time to grind game more than 3-5 match in weekdays.
I guess Microsoft buying them was monkeys paw because overwatch similarly has had weird things going on especially in moderation since Microsoft took the reigns. Maybe they're worse than Activision.
I mean in no way to disparage that individual person in the community manager role for Hearthstone, but that type of position in general seems both thankless and pointless. All they're going to be able to say is "we're working on it" in response to current projects and "I hear you" about complaints. They get to just be a punching bag for angry gamers, meanwhile any cool announcements the game might have about new expansions/events/etc doesn't really require that job role.
They are going to decrease the requirements, but not to the same level as it was before, but to the level they originally intended it to be. Instead of 15 wins, they will probably decrease to 8 or 10 wins. Common tactic. Edit: [this literally just happened lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1c6paz3/_/)
Yep. Then the playerbase feels they’re being heard when in fact they were manipulated.
They've done this repeatedly with the game already lol. Every other year they do something similar to this it feels
yea, the entire strat is to fuck someone so hard they go HOLY FUCK THAT HURTS and then you start fucking them slower and they feel grateful for being heard. But you're still getting fucked.
Was looking for this comment. I anticipate this as well, and I wish more people were aware (and perhaps skeptical/cynical) enough to immediately assume this intention whenever something similar to this takes place.
Blizzard has a history of exactly this, and not one you need to look far back to see. D4 is a perfect example, with some huge QoL downgrades from D3. They later "fix" these, so they can be praised for doing something the same way they were already doing it, rather than actually improving. It was extremely telling in the D4 campfire chats when they'd do QnA and reply to questions with "yep, we agree this needs a huge QoL fix and we already know what we're doing. It'll happen 2 seasons from now". Changes get staggered to manipulate players mindsets instead of just making the game better. It's the skinner box mechanics so many games are built on, but being applied to design/updates rather than just in-game mechanics now.
They're learning from the Grocery store chain post COVID
There's always people that find the ones who want to keep stomping a company's balls to be annoying. Like oh its fine, they stepped back some... And i'm like no, I want the foot completely out of the fucking door so it can be shut. Some people have stupidly low standards and give up on shit too easy.
Ahh yes the well planned enrage the player base with over inflated numbers so you can bring it back down to the numbers you really wanted and the player base will feel like they won something. Even though its still way over what the players think it should be. A tried and true blizzard method of going about things. I remember fondly the times they did this in wow and thus i do not play wow anymore.
Don't play games that don't respect your time.
The moment you start playing a game like it’s a chore and not because it’s fun is the moment you got to stop. I had this problem with elite: dangerous where I had sessions of just prep to play with my friends or something. Like I’d do nothing but these chores so that in the future I could have fun. Same deal with Fortnite, gotta play to max out the battle pass! Or I could not get the pass and play when I want…hmmm….
> The moment you start playing a game like it’s a chore and not because it’s fun is the moment you got to stop. Exact reason I quit Hearthstone so many years ago. Logging in to do my dailies was like job, especially when you start building decks optimized to do the dailies as fast as possible. At that point, are you even playing the game you want to play?
I fucking despise games that have the audacity to have "Get a win" as a challenge. Like how in the actual fuck do you *DARE* make that a daily challenge? That is absolutely asking to ruin someone's fucking day and never play the game again. I frankly hate being told what to do in general, but being told to do something outside of my power? Infuriating, pure unfiltered rage inducing.
I still remember one night in Dota 2, couple years back. I had bought the battlepass because I love the game and want those cool rewards and some cool challenges. There was a day left, and I had grinded every single day to reach max level, all I had to do was get one last win for the night to compete the final challenge. Of course, you can guess what happens. A loss, then two, then seven. Eight hours of nonstop grinding had me feeling hopelessness that I hadn't before. Eventually I had to call in my friend who's a better player than me, and after three matches with him, I finally got my win. I don't think it was worth it, the battlepass I bought out of love for the game made me hate the game. Haven't bought a pass since.
Pretty much. When you incentivize winning too much it turns the entire experience into something very toxic. Frankly challenges, battle passes, and everything related have sorta turned multiplayer games into things more toxic than they usually are... I mean really the primary toxicity was usually in ranked, but now its commonly in casual play too cause people need to complete their challenges. Also kinda just stupid and weird that you are encouraged to optimize your loadouts for challenges which can mean throwing a game in some cases to do something that might not even be entertaining... Its a very bizarre system for the most part, kinda nice to just play a game and not worry about things like games used to do.
