This update is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen Blizzard do to HS in my 7 years of playing; the shop is a mess, barely functioning is one thing, but the bundle prices are blatantly predatory. It is far more cost effective to get large amount of this “runestone” cancer in a great number of smaller bundles than one of the bigger bundles. Let’s look at the prices as a UK based player:
500 RS: £3.99
1000 RS: £8.99 (2x£3.99=£7.98, or £1.01 wasted)
1500 RS: £12.99 (3x3.99=£11.97, or £1.02 wasted)
2000 RS: £16.99 (4x3.99=£15.96, or £1.03 wasted)
5000 RS: £44.99 (10x£3.99=£39.9 or a staggering £5.09 wasted)
8000 RS: £69.99 (16x£3.99=£63.84, or £6.15 wasted)
This is absurd incompetence, or deliberate theft. You are supposed to get DISCOUNTS at higher values Blizzard, not the other way around. This cannot be excused as “convenience tax” since such a concept is ridiculous, it is virtual currency that costs nothing. The whole system is already excused by Blizz as “The costs of products aren’t changing, their prices are just being converted to Runestones” they may cost “the same”, but that’s ignoring the 5 quid wasted to buy the damn bundle. What about the 3k jump in runestones from 2k to 5k, or 5k to 8k?
That surely isn’t just so you can squeeze more money at the “convenience” bought buy the consumer? Let’s do a relatively comprehensive overview of all one can buy in the HS client.
If you want to buy the gold mini-set for VtSC, you will be set back either; 7k Runestones, or £59.99. Seems fair, about in-between the costs of 5k-8k Runestone bundles. Wait… where’s the 7k Runestone bundle so I can buy this mini-set in all gold “at the same price” as real world money?
Your reasonable choices are to buy a 5k and a 2k bundle, as would seem reasonable to add up to 7k, or the 8k bundle with 1k left over, or to pay full price. For the added up option, you pay £61.98 wasting £1.99 on thin air as “convenience tax” for using Blizzard’s wonderful “fairly priced” virtual currency totally not made for this exact reason. For the 8k option, you get an extra 1k RS at an expense of £10 (£1.01 extra at store price) You could alternatively inconvenience yourself a great deal by buying 14 of the 500 Runestone bundles for £55.86, saving £4.13 if you payed full price. To do so would be to use the buggy mess of a client 14 TIMES. Or… you could pay full price like has been done since the game was released, with no nonsense to work around. The Mini Golden Standard Bundle has a similar fate at 2500 RS
These discrepancies are enormous and it can’t be tolerated. It’s one thing if RS were a minor currency rarely used or promoted, but they are literally EVERYWHERE. Plastered all over the shop like politician propaganda, at the top of all options so you see it first, and obfuscating the true prices of things, making people either pay far more than they should for some stupid useless card game item, or go through 14 separate transactions to save an insane amount of money relative to the “actual” price. Why make the system like this? The shop barely works as is, being a buggy, laggy mess, adding another layer is an incomprehensible idea. Why say these we can “use them just like you would use money” if they are not only more expensive than using real money, but also the only option for some items?
Over at the mercenaries section if you want to buy some C’Thun coins for whatever godforsaken reason, you will be set back 1.2k Runestones. Fantastic. An uneven number in a system based on 500 increment bundles. What happened to fairly priced? To buy this abomination one is FORCED to buy a 1k and 500 bundle, a 1.5k bundle, or 3x500 bundles. I rarely checked Mercenaries before this mess of an update, so I don’t know the real world prices of these whalebaits, and can’t compare the amount lost or saved. Does that matter when the price is a blatant scam? You can’t win either way you choose to spend. There is also a 2.5k bundle and 3k bundle, with much the same problem considering you can’t use real world money on mercenaries bundles, only merc packs have that luxury. More predatory design in the worst gamemode ever made in HS history! Neat.
