TLDR : Hearthstone could use a more deep economy with a crafting system, daily login mechanics and periodic events, to ensure player retention and investment.
After having played many other digital card games, which all rely and both player purchases and, most importantly, player retention (keeping as many daily logins as possible), I’m surprised Hearthstone hasn’t integrated many of these beyond daily quests for gold and the rare seasonal events.
So, here I will offer a few ideas inspired by those other games, which would be aimed to incentivice player logins, via rewards and such, as well as develop a more complex economy system for Hearthstone.
These ideas come from different types of games, some with a heavy mobile focus, some ‘gacha’ (which are VERY predatory to the consumer) and digital card games. These ideas are then adapted to the Hearthstone system.
An important limitation to these ideas is Hearthstone’s principle of simplicity. The devs claim that a complex User Interface can confuse the playerbase and yield diminishing returns. In my opinion, this principle, while still useful, has become obsolete and is a limitation to further progress in the games development.
Another limitation is the obvious art and development load, but proposing is free.
So, these are the ideas:
NEW ASPECTS TO THE GAME ECONOMY : currently Hearthstone has only 2 ingame resources: gold (general purpose) and dust (specific card crafting). Other games incorporate more layers to the economy for more specialized purposes, granting a sense of greater depth and consumer choice.
Some ideas for other resources in Hearthstone would be:
- Wildcards by rarity : Common Wildcard, Rare Wildcard, etc. Items that can be directly redeemed for any card of said rarity. May be called ‘Tokens’ or ‘Vouchers’.
- Crafting materials : introducing into the game a set of cards that are in the new “Materials” tab in the collection. These cannot be crafted nor disenchanted, and are used for the new Crafting System . This materials would be based in World of Warcraft materials such as: Peacebloom, Copper Ore, Purple Lotus, Essence of Fire, Bleach, Dark Iron, Truesilver, Shadowgem, etc.
CRAFTING SYSTEM : a new pool of cards exclusive to this system, that can only be crafted by earning and using the mentioned crafting materials. Think of these cards like more accessible Solo Adventure cards that require a bit of grinding but dont drain your gold reserves.
To obtain these materials, players can participate in events, daily quests, and a special constantly updated side adventure with events and rotating encounters with WoW themes, like exploring areas, fighting mobs or clearing dungeons.
The crafting system is the engine of the player retention mechanincs, for it rewards loyal players with more resources to develop their collections. It also requires new utilities to make them useful. These mechanics are to be given personality, and will be tied to beloved or known Hearthstone and WoW characters:
- Griftah’s Trading Post: Griftah will allow you to trade your surplus materials for others you might be lacking, but not at a 1:1 rate.
- Oakheart’s Guild Hall: come here to find new recruits for your guild (this is the minion crafting menu).
- Bae Chao’s Library: spell crafting menu.
- Hobart Grapplehammer’s Workshop: weapon crafting menyu.
- Rafaam’s Absolutely Legal Market inside his coat in a secluded back alley: special menu for event related crafts, special offers and some other nonsense. Don’t tell the Explorers.
Last, but certainly not least:
LOGIN REWARDS AND PERIODIC EVENTS
These events are divided into categories: login, unique, daily, weekly and seasonal/monthly.
- Daily events: daily missions to be completed for gold or materials.
- Weekly events: special, rotating events that involve a character of HS or WoW and yield a reward every day of the week, getting better the more consecutive days the player participates.
- Monthly or Seasonal events: very visible events full of activities and desirable loot, with their own particular rules and questlines, usually linked to special occasions, releases or shop sales. Heavily themed. May match WoW events as well, for special tied in cross promotions.
- Daily Login progression: VERY common in mobile focused games. Every login the player gets a reward and a stamp in a progression map. When the map is full, a very good, desirable and difficult to obtain reward is guaranteed, thus incentivicing frequent logins.
- Unique events: events that are self-contained and independent of timings, such as limited time, rotating (thus returning) boss encounters for specific loot, like a Ragnaros event for Fire materials, Thunderaan, Hakkar, Onyxya, Azuregos, etc.
Some ideas for the themes of theses events are:
- Genzo’s Pick-a-Card
- Boom & Flark’s Bomb-o-rama
- Luna’s Amazing Outland Adventure
- Baku’s Moon Eating Contest
- The Darkmoon Faire (Baku may have eaten the moon).
- Kazakus’s Potion Emporyum
And that’s it. I hope you like it, a dev sees it, and I really hope this was useful to some degree. Feel free to share your opinions and takes on this.