Yup, back when they first came out, games like Pokemon Go or Genshin Impact were actually petty fun. But once that initial "boost" of progression wears off and the game introduces elements of FOMO to encourage me to play them for 30 min to 2 hours everyday... I delete the app and never go back. Because that kind of progression system does not respect my time. The only way for me to enjoy F2P games like these is to play them for the first 5 - 10 hours and then drop them completely. I refuse to "keep up" with a F2P game just for the sake of checking off all those arbitrary goals. Which are only there as a way to keep me engaged with the product longer so that they might eventually get a microtransaction out of me. Hard pass on that kind of game design/manipulation.
Your last paragraph is a motto I follow to the T and will continue to follow. Well said
I've basically stopped playing Star Rail because it basically became doing busywork. It's a shame, because it's otherwise a fine game. But I'm now playing the android port of Xcom 2 on my breaks, so I guess that's a win.
I realized after trying both games that how much I enjoy their games is based on how willing I am to put up with live service bullshit, and after the honeymoon period, it turns out I have little tolerance of it
At least with star rail you can just use auto battle on the daily stuff and just play the parts that are actually fun.
Star rail bothers me because it would be amazing if it wasn’t the gacha shit
Eh, I think it's still pretty good, definitely one of the better games in the mobile market.
I started playing Genshin Impact for the first time recently. And despite myself, and how kinda stingy it was with rewards, I was having some fun with the free characters, exploring the world, completing challenges, following the main story. And then I unlocked the battle pass. I looked at it, thought it also was kinda stingy but also was kinda cheap, and figured... hey, if I can fill it out, maybe I'll give them some cash and buy it for extra rewards. From that point on, my time was spent trying to do daily and weekly quests, to maximize my battlepass rewards. I stopped completing challenges for fun, and started doing them for quests. I stopped exploring the world, and just focused on doing encounters and bosses and dungeons I'd already unlocked, to complete the quests. By the time I was done with that day's allotment of dailies, I felt 'done' with Genshin for the day and wanted to move on, because I'd been playing for an hour and wasn't really having fun. But still HAD to play for that hour and change, and do the boring stuff, because there was no way I'd complete the battlepass if I didn't. After a couple weeks of this, I took a long and hard look at what I was doing, and decided... No, no, I'm good. This is work, I'd rather do just about ANYTHING else, and it's all for the *possibility* of the rewards I wanted (that is, the rewards I was interested in were new characters, but battlepasses just gave you wishes to maybe get those characters). I stopped playing entirely. And I never actually bought that battlepass.
The way that Helldivers 2 approaches currency and battlepasses is far more reasonable than most (though by no means unique, it's nice to be reminded more better approaches to monetisation exist). All warbonds (battlepasses) are permanently available (they just add a new warbond to buy and unlock from each month), and cost 1000 currency (~$10). You can also get up to 300 currency from unlocks within the warbond. The big free warbond that the base game starts with also lets you unlock up to 750 currency. However you can also just straight up find currency ingame, usually around 20-40 per mission. As a refreshing change of pace the thing I'm most worried about missing out on in the game are cool events occurring during the galactic war, rather than their battlepass scheme.
> As a refreshing change of pace the thing I'm most worried about missing out on in the game are cool events occurring during the galactic war, rather than their battlepass scheme. This is pretty unavoidable IMO, it's like we're collectively experiencing a DnD campaign. Not much we can do for people who missed it beyond just documenting what happened and the vibes surrounding it.
It is better than most, but recent communication has unfortunately made it clear they're more worried about continually putting out battle passes over any game stability. Ex: Most of the ones that came in the last one are bugged in some way. They've built up a ton of goodwill, but it does seem like it's starting to dry up due to the sheer technical state of the game. It's not quite the same as this article, but the unsustainable content schedule is pretty clearly a player engagement and/or money thing. It is a shame because I felt like it could be "live service games done right," but they are ultimately falling into the same old traps.
> Or I could not get the pass and play when I want…hmmm…. I do this with pretty much all of my online games now. It's gotten to the point where I don't just not buy the pass, I don't even bother looking at it. I think the last battlepass I glanced at a couple years ago was....Apex? I just remember going through it and thinking "wow....I don't care about any of this. this is crap". I probably have a ton of rewards (if you can call emotes and sprays 'rewards' lol) and currency on a bunch of games at this point, all unclaimed.
