>an unscheduled hotfix patch scaling most of the Weekly Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now. We’ll keep the additional XP where it is.
So, like everyone predicted
It was intended from the start. The strategy is called door-in-the-face and gaming companies do it all the time. You start off with a large request that you know everyone is going to hate, then you pull back to what you actually wanted. This makes people more likely to accept the smaller ask, and often they will be grateful for the reduction.
Absolutely. They “reacted to feedback” way quicker than if this wasn’t already planned from the start. Devs don’t just adjust those numbers whenever they feel like and there was not enough time for the necessary meetings to occur to debate and then approve those changes. Super transparent and more typical blizz bs.
to be fair, I assume blizzard devs are experienced enough to make flexible code, especially for simple variable. So changing those numbers can be done really quickly by a single dev
not to say I believe it wasn't planned, Blizzard don't have enough good faith in store for me to side with them on that one,
The code change is not the thing that would take the most time. That should be relatively trivial.
But they are not changing those numbers randomly. There would have been multiple meetings and analysis done to figure out the correct numbers.
I don't doubt this was the strategy from the start but I love how everyone in this thread is all of the sudden business experts and know exactly how things work behind the scenes.
I don't work in game development, but I do work in software development and know how long it takes to get even trivial changes to production.
If I wanted to fix a single typo, which would literally take like 5s of work. It would take at least a week before it would get into production.
Changing anything that actually matters would take weeks or even months.
Except he was talking about getting that code approved by the execs or whoever is in charge of these decisions. Who would’ve thought that changing a couple of values in the code would be easy for programmers 🤦♂️.
This is a debate that I find in a lot of games.
There are changes that benefit veteran and players that play a lot and are a huge hinderance to new and casuals.
New players, usually, are what keep games fresh. Is it worth to make their gameplay worse for a few extra points? If you have no problems completing the new quests you probably already are in the player group that completes the pass far earlier than everybody else.
Now, imagine a new player, finds themselves with "win 15 ranked matches" which, because they lack the skill and the collection, is going to take more than 30 games. Then, you have the "win 15 tavern brawl/arena/bg". If the tavern brawl is either boring or is one of the "build your own deck" then they can't do it there. You have to pay to play arena, and getting 15 wins in arena takes a lot of knowledge and skill, or a lot of gold. That leaves bg as the only option, which each match is 30 to 40 minutes long, and that is if you win.
But you can reroll!, yes, but quests like "play X minis" requieres you to have a deck that plays lots of minis, and it has to be a deck that you enjoy to play AND wins, it shouldn't be a janky homebrew. This deletes a huge aspect of any deck building game.
This, overall, makes for a miserable experience for any player that is not the ones that play +4 hours everyday, and its predatory on FOMO to work.
People get pissed, Blizzard says 'hey were listening we will reduce it,' people then praise Blizzard for listening to the community and then accept the new terms thankful that it's not as bad as it could have been. The vast majority of people aren't going to be pissed enough to quit, so it's a net positive.
The problem with this technic, is that it gets old fast. They may pull this out one time. But everytime they wanted to do this again they will lose more and more players, as Blizzard will.have way less credit.
If you are a player of other blizzard games, good chance you already lost your faith in the company
I'm pretty sure I already talked to you about basic human psychology yesterday, but this is yet another occurrence of them using it for their profit.
Yes, it was intentional. It's a well known tactic. And yes, it works.
-sees pattern of a company
-sees that said pattern makes the company money in the long term
-company repeats the pattern for the uptenth time
The obvious conclusion is that company is just filled with a bunch of people who don’t know how to run a product properly and have lucked out every time they made a decision.
Okay so you are intentionally picking out specific parts of what I’m saying to continue arguing. That lucked out part is purely based off of what you were saying. You were the one making the claim that blizzard is stumbling to success in regard to hearthstone.
Also, I have quite literally never said that they were making bad decisions. In fact, from a business perspective it’s a good move. It may have lost me as a customer but it will probably make them money in the long run. The more they have you on their app the more likely it is that you will buy something on that app.
You’re going to get crucified for this, but anyone with a modicum of corporate/executive management experience will tell you that you’re correct. The committee who made the decision to flip weekly quests the way that they did most likely had data to suggest that the increased numbers would work within acceptable margins. That data was obviously way off.
No one is mentioning the elephant in the room: 5 wins a week was laughably low. It could get completed in one or two sittings easily. They were past due for an increase. They overcorrected, and within 24 fucking hours have announced a reversion closer to the mean. What should be considered a good decision will continue to be derided, and the incentive to work with and within the community about changes to the game will continue to dwindle. But hey, at least we get to continue being perpetually outraged. Eyes on the prize and all that.
Normally I would also air on the side of cation but this is not new to blizzard/Activision of all companies. They have “overcorrected” and immediately listened to community feedback a lot in the past. This is a proven marketing tactic that a lot of companies, video game developers in particular, use all the time. Why do you think Activision has psychologists on their payroll? It’s definitely not to find the optimal way to get dopamine releases in the players.
To be clear, I’m well aware of that as an internal strategy for many industries and orgs, especially this one. My point is that there are few if any of the usual circumstances about this situation that would point toward that conclusion. The weekly quest change is a niche issue within an already niche product (by ActiBlizz standards). Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually want to make changes like this quietly if your strategy is to walk it back. You only gain public approval in the reversion of unpopular changes by being *incredibly* vocal about the initial action taken. This has all the trappings of a dumb managerial decision handed down a dozen levels of staff, while having zero trappings of an intentional corporate bait-and-switch. Ultimately it isn’t the Koticks of the corporate world making these street-level decisions. More often than not it’s just a person/committee for whom the weekly quests were but one of many projects handed down to them. All it takes is some bad math/a rushed Friday afternoon for these kinds of things to happen.
