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Hearthstone Evolving Monetization
I mentioned it last post, but Hearthstone recently came out with a new expansion, Whizbang’s Workshop, which also heralds a new Standard cycle with several sets rotating out. But after 10+ years of playing, this is actually the first time that I intentionally didn’t purchase the expansion bundle.
Now, nobody needs to know the machinations that transpired that resulted in my declining to spend money on Hearthstone, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Because, well, I certainly found it interesting.
Hearthstone is like most TCG/CCGs (e.g. Magic: the Gathering) in that it releases expansions several times a year (and pushing older expansions out of Standard). Card packs can be bought for 100g via in-game currency or purchased using real money at any time (basically $1/pack). In the weeks leading up to expansion releases, Blizzard will offer limited-time pre-purchase bundles, which sweeten the deal: $50 and/or $80 for 50/90 packs, random Legendary cards, and cosmetic Hero portraits. If you are trying to build a collection, these are typically the best bang for your real-dollar buck.
Blizzard will also sell you a Reward Track Pass ($20) that gives rewards like specific Legendary cards, and even more cosmetics. There is a separate Tavern Pass ($15) for Battlegrounds, which unlocks cosmetics but also an additional 2 Hero choices at the beginning of each game (arguably the most naked Pay2Win). Hearthstone also has an in-game store which features bundles of cards (typically $20) or macrotransaction cosmetics ($60!) for “signature” Legendary cards, e.g. alternative art.
All in all, if you want to give Blizzard your money, they make it easy to do so.
The actual value proposition has gotten murky to me though. A few years ago, Blizzard implemented both a pity timer (e.g. guaranteed Legendary cards after X packs) and copy protection that was later extended to all card rarities. This was an enormous Quality-of-Life feature that doesn’t necessarily get the press it deserves. On top of that, Blizzard more recently added a “reroll” feature once they committed to alternative art cards, which meant you could get a different card of the same rarity if you already had a “better” visual version. This doesn’t come up too often, but sometimes it’ll let you exchange a weak duplicate on the free Reward Track for a chance at something much better.
Concurrently, Blizzard has also seemingly changed their design philosophy regarding the power of cards overall. Historically, it was all about the high-profile Legendary cards flipping games by themselves. While that is sometimes still true, most of the time the best decks are only good because of the supporting Common and Rare cards. This change appears more democratic… but it has a sinister edge. When Blizzard nerfs a card, they allow you to dust (disenchant) the card for its full dust value, rather than the normal 25%. Back when Legendary cards ruled the day, a nerfed Legendary meant you could just dust it and craft another brand-new Legendary and play with a different broken deck. These days, Blizzard nerfs the (relatively powerful) supporting Commons/Rares, leaving the Legendary cards alone. Except, without the support, the Legendary card is useless, but you can’t dust it for full value because the Legendary itself hasn’t changed. Thus, “investing” in Legendaries is risky.
As an example, Blizzard just released a balance patch yesterday that contained three Paladin nerfs to Common/Rare cards. Now, the Paladin deck did need adjustments, as it could kill you from hand with buffed minions. And these cards were problematic. However, if you crafted the 3-5 Legendary cards that went along with the deck (and improved your winrate thereby), well… oops. Best you can hope for is that some other Paladin deck rises from the ashes before the cards rotate out of Standard.
Coming into this expansion, I had actually accumulated 6700g, which meant I could buy 67 packs straight-up. The copy protections mentioned above essentially means that that is enough packs to get all of the Common and Rare cards, along with a handful of Epic and Legendary cards. What would another 50-90 packs give me on top of that? A few more pity Legendaries/Epics… but remember, they are less critical than they were before and/or more risky. I would get a lot more dust to craft whatever card(s) I want, but again, I will already have the important Common/Rare cards already, and thus be gambling on “investing” in the higher tier cards that may get stranded in nerfed decks. No thanks.
Finally, to really bury the lede: Whizbang’s Workshop is a weak set compared to what we just had.
The extra funny issue surrounding everything is how players – including myself! – react to new sets. Many times the top theorycrafters will say something like “Totem Shaman is still Tier 1, but no one wants to play it.” What they really mean is that a deck that was super strong two years ago is just as strong against the current format without needing new cards. But no one wants to play it. Because A) they already played the same strategy for years prior, and B) it means acknowledging you paid money buying new cards you can’t even effectively use. It’s a double cognitive dissonance whammy!
