In my opinion, they should have never replaced the adventure format in favor of more expansions. I mean I get it, they earn more money this way. But it really pisses me off when developers change something that was fun and good just to make more money even though the game generated more than enough revenue before.
Am I the only one that thinks this way?
You got adventures; the single player content we’ve received in every expansion ever since Kobolds & Catacombs. ![:slight_smile:](https://d30yn6ctwpaot1.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
I bet making those didn’t make them nearly as much money as the old adventures did. Not even Dalaran Heist you had to buy with money or gold.
Think what they meant night have been the old section based adventures where you used your own deck and got all expansion cards from the adventure back when the solo adventure was the expansion
In my opinion they did well. Adventures have a much smaller card set and the effects on the meta are residual if the cards are not completely broken. I love adventures but from a deck building and meta shaping point of view, they are too narrow.
Contrary to popular belief, developers do what is best for the games, hoping it will not hurt revenue. Direct revenue increase is a bonus. There are large developers that just milk it as much as they can, EA comes to mind, but generally speaking, developers do what is best for the KPIs they want to improve and, believe it or not, that is rarely revenue. Other KPIs, depending on the game, platform and audience are way more important than pure revenue.
Also, how did they change what was fun and good considering the amount of single player content that are putting out? They changed the schedule of releases to be only expansions but they have paired that with single player content for many expansions now.
Apologies if I sound a bit too confrontational, but I dislike the assumptions players make on the people that create the content that defines them. Most game developers do it because they love it. Wild assumptions of greed and uninformed opinions rub me in the wrong way. It’s not personal and it’s not your fault though, so, in case I sounded triggered, my apologies.
Yes, I knew exactly what he meant. So, he wants all the new Standard cards from adventures…? Basically pay less money for all the cards of a set? Is this what this is about? Because, like I said, the single-player adventure content is still there.
Maybe you should be more honest what you really want next time, OP; pay less money for all the content. Got it. I mean, who wouldn’t want that?
And to defend Blizzard’s decision to replace the old adventures with expansions; the adventures offered only a handful of cards in comparison to expansions, and thus the meta changed only a little each time unless they offered some insane cards that single handedly reshaped the meta. With expansions’ larger card pool there’s more potential for wider meta shifts with more cards rather than just a few.
It wasn’t until the apology that you sounded a bit triggered to me but you are not wrong, we have gotten adventures with expansion which 4 of them were free (lich king, dungeon run, witchhunt and gurabashi arena) and the recent solo adventure is a combination of the old format of getting content with the new style of playing adventure which i honestly think is great since the adventure isnt just a 1-off and has replayability
Probably not. There’s millions of people out there. There’s always someone who agrees with you.
But I don’t. I really prefer the endless replayability of the newer solo format over the old adventures.
Yes, I had fun trying to beat them at Heroic. And I still have a few left to tick off before it’s all complete. But once a game is won, I see no need to return.
The new solo format with the random rewards may not be as consistent. You cannot carefully draft a deck that almost guarantees wins. You rely on RNG, and if you get sucky rewards you won’t make it past the later bosses.
But every game, every run, is new. Always fresh. Always different.
I like it.
What indicators are those?
I prefer having over 100 new cards to play with, rather than 35, even if it means I’m missing 30 or so cards. I can do without those boring epics/legendaries and I don’t actually spend any more money as since those days they’ve increased the freebie stuff from just being involved with the game to the point where it’s basically a wash.
@Chicharito:
Daily active users, retention rate, return rate, downloads are generic ones that may be more or less important depending on the company’s vision and purpose.
Then there are the one’s that are tied to each individual game and often are connected to a rather elusive concept that we call engagement. For instance, for a game like Hearthstone I would probably consider matches per day and then drill down to ranked matches, casual matches, friendly matches. Different populations would also be segmented differently, e.g. arena, like arena runs per day.
To have a good sense of engagement we need to tie back to generic KPIs, for instance, what is the likelihood of a cohort having lower retention and return rates as a function of matches per day? I’m speculating, of course, I have no idea what Blizzard looks at but that’s the kind of hypothesis I’d be testing.
Single player content, since that’s what we are discussing here, is an interesting one. It doesn’t contribute to the core of the game, the current form has an impact on game economy and monetisation but it should be tied to engagement. I was surprised when I heard that it was going to be paid because, usually, developers happily trade higher retention and engagement for lower monetisation. Making the adventures paid raises the question of the cost of development of current and future adventures, since some engaged players in this forum have voiced that they opted out of paying for it.
Naturally this ties to revenue, even if indirectly. If you retain more players you’ll have a bigger population. A bigger population ties to virality (so even bigger population) and total revenue in the short term. If you engage more players, you’ll have a more loyal players and total revenue in the long term. My point is that caring for the game and the players is not only the default position of most game developers, it is also the best long term strategy from a revenue point of view.
Strange coincidence, isn’t it?
Missing the adventures, I still do … way much more fun (not that repetitive) as the expansion sets 