Ben Lee Talks About The Battle Pass And A Progression System
Ben Lee just responded on the highly discussed topic about the Battle Pass and a Progression System, sharing some interesting insights.
- This year, they took big steps towards making the game more affordable and they intend to continue maintaining the game affordable going forward.
- Reward and Progression system is something major that they are working on right now.
- The Battle Pass survey wasn't sent to "state" what's the progression system will be about but rather to gather some information about which way they should shape the Battle Pass.
- One of their goals for this new system is to allow you to play Hearthstone your way, you won't be tied to playing only Standard or Wild in order to obtain the majority of the games’ economic rewards anymore.
- Another goal is to "repack" (not reduce) the current rewards in a way that is easier to understand and track for a player.
- In addition, there will be more cosmetic rewards that players might earn during every expansion cycle.
- The system will be beneficial for every player type, you won't have to worry about missing something if you just don't have a time to play every day.
- More details (new features, improvements, etc) to come at the start of the next expansion's reveal phase.
Quote from Ben LeeThis year we took big steps towards making it easier and more affordable than ever for players to acquire an awesome card collection, including making the game more friendly to our free-to-play-players.
With the launch of Ashes of Outland, we implemented the no duplicates rules, introduced free competitive decks for new and returning players, significantly increased ranked rewards, added 1st time ranked rewards, held multiple events with hefty reward packages, offered rewarding expansion quest chains and we’ve also committed to providing free single-player Adventure content for the foreseeable future.
We chose to do these things because they are good for our players and we believe they are the right thing to do for the game. They weren't reactionary measures to competition or a dwindling player-base. We have many millions of players and are going to be here and strive to remain one of the most popular, relevant, and fun games around for many years to come.
We are grateful to our players for their continued support and as described above have worked hard to try and value their time and financial investments fairly. We have no intention of going back on or undermining the progress we have made on this front.
By the above statement, I very specifically mean to identify and clarify that we absolutely intend to maintain the value that players can earn within the game and keep the flexibility of purchases that current rewards provide.
We are undertaking a major rework of our rewards and progression systems. A survey did go out about this recently with the aim of gathering information to help us refine the design of the systems. This isn't something new, Hearthstone has been sending out surveys for years and often what is discussed in these surveys does not represent what ends up going into the game.
One of our goals for this new system is to allow you to play Hearthstone your way, you won't be tied to playing only Standard or Wild in order to obtain the majority of the games’ economic rewards anymore.
We are also planning on repackaging (not reducing) the current rewards that you can obtain in Hearthstone and put that information in front of you in an easy to view and understand manner. We want you to know how many rewards you've acquired, how many more you can earn and what steps you need to take in order to obtain them. In addition, we're adding a number of exciting cosmetic rewards that players can receive during every expansion.
Finally, we are investigating broadening the benefits of the existing Tavern Pass system to supplement the rewards of the upcoming progression system with exciting new cosmetics.
There’s been some discussion that a huge time investment would be required to complete the levels in the system. We don’t intend this to be the case.
I'll use myself as the example here. I reach Legend every month, during an expansion cycle I typically earn more than 5,000 Gold (I would not expect to earn less under the new system). Outside of Hearthstone, I am a busy father of two children, I have a demanding full-time job, active life and I play a huge amount of other games outside of Hearthstone in my spare time. We want people like me who love Hearthstone but also have other responsibilities and interests to be able to complete the rewards track levels.
We want our players to feel good about participating in this new take on rewards and progression, without feeling that they might miss out if they don't have time or that they'd have to make sacrifices in their lives in order to do so.
We look forward to showing you this and a host of other things we've been working on to bring more exciting content to Hearthstone during our Year of the Phoenix Mid-year check-in at the start of our next expansion's reveal phase.
Ben Lee
Game Director - Hearthstone
Quote from Ben LeeThe 5,000 gold that I reference is my personal experience based on how much I am able to play per expansion. Yours would be different depending on how much time you can put in.
This is categorically not a statement that the system is capped at 5,000 Gold. The section highlighted in bold clearly address this also.
-Ben
I believe you don't fully understand how duplicate protection works...
If you have all of the common cards you'll get duplicate common cards, but, for instance, the rare ones will be the ones you don't have yet, until you complete them too. No duplicates doesn't mean once you got all of the common ones you'll get packs full of higher rarity cards lol.
No, I still get common cards (hasn't happened to rare cards), from packs, that I already have two of. Though I don't have all the commons from that expansion.
Did you dust any of those? Because they'll count as owned and be out of the pool
Of course not, I got X3 of them
Audience numbers are dropping? Or what?
Absolutely. Ben Lee talks about dwindling playerbase so at least they acknowledged that.
I know this may sound stupid... but does that mean it's the end of daily quests? Probably not, but that's just one of the possibilities if you think about it. I hope not, but who knows, the new system may replace it completly with the new battlepass, which kinda worries me a lil, just the possibility that is looming about it.
I don't really wanna lose the ability to do quests with my friends since just goofing off while doing quests was the way I was playing this game for a really long time, just casually playing with him and slowly gathering collection to play other stupid deck ideas.
Just make it a fair price point and have all the cards available for that price each expansion, how hard is that? It's utterly absurd in a world where you can pay over a hundred hard earned bucks every 4 months and still not have every card in the set.
Seems like Blizz and WotC are in a battle to see who can alienate their playerbase/kill their game the most/fastest.
its about time blizzard did something for the F2P players out there. the sooner this BATTLEPASS goes live the better. big up blizz and big up the hearthstone dev team.
WE 👏 DON'T 👏 WANT 👏 SUBSCRIPTIONS 👏
Game is over long time ago my friend.
If it's going to be more affordable, then daily quest need to award dust. One of the biggest problems with building a deck is I NEVER have enough dust. I rarely draft, and save all my gold for packs when the new expansion comes out. Even with all that gold for packs I still can't ever complete a whole deck 99% of the time unless I get super lucky on pack openings. It makes it feel like I HAVE to spend money in order to get a single deck up and running.
If you want to make it more affordable, just change the pack reward to 100g, leave the decision to players to make whether to buy current release pack or save for the future release.
What i really dislike about this system is you get random legendaries and epics, just give us Dust so we can have more fun and craft what we want, that is purely a downgrade to the current system and it should be addressed to Blizzard.
Are you all reading the same post that I am? The battle pass has been confirmed to be “purely cosmetic” so fucking stop whining and READ god damn. Also to whoever said they’re taking away their gold, you pretty much are hopeless, I would suggest reading the article but you clearly can’t.
Uh, where do you see it say it's only for cosmetics? I see it says "Finally, we are investigating broadening the benefits of the existing Tavern Pass system to supplement the rewards of the upcoming progression system with exciting new cosmetics."
That says to me cosmetics will be added to the rewards, not the only rewards.
With all due respect, f**k you, Blizz.
Hearthstone IS NOT free player friendly and will never be. Sadly for me who bought all the pre-orders expansions since Un'goro I haven't completed half of the legendary and epic cards the game has.