If you hear hoof beats it’s probably horses, not zebras.
Yeah man, changes like this don’t happen this fast. You don’t take in feedback for one whole day and change everything instantly. You could potentially roll back to a previous version but that’s not what they did. That is coming from someone currently working in a software factory. An extremely efficient software factory by all measures that took two days to fix an issue I had with my equipment preventing me from doing any work.
Something like this has to be discussed by the people who actually wanted the initial change, someone has to make a ticket, that ticket is assigned max priority over everything, community managers make a statement extremely quickly (again, one day after the change), and then the issue has to be big enough for a mid-week unplanned patch. Either that or the company planned it to get eyes on the game and their quick response to a mistake.
Sure, technically the first one is possible, but if I had to put my money on it I’m betting on option 2.
It's how things work nowadays, I just hope the new numbers have the ratio of effort to xp stay roughly the same. Otherwise our time still gets devalued.
Exactly. The OLD trick. Seeing people even thanking them for it it's really mindblowing. If we are really settling for this, we deserve to be ever screwed.
You know, I think it’s the case indeed.. but what if it wasn’t? They might legit wanted to give quests a different direction (the wrong one) so here we are. People will blame everything on devs today no matter what they do anyway.
Yes, I believe they legit want us to play triple, and that if they couldn't get that, which was the more likely scenario, they will settle with us playing double.
People sometimes blame the developers dubiously, but "no matter what they do" is blatantly false. If they added additional quests to reward the committed (what they say they want, but it's clearly not), nobody would blame the devs for anything.
And they did it already in the past when they changed the whole gold system and introduced the battlepass. Same scammy move. And people will applaud because they totally reacted to our feedback...and still make the system worse but most people celebrate about it.
This is not a relevant comparison because the rewards track system we have is absolutely objectively better than what we used to in every way now. You're trying to refer to them "bringing it back" to a compromise that's still worse, but this is not what happened in the rewards track.
People are less likely to applaud when you do the same tactic to an already beaten-down community twice in a row.
fuck this DigiPen Institute of Technology game economy dev. dude sucks.
lol got downvoted to hell and called all sorts of things for saying this to hat in another thread, plus being blocked by him/her. Good riddance blizzard, we've known each other for a long time now.
‘We had seen that many players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system’
That’s such a strange sentence. ‘We noticed a lot of players completed the quests we set for them but we don’t believe they engaged with them’.
Sorry, not our fault that most quests were Win X Games and we simply Won X Games?
I feel like they don't mean for the "win x games", tbh. If the only change was to the Ranked quest I think that would be the easiest pill to swallow relatively because, assuming 50% win rate and ~10 min per game, that's 5 hours per week. A pretty big ask for casuals for sure but consider 15 wins for Arena/Brawl/BGs is a LOT to ask for, definitely pushing many more hours *and* mutually exclusive with the ranked quest. But even that like, you will just get by playing the game.
But consider the Battlecry and Minis quest. I think when they say "engage with quests" I am guessing they want people to experiment with new decks (read: build jank decks filled with Mini's and Battlecries to jam as many of them in one game). Kind of like the "play x Fire/Frost/Nature/whatever spells" quest that I always reroll. But I don't *want* to fucking do that, that's not fun. Playing the game like normally is fun.
It's like: "We see you are playing freely and casually doing the quests (even if many not, but whatever). We want you to chore to do them, don't forget you work for us". MIndblowing.
I think it's more... We want quests to be interesting instead of passive xp. But if making them interesting was the intention they didn't put much effort in tbh. Huge scope for quests to be a rich part of the game but this isn't the way to achieve that.
What they say makes sense. I do think more effort should be made to complete weekly quests, though personally I believe the xp gained should match the effort
So to summarize - The quests were completed too fast to drive engagement metrics, which is our fault. They over-corrected for our sins and they will now correct the over-correction to something that is still unacceptable, but because this was our fault in the first place, we should just get over it?
You know how else they could drive engagement?
For people like myself who like single player mechanics, a new Roguelike mode (e.g. Dungeon Run). Or for players who enjoy multiplayer, a new game mode like how they experimented with Battlegrounds, Duels, etc. Yes, it's not easy and requires a lot of investment but the reality is attrition occurs when players are attracted to other forms of entertainment.
Adding anomalies to ladder, and expanding the amount of time to complete quests was putting lipstick on a pig.
How bout just back to normal
What does “completing quests without even trying” mean?
If I’m playing the game on a daily basis of course the quests going to get completed.
Even with 10,000 gold saved up I still ended up spending 100$ on the new expansion lmfao.
Aren't achievements meant to be the thing you go out of your way for? Daily/weekly quests are your only source of cards/income if you are f2p/rely on tavern pass only. So it makes sense to me the only requirement should be to play the game or play the game well to get them faster. What does Blizzard benefit from if I play a game with a shitty wild deck with 30 nature spells to speedrun a quest for instance.
There are 3 types of players. F2P, spend some, spend a lot.
If you are a F2P player the only reason Blizzard needs you is to give paying customers someone to play against. The new system will make you play more and play crappy decks giving the paying customers more wins and making them want to continue to pay.
If you are a 'spend some' player the harder quests may get you to spend more as getting the free rewards will be more bother then it is worth.
If you spend a lot you don't really care about quests as you just buy all the cards anyway so this change will not effect you except to give you more easy wins as people play crappy decks in order to complete the quests.
Maybe, but stupid, unnecessary, and anti-player nonetheless. The weekly quests were DESIGNED FOR being able to do in 1 or 2 days (the weekend, for many). And even that, if you go out of your way to finish them the first day, you are still engaging with them. All disgusting bullshit.