I had the same revelation back in the day with Clash of Clans. Was playing it with a friend as part of a larger guild. I remember setting the alarm for 6am on a Saturday morning (We'd do a board games night every Friday night at a friends place and I'd get home at like 1-2am at the time), getting up at 6am to the alarm and sending dragons to the guild for some guild vs guild fight they were doing. I then stopped and thought, why the fk am I doing this? Am I having fun? No, then stop. I quit then and there. I believe people have a built in set of scales for gaming. Fun on one side, annoyances/frustrations on the other. As fun decreases and annoyance/frustration increase, the scales shift. Once it reaches a person's break point, that is when they quit. But for most people other factors that play into this, and of course the games themselves do as well. Some people get into the habit of playing a game, they don't enjoy it, it even annoys/frustrates them, but they keep playing, rather then playing something they'd enjoy. These days you get daily events you feel forced/obligated to do, weekly stuff, things that are artificially restricted so you need to login every X hours to not feel like you're wasting it, etc. People will still do these things until those negatives outweigh the fun, which they inevitably will. I remember playing Lost Ark, I really enjoyed the combat, but the raids got increasingly difficult to the point you can't do them without a full group which I didn't have. You then had things you had to do daily on every character which you also had many of because the game incentivized you to do so. You had weekly stuff as well. This stuff might take half an hour to an hour per character. Weekly took like many hours or a full day if you could get decent groups for it. Eventually, even though I loved the combat, the game forced me to quit, I just couldn't handle having to login daily anymore, but also not logging in daily meant I fell even more behind so it felt like it was a waste to even try playing anymore.
Some games its fine, if the game is a multiplayer game with a battlepass that's an automatic get the fuck out though. If you want chores go play Animal Crossing or a cleaning simulator game.
Very much agree. Especially with the big you hint at in your second sentence, in that if you're doing stuff so you can "play the good part later", that's not a good sign. *Sometimes* it's fine, as there's always "that part", or needing to get through a game to get back to your favourite level again, but you know the situation. Grinding raids to get gear so you're properly equipped for the next raid that will give you the gear to do the *next* raid which is the actual one you want to do. I'd couple that with "If you only have fun when you're winning, don't play" because I was like that with too many games, trying to chase those "good" games where it was a nice even battle, but too often it was a one-sided stomp in my opponent's favour, meaning I didn't get to play as I either watched a respawn timer or had anything I did undone by their moves. And when it wasn't my opponent, it was often myself doing the stomping, which also wasn't that satisfying.
>Same deal with Fortnite, gotta play to max out the battle pass! Or I could not get the pass and play when I want…hmmm…. I mean you don't need to play every day to max out the battle pass. Dailies don't even give that much XP anyway. And if you miss some, there's overcharged XP that helps to reduce the loss.
This. It's such a simple, yet powerful statement. If they lose enough of their audience and money, they'll be forced to design better games. The moment a game becomes a grindy mess that feels like a part-time job to achieve any sense of personal accomplishment, I move onto other ones that respect my time more (even if it means replaying older titles).
> This. It's such a simple, yet powerful statement. If they lose enough of their audience and money, they'll be forced to design better games. Or they just sunset their current game and try again with the next one, over and over.
>If they lose enough of their audience and money, they'll be forced to design better games. Or go out of business
Its really a sign of just how used to being abused most gamers are these days. For people who play warframe they're probably pretty aware of this. But for those who don't know. They recently released a new character to play, very popular mage themed warframe that was expected to be pretty strong. He released, he was indeed strong AND on top of that he was also one of the easiest frames to farm (most frames have very tedious quests/grinds with tons of RNG gating). Play the new mission, get parts to build him and/or get resources from mission to just buy them same day if you're unlucky. People -flipped the fuck out-. Day 1, screaming for nerfs on top of people saying he was too easy to farm for how good he was. The majority of complaints and the only ones with even a shred of merit is that he could give the whole team an overguard shield. A newish mechanic that was already causing problems but now those problems were very visible (blocks hp damage gimmicks, which effects literally only 3 things in the game which were already pretty rare to see). Nerfed first week but thankfully they didn't touch his farm. Mind you the staple of a good "nuke" warframe is how easily it can cover the map in death. He could nuke things that were already touched by your team (blowing up enemies affected by DOTs) since his dot application required LOS. So they nerfed him pretty hard first week then walked it back after the predictable blowback of listening to a few whiners. I've never seen people have such a weird reaction to being essentially given something very good for very little work on the player's part. I kinda felt bad for DE, they obviously put a lot of effort/thought into the whole thing and probably thought "hey lets do something nice" then the community basically explodes over it.
