Blizzard just published an emergency blog post regarding yesterday’s Weekly Quest changes. After Patch 29.2 went live, players have noticed that requirements on most of their quests have tripled. The rewards also increased, but not nearly as much (by around 25% if we average all three Weekly Quests). I’m sure you’re aware of the situation, but if you haven’t heard about it for some reason, or want to look at the exact numbers, Old Guardian wrote a detailed article about it earlier today.
The response was immediate, and it wasn’t good. Players have pointed out that the new requirements are significantly too high. Many of them simply don’t play the game enough to be able to complete them or simply don’t want to be forced into playing game modes/decks they don’t want by Quests.
As you can see, pressure from the community can work. It didn’t take Blizzard long to reply. They just published a blog post apologizing for the changes and promising adjustments. The adjustments will go live soon – the current plan is to push it in addition to a hotfix already scheduled for this Friday.
One important thing to note is that this is not a full revert. They will be lowering the requirements from where they are right now, but still higher than the original ones. The good news is that the extra XP will stay. However, given that there are no specific numbers yet, I can’t fully judge the new system.
I really hope that’s not the case, but right now 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 love to be wrong about that, but many gaming companies have attempted it in the past, sometimes successfully. Again, all we can do now is wait for the final numbers and timing details.
Anyway, you can read the full blog post below:
Yesterday, Patch 29.2 went live with some changes to Weekly Quests, making them harder to complete but grant more XP. We had seen that many players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system. 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.
But we’ve heard your feedback and it’s clear that we pushed too far.
We want to reward players for their additional efforts, not make those rewards outside of their reach. 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. We’ll keep the additional XP where it is. We’ll have more information on the timing of this unscheduled hotfix soon, but it will be in addition to our first scheduled hotfix that is already planned for this Friday.
There might be some weird effects of this scaling down of Quest requirements. When you login, for instance, you might see a Weekly Quest over 100% completion. If that happens, it should get cleared up after you play a game and progress that particular Quest once more.
Thanks for your feedback on this update. We look forward to hearing how the changes feel after these adjustments.
Well from their POV it makes sense to make the increase to the reward and the quest requirement disproportionate because no matter the requirement the active players would end up completing them anyway so they are essentially giving out “free” xp that otherwise wouldn’t be there, so to balance it out they apparently wanted to cut down some of the xp the casual players earn instead. They probably made the limits such that the total xp earned across all playerbase would be less, in order to turn some of the casual players to active and maybe even paying players. However in whatever way you look at it there’s no way any demographic would be happy about this change, so I’m surprised they went through with it anyway. It makes me really happy to see the outrage for it though, I feel like the community should have given the same reaction couple months ago when they announced they would put cards (corridor sleeper for the last expansion) on early access from now.
“Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now.”
Nice, just double time to complete for only 20% extra XP now. ???????? This mf guys are really genius of blowing up player base. ????????????
Seriously, what they are thinking!? In what universe this is a good idea?
My presumption is that they don’t care. I’ve been playing since the beta but, as a casual player, I’ve barely spent a dime on the game. The ques rewards were enough to keep you competitive without spending. In fact that was one of the key appeals of the game.
But of course people like me don’t help pay for the server space or programming effort. So Blizzard don’t care if we drop over this and, frankly, unless those numbers are *way* down, this will likely end Hearthstone for me. And Blizzard will not care because it doesn’t affect their bottom line.
This feels like a deliberate attempt to drive away casual players and increase the number of whales among those that remain. It’s cynical in the extreme and I’m deeply disappointed
The main problem with this line of thinking is not that it is cynical, but also counterproductive. About a year ago, just before Microsoft acquired Activision, I saw a video discussion about the story of Blizzard, their games and the economics of the company under different managements and owners.
Its main conclusion was that the profitability of these namely F2P games is depending on the “whales” you mentioned above, players who buy everything and spend huge amounts of money – and they are a relatively small portion even among the paying players.
If I were the company leader, I would ask myself: “Why do the whales (or all the paying people) play the game and pay?” Because they just love to lose their money? No, they are here because they enjoy the game, the competitive play against decent opponents. They won’t do that if all their opponents were bots or “casual noobs”.
As a developer, I have two choices to build and maintain a decent playerbase: sell the game so cheap, almosr everyone can afford it – or sell the real good stuff for high price, and spend some of the income from the whales to “feed” many F2P/casual players, and give them a real chance to be competitive (ideally just a bit less than a paying one). If I cut them down like ballast, eventually I will lose the whales as well.
Or could it be that the long-term goal is to slowly let Hearthstone die, without causing a uproar by just shutting it down – because it is not very profitable anymore compared to their other products?…
“Or could it be that the long-term goal is to slowly let Hearthstone…” If it’s this, we are in trouble. Blew up the game seems like a “thing to do” for just ruin it and close it after the player base goes down. :/
Again, I hope this isn’t the case. </3
Yeah, looks (for me) like that. They truly DON’T CARE about it. And yes, amount of players will be down for a lot!