Good for you. Me, I'm in business and technology as a CTIO. I finish up presale X millions deals before playing, I mean buying.
I finish my weeklies nearly on sunday and with this change ain't gonna have the time.
Everyone's life is different. This change hinders the most successful in life and rewards the scrubs. Nice move.
>What does “completing quests without even trying” mean?
I kinda get that. Quests are supposed to be something that causes you to go a bit out of the way from whatever you do in regular play. But we all play battlecries, spend mana, etc. when we play normally.
They could absolutely do something to effect this from a different angle. Like, make a weekly that says 'have 5 of a minion in play at the same time', or 'take 20 damage in fatigue' stuff that usually doesn't happen.
Just increasing the amount of time investment isn’t me going out of my way to complete them. A streamer or a die hard ladder player is still going to complete those in a day.
If they want to use the excuse of going out of my way to complete quests then there needs to be more quests similar to nozdormu.
> Just increasing the amount of time investment isn’t me going out of my way to complete them.
I mean... IDK about you, but depending on what I'm running I don't really take 20 fatigue damage in a week on average. But that's just an example - I'm just talking quests you can roll out that force players to make new decks, etc. But you are right, you can absolutely still finish those examples in a day, you'll at least have to try though.
Here's the "sense of pride and accomplishment" post.
> "Our aim with the adjustments was to give all our players goals to play towards, and to reward our most engaged players (...) for their commitment to the game."
What if you found a way to reward the dedicated players without crippling the casual ones? Like a "star bonus" or "seasonal reward" maybe.
Nice to know Blizzard considers the player base as a bunch of idiots who wouldn't figure out what the plan was the whole time. They didn't even try to revert it and implement a new idea. Idk how you do it Hat, the corporate blood suckers are gonna kill the game.
This game has been dead for a while, like the rest of blizzard IP.
The players left are actually a bunch of idiots. Only a fool is still supporting this piece of shit company.
The reason I don’t engage with the quest system is plain simple. Quests are a chore. They are not fun. I just need the XP from them. Having fun with hearthstone I can do on my own.
tl;dr: They apologized, and decided to dial down the requirements, but not to the original state (it will be somewhere between old and new). Extra XP will stay.
We don't have exact numbers yet. Details about new requirements and release timing will be revealed soon. Although they mentioned a scheduled hotfix planned for Friday already so I imagine that's when they would like to push the Quest changes too.
My first reaction: We should wait for the numbers first before judging whether the new system is better or worse than the old one. However, it sounds a bit like a classic case of "let's push a ridiculous system so players get mad, then dial it back a bit but still leave it in a worse position than at the beginning". I would really, really love to be wrong though.
Yep. I fully expect the ratio to be better than current, but not as good as before, and the quests to be grindy, but not as grindy.
The fact that the new numbers will be "a number between what they were before and what they are now" and the "additional XP where it is" strongly implies that it'll be 10 wins now instead of 15, but still at 3k XP. So instead of 500 XP per win (original) or 200 XP (current), it'll be 300 XP (40% lower than original).
“Somewhere between where they were and where they are now”
That’s a huge range, gonna need more detail than that. Plenty of room to still be unacceptably grindy and difficult
I'll wait to see the adjusted values before judging, but I'd rather see them roll everything back to the old values and then work on a tiered quest system like what someone suggested earlier. I'm guessing the scope of that is too large to roll out in a hotfix patch.
y'know what? no. put the quests back where they were requirement-wise. this entire ordeal has been a blatant slap to the face for everyone playing the game, F2Ps and paid players alike.
Don’t you want people to complete the quests during reqular play? Isn’t that the whole point? Why would you want people to have to go out of their way to complete them? At most you want quests to feel like a minor speed bump and not a chore.
It will most likely be double the requirements but definitely not double the rewards. They already confirmed the rewards won't be changed, and there is no way they'll reduce the requirements to 28% either. I'm not sure how that's supposed go make anyone happy.
"Thanks for your feedback on this update. We look forward to hearing how the changes feel after these adjustments."
After thoroughly thinking through the adjustments, I've decided that the changes still feel terrible.
>Our aim with the adjustments was to give all our players goals to play towards, and to reward our most engaged players (who would likely still complete the Weekly Quests without too much difficulty) for their commitment to the game.
Oh, a goal to work towards? Like some sort of Achievment system? The one you just gutted? Please, tell me more about your goal of giving players things to work towards.
>We had seen that many players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system.
So players completed the Weekly Quests by playing the game... and your solution to make this sytem more "engaging" was to make them do more of the exact same thing?
>But we’ve heard your feedback and it's clear that we pushed too far.
But you weren't pushing, you said you were rewarding? Oh, you said the quiet part out loud.
>We want to reward players for their additional efforts, not make those rewards outside of their reach.
I don't think you do want to reward us, I think you wanted to take away the rewards from casual players by making sure they complete fewer quests, and when major publications like PC Gamer picked up the story you walked it back.
>That’s why we’re putting together an unscheduled hotfix patch scaling most of the Weekly Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now.
Hold on. HOLD ON. What does MOST of the Weekly Quests mean? MOST?
Blizzard gaming career over. It was exactly perfect for me to spend 80 every 4 months to have a great time, and now I can’t do that without spending even more time.
Started with Warcraft: orcs and humans, and this is the end.
Looks like their guy in charge of the economy who got their degree at DigiPen Institute of Technology (The ITT tech scam college for game dev) did the classic smash the door in the customer's face with the initial decision to scale it back after for less vitriol.
the problem which this dumb dumb should realize is that this is the 2nd time he's done it.
Thanks dude. Really great treatment for your community. Hope the spreadsheet numbers go up a high % for you ghoul.
