Hearthstone is jumping on the Season Pass bandwagon… in perhaps the dumbest way possible.

Earn More Rewards with the Darkmoon Faire Tavern Pass!
The Darkmoon Faire Tavern Pass unlocks the potential to earn even more rewards on the Rewards Track! With the Tavern Pass you can earn Hearthstone’s first-ever Cosmetic Coin, the Annhylde Warrior Alternate Hero and card back, three Jaina Mage Hero skins, three Thrall Shaman Hero skins, and experience boosts of up to 20% on the Rewards Track. Once you purchase the Tavern Pass, you will unlock the Silas Darkmoon golden Legendary minion and a 10% experience boost immediately!

In case you missed it, Blizzard did a big overhaul on Hearthstone rewards in conjunction with this Tavern Pass. Previously, the reward system was very straight-forward: you get daily quests (up to 3) that reward primarily gold, and 10g for every three wins. The new system is that there are now both daily and weekly quests that award XP, and you receive rewards as you level up along a track (which includes gold and other things). If you pay for the Tavern Pass though, you get the normal rewards plus a few cosmetics along a parallel track, plus a general 10-20% boost in XP gain.

Throughout the process leading up to the change, the Hearthstone devs repeatedly stated that this new system would not result in less gold rewards. But it does.

And the real kick in the teeth? The Tavern Pass costs $20.

Last year, I was gushing about Supercell introducing a Season Pass in Clash Royale. A large part of why was because of the value. Clash Royale has a cash shop that is borderline absurd/predatory, which made the $5 asking price seem downright beneficent in comparison. That’s… likely not an accident. Be that as it may, the amount of extra stuff you walked away with for $5 made it worth it for me.

When I look at Hearthstone in comparison, I don’t even recognize the company anymore. Literally, what is this shit? Paying $20 was always borderline for me when it came to the mini-expansions and the Dungeon Runs, but I put down the cash and largely walked away with what I considered some value. Dalaran Heist single-handedly got me through hundreds of hours of my son’s larval stage.

With the Tavern Pass though, the dissonance is getting too real. Hearthstone is not a premium game worthy of a $20 Season Pass. Seeing expansion sets with $80 “mega” bundles being advertised everywhere is sickening. And we just learned that in addition to the new normal of three expansions per year, Blizzard is adding another mini-expansion. Which would be fine, if the game were not so goddamn expensive already.

In the early days, the prices justified themselves in comparison to Magic: the Gathering and other paper CCGs. It isn’t 2014 anymore though – Blizzard is now competing in a world in which gamers can get things like Genshin Impact for free and the Xbox Game Pass for $10/month. Those obviously are not CCGs, but the world is moving on.

Blizzard has been keeping things fresh, like when they introduced Hearthstone Battlegrounds, which has been a relatively large success in spite of the fact that it’s even more crazy RNG nonsense. But that very innovation casts the rest of their monetization strategy into sharp relief. Battlegrounds Perk is another tier of paid advantage that expands the random selection of heros at the beginning of each match. Then there is Duels, another new game mode which seems poised to cannibalize the Dungeon Run roguelikes by replacing bosses with human opponents.

Also, Duels is directly tied to your card collection because fuck you.

SynCaine used to say that Hearthstone was a garbage P2W mobile game ported to PC, which never made much sense at the time (it released on PC first), but seems to retroactively becoming true. Except Hearthstone as an app is pretty garbage by itself – the app takes 40+ seconds to load, there are frequent disconnects, and it takes up a huge amount of space. So, basically, the monetization of a P2W app without the optimization.

I really don’t understand what Blizzard is doing. And, likely, neither do they.

[Fake Edit] As I was typing up this post, Blizzard released an official announcement:

We have been listening to your feedback regarding the Rewards Track and it’s clear we missed the mark both in how we communicated and implemented the full functionality of this first version of our rewards system.

We apologize for the confusion and disappointment we have caused.

During the natural progression of the rewards cycle, our intention was, and still is, to give out extra XP over time through a variety of ways. The aim is to help players get through the Rewards Track, or catch-up if they join later in an expansion phase, ultimately ensuring players earn more rewards. […]

In addition, you’ve provided us with a wealth of feedback, and we agree that the pack rewards at the end of the track don’t feel appropriate for the effort it takes to get them. We’re going to adjust these rewards in the later stages of the track, swapping six packs for a total of 1350 gold that players can spend as they see fit. If any players reach this milestone before we implement these changes, they will be retroactively compensated.

https://www.hearthpwn.com/news/7783-rewards-track-update-official-blizzard-statement

Amusingly, they appear to be following the same script as Bethesda with Fallout 76: release a reward track that mathematically requires hundreds of hours of grinding (unless you pay!), ignore the people that warn about the math prior to release, then release it on a population that instantly revolts, and then “remember” that you forgot to mention the hastily thrown-together events that give bonus XP.

Sounds legit.

This is the part of the post in which I make a token effort to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt. “They’re changing the 6 pack reward with 1350g, which is a big improvement!” But this capitulation was foreseen on Reddit for the past week: “2 greedy steps forward, 1 greedy step back” And seeing it play out in real-time is a bit nauseating… because it’s true.

Great, they fixed patched a very obviously broken reward system. And yet here we still are with a $20 Season Pass, with a new game mode dependent on having X epics in your collection, which means you can’t dust them to craft new expansion Legendaries that single-handedly win games on the spot. And Battlegrounds Perks is another whole layer of season pass-ness that exists for no rea$on.

Disgusting is the word that keeps coming to mind. Not exploitative, not greedy, but disgusting. Charging for MMO hotbars or lootboxes with 0.6% rewards are terrible, pernicious things to game design. But Blizzard’s Hearthstone “strategy” feels like strange hands slipping into pockets, groping about, feeling for loose change. What the fuck, Blizzard. This is a CCG, just sell some packs, Jesus Christ.