Blizzard has gotten a bit better at adjusting cards (including buffing them, which they almost never did before) at regular cadences, but all the interlocking factors I talked about really makes me wonder about unintended side effects for players like me, e.g. the ones that try to gauge the value per dollar gained. Moving heavy into more cosmetic options is a clear workaround, but even that is fraught in nature – if the alternative art Legendary isn’t competitive, you’ll never likely be able to play it. And if you never play it, you may never be enticed to purchase said alternative art.
Or maybe you don’t care and just want to watch it animate from your collection like an NFT and/or play casual games and hope you draw it before getting killed by a bot. In which case, you do you.
Doublespeak: Blizzard edition
File this one under Dissonance, Cognitive:
One of our upcoming goals in Mists of Pandaria is to make the gap between the overall DPS/healing of both PvE and PvP items smaller. In fact, we have design plans for new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP than equivalent level PvE gear and weapons.
The overall goal is to reduce the barrier for crossing between PvE and PvP (and vice versa), as well as to also ensure that PvP gear is the best in PvP, and PvE gear is the best in PvE.
I read that, and now feel like I’m losing my ability to understand language.
I mean… okay, making the gap between PvP and PvE gear smaller. Got that, that’s good. But then they’re making “new PvP combat mechanics that will make PvP gear and weapons markedly better in PvP.” So… err… they want the gap to be larger. Even if I somehow imagine that the DPS/healing difference will be smaller between the two gear sets, if these new combat mechanics makes PvP gear “markedly better” in PvP than PvE gear… then what the hell? You are right back where you goddamn started!
Up cannot be Down. We can’t have always been at war with Uranus Eurasia!
The only sort of thing I can imagine is if, for example, each piece of PvP gear reduced the cooldown of your PvP trinket, but otherwise had the same relative DPS/healing as PvE gear. Maybe that would be a lower barrier to entry? But if CC was balanced with lower trinket cooldowns in mind, then a fresh player would still be at a high, relative disadvantage. Perhaps not in BGs or even Rated BGs – respawning and getting back to the fight erodes a large chunk of your timer naturally – but absolutely in Arenas, which was the thrust of the thread the blue responded to.
Regardless, how would Blizzard ensure that PvE gear would be better in PvE in ways that didn’t affect DPS? Having 4000 resilience means you have 4000 less Haste/Mastery/Crit, right? It’s a huge difference.
I am so confused right now.
The F-Word
I was reading Stabs’ post about treasure hunting in Diablo 3, how the typical gold farmer strategies won’t work and so on, when I see Nils in the comments say:
While reading this something inside me cries out: “Why don’t you just try to have fun??”
You seem determined to optimize the fun out of it.
The first question that popped into my mind was “What if you find optimizing fun?” And Stabs replies:
@Nils Ah we’re getting back to the question, what is fun? All I can say is, for myself, I’m hyped that I’ll be able to play D3 for money, it was a game I’d have played heavily anyway, I’ve always loved theorycraft and numbercrunching, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane D2 mechanics and I believe I’ll have an utter blast doing this.
I can’t really defend optimisation to someone who considers it not fun. I do suspect that you’re swimming against the tide.
If you listen to the PC Gamer podcast I linked you’ll hear them argue very persuasively that D3 is a game where everyone is a gold farmer but then go on to talk about how much fun it is to play. They’re not mutually exclusive.
I think the only fun I’ll intentionally sacrifice for optimisation is alting. I usually mess around with lots of different classes and builds when I get a new game. With this game I’ll be rushing to the end.
I have heard the phrase “optimize the fun out of it” from Nils and Tobold and others, and it was not until Stabs’ unapologetic response that I realized how asinine the phrase is to begin with. Optimization is fun. I am not going to hedge that with “can” or “to some people” because you have to fight stupid declarative statements with Objective (Self-) Truth. If you find optimization fun, then it is. Period. If you don’t like it tomorrow, then it is not fun, until such time that you change your mind again. If someone finds something different fun, they are wrong. Unless you agree with them. Is that not the implied premise in these fun discussions? Are we not justifying our favorite colors (red), flavors (peanut butter), or meals (taco salad)? I hate steak. Do I ask why people ruin their dinners with slabs of tough, bloody cow muscle? Of course not. And not just because I prefer taking a perfectly healthy salad and smothering it in greasy ground meat, nacho chips and sour cream.
I do not judge because I do not live in a solipsistic bizzaro-world where Fun is some objective Form straight out of the works of Plato. Have you read Gevlon at Greedy Goblin lately? He “refuses to nihilistically believe” that two people playing WoW can have different goals, motivations, desires. In a Battleground, he rages at the people fighting on the bridge instead of guarding a flag like he is; they are M&S (moron & slacker) for not winning in the most efficient manner. I was not aware winning was more important than having fun, but he covers that too by saying winning is the only way to have fun in the first place. I am not quite sure how he handles games like The Sims or Second Life – possibly you are M&S for not playing winnable games to begin with – but Nils, Gevlon, and Stabs all played WoW at some point in time so obviously someone was doing it wrong. Right?