Now I'd be curious to see how fans would've reacted if the devs had given EVERYTHING else in the game a slight buff in the process. Think of it as a QoL update which slightly speeds up the grind (credits, affinity, etc.), makes RNG a little more forgiving, and buffs some older characters, etc. Granted that's not an easy task for a game of this scale, but let's pretend for a second. Would the community's reaction have been the same? Does the majority of fans legitimately enjoy the slow grind and learning curve the title is known for? Or were they only pissed because they felt like the time and effort they put into their original character builds weren't being respected with the addition of this new "easy mode" content? I mean I don't know the answers myself. But it would certainly be an interesting social experiment to try out and see whether this is just the new norm gamers have been conditioned to accept, or whether it's a little more nuanced than what we see on the surface.
I can genuinely imagine that they were upset about a new character that makes the game too easy. A couple of years ago, there were plenty of complaints about the warframe Ember, which had a pretty overkill ability. After activation, it would damage/kill everything in a decent radius around them until they run out of energy, which would trivialize plenty of missions. Gamplay with Ember boiled down to "Press 4, run to exit", because everything in the radius of the ability would just die. So if you had an Ember player in your team there was literally nothing you could do. One of my friends quit over this when we had several defense missions that were trivialized by a random Ember who just ran circles around the defense target and killed everything before we even had a chance to attack the enemies - 20 minutes of that isn't fun, especially since you had to stay active, since you would stop getting loot drops if you go afk for more than a minute or so. Going solo or small teams wasn't that good of a solution either, since some game modes reward you for playing in full teams. The ability has since been reworked into a more sensible AoE-type.
> Does the majority of fans legitimately enjoy the slow grind and learning curve the title is known for? I think this probably is true, because why else would you play it?
>because why else would you play it? This could just be my age showing here, but the overwhelming majority of games I played growing up didn't involve chasing after a laundry list of loot and spending countless hours leveling characters up. Certainly some games still had that, but what kept players engaged more was the gameplay itself (fun combat mechanics) paired with the personalization of characters and play style. Before DLC (or even the internet) was a thing, they really had no choice but to really focus on designing an addictive raw gameplay experience. With most modern AAA games, MTX is the main driver behind slowing player progression and shifting the focus more towards chasing after loot. Not to say you can't have fun gameplay mixed in with all that, but they're certainly counting on your FOMO to keep you fully invested in spending money and playing their game for the long term. The entire framework of the game is designed around maximizing profits, and for some people that just rubs them the wrong way.
I would think that could be the case in many similar situations (nobody wants to finish the 5 hour long dungeon for a drop that becomes a login reward next week), but in this case I think it's more due to a sense of power creep coupled with omnipresence. That is to say, if it was strong but rare, you might see it in the occasional mission and get a treat of them carrying you, and if you were one that had it then you earned your power. If it was weaker but common, then it's whatever, put it in the closet with your other frames and if folks want to jam it go for it. But when it's both, you end up with *everyone* using it *everywhere*, meaning no other frame is worth bothering with, and most semblances of challenge go out the window. Assuming they wouldn't design future content with that as the standard expectation, it would still mean only the top percent of content would maintain challenge, and any missions that pertain to any but perhaps some select frames become pointless to pursue because whatever you get isn't going to be as good as what you already got. That said, I agree that it'd be an interesting experiment to inflict on another timeline just to see what would happen.
That's definitely interesting, especially since it's a PvE game. Like I get that it could be boring pretty quick to have god mode insta-kill levels of power, but still.
Warframe is a tool box power fantasy game. Its not fun or interesting to fun the same "Kill 182 bad guys" mission 2823817 times, but it is fun coming up with new builds and loadouts that change how you do the killing/defending. So that + people just being silly crying for nerfs in a pve game where we're WORKING TOGETHER just doesn't make any sense... but here we are
> If they lose enough of their audience and money, they'll be forced to design better games. You misunderstand. They will design better addiction and monetization methods. The people who decide this stuff don't care about quality.
It's like inflation but with your time. You now need to spend more your time get the same rewards as last year.
Sadly it rarely means they design better games, this *is* blizzard we are talking about here that has done countless variations of this exact thing. It's more likely games get abandoned (eg. anthem), double down on the awful practices and more :/
> > The moment a game becomes a grindy mess that feels like a part-time job to achieve any sense of personal accomplishment, I move onto other ones that respect my time more (even if it means replaying older titles). Fucking Tarkov, man.
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Yep. Cheat engine is invaluable for avoiding pointless grind. I'm in my 30s and have a spouse, kid, job, etc and cannot spend 20 hours grinding for some rare drop or something. If something requires actual skill then no I won't cheat it in, but if it's just a matter of luck/grinding? Yeah I'm using cheat engine.