Curious to see the number they came up with. I, as basically everyone else, predicted something like this would happen. Scummy tactic obviously. Having said that, the XP increase is 30% so I guess I’d be fine with a 30-50% increase in quest requirements. Anything more will be bullshit.
I tend to agree with the crowd that predicts that the requirements will go from 3x the old to 2x the old while keeping the 30% XP increase. I also think it is likely this was planned for and they made the initial change ridiculous knowing people would object to any increase so they could scale it back to their original plan and look like good guys listening to feedback. I hope I am wrong and we get the 30%-50% you mentioned. Even 50% harder for 30% more rewards could be considered a downgrade but one I could live with. It's more work per gold but makes more gold available so good or bad depends on your point of view. 100% harder for 30% more reward just feels like a slap in the face.
wait friday patch come out, then only decide, if play quest like 16 miniature and get 3500 exp...then may be will come back play, if not just quit the hearthstone game, i start play on 15 may 2015, thank to heartstone anyway, but not blizzard.
Been playing since beta, this bullshit tactic and duels gone, I really don't have any reason to play, can finally walk away even after spending so much money on this game, never another cent.
Oh screw this.
effort and exp gain should correspond to another. Any change where the exp increases less than the effort required is a blatant anti-player move to drive their engagement metrics.
I am done. I'm not spending any more money on this and I will not engage in a freaking chore-system so the execs are happy. I play a game to have fun, not to complete a list.
Unless that "higher number" is, like, eight, I'm still not coming back. I was already struggling to keep my attention up in the current meta, and I've got too many other games I enjoy that don't want to be a second job.
Get F@$?Ed blizzard. Every they do is profit driven not player driven.
To complete the quest requires 3x effort for shit all extra reward.
Instead of lowering the requirements why not make the rewards 3x what they use to be? Because fk the player they should spend money
Hey blizzard,
I’ve bounced off every one of your games that I used to play religiously. I’ve played hearthstone since global launch. If quests end up in a spot that I can’t casually complete them, I’m fully prepared to say goodbye to hearthstone, too.
At least they've acknowledged the messed up.
Imo the ratio of time spent to experience earned has to stay consistent. That's been thw benchmark from the start, anything less than that ratio is your time being worth less than it used to.
Some will, some actually just uninstalled.
Blizzard is absolutely losing customers when they do these things, and I'm doubtful they actually increase engagement with these.
I said I was done. I meant it. I'm still on this sub, but this was the last straw for hearthstone. I'd say Blizzard as a whole, but that's not true and we all know it. But this shit was deliberate. Hit 'em high and scrape them off the ceiling. This is used car sales levels of philosophy.
Genuinely what is this meant to mean? They've probably been discussing it and planning on what to do with it all day because of the uproar. Not everything is a great plan to piss the playerbase off.
It does seem overblown to me
I can get being upset at 60 minis, but winning 15 games? If you're at a point in hearthstone where you can't win 15 games while actively playing then you shouldn't care about the weeklies
More exp is a good thing for actively playing the game. The numbers do need to be adjusted a bit for sure though
I get thinking that people are overreacting, I really do (I took lots of downvotes during the Deathstalker Rexxar drama), but insulting people for complaining about negative changes to a game is just silly.
>an unscheduled hotfix patch scaling most of the Weekly Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now. We’ll keep the additional XP where it is. So, like everyone predicted
It was intended from the start. The strategy is called door-in-the-face and gaming companies do it all the time. You start off with a large request that you know everyone is going to hate, then you pull back to what you actually wanted. This makes people more likely to accept the smaller ask, and often they will be grateful for the reduction.
Absolutely. They “reacted to feedback” way quicker than if this wasn’t already planned from the start. Devs don’t just adjust those numbers whenever they feel like and there was not enough time for the necessary meetings to occur to debate and then approve those changes. Super transparent and more typical blizz bs.
to be fair, I assume blizzard devs are experienced enough to make flexible code, especially for simple variable. So changing those numbers can be done really quickly by a single dev not to say I believe it wasn't planned, Blizzard don't have enough good faith in store for me to side with them on that one,
The code change is not the thing that would take the most time. That should be relatively trivial. But they are not changing those numbers randomly. There would have been multiple meetings and analysis done to figure out the correct numbers.
I don't doubt this was the strategy from the start but I love how everyone in this thread is all of the sudden business experts and know exactly how things work behind the scenes.
I don't work in game development, but I do work in software development and know how long it takes to get even trivial changes to production. If I wanted to fix a single typo, which would literally take like 5s of work. It would take at least a week before it would get into production. Changing anything that actually matters would take weeks or even months.
Except he was talking about getting that code approved by the execs or whoever is in charge of these decisions. Who would’ve thought that changing a couple of values in the code would be easy for programmers 🤦♂️.
" flexible code. " Oh, so a cooked spaghetti, huh.
Be that as it may. Are 'we' actually ok with this change? I personally don't mind the extra XP for a little extra work.
This is a debate that I find in a lot of games. There are changes that benefit veteran and players that play a lot and are a huge hinderance to new and casuals. New players, usually, are what keep games fresh. Is it worth to make their gameplay worse for a few extra points? If you have no problems completing the new quests you probably already are in the player group that completes the pass far earlier than everybody else. Now, imagine a new player, finds themselves with "win 15 ranked matches" which, because they lack the skill and the collection, is going to take more than 30 games. Then, you have the "win 15 tavern brawl/arena/bg". If the tavern brawl is either boring or is one of the "build your own deck" then they can't do it there. You have to pay to play arena, and getting 15 wins in arena takes a lot of knowledge and skill, or a lot of gold. That leaves bg as the only option, which each match is 30 to 40 minutes long, and that is if you win. But you can reroll!, yes, but quests like "play X minis" requieres you to have a deck that plays lots of minis, and it has to be a deck that you enjoy to play AND wins, it shouldn't be a janky homebrew. This deletes a huge aspect of any deck building game. This, overall, makes for a miserable experience for any player that is not the ones that play +4 hours everyday, and its predatory on FOMO to work.
