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    Hearthstone Newbie Tuesdays Weekly Discussion

    December 07, 2020

    Hearthstone Newbie Tuesdays Weekly Discussion

    Newbie Tuesdays Weekly Discussion

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 04:07 PM PST

    Hello members of the /r/hearthstone community,

    This is part of a series of weekly threads aimed at both new and old players from the community. It is designed so that everybody may ask any and all questions regarding the game's mechanics, decks, strategies and more.

    Please keep it clean and try to add more than just a one or two word response. As the goal of this post is to increase the community's knowledge, the thought process matters as much as the answer! There is also a PullsDay Thursday weekly post, for those who want to share their pulled packs.

    Sticky Threads and Guides - Great resources for new players!

    Note: I am a bot. Questions or feedback regarding this thread? Message the moderators.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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    Rewards Track Update Coming Soon

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 10:31 AM PST

    Dust system in one pic

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 03:54 AM PST

    Changes to the progression system are coming

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 10:40 AM PST

    You’ve got to be joking

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 11:05 AM PST

    The Mods deserve a thank you.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 11:50 AM PST

    Whether you believe the new progression update is enough or not, the mods deserve some recognition for allowing the subreddit to be able voice it's concerns throughout this ordeal. I've been in other subreddits where modes stifled valid discussion and concerns and it lead to a lot of distrust between the community and the moderators due to the restrictions. The mods also could have just simply made a mega thread where a lot of voices would have been lost in one place. It would have been easy for a dev to dismiss the criticism in that case if all the opinions were in one thread that can be avoided. Perhaps things did get a bit out of control here, but overall I think the mods did a great job being flexible the last month and letting the community decide what hits the first page and with that they deserve a thank you.

    submitted by /u/ingyball
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    Anyone else feel like Blizz's reaction is just way too little? I want a radical change, so that you get a complete collection for $240 a year.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 11:39 AM PST

    For those who don't know, Blizzard just released a statement announcing changes to the reward system following the community outrage.

    In a nutshell, they're reducing the amount of xp you need to reach level 50 and making changes to the quests themselves, among other things. You can read all the details in their post: https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23585675

    Don't get me wrong, all the changes they're announcing are good. But I feel like they're missing the point. I've been following the posts in here closely over the past few weeks, and while a lot of people where complaining about the reward system, a lot more people seemed to criticize the cost of the game in general.

    Most posts and comments seemed to be along the lines of "Yeah the new reward structure is not ideal, but the real problem is that the game is too expensive and people are just waking up to that now because of the updated reward structure."

    So yes, with their planned updates the game will become marginally cheaper than it is right now. But it's still going to be absurdly expensive.

    • For $80 (the price of a AAA game) you will still only get a fraction of an expansion.
    • It's still extremely expensive to get a full collection.
    • The negative aspects of their current content release strategy (which I've detailed here) are left completely untouched.

    I feel like they're just desperate to throw something out there to prevent a negative spiral. But it's just not enough. They need to significantly reduce the overall cost of the game.

    submitted by /u/spoqster
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    Hearthstone Mathematics has no credibility.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 10:25 AM PST

    Introduction

    I think it's long past time people stopped taking "Hearthstone Mathematics" (u/HS_Mathematician) seriously, for those that ever did. This person tries very hard to wrap themselves in a veil of mathematical authority, yet doesn't seem to have even a basic grasp of how statistics or data analysis is actually done, and I seriously doubt they have any formal mathematical training. I can see only two possibilities: they are talking out of their ass, or they know better but don't care because they have a narrative they are trying to push and just want to get there with the least effort possible.

    Bold Claims

    This individual recently posted what I will generously call an infographic with the headline "The number of players who are willing to invest money has been reduced by almost half, 33% of players continue to boycott Blizzard. What should "Team 5" do to earn your trust?" https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/k7ujtc/the_number_of_players_who_are_willing_to_invest/

    Hard Evidence?