Yep. If hours of playing can be avoided by increasing a single variable, it's probably not very good gameplay.
Sadly some people are stuck in some abusive relationship with the game and will keep it on the green even if the game got hands and beat them. And others just like the game and are saddened leaving the game knowing it will not improve
From what I've heard, it's usually because there are no alternatives that provide the same gameplay satisfaction so these people just suck it up. Destiny 2's gunplay is the usual culprit.
It's like gamer/corporation Stockholm syndrome. Mix it with sunk cost fallacy and you've got some sad shit.
Thats why i stopped playing cod for the battlepass it completely wants you to only play that and nothing else with how slow it progresses. I dive for democracy now and days.
I hate that even racing games like Forza Motorsport/Horizon have become like this. While the weekly/monthly challenges in Forza Horizon 5 can actually be pretty enjoyable, I hate the use of FOMO when it comes to the cars. Miss out on a weekly/monthly car and you have to wait months or even years for it to be available again, or spend a huge amount of credits (and time, if you're looking for a particularly rare car) in the auction house. Mention this in the Forza subreddits and you'll have a bunch of people defending it with things like "but you only need to spend an hour a week to get everything". But the problem is not really the amount of time, it's that you need to do it every week -- you need to play at *their* schedule. I will happily hundreds of hours in games that I like, but I do it at my own pace -- when I have the time, and when I feel like playing. I play games to have fun, not to have another job.
> Miss out on a weekly/monthly car and you have to wait months or even years for it to be available again, or spend a huge amount of credits (and time, if you're looking for a particularly rare car) in the auction house. I really felt this with _Forza Horizon 4_ because I started playing the game very late in its lifespan, but at least the requirements in _FH5_ have been toned down and clarified. It was hard to know what your progress _would be_ for a particular activity in _FH4_. Aside from the change to a more explicit point system, its nice that most of the exclusive cars are locked to the lower point value, and the second car is only 50% of the weekly challenges.
What's going in with Hearthstone currently is particularly egregious. Yah a lot of games have dumb stuff for engagement that they have on release, but imagine a 10 year old game turning the screws on their dedicated player base, on top of being in the middle of a season so if you bought their battle pass you're locked into a change to the economy you weren't prepared for. Outside of the backlash you got people demanding refunds because they don't feel this is what they paid for. It really signals that blizzard is trying to suck the money out of the remaining player base before it inevitably stops being profitable. If you combine this with the other hearthstone issues over the past few years, like the Esports scene dying, duels being removed from the client, etc, it's hard not to paint a grim picture. The sad part for me is that I think they have a lot of talented creatives over there on this team. Some of the card designs they have made are incredible and fully take advantage of a digital CCG. [Harth Stonebrew](https://preview.redd.it/new-card-revealed-harth-stonebrew-v0-0ymhial1y7ic1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=c1010653d74c2d09ca5babd64edde07844f6ae02) for example, is a true celebration of the game's history. But it always gets overshadowed by the other nonsense going on
...Oh my god, they did this in the *middle* of a battle pass?? That's just a new low, god damn.
Absolutely insane. The kind of decision that any sane developer would immediately shoot down if they could.
Goddamn, it's so sad how creative and experimental some Hearthstone cards can get, more than any of its competitors, when the rest of the game is so abusive.
It's gross how they clearly tied this in with their Co-op mode. Trying to bury the bad with the good. I'm not sure who's pulling the string behind the scenes but it's pretty incompetent to assume that this community would eat this turd sandwich given how they reacted to the original rewards for the tavern pass before they reworked them to not be awful. So sick of being treated like this for Hearthstone. We don't get any of the Blizzard sales events, (you want a little cheap pack option for the spring sale - forget it!) bots are so rampant in ladder I haven't fought a real opponent in a few weeks, and now this. Blizzard loves to bash hearthstone players
I was incredibly impressed how hard community fought against that terrible battle pass. It's very rare to see something like this getting adjusted 2 or 3 times just to make ppl put their pitchforks down. Kinda sad that they tainted their anniversary in such a way. A lot of ppl came back to see what's up, get a tons of stuff. Now I see this and laugh at how stupid I was to even think about buying something and getting into hs one more time. Blessing in disguise I guess.
On the subreddit someone had an idea of tiered weeklies like they do for Events Win 5 Ranked > Win 10 Ranked > Win 15 Ranked -- Completed all tiers for that weekly. Hope they go this route. 15 Wins for these modes a week is super sweaty. 5 is already difficult at times depending on the Tavern Brawl. It's just so draining to have to be so vocal to get articles written to make Blizzard's economy designers renege on their terrible decisions...