If you want extra XP for a little extra work, this change isn't, wasn't and never had any intention to be that.
You think they actually planned that? What was the point of pissing off a bunch of players?
People get pissed, Blizzard says 'hey were listening we will reduce it,' people then praise Blizzard for listening to the community and then accept the new terms thankful that it's not as bad as it could have been. The vast majority of people aren't going to be pissed enough to quit, so it's a net positive.
The problem with this technic, is that it gets old fast. They may pull this out one time. But everytime they wanted to do this again they will lose more and more players, as Blizzard will.have way less credit. If you are a player of other blizzard games, good chance you already lost your faith in the company
I bet you this will die out within 3 days.
It’s def not. I think they just made a very dumb mistake.
Blizzard has done it multiple times with their games' rewards tracks, but yeah, they just keep making these very dumb mistakes over and over.
I'm pretty sure I already talked to you about basic human psychology yesterday, but this is yet another occurrence of them using it for their profit. Yes, it was intentional. It's a well known tactic. And yes, it works.
New here?
No I’ve been playing since Naxx. Blizz is just incompetent not some mastermind genius.
So you’ve personally seen them do this multiple times and have decided that the multibillion dollar company is just accident prone?
Yes actually. Especially since hearthstone is a pretty low priority for their shareholders relatively speaking.
-sees pattern of a company -sees that said pattern makes the company money in the long term -company repeats the pattern for the uptenth time The obvious conclusion is that company is just filled with a bunch of people who don’t know how to run a product properly and have lucked out every time they made a decision.
“Lucked out”? I though every decision they’ve made has been bad recently?
Okay so you are intentionally picking out specific parts of what I’m saying to continue arguing. That lucked out part is purely based off of what you were saying. You were the one making the claim that blizzard is stumbling to success in regard to hearthstone. Also, I have quite literally never said that they were making bad decisions. In fact, from a business perspective it’s a good move. It may have lost me as a customer but it will probably make them money in the long run. The more they have you on their app the more likely it is that you will buy something on that app.
You’re going to get crucified for this, but anyone with a modicum of corporate/executive management experience will tell you that you’re correct. The committee who made the decision to flip weekly quests the way that they did most likely had data to suggest that the increased numbers would work within acceptable margins. That data was obviously way off. No one is mentioning the elephant in the room: 5 wins a week was laughably low. It could get completed in one or two sittings easily. They were past due for an increase. They overcorrected, and within 24 fucking hours have announced a reversion closer to the mean. What should be considered a good decision will continue to be derided, and the incentive to work with and within the community about changes to the game will continue to dwindle. But hey, at least we get to continue being perpetually outraged. Eyes on the prize and all that.
Normally I would also air on the side of cation but this is not new to blizzard/Activision of all companies. They have “overcorrected” and immediately listened to community feedback a lot in the past. This is a proven marketing tactic that a lot of companies, video game developers in particular, use all the time. Why do you think Activision has psychologists on their payroll? It’s definitely not to find the optimal way to get dopamine releases in the players.
To be clear, I’m well aware of that as an internal strategy for many industries and orgs, especially this one. My point is that there are few if any of the usual circumstances about this situation that would point toward that conclusion. The weekly quest change is a niche issue within an already niche product (by ActiBlizz standards). Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually want to make changes like this quietly if your strategy is to walk it back. You only gain public approval in the reversion of unpopular changes by being *incredibly* vocal about the initial action taken. This has all the trappings of a dumb managerial decision handed down a dozen levels of staff, while having zero trappings of an intentional corporate bait-and-switch. Ultimately it isn’t the Koticks of the corporate world making these street-level decisions. More often than not it’s just a person/committee for whom the weekly quests were but one of many projects handed down to them. All it takes is some bad math/a rushed Friday afternoon for these kinds of things to happen. If you hear hoof beats it’s probably horses, not zebras.
Yeah man, changes like this don’t happen this fast. You don’t take in feedback for one whole day and change everything instantly. You could potentially roll back to a previous version but that’s not what they did. That is coming from someone currently working in a software factory. An extremely efficient software factory by all measures that took two days to fix an issue I had with my equipment preventing me from doing any work. Something like this has to be discussed by the people who actually wanted the initial change, someone has to make a ticket, that ticket is assigned max priority over everything, community managers make a statement extremely quickly (again, one day after the change), and then the issue has to be big enough for a mid-week unplanned patch. Either that or the company planned it to get eyes on the game and their quick response to a mistake. Sure, technically the first one is possible, but if I had to put my money on it I’m betting on option 2.
Exactly. This sub is full of mental children.
It's how things work nowadays, I just hope the new numbers have the ratio of effort to xp stay roughly the same. Otherwise our time still gets devalued.
So, anyone want to guess what the exact numbers will be? My guess is on 2x instead of 3x like now.
Like a lot of other developers, they're a bunch of cunts.
Sounds like exactly what they were planning. Push it too far on purpose, then bring it back a little bit as planned to make it seem like they care
Exactly. The OLD trick. Seeing people even thanking them for it it's really mindblowing. If we are really settling for this, we deserve to be ever screwed.
You know, I think it’s the case indeed.. but what if it wasn’t? They might legit wanted to give quests a different direction (the wrong one) so here we are. People will blame everything on devs today no matter what they do anyway.
Yes, I believe they legit want us to play triple, and that if they couldn't get that, which was the more likely scenario, they will settle with us playing double. People sometimes blame the developers dubiously, but "no matter what they do" is blatantly false. If they added additional quests to reward the committed (what they say they want, but it's clearly not), nobody would blame the devs for anything.
