Hearthstone Is Becoming More of a Mobile Game...for Better and Worse
As it nears a decade of life, you might expect a game like Hearthstone to become more stuck in its ways, stable, unchanging, and easy to predict. Blizzard has wisely chosen a different path, spending the last couple of years shaking up the release schedule so new cards were added more often, adding a battle pass system, and most importantly, introducing several major new modes to the game.
Of those modes, the most popular by far has been Hearthstone Battlegrounds, a brilliant take on the auto-battler genre. In this mode, eight players are each presented with a set of three or four heroes (who are themselves picked at random from an ever-increasing pool of heroes, now nearly 80 in total). Each hero has their own unique power, and players must build up a board of units that take advantage of whichever hero they pick. Then they face off against other players in the same lobby in one-on-one automated battles, whittling down health pools until only one player remains standing.
Battlegrounds can sound kind of confusing and hard to wrap your head around if you've never played it, but it's an example of something Blizzard has always been astoundingly good at: taking a hardcore, relatively unpolished genre (in this case, auto-battlers), and creating a slick, easy-to-play version. It's no surprise then that Battlegrounds has exploded in popularity, at times seemingly pull in more players (and more Twitch and YouTube viewers) than Hearthstone's traditional card game modes.
Perhaps it should also be no surprise, then, that Blizzard is looking to capitalize further on the success of Battlegrounds. This week the developer announced what it is calling "Battlegrounds Season 2." (Pay no mind to the fact that there was no official Season 1, or that the unofficial Season 1 has apparently been running since Battlegrounds launched in 2019). New and more frequent Battlegrounds content updates will be great news for fans of this mode, and some of what Bliz has announced so far sounds great. But it comes with an interesting caveat that has left the greater Hearthstone community in an uproar.
See, along with Battlegrounds Season 2 launching next week, Hearthstone will also receive a new premium currency: runestones. While common in mobile games of all sorts, Hearthstone has up to now never had a premium currency. All real money purchases in the game were made with...well, real money! Now players will have to purchase runestones at a rate of 500 runestones for $4.99, which will can then be spent on things such as card packs, season passes, and so on.
According to Blizzard's explanation of the confusing new monetization scheme, a small number of items will be purchasable using real money, such as the pre-order bundles for new expansions for the base Hearthstone game. But the vast majority of in-game purchases (including any Battlegrounds season passes after Season 2) will only be available by spending runestones. Oh, and unlike most mobile games, they currently have no plans to make runestones earnable in-game in any form—not even a slow trickle of them.
Some players have scoffed at the idea that the Battlegrounds mode will now have its own season pass that is separate from the regular game's "tavern pass." I understand where the annoyance comes from, but for my part, I think this is a good thing. It will mean more Battlegrounds content, including cosmetics, and financial support for more (and more regular) Battlegrounds updates going forward. If you're a Hearthstone player who primarily, or even just casually, cares about Battlegrounds, the mode having its own season pass is positive.
What is not so positive is the first bonus that comes with purchasing the Battlegrounds season pass: additional hero choices at the start of the game. Remember when I said that Battlegrounds matches begin with players choosing from a set of three or four heroes? With the season pass, players who haven't purchased will only have two choices; players who have purchased it will have four.
Obviously, Hearthstone is a card game, and Battlegrounds is already randomly picking those heroes from a massive pool, so there's an unavoidable element of randomness that goes into each game you queue up for. But it goes without saying that players who have more options will have a higher chance of getting a hero who generally performs better or who they are more familiar and comfortable with.
One streamer suggests the odds of getting access to an above-average choice for a hero according to the current meta goes up by nearly 25% if you have four choices rather than two.
To be clear, the "two choices versus four choices" divide has already existed based on whether players purchased the "Battlegrounds perks" option with each expansion, but that was purchasable using gold earned in-game. By locking this major upgrade behind a forced real-money transaction, Battlegrounds is becoming pay-to-win in a very direct sense of the term.
You can check out one of my personal favorite Hearthstone content creators, RegisKillbin, offering his disappointed take on this new in the video below.
On top of all this, there's the looming specter of runestones, which will be used across Hearthstone and not just for Battlegrounds. I play plenty of mobile games that use premium currencies, but I can't help but be annoyed at this terrible trend making its way to a game I've loved since its launch.
The problem isn't even that I'll need to spend money. I spend plenty of money on Hearthstone, and given the literal thousands of hours of playtime I've got out of the game over the last eight years, I'm totally comfortable with that. Every time a new expansion comes out, I know I'm going to eat the $80-plus for the biggest bundle so I can start out with as many cards as possible. But I also know that free-to-play players who are more dedicated and focused with their time can definitely be on equal footing, and that the only things I've spent money on that those free players cannot access are purely cosmetic in nature.
The new runestones system has a two-fold problem. First, it creates an unbridgeable divide between paid and free-to-play players in Battlegrounds mode. Blizzard can say whatever it wants about being "committed to maintaining hero and gameplay balance," but there is just no way around the reality that players who have paid money to have four hero choices will have an advantage over players who have not paid money.
And secondly, runestones embrace the mobile premium currency trend of obfuscating how much things cost in-game and how much money players are spending. The developer claims that its runestone bundles are purposefully created to match the cost of the most popular purchases, so it won't be a system where players have some small number of runestones left over, taunting them into purchasing more for the next item they want.
I'm skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, exchanging real money for a fake currency still creates this psychological distance. Intellectually I might understand that I spent $20 buying V-Bucks on Fortnite, but when I spend 800 V-Bucks on a new emote it doesn't feel like I'm handing over $8.00. That Blizzard is just catching up to something that most long-lasting mobile games have done forever doesn't make it any less shady and disappointing.
The Hearthstone fan base has reacted similarly. Over on the Hearthstone Reddit, players have expressed a range of negative emotions, from vague annoyance to full-on anger. User silverscreemer promised that they "will never buy a runestone" despite not being "a free to play person." In a thread devoted to general discussion about runestones, one poster expressed that they "haven't seen really anyone speaking to the positives of it, apart from Blizzard marketing-speak." Another called the move a "money grab by a dying company for a dying game," which is maybe a bit of an exaggeration but speaks to the frustration folks are legitimately feeling.
So what do you think? Are you excited for the big Battlegrounds changes? Do you feel like they're completely overshadowed by runestones and the season pass issue? Or are you not particularly bothered by the new premium currency?
Leave some comments, and I'll be sure to respond!
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