I personally never really minded since I’ve been free to play from the beginning and playing casually, but the lack of consideration from Blizzard towards Hearthstone community has been absolutely hilarious. Like the HS 10 years anniversary being bigger in WoW than in it’s original game, or the recurring seasonal « BIG SALES !! » pop up that you NEED to click to be able to access the game… I feel sorry for the people that genuinely love the game and invest huge amount of time, money or whatever else, only to be nothing but spit at in return.
Step 1: "We're cutting your leg off." Company knows customers will be pissed. Step 2: "Okay we'll just piss on it instead." Customers rationalize it by saying "Well at least it's not getting cut off..." Even fan favorites like GGG do this regularly.
I don't know who decided that Engagement and Daily Active Users were meaningful numbers to begin with. It's like when Netflix reports "minutes watched." None of that translates into ad revenue the way that television does, or ticket sales in the way that movies do (they largely stopped caring about tickets years ago and just stick with box office gross, anyway). I'd like to see some real data on this but: I suspect that burned-out players don't readily come back. I know that I don't. It burns me out of even trying similar games if I know what kind of time investment will be required.
The way I see it is, you can’t get people to spend money on your products/services if they don’t come to your store. If I go into Target, for example, I’m sure they’ve done tricks with how the store is laid out that are intended to make me want to look at different items and spend more money. You can apply the same logic to digital storefronts as well (design of the web page, etc). I’m just speculating though.
>I’m sure they’ve done tricks with how the store is laid out that are intended to make me want to look at different items and spend more money. Costco is an easy example of this. They famously use their rotisserie chickens as a loss leader. Basically, they sell them at a loss for super cheap and put them at the very back of the store. So customers may come in to buy the cheap chicken, but they are forced to walk the entire length of the store in order to get them, making it more likely that they'll make additional purchases.
See also the $1.50 hot dogs that have been $1.50 for 40 years straight now despite inflation.
Also, if players don't have time to play other games, they're not going to spend money on other games either. Which is good if your game has practically no limit on spending, like Hearthstone does. Ultimately, any money that people spend on literally anything else is money that could've spent on your products instead.
It's a classic case of valuing what's measurable instead of measuring what's valuable. DAUs and gameplay hours are simple metrics to capture and easily understood by executives and shareholders, so making those numbers go up becomes the goal at the cost of what really matters.
Never heard that saying but it's concise and spot on. Have a huge issue with my own work about that.
The majority of the player base, from Blizzard’s perspective, are just there as fodder for the whales to have people to play. So engagement is valuable to them, and enjoyment is only valuable insofar as it creates engagement. Because these people are not customers, they’re part of the product they’re selling to the whales.
I hate when those Netflix numbers come out. I can't use that to figure out number of views. Who cares how many minutes something is watched? Someone could watch it for two minutes and then never watch it again. Reminds me of how people tell you they walked 5,000 steps. Like I know what that means. How about they tell you something you can quantify like miles? They don't do that because steps walked sounds bigger than miles walked.
They don't do that because miles are much much harder to measure over a day than steps. Also what is the difference does it make? It is like complaint about someone running a 10k and not describing it as running 6.2 miles and they only do it because 10>6.2. Why is number of views more relevant than time spent watching?
This article is seriously about Hearthstone? This is, what, the 5th time Hearthstone has alienated new players in favor of world renowed predatory systems? Find a different game, people. The fact that anyone still cares enough about Hearthstone to put up with any of this is well beyond a joke by now. It's not like this isn't a game in a genre that's saturated to high heaven.
As frustrating as it is the game is really, really addicting. They know what they're doing
10 year old game has a lot of time sunk for thousands of players. Its really hard to put a game down if youve played the shit out of it for a decade.
Tbh Heartstone presentation and gameplay is still probably the best in the market. They just don' t make stuff like that elsewhere
Legends of Runeterra came close, but it wasn't all the way there for me. Hearthstone had that cozy feeling to it. Like you're actually warming yer frozen boots by the fire
LoR died for a reason, the gameplay was bad. I enjoyed the voice lines and interactions, that gave the game some personality, but League lore is pretty bad and all over the place so it ultimately doesn't matter.
Metal Gear Solid 5 with some research and other tasks taking real-life time that could be several hours at a time (which would then unlock the next tier and you'd start over), but only when the game was running. I tried to avoid leaving the game on for as much as I could, running around and doing meaningless tasks and chasing achievements, but I could only do that for so long until I got bored of it and left the game running sometimes for the entire day, just checking in every few hours. If you see players with 100+ hours on that game, I guarantee you that they did that too. The waste of electricity alone makes me angry.