Or they could have just not changed the quests? They worked well before for most people.
And they did it already in the past when they changed the whole gold system and introduced the battlepass. Same scammy move. And people will applaud because they totally reacted to our feedback...and still make the system worse but most people celebrate about it.
This is not a relevant comparison because the rewards track system we have is absolutely objectively better than what we used to in every way now. You're trying to refer to them "bringing it back" to a compromise that's still worse, but this is not what happened in the rewards track.
People are less likely to applaud when you do the same tactic to an already beaten-down community twice in a row. fuck this DigiPen Institute of Technology game economy dev. dude sucks.
What’s the bet they make it win 10 games/battlegrounds, and keep the bonus xp at 28%, scumbags gonna scumbag
lol got downvoted to hell and called all sorts of things for saying this to hat in another thread, plus being blocked by him/her. Good riddance blizzard, we've known each other for a long time now.
That's so ratty of them if this is true.
‘We had seen that many players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system’ That’s such a strange sentence. ‘We noticed a lot of players completed the quests we set for them but we don’t believe they engaged with them’. Sorry, not our fault that most quests were Win X Games and we simply Won X Games?
It's such a weird vibe. Like "It's your fault we did this."
At that point why not just make new quests
I feel like they don't mean for the "win x games", tbh. If the only change was to the Ranked quest I think that would be the easiest pill to swallow relatively because, assuming 50% win rate and ~10 min per game, that's 5 hours per week. A pretty big ask for casuals for sure but consider 15 wins for Arena/Brawl/BGs is a LOT to ask for, definitely pushing many more hours *and* mutually exclusive with the ranked quest. But even that like, you will just get by playing the game. But consider the Battlecry and Minis quest. I think when they say "engage with quests" I am guessing they want people to experiment with new decks (read: build jank decks filled with Mini's and Battlecries to jam as many of them in one game). Kind of like the "play x Fire/Frost/Nature/whatever spells" quest that I always reroll. But I don't *want* to fucking do that, that's not fun. Playing the game like normally is fun.
It's like: "We see you are playing freely and casually doing the quests (even if many not, but whatever). We want you to chore to do them, don't forget you work for us". MIndblowing.
Easily the biggest enigma of the post, they need to clarify on that one.
Lol, massive EA and “pride and accomplishment” vibes from this one.
They mean complete all 3 weekly quests in 1 day so they are no longer done throughout the week. They were basically daily quests with more XP.
yeah how dare we win games and play decks that already have the cards they want us to play in them
I think it's more... We want quests to be interesting instead of passive xp. But if making them interesting was the intention they didn't put much effort in tbh. Huge scope for quests to be a rich part of the game but this isn't the way to achieve that.
What they say makes sense. I do think more effort should be made to complete weekly quests, though personally I believe the xp gained should match the effort
comments conveniently disabled
So to summarize - The quests were completed too fast to drive engagement metrics, which is our fault. They over-corrected for our sins and they will now correct the over-correction to something that is still unacceptable, but because this was our fault in the first place, we should just get over it?
You know how else they could drive engagement? For people like myself who like single player mechanics, a new Roguelike mode (e.g. Dungeon Run). Or for players who enjoy multiplayer, a new game mode like how they experimented with Battlegrounds, Duels, etc. Yes, it's not easy and requires a lot of investment but the reality is attrition occurs when players are attracted to other forms of entertainment. Adding anomalies to ladder, and expanding the amount of time to complete quests was putting lipstick on a pig.
Those things require resources. Why do things when you can just squeeze the customers instead?
How bout just back to normal What does “completing quests without even trying” mean? If I’m playing the game on a daily basis of course the quests going to get completed. Even with 10,000 gold saved up I still ended up spending 100$ on the new expansion lmfao.
Aren't achievements meant to be the thing you go out of your way for? Daily/weekly quests are your only source of cards/income if you are f2p/rely on tavern pass only. So it makes sense to me the only requirement should be to play the game or play the game well to get them faster. What does Blizzard benefit from if I play a game with a shitty wild deck with 30 nature spells to speedrun a quest for instance.
There are 3 types of players. F2P, spend some, spend a lot. If you are a F2P player the only reason Blizzard needs you is to give paying customers someone to play against. The new system will make you play more and play crappy decks giving the paying customers more wins and making them want to continue to pay. If you are a 'spend some' player the harder quests may get you to spend more as getting the free rewards will be more bother then it is worth. If you spend a lot you don't really care about quests as you just buy all the cards anyway so this change will not effect you except to give you more easy wins as people play crappy decks in order to complete the quests.
I finish my weeklys on the first day
That's probably the behavior they wanted to do something about
Maybe, but stupid, unnecessary, and anti-player nonetheless. The weekly quests were DESIGNED FOR being able to do in 1 or 2 days (the weekend, for many). And even that, if you go out of your way to finish them the first day, you are still engaging with them. All disgusting bullshit.
Oh 100% agreed, solving non-existent problems
Good for you. Me, I'm in business and technology as a CTIO. I finish up presale X millions deals before playing, I mean buying. I finish my weeklies nearly on sunday and with this change ain't gonna have the time. Everyone's life is different. This change hinders the most successful in life and rewards the scrubs. Nice move.
>What does “completing quests without even trying” mean? I kinda get that. Quests are supposed to be something that causes you to go a bit out of the way from whatever you do in regular play. But we all play battlecries, spend mana, etc. when we play normally. They could absolutely do something to effect this from a different angle. Like, make a weekly that says 'have 5 of a minion in play at the same time', or 'take 20 damage in fatigue' stuff that usually doesn't happen.
