I have seen a bug not mentioned here in Battlegrounds twice now: a minion with zero health stays on the board, can be attacked, damages the attacker, and counts for damage against the enemy hero.

Well, we dodged that one – for now.

You think they raise the price since we are getting “more” gold?

Maybe, if you just excavate deep enough, you end up in Deepholm.

Loving the clinical description and the tumbleweeds here in the comments, at least comparatively. This is the publisher of Diablo, Starcraft, (World of) Warcraft, Hearthstone and Overwatch announcing a completely new game, and no one really cares.
Justified for me, by this trailer at least.
Seems any hope of an interesting new, actual game of this company is out of the window by now.

Fwiw, it seems to register sometimes. I just finished the Noz-Quest today after four games. The one it did not register, I conceded, but made progress on another quest. I did not get this new warning, which shall prevent you from conceding without getting progress.

Same here. No Noz progress, but other (weekly?) progress seems to register (spend 500 Mana, win 5 BG).

Came here to write that, not bad at all!

My perspective as a f2p casual player:
Hearthstone is not my “main game”, but my goto time killer whenever I have a window of a couple of minutes. If I have time at hand, I go play some big singleplayer game (currently replaying Metroid Prime 2 from the trilogy, for me its close to gaming heaven).
I do not want to “learn the meta”, cause that is much too involved for my use of HS. I have no interest in learning which cards are in what decks, so I do not play very forward-looking, anticipating which card will played next.
Also, I can only craft one or two decks which are competitive (thats by the way sth. I actually miss from early HS: throw together some synergistic cards to get some wins in lower ranks, where you face similarly crude decks. Thats gone). I am with HS from late beta, so I have a large card base and will not likely change to another game to start over, but I will not pay money for a game which is not very important for me on the whole.
When Blizzard made this post “These four hunter cards are the best cards in the game right now” earlier this year, I crafted the missing ones, made my Face Hunter deck (always liked Hunter), and started playing ladder. And because I had a deck which was cheap/I pulled the legendarys, could actually win, does not need knowledge of the other deck AND was primed for short matches (the time window thing), I had the most fun in Hearthstone (standard) since for a very long time.
Same with Quest Mage. You do not need to know what the other player does, but you have to be bit smart in deciding when to use which spell when. As an effortless but not too shallow bit of competitive card chucking, its just perfect. On top, in Quest mage, you and your bad decisions are your main enemy, the games are not decided by matchup in general, similar (but not same) to Face Hunter. Thats why I played much more HS in general and Standard specifically than last year (not only BGs and Tavern Brawls (a too much neglected mode, btw.), because it fitted my main use of HS much better, and I had fun playing my fast decks, without getting crushed by meta decks.
I do like to play control now and then. But since it goes again my main use of the game, I do not play it very often. It is, of course, best, the more player enjoy HS, but I just wanted to shine a light why the “silent majority”, which pretty sure exists mainly as casual players, might be more “engaged” in this meta.

To this day I thought Huge Toad had a cigar stump in his mouth for some reason.

I do not like to tie someones unappealing attitude to criminal deeds (because what does it say about the reverse?), but I am a bit relieved to see that I am not alone in finding him very unlikeable. For me, he stood out like a sore thumb in the group around Kibler, Firebat and Frodan.
Not that they are per se not capable to do something alike (see parenthesis before), but they seem so much more genial.

I was under the impression that there had to be lethal on board, or you already lost a good chunk of health, or there were x turns played or sth. It was not that you would never receive your progress if you concede. But you did not get it when you conceded right away.
Maybe thats new, too.

Great!
Having a constant flow of small rewards is nice, like you wrote. Seems like f2p-101 to me.
Did they actually not know better?

Sorry for following up so late.
Maybe its just semantics. Of course society needs to be protected. If you apply the “creating better atmosphere” idea to society, it means that “the monsters” have to be adressed, which may be that they have to be seperated (“banned”) from it. Punishment for punishments sake is useless, I think.

A tangential: The achievement scrolling is iffy for me. If I pull the slider down, first nothing happens, then it jumps to the bottom of all achievements. Pulling it up again results in jumping back to the top, or jumpy scrolling. This way finding the one achievment you are looking for is very fiddly. It seems that the achievements not seen at first are streamed when you start scrolling, and then they don’t stream fast enough.
Does anyone else see this behaviour?

If your logic would apply, there would be no wars, massacres and other massive crimes any more, because many things are being punished severely for ages now (e.g. drugs). You see where I am aiming at.
This is a delicate thread. BeastCompanion made a valid point, from a societal perspective. For that he became answers about punishment being necessary to uphold peace, generally speaking. These answers represent a authoritan view of society. North Korea is an ideal state, if you put it this kind of view to the end. I do not think thats what was implied here, but some “careful designed measures”. This is understandable, because in Europe, or the west in general, we have this centrist model of society for ages, we we are familiar with it and tend to think this is the best way. As mentioned above, it does not work that well, if you look from the outside. I do not have a solution, but I would be happy if you take a step back and ask if punishment is indeed without an alternative in society.
That said, moderating your video game behaviour/chat/forum (do you feel the whiplash?) is not about punishment, or should not be about that, but about maintaining a certain atmosphere. This should be, in my opinion, one that condemns harassing other people, or bad behaviour in general. Banning those would erase their bad behaviour, which in turn makes for a better atmosphere. This is, of course, also a punishment for the banned player, but incidentally. Heavily curated comment sections like the RPS one are better for that, I think. How this could all be applied to roping players, I do not know, but this thread derailed heavily.

One reason why the new system “feels” worse for me is that you can only guess when you get rewarded. Its a bit related to the instant gratification issue.
In the old system, everything was clear: Do this, and you get this reward. Clear a daily quest any day, and you get a new one. Clear two, and you have a day leeway. Fail to do that, thats 60 Gold less for the next expansion. I just had to decide if I care enough. The new system, as it is with all battlepass systems, puts you under more pressure to play more, and more often, as it does obscure your actual gain and loss. I feel the need to play more, just to be safe, but it demotivates me to just do that (that petty spite thing).
Additionally, while it may be true that the system generates as much gold as before, and there a some improvements (duplication protection), there are also little things that are worse. No quest progress for tavern brawl. The XP for playing is more a gesture than meaningful progress. More and more pack types to stall the pity timer. The mini expansions, which will inflate the card pool (with some login packs, sure). And it just rubs me the wrong way that Blizzard (the publisher), instead of raking in a tremendous amount of goodwill by upping the rewards significantly, just tries to get by with the – your words – bare minimum of sidegrading the old system.
But thanks for the article, its that thoughtful commentary and analysis which makes this my only HS Site.

The online loophole I can see now (if they do not want to contradict themselves) is that you have to buy the battle pass to receive the same amount of gold as before. They did not stated explicitly that its on the free pass, did they? I mean, its implicated, but the progression chart form a few days ago was much stingier with the gold. I know its far-fetched, but Blizzard has become so terrible the last years.

I am getting Stormwind Magic Quarter vibes.

Ah! Thank you for the clue.