The Dark Heart of the Matter
The underlying problem with “what is fun?” posts is not just because fun is a subjective thing. The underlying problem is that none of us can really be sure what fun even is to ourselves. That is, strictly speaking, an absurd statement. But the psychological fact of the matter is that human beings are damn near incapable of accurately predicting how they will feel in the future. Feel free to read along at home the article entitled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. A choice excerpt:
Much of the work of Kahneman, Loewenstein, Gilbert and Wilson takes its cue from the concept of adaptation, a term psychologists have used since at least the 1950’s to refer to how we acclimate to changing circumstances. George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ”Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we’re designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.” In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ”We don’t realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.”
It is easy to overlook something new and crucial in what Wilson is saying. Not that we invariably lose interest in bright and shiny things over time — this is a long-known trait — but that we’re generally unable to recognize that we adapt to new circumstances and therefore fail to incorporate this fact into our decisions. So, yes, we will adapt to the BMW and the plasma TV, since we adapt to virtually everything. But Wilson and Gilbert and others have shown that we seem unable to predict that we will adapt. Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event and almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.
You can probably draw a line from that concept and connect it with Cognitive Dissonance, and especially the sub-set of that: Effort Justification. This is extremely relevant in MMO discussions about what is “fun” and what is not for what shall be readily apparent reasons:
Dissonance is aroused whenever individuals voluntarily engage in an unpleasant activity to achieve some desired goal. Dissonance can be reduced by exaggerating the desirability of the goal.
Oestrus from The Story of O and Nils from Nils’ MMO Blog both wrote about this dissonance in their (hopefully cynical) “What is fun?” articles. Both Nils and Oestreus argue (in effect) that fun is the resolving of the dissonance that is doing a long, arduous grind for an ultimately meaningless reward. After completion, you convince yourself that the journey was meaningful, and magically you retroactively have fun. Your brain does this because it refuses to believe that you could be so dumb to have spent all that time voluntarily being miserable, ergo the reward must have been worth it. And the sad thing is, this works. Nils even has a series of posts talking about how “great games enslave you,” not through riveting substance or fun activities (which is really salt that ruins the larger shit soup), but by pulling a Lucy and moving the football before you get to it, every goddamn time. I may be paraphrasing here.
In their defense, I do believe they are talking about great MMOs specifically, where “great” is defined as ones that keep you pressing levers for food pellets as long as humanly possible. It is the same definition of greatness, incidentally, that makes America’s Funniest Home Videos one of the greatest television shows of all time. Better than, you know, The Wire, The Sopranos, Dexter, etc etc.
On the Other Hand…
The good news is that your inevitable, happiness-based existential crisis may be unnecessary, and here is why: Think about your favorite games of all time. Now… were any of them MMOs? I am guessing no. For me, my favorite games are Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics, Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, and so on. I quit playing WoW a few weeks ago after four years, and I have 7000+ hours logged; not only is that more time than I spent playing those listed games combined, it is probably more time than I played in the entire SNES era. And yet WoW will never occupy a place on my favorite game list. No doubt I had some memorial experiences, but the vast majority of those experiences were social ones that could have existed just as easily elsewhere, like in EQ, Rift, LotRO, Warhammer, etc etc. There was nothing specifically exclusive to WoW to merit associating the social triumphs with the quality of the game itself. Moreover, the very principals Nils attributes to “great” MMOs sours my memory of the WoW-specific moments of genius – Sunstrider Isle was an absolutely amazing starting experience, but it and other experiences are diluted by ~6920 hours of merely Okay gameplay. Just like a movie or book or blog post (like this one) can overstay its welcome via lack of editing and meandering structure, a game too can ruin itself by unnecessary extension.
It is for this reason that I believe the future of the MMO market is heading towards a more single-player Show & Tell experience. This was not possible when the payment model was pretty exclusively subscription-based, but now the stage is set through the legitimization of alternative payment models (F2P, but also Diablo 3 RMAH, etc) to allow developers to go back to crafting experiences with defined beginnings, middles, and ends. The end of the story is not always the end of gameplay, of course, which is where the Show & Tell comes into play. MMOs will be less about Lucy taking away the football at the last moment, and more about showing her how far it can fly.
In An Age 