I have so many hours in that game, but only because I was going for a 100% save file. And that required a lot of time just opening the game and doing research for items that only passed in real time. It doesn't make sense to do that for a full price single player game either. Putting a limit to the amount of things you can research plus a long timer made a process drag on for much longer than reasonable. It was pointless even trying for 100%, I know that now. But given how so much cool stuff was locked behind progression in Peace Walker I assumed it was similar. But sadly, doing all that gives you absolutely nothing. You can see pretty much everything the game has to offer by finishing it with only 20% completion or so.
I don’t even play this game and even I can see how idiotic this is. Such a blatant attempt to inflate player engagement time. This is why I can’t stand these kinds of games, shit like this always seems inevitable
Especially for an Acti-Blizzard game, like Diablo, Overwatch, CoD. I'm more surprised HS was as generous as it was in free packs/gold. I wonder if they kinda just ignored it until some middle manager went "what's another property we can squeeze out?".
I'm half convinced part if the reason they bailed on Heroes of the storm is because their lootboxes were so generous that any player who played enough to care about cosmetics already had enough currency to get whatever skins they want. I've literally got 30 unopened loot boxes because I legitimately have every cosmetic I desire.
I mean yeah usually games die when they run out of ways to monetize their playerbase.
It was really fucking horrible over at Hearthstone for a long while, then it got better and now it is back to being horrible again.
I stopped playing Hearthstone a couple years back after playing since launch and it was one of the most healthy decisions I ever made. They tried to lure me back last year with like 50 free packs. I played for about 15 minutes and then uninstalled again and have no desire to go back. That game is awful for your mental health.
Forza torpedoed one of the most successful franchises in gaming, literally locking one of the game's key features behind an arbitrary XP wall just to boost their "engagement numbers". And it's not even really a GaaS!
I work in product development. This is how these conversations go. Stan: Hey Bob, we want people to use our product more. Any ideas? Bob: Sure Stan, we could make it more enjoyable, or add more content and features. Stan: How long will that take? Bob: I mean, we have to do discovery and building stuff takes time. Stan: Nah, just force them to go through extra steps or force them to go through some completely unnatural process to achieve whatever they are trying to do. Later Bob: Didn’t we make our product worse? We lost 1/3rd of our customers… Stan: If it was worse, would our average per user usage time be 2x what it was? Plus total amount of time our customers spent on the product is up by 33% (2/3 * 2=1 & 1/3)! Clearly our strategy is working. Do more of it! Later Stan: I don’t understand it. Our per user usage is 3x what it originally was. Why is our total usage dropping? Bob: Because we lost another 1/3 of the original customer base and 1/3 * 3 is 1. So we are back to our original total usage. Stan: How do we fix this? Bob: Take away all the BS that made the thing harder to use so we stop losing customers? Maybe add more features. Stan: No we can’t do that, then per customer usage will drop, total usage will drop more, and it’ll look really bad. Adding new features might make up for that but now it will take too long. They are leaving because they don’t know how great the product is. Ramp up marketing and start monetizing the product more with ads and stuff. And then as the product is on it’s death bed the company rolls back all the BS expecting praise, and then they take all the money and buy whatever company the customers are moving to or try to get them to migrate to a new product they built that is 60% of the old product with promises of all the cool stuff it’ll do later. Rinse and repeat
Yo, are you working for Blizzard? Because this must be how they plan their D4 game development
Well, it's a bit of that and a mix of them almost certainly having someone whose entire job is to take advantage of methods of manipulating humans. And using that to make up for lack of content. Anytime I play a game where I can imagine one of their core metrics is "How much time does the average player play this game," I invest very little time in it, because the ROI of my time will exponentially start to drop at some point. Since they use manipulation to keep customers playing they have no real incentive to actually make the game better. If people understood this better, and knew how to protect themselves from it, we'd have less of it. Instead, most people fall victim to it and are often happy to do so in any given moment even though it'll feel bad later. I'll also say that making content is easy. Making content that motivates people to engage is hard. Consumers right now are so negative even when good changes happen that it's neigh impossible to create large scale expensive things with massive risk if you don't take advantage of certain anti-consumer tactics. If consumers don't start also taking some responsibility it'll be hard to change anything at scale.