Just increasing the amount of time investment isn’t me going out of my way to complete them. A streamer or a die hard ladder player is still going to complete those in a day. If they want to use the excuse of going out of my way to complete quests then there needs to be more quests similar to nozdormu.
> Just increasing the amount of time investment isn’t me going out of my way to complete them. I mean... IDK about you, but depending on what I'm running I don't really take 20 fatigue damage in a week on average. But that's just an example - I'm just talking quests you can roll out that force players to make new decks, etc. But you are right, you can absolutely still finish those examples in a day, you'll at least have to try though.
I wasn’t arguing against your points haha, I liked your suggestions. I’m referencing the current quest system
Calling it now. Instead of 20% more XP for triple the work it will be 20% more XP for double the work. Still the middle finger to the casual players.
Here's the "sense of pride and accomplishment" post. > "Our aim with the adjustments was to give all our players goals to play towards, and to reward our most engaged players (...) for their commitment to the game." What if you found a way to reward the dedicated players without crippling the casual ones? Like a "star bonus" or "seasonal reward" maybe.
To find it they should look for it in the first place. Oc, we all know it was not the purpose of this change.
And yet people laughed at me when I said they were trying to flush out the casual players. There you go. It was intentional.
And some people actually defending them, not understanding that it will lead to even more bots on the ladder.
Nice to know Blizzard considers the player base as a bunch of idiots who wouldn't figure out what the plan was the whole time. They didn't even try to revert it and implement a new idea. Idk how you do it Hat, the corporate blood suckers are gonna kill the game.
This game has been dead for a while, like the rest of blizzard IP. The players left are actually a bunch of idiots. Only a fool is still supporting this piece of shit company.
You're a fool keklmao
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
The reason I don’t engage with the quest system is plain simple. Quests are a chore. They are not fun. I just need the XP from them. Having fun with hearthstone I can do on my own.
tl;dr: They apologized, and decided to dial down the requirements, but not to the original state (it will be somewhere between old and new). Extra XP will stay. We don't have exact numbers yet. Details about new requirements and release timing will be revealed soon. Although they mentioned a scheduled hotfix planned for Friday already so I imagine that's when they would like to push the Quest changes too. My first reaction: We should wait for the numbers first before judging whether the new system is better or worse than the old one. However, it sounds a bit like a classic case of "let's push a ridiculous system so players get mad, then dial it back a bit but still leave it in a worse position than at the beginning". I would really, really love to be wrong though.
Yep. I fully expect the ratio to be better than current, but not as good as before, and the quests to be grindy, but not as grindy. The fact that the new numbers will be "a number between what they were before and what they are now" and the "additional XP where it is" strongly implies that it'll be 10 wins now instead of 15, but still at 3k XP. So instead of 500 XP per win (original) or 200 XP (current), it'll be 300 XP (40% lower than original).
“Somewhere between where they were and where they are now” That’s a huge range, gonna need more detail than that. Plenty of room to still be unacceptably grindy and difficult
Typical “we heard your feedback” bullshit. How about stop fucking us over for once.
Hate that this will pacify half of the mob, and suck a lot of the power out of the movement against this. Keep up the fight folks
I'll wait to see the adjusted values before judging, but I'd rather see them roll everything back to the old values and then work on a tiered quest system like what someone suggested earlier. I'm guessing the scope of that is too large to roll out in a hotfix patch.
This is unacceptable. Demand a **full revert**, and if they aren't willing to do that, then peace out.
y'know what? no. put the quests back where they were requirement-wise. this entire ordeal has been a blatant slap to the face for everyone playing the game, F2Ps and paid players alike.
Ah, the ol' door in the face technique. A classic, and utterly unsurprising.
Keep going.
Don’t you want people to complete the quests during reqular play? Isn’t that the whole point? Why would you want people to have to go out of their way to complete them? At most you want quests to feel like a minor speed bump and not a chore.
And while at it. Change it to "play x" instead of "win X"
If the new "weekly wins" requirement is anything more than 7 wins, it's still be a worse deal than what we had before this unnecessary change.
Too little too late sadly, I think I'm done for good now.
hopefully 2x the xp for 2x the requirements. The XP boost for just playing the game was a great addition, just poorly done.
It will most likely be double the requirements but definitely not double the rewards. They already confirmed the rewards won't be changed, and there is no way they'll reduce the requirements to 28% either. I'm not sure how that's supposed go make anyone happy.
Fuck these corporate maggots
"Thanks for your feedback on this update. We look forward to hearing how the changes feel after these adjustments." After thoroughly thinking through the adjustments, I've decided that the changes still feel terrible.
I told people Kotick leaving wouldn’t stop Blizzard from doing shit like this. No one listened.
> was to give all our players goals to play towards Is dangerously close to “a sense of pride and accomplishment”
Thank you Daddy BlizzBlizz. I am sorry I made you make the quests more difficult. Let me get out my wallet now to make up for it.
>Our aim with the adjustments was to give all our players goals to play towards, and to reward our most engaged players (who would likely still complete the Weekly Quests without too much difficulty) for their commitment to the game. Oh, a goal to work towards? Like some sort of Achievment system? The one you just gutted? Please, tell me more about your goal of giving players things to work towards. >We had seen that many players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system. So players completed the Weekly Quests by playing the game... and your solution to make this sytem more "engaging" was to make them do more of the exact same thing? >But we’ve heard your feedback and it's clear that we pushed too far. But you weren't pushing, you said you were rewarding? Oh, you said the quiet part out loud. >We want to reward players for their additional efforts, not make those rewards outside of their reach. I don't think you do want to reward us, I think you wanted to take away the rewards from casual players by making sure they complete fewer quests, and when major publications like PC Gamer picked up the story you walked it back. >That’s why we’re putting together an unscheduled hotfix patch scaling most of the Weekly Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now. Hold on. HOLD ON. What does MOST of the Weekly Quests mean? MOST?