    What evidence is provided to support such strong claims? The certainty of the headline suggests hard evidence, like quarterly earnings reports with appropriate loss of revenue and statements from Blizzard promoting that narrative explanation. You won't find one, and the most recent Q3 2020 report from ActBlizz itself (which it should be noted will not include backlash from the battle pass--we'll have to wait for Q4 for that, or even Q1 2021), shows growth and an increase in hours played year over year. When you look at virtually all metrics, 2020 has been one of their best years. We have a lack of hard data, and what we do have doesn't support these claims.

    Bad Statistics

    However, there are other ways to know things. What we were given are the results from two Youtube polls conducted by Hearthstone Mathematics with the implied comparison intended to show a decline in player purchasing behavior. Any person who has done data analysis knows that there is as much art as science to it. We have powerful mathematical theorems to help us, but they often assume perfect conditions that are simply not met in practice. Considerable effort and years of education and training are needed before a person can confidently employ best practices in regards to administering and interpreting polls. Expertise that I, someone with a formal mathematical education and experience in data analysis, do not fully possess myself because I do not work as a pollster. What is on display from Hearthstone Mathematics is laughable even to me.

    There are many problems with this comparison and I'll go over them now. This is not a comprehensive list, and I welcome others, especially those with more polling experience than I have, to weigh in as well.

    1) The two surveys do not ask respondents about their willingness to purchase products from Blizzard in general or whether their spending habits have or will change in accordance with the battle pass, but about their willingness to purchase specific products. Additionally, one survey asked if they were planning to purchase a product while the other asked if they had purchased it already. Small changes in the way a question is asked can change the results, much less asking completely different and unrelated questions. One question asks whether the purchase is "profitable" while the other asks if it is "worth it"; vague and useless.

    There are two kinds of pollsters: those who don't know this and make bad polls, and those who do know it and skew their questions to get the results they want. One is negligence, the other malice. A better survey would not have used leading language in the response choices, and would have asked more than one question that determined whether the respondents had spent money in the past, whether they planned to spend money in the future, whether their feelings towards Blizzard or their behavior influenced their decision (which by the way the reasons people were claiming to protest were very different when the two bundles came out as one was about Blizzard's behavior politically and the current drama is about ingame rewards) to buy products or whether their decision to purchase was based solely on the perceived value of the products, etc. Then, you give the same survey again so that you can get comparable results and look for correlations in the data (which as everyone knows should not be confused for causation, but we didn't even make it that far, he went straight from nothing to causation).

    ​

    2) In order to get good results from a small sample size, you need a random independent sample, which is something that all polling suffers from. Selection bias, either on the part of the people administering the survey, or self-selection bias on the part of people who choose to take an optional survey is a big problem. The fact that he only asked his own youtube audience automatically rules out the idea of this being a representative sample. It only covers English speaking players who are engaged enough to seek out content on other platforms, and among those only the ones motivated enough to answer a survey. Hearthstone is an international game with players all over the world, and the game isn't even the same in every country as we know from the systems designed to circumvent gambling restrictions in China. The culture is different in different parts of the world, and not all players who use social media to discuss or learn about the game use Youtube or watch his channel.

    Good polls usually have a margin of error based on a confidence interval, the mathematics of which only hold water if you conform to the assumptions needed to make them work, and while there are many, the independent random sample is high on the list. There is no confidence interval or margin of error given, nor would any such calculation be worth anything when we know the underlying assumptions are not met to make them valid. Good polls struggle with this as it's nearly impossible to get a truly random independent sample, but they make every attempt possible and in the case of important things like elections, multiple polls are combined with other data into a richer model. Absolutely no attempt was made here and HS_Mathematician even admitted that he made these surveys without any intention of comparing them, showing just how lazy and half-assed this attempt at data analysis was.