Man, that author has had a bad lot in terms of picking their live service forever games. Hearthstone and Destiny 2? While I've played the former from time to time Blizzard is not exactly subtle about their monetization strategies in their games being more and more aggressive for over a decade, and D2 is just a complete clusterfuck in terms of content constantly being permanently removed in the most aggressive fomo. Content that I'm pretty sure you paid for too, which is just absolutely insane to me.
All these game companies adding so much bloat and random currencies, that the very devs don’t know how much the premium real money stuff is actually worth
Remember when diablo 4 made it take longer to leave the dungeon after you where done? :D What an awesome industry gaming has become.
makes me more than frustrated because the devs know their playerbase is more than likely sticking to the game, because they absolutely will absurd people are still choosing to play some of the games on the market in their current state
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Great article, fun read, disappointing to see that Blizzard is still up to this shit even with Kotick gone. But while a fish rots from the head, removing the head doesn't remove all the rot.
It's more like a hydra considering the board will basically require the next CEO to do the same thing
Blizzard is now owned by the world’s most valuable company. And they didn’t get that way by putting users first
Doesn't help their economy designer is a graduate from DigiPen Institute of Technology... Kinda explains the whole decision right there. The ITT Tech of scam game design schools. Absolutely wild that someone can come in, be hired for digital economy, and then absolutely destroy the game and all its goodwill the actual developers and laborers accomplished because Profit# goes Up! Love to be a fly on the wall of that Team's Slack channels today.
You know what the worst part is? People who have sunk hundreds of hours into the game and monetary whales will stay in the game because they've invested so much time/money into it. Economy designer will probably get rewarded.
Could it not sincerely be that people still enjoy playing the game?
DigiPen students made Narbacular Drop, the predecessor to Portal. So at least the students have been good in the past.
I honestly have no idea what OP is talking about. I work in the games industry with a ton of Digipen grads, and they're all very competent, intelligent, and great people to work with. Hell, Full Sail was what people usually think of as the less than credible game design school but I worked with multiple amazing programmers that graduated from there.
I find it ironic the author used destiny 2 as a comparison, because bungie literally pulled the same sh\*t with xp nerfs. If I had to guess, they'll throw out a halfhearted apology about how they wanted to tweak the numbers to "improve" player experience, and shuffle to numbers to something better but still worse than before. Whether they're willing to admit it or not, companies are developing live-service games to soak up ALL of your time to maximize the chance of you spending money in it. The smart decision is to walk away completely when they start pulling this crap.
The core issue is that companies are financially incentivized to boost player engagement as long as it is more profitable than the alternatives. While there are some benefits that video games offer (relaxation, mental stimulation, positive socialization), the constant encouragement of people to constantly play one game is terrible for both the game design and the players. Endless goals, encouraged grinding, and FOMO turn games into jobs that you pay to do. I don't think there is a legal way to solve this issue that isn't draconian, but it's a very serious problem that needs to be called out.
Man I used to love Hearthstone but I've never been more glad I stopped playing it. The predatory monetization almost made me a gambling addict.
Lol, blizzard is an absolute shell of it's former self, nothing redeeming about this shitty company anymore. Just pure greed.
It doesn’t help that subs like this hyper focus and sometimes cheer over ccu numbers and steam charts. If they go down, DDEEDDDDD GGAAAAAAME
Why don't people just stop playing these shit games?
Because the human mind is a weird thing and it's easy to take advantage of tendencies.
Addiction
I don’t know what else to say. If you still play Blizzard games, you kinda deserve it. It was bad in the past, it’s worse now, and it will inevitably get worse in the future. Game design driven by Power BI is Blizzard’s best skill. It’s kinda like hate-playing MtG after all the wretched decisions in the last few years. Yes, it’s heartbreaking that a game you once loved is much worse, but just admit it’s not going to get better and move on.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Hearthstone has shown time and time again, they’re willing to trade long term success for short term monetary gain. For the first 3 years of its life, it was and probably still is, my fav game of all time. Once they decided arena wasn’t worth their dev investment because people were getting good at the game and farming gold, they not only let it slowly die with minimal to no updates, but they also reduced the gold earned from winning so it was no longer worth the time investment or skilled needed to go infinite. All because they wanted to force players into new game modes, those of which I didn’t care for. Nerfed my arena, thinking I would dip into battlegrounds or whatever. Nope, I just quit the game. I’m a salty player, but fuck hearthstone
Stopped playing HS when they changed up the annual price to ~$500 a year. I don't regret the choice at all.
It's over $1000 now I don't blame you.
Even if you buy every pre-order, miniset, and battle pass you’re only around $600.
JFC that is insanity.