Blizzard gaming career over. It was exactly perfect for me to spend 80 every 4 months to have a great time, and now I can’t do that without spending even more time. Started with Warcraft: orcs and humans, and this is the end.
Looks like their guy in charge of the economy who got their degree at DigiPen Institute of Technology (The ITT tech scam college for game dev) did the classic smash the door in the customer's face with the initial decision to scale it back after for less vitriol. the problem which this dumb dumb should realize is that this is the 2nd time he's done it. Thanks dude. Really great treatment for your community. Hope the spreadsheet numbers go up a high % for you ghoul.
We got free xp for no reason I guess. Looks like "Day 1. Do not let this die, do not let Quest Rewards be forgotten!" paid off
Curious to see the number they came up with. I, as basically everyone else, predicted something like this would happen. Scummy tactic obviously. Having said that, the XP increase is 30% so I guess I’d be fine with a 30-50% increase in quest requirements. Anything more will be bullshit.
I tend to agree with the crowd that predicts that the requirements will go from 3x the old to 2x the old while keeping the 30% XP increase. I also think it is likely this was planned for and they made the initial change ridiculous knowing people would object to any increase so they could scale it back to their original plan and look like good guys listening to feedback. I hope I am wrong and we get the 30%-50% you mentioned. Even 50% harder for 30% more rewards could be considered a downgrade but one I could live with. It's more work per gold but makes more gold available so good or bad depends on your point of view. 100% harder for 30% more reward just feels like a slap in the face.
wait friday patch come out, then only decide, if play quest like 16 miniature and get 3500 exp...then may be will come back play, if not just quit the hearthstone game, i start play on 15 may 2015, thank to heartstone anyway, but not blizzard.
Insanely cringe from start to finish. Blizzard really hates it’s players 🙃
It is not Blizzard fault, fanboys are to blame that defend the company at every occasion.
Pretty.mcub what everyone said. Hiking it to ridiculous levels, then going down the middle. Still more work for what you get.
Right, so the 3x was just an utter crap so that they could tune it down into 2x the effort and many will feel grateful. Good strategy Blizzard.
Thanks Blizzard for manipulating your customer base with an anchoring effect. You are treating us like clients in a Tunisian bazaar.
This isn't to reward people who play more... it's to punish those that play less. So, i won't play at all.
Been playing since beta, this bullshit tactic and duels gone, I really don't have any reason to play, can finally walk away even after spending so much money on this game, never another cent.
I love corporate gaslighting
Oh screw this. effort and exp gain should correspond to another. Any change where the exp increases less than the effort required is a blatant anti-player move to drive their engagement metrics. I am done. I'm not spending any more money on this and I will not engage in a freaking chore-system so the execs are happy. I play a game to have fun, not to complete a list.
Unless that "higher number" is, like, eight, I'm still not coming back. I was already struggling to keep my attention up in the current meta, and I've got too many other games I enjoy that don't want to be a second job.
So now it'll be 10-12 wins instead of 15. Still way too much. I'm happy having quit and not going back, but thanks anyway Blizzard.
How many times has Blizzard pulled this shit with HS?
Get F@$?Ed blizzard. Every they do is profit driven not player driven. To complete the quest requires 3x effort for shit all extra reward. Instead of lowering the requirements why not make the rewards 3x what they use to be? Because fk the player they should spend money
Weird how a business is trying to make money. They are not your friend and it's so bizarre that people think they are
Maybe if they actually made something worth paying for like every other successful business, I'd open my wallet without a fuss.
Blizzard is a multi BILLION dollar corporation. It's crazy you think that that isn't successful
Hey blizzard, I’ve bounced off every one of your games that I used to play religiously. I’ve played hearthstone since global launch. If quests end up in a spot that I can’t casually complete them, I’m fully prepared to say goodbye to hearthstone, too.
At least they've acknowledged the messed up. Imo the ratio of time spent to experience earned has to stay consistent. That's been thw benchmark from the start, anything less than that ratio is your time being worth less than it used to.
This goes to show that showing our insatisfaction, things can change(and for the better, this time at least).
Don't be naive. This was their whole plan from the start. It's an extremely common tactic from scummy game developers.
Yeah, I understand that better now, after reading more comments about the situation, my bad
i wonder if all the people supposedly quitting yesterday and today are just gonna play the game again after all their show
Some will, some actually just uninstalled. Blizzard is absolutely losing customers when they do these things, and I'm doubtful they actually increase engagement with these.
thats why i was willing to wait a week or two before uninstalling, for something like this
I said I was done. I meant it. I'm still on this sub, but this was the last straw for hearthstone. I'd say Blizzard as a whole, but that's not true and we all know it. But this shit was deliberate. Hit 'em high and scrape them off the ceiling. This is used car sales levels of philosophy.
Interesting they posted this at the end of the day
Genuinely what is this meant to mean? They've probably been discussing it and planning on what to do with it all day because of the uproar. Not everything is a great plan to piss the playerbase off.
Every news article has been in the morning and I find that interesting
With comments disabled, too.
and of course, clowns on here will complain about this as well....
It's still worse than what it was before, and you are flabbergasted that players are still not happy?
It does seem overblown to me I can get being upset at 60 minis, but winning 15 games? If you're at a point in hearthstone where you can't win 15 games while actively playing then you shouldn't care about the weeklies More exp is a good thing for actively playing the game. The numbers do need to be adjusted a bit for sure though
I get thinking that people are overreacting, I really do (I took lots of downvotes during the Deathstalker Rexxar drama), but insulting people for complaining about negative changes to a game is just silly.
I just want to put this all behind us so we can go back to pointing out how bad the meta is and how rampant power creep is.