    ​

    3) The conclusions don't make any sense and are heavily misinterpreted if not outright wrong. He says that "the number of players willing to invest money has been reduced by almost half", based on the data that 27% of his respondents said they were planning to buy the Felosophy bundle, while only 15% of his respondents claimed to have purchased the C'Thanks bundle. First of all, the C'Thanks bundle was still for sale, and is currently for sale as of the time of this writing, so it is very likely that not all the people who will buy it had done so at the time the survey was taken, and they were given no option to indicate that even if they knew at that moment what decision they would make. Likewise, we don't know how many people answered the Felosophy bundle survey indicating they were, or were not, going to purchase it but then made a different choice once it was for sale. Because these surveys are asking different things, and the methodology was sloppy, it becomes a very poor and nearly useless apples to oranges comparison. Additionally, because these two surveys were focused only on individual products, it could be that a person did not choose to buy either but still purchases other things like the battlegrounds perks or arena tickets.

    About the claim that "33% of players continue to boycott Blizzard". What does boycott mean in this context? Presumably it means abstaining from purchasing a product they would have otherwise purchased, but that is not all the word 'boycott' means, and void of any clarification in the responses, it introduces doubt. Boycott can also mean abstaining from playing the game. A free-to-player who was never going to purchase the bundle anyway, but who is also boycotting by not playing the game, could have chosen that as a perfectly valid answer. Or it could be that a person is boycotting the purchase but would not have purchased it anyway for different reasons not covered in the other two 'no' responses. You are led to believe that one third of all the players who habitually buy Hearthstone products have stopped buying things they would have otherwise purchased in order to protest the Battle Pass. That is the conclusion he wants you to draw because that is the conclusion he knows will be well received by his audience. And that brings me back to the point I made earlier: negligence or malice? In my opinion, malice is the only conclusion I can draw.

    Conclusion

    Having an opinion is one thing. Zeddy tells the community what it wants to hear constantly, but he doesn't dress himself up in the perceived prestige and authority of a mathematical expert. This community has actual mathematical experts working over at Vicious Syndicate, and Hearthstone Mathematics trying to glom onto same respect when he doesn't deserve it and hasn't earned it is worthy of rebuke.

    As I said at the beginning, it is long past time to stop taking Hearthstone Mathematics seriously.

    submitted by /u/gauss_sto
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    Week after week still radio silence from Blizzard

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 08:21 AM PST

    When Blizzard refuses to address the fact that we pay $240 a year for 50% of the game

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 01:39 PM PST

    POV you have the 4-win Arena quest

    Posted: 06 Dec 2020 11:41 PM PST

    Wait what?! .. It's very true nonetheless

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 04:18 AM PST

    The reward track changes were designed to look like a lot while not fixing anything.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 02:36 PM PST

    Maths has already begun to come out regarding the newly promised changes to the new rewards track.

    It's better now - from what I've seen, roughly 1.6k gold over the track better than before, not counting the "we're soooorrryyy" freebies. There's also been a slight amount of freedom added back - players who don't like ranked now need to win less, and Tavern Brawls contribute towards quests again. But this isn't even coming close to fixing all the things that needed fixing, that we hoped the new rewards system would come with.

    • The current rewards from the new system still don't come close to matching the increased cost of the game from mini-expansions.
    • The dust economy is still an absolute joke.
    • Despite the huge number of wild sets, there's still no discount for wild.
    • The tavern pass is still not included in the extremely high-cost pre-order.
    • There's still no reliable way to earn small amounts of gold.

    A lot of people will try to tell you that if you're still complaining, you'll 'never be satisfied', 'just hate blizzard', are being 'too greedy'. Ignore them - the system is still bad and complaining about it is still valid if you love this game and want to be able to play it while getting good value for your time or money. These changes were designed to look like a lot while being relatively little, and erode the community's anger and dissatisfaction. Don't let it work.

    submitted by /u/Elteras
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    Is HS even capable of real change?

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 01:51 PM PST

    ​

    The text is not mine, I read it on HS forums, but it reflects what I think about the new changes and I think it is a good place to start a conversation about them.

    From Madcookie on HS forums:

    "XP from level to level is reduced but this is in the place of Event bonus XP = Cosmetic change

    XP per level past lvl 50 decreased, but gold decreased as well. If it is 4500xp for 150 down to 1500 xp for 50g then this too = Cosmetic change

    100xp more on a quest that you probably will re-roll anyway = Cosmetic change

    Again(emphasis on again) be able to complete quests in tavern brawl = Cosmetic change

    So apart from cosmetic changes all we are given is one time 5 packs and 500 gold. Which basically means here's some handout to muffle the criticism and we are not changing anything

    Thanks…"

    submitted by /u/vergatull
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    Celestalon might be wrong here... It would be difficult to get 75% Darkmoon Achievements if you dont have most of the cards plus some achievements is super hard to do. Your lucky if you reached even 50% by end of season.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 08:13 AM PST

    The Rewards Track has been revamped, but don't let it distract you from the bigger issues!

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 01:24 PM PST

    I noticed in the announcement thread that a large amount of players seem to be placated with the new reward track system. That was a small win for the players, but was most likely a part of Blizzards plan. It's a known corporate strategy to overdo when introducing a negative aspect then revise it in a way that will be satisfactory to the player base.

    THEY PULLED A FAST ONE ON YOU.

    The truth is; the real strategy here was to make you accept that the game is ultimately MORE EXPENSIVE than it was before! All the gold you attain will have to be sunk into the miniset, and for the average player or whales, that's an additional cost!

    Did we suddenly forget that the dust system hasn't changed in the slightest, and that we still have to sink 4 legendaries to craft one?

    I fear that this small pittance that Blizzard has bestowed onto us will make us ignore the fact that it costs $400 and even more to own a fraction of the set! If we didn't all love Hearthstone, we wouldn't be doing this. DON'T BACK DOWN. VOTE WITH YOUR WALLETS AND YOUR TIME.

    submitted by /u/BeatBoxxEternal
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    I consider myself a "typical avid Heartstone player" who normally doesn't go onto reddit, but even I can't understand the new changes.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 07:09 AM PST

    It's easy: Activision want people to pay more money for Hearthstone: it's a company after all. They try to do this by switching to the "season pass level up as you go" route that many other (mobile) games have done, and apparently according to their marketing research that is the way to go forward...

    But man, aside from protests and boycotts and purely from a personal viewpoint do I not see myself spending any more money on this game. I almost never pre-ordered an expansion, but mostly waited a week to see if it was any good, look at decks I want to play and then decided whether I'd buy the expansion packs. But the meta is SO horrendous, gold progression is SO slow, and it's almost impossible to get dust.... Even then if I'd spend 80$ I'd get maybe 4 legendaries, that I could just not keep up with.

    Sorry if this exact rant has been posted before, but I had to vent.

    submitted by /u/xxStefanxx1
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    Unpopular opinion: hearthstone do have a predatory scheme but is more fun than LoR

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 01:27 PM PST

    I would never have heard of LoR if wasn't this subreddit, and while I totally agree that hearthstone became a scheme, LoR is boring. There, I said it. I don't play much hearthstone either because I'm also tired of blizzard, but...It's league of legends magic the gathering.

    It's slow, feels weird and without salt, the songs and the way legendaries appear on the flow of the game in Hearthstone is way better for me.

    For me you people are either marketing LoR because are pissed with blizzard or Riot is marketing this game on this subreddit.

    Either way, this is the curse of the turtle mage, you fuckers banned my beautiful and broken love. Hearthstone is forever cursed now. And Riot can go fuck itself in hell also.

    submitted by /u/thenoisemanthenoise
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    This might be the change we wanted but it's barely %25 of the problems somewhat touched upon.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 11:25 AM PST

    They are making it easier to level up the pass and increasing the rewards. This means less time spend until a point, hopefully higher levels are not absurdly hard to climb this time.

    But looking at the other problems, the horrendous dust system is still the same. 1 legendary still costs 4 legendaries dusted. Same for epics.

    No change on prices, barely 1/3 of the game still costs more than a AAA game and it doesn't even guarantee a single deck.

    No change on drop rates either. 80 dollars can easily net you only 3 legendaries and 8 epics, again barely a deck and not even guaranteed to be a meta deck.

    Stealth nerfed arena rewards are still same too.

    I would like to say I want to trust them to actually act but the amount of corporate talk and their history doesn't give much hope.

    submitted by /u/ItsTaft
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    After changes to the reward system, Hearthstone will still be more expensive than before

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 12:09 PM PST

    The hero the meta needs...

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 03:48 AM PST

    I wish the win 7 games of Ranked Play Mode quest was win 7 games in any mode.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 08:14 AM PST

    I get this quest every week and despise playing ranked mode. I don't have have a great collection and feel like I see the same decks over and over. I enjoy the area, battlegrounds and even casual mode(I can play weird decks and actually win), so it would be nice to be able to complete this quest in these modes.

    submitted by /u/RedRiverDG
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    Turn 1 btw

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 11:48 AM PST

    WEEKLY UPDATE: Collecting data on the new XP system

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 04:03 AM PST

    This is a follow-up to both my original post and my previous update.

    ​

    EDIT: I've been told it would be a good idea to state once more what my goal in doing this data collection is. So, here's a quote from my first post:

    I'll be playing exactly the way I used to play before the new system, meaning I'll only be intentionally doing daily quests, and other than that I'll focus on BG (and maybe trying some fun stuff once in a while). [...] I'll consider the new system to be better if it takes me less than 35 days to earn 2kG, as it previously would've taken slightly more than a month to unlock the BG pass.

    In short, the purpose of this data collection is to see how this new system compares to the previous one, with the condition that I won't change the way I play. If it's better, it has to lead to better results without me having to do anything I wasn't doing before.

    ​

    Weekly data in comparison to previous week:

    - This week I gained 14223XP, compared to the 16861XP from last week. This difference is explained by the fact that I got a few 800XP quests, and also didn't get the "challenge a friend" quest from someone else.

    - On average, that was about 2031 daily XP compared to the 2400 from last week.

    - Making a projection from just this week, it would take me about 34 days in total to reach my goal, as opposed to the 28 that came out of last week's projection.

    ​

    Overall observations:

    - All in all, considering my averages, it would take slightly longer than 31 days to get to my goal. This is still faster than the previous system, which would've required about 34 days.

    - As requested last week, I found a way (through the Power.log game file) to get the exact time my games start and end, down to the millisecond. I will incorporate this new data starting today, and will add an "average XP over time" stat.

    ​

    Please, let me know if I can do anything else to improve my data collection.

    submitted by /u/TobiaF
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    Don't fall for the recent changes to rewards progression.

    Posted: 07 Dec 2020 12:24 PM PST

    With the proposed updated reward system, the game is still more expensive than before, because of mini-sets. The xp needs to be at least doubled for the game to start being accessible again.

    ​

    EDIT: Also it's not 20% btw, it's 'nearly' 20%, for SOME levels. Simply not enough.

    Shifting the goal posts: A 20% is not going to change much. They may have even planned this in advance and purposefully put out a bad rewards track so that a 20% increase to some levels of xp would be applauded. This is similar to what Apex Legends did - release an extremely bad system, then make it slightly better and get praised for it. Many people fell for this and were tricked into thinking it was good, when it was actually still worse overall. This is called shifting the goal posts.

    Remember, Hearthstone was already too expensive and inaccessible before the rewards track, and after this new change it will be even worse than that, due to mini-sets. And from what I see, they took away the xp for the bonus events.

    These changes are not nearly enough, and we should not just give in so easily. Don't start throwing money at Activision just because they made a terrible system slightly less terrible. We need to bargain for a more rewarding system, or this game will just be a small population of whales in a big, wasted sea. I cannot recommend this game to my friends in the new, ever so slightly improved proposed reward system, and that's quite sad.

    submitted by /u/Uranus169
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