Solo Adventures quickfire before the finale
Galakrond’s Awakening: 700 RS per chapter, or 700 gold. Whole adventure is £16.99. You either buy a 1k bundle with 300 left over, wasting £2.606~, or 2x500, wasting £1.596~. No matter what you do there is waste. Nice. At least you can opt to grind gold to avoid paying excess to the money grubbers at Blizzard
Tombs of Terror: 700 RS per chapter, or 700 gold. Whole adventure is 1.5k RS for some reason. Why is it £3.99 less expensive? Christ knows and only he can save my soul
Dalaran Heist: 700 RS per chapter, or 700 gold. Whole adventure is 2000 RS. At least it’s the same price as GA but in RS
Karazhan: Already owned so can’t comment on price in the in-game store, nor in Blizzard’s store. Because “convenience”
League of Explorers: Years ago I bought wing 1, and now the game has decided I own the whole thing as far as the store is concerned. Attempting to access this content results in an infinite loading screen every time, and this applies to Blackrock Mountain and Naxxramas as well
Heroic Duels and Arena are both 200 RS or 150 gold to enter. A fantastically inconvenient number meaning at the lowest price you get 100 RS left over for 2 runs, although not that bad comparing to everything else
Now the fun part, and I am nearing my wit’s end. Battlegrounds. Predatory bundle design aside, the update with this “reward track” is horrible in so many ways. It is the corpse of the old perk system strung up over 40 tiers, except now it’s E X C L U S I V E to paying customers.
Before, one had to grind for hours on the awful base game to get access to Battlegrounds perks as a f2p player, in order to enjoy the same benefits as a paying customer. That seemed grizzly back then, but now it’s objective p2w. There is a vast number of bad heroes, and a limited number of viable let alone strong ones at higher elos. If one wanted the same chance at getting one of the good heroes, 4 choice slots are pretty much required, and now that is hardlocked behind a paywall with no chance or vision in the future to change that. It survived over a week of outcry from the community, begging for it to not be implemented, and it’s already made it to live. Battlegrounds make/made up the largest proportion of people playing the game, which being entirely f2p meant it had 0 barrier to entry. There is now a giant barrier to entry, a “screw you” paywall.
P2W aside, the reward track is worthless. It’s useless cosmetics no one gives one about over 39 tiers with the only useful part (4 hero options) at the start to remind f2p players that they are Blizzard’s paypig. That means for the same price as before you at least get the only thing you care about at the start, just with the added benefit of getting to grind like a dog for some cosmetics. Price becomes relevant when you consider that you can only get this mess with real money, as a separate paid option, and not as an added bonus attached to the hip of the pre-purchase bundles for people that wanted to play both constructed AND Battlegrounds, like you used to be able to. Blizzard saw that people enjoyed playing both sometimes, and decided that now one has the choice of spending money for either game mode to be viable, or becoming a megawhale to continue playing both. And what a good job they did, because I probably won’t play either until this mistake is fixed, if ever.
To come to a glorious conclusion in this journey, we first quote Blizzard themselves: “One benefit of this changes is that it allows us to offer smaller-scale items in the shop, like individual Skins or Battlegrounds Emotes, that would previously have had to have been bundled together with other items.”
Now, we look at the freshly made Battlegrounds shop; here one can stand in awe at their pick of 6 hero skins (with no special effects or animations), an emote bundle, and a special strike. The hero skins are priced at 150 Runestones, a perfect choice to be as inconvenient as possible, the latter two options both themed around the last expansion, priced at 500 RS. Behold! The “smaller-scale items” that warranted this whole fiasco! Cosmetics objectively worse than those in the season pass! Flat portraits and emotes for a gamemode you will probably never play again as a f2p-player. Looking at these terrible, pointless items, you have to ask yourself: was it worth it? To rend an entire section of the game as p2w. To create bundles with predatory price increments. To send both halves of your split playerbase into madness, for some incredibly minor MICRO-mictrotransactions? No. Because that was never the point.
While exploring the depths of the game, it crashed several times, including the various stores, resulting in a complete loss of sanity. But I also saw a great deal of free content beside constructed ladders, duels, adventures, or even Battlegrounds, like the good ol’ dungeon run and it’s mutated clones, as well as the Book of Mercenaries and Book of Heroes. I guess we can at least appreciate those for remaining free… for now.
If this comes across as unhinged rambling it’s because navigating this awful client while tired (3AM at time of writing this) and pissed off that my once revered game has becomes like this, and I’m sorry, but thanks for reading. I had to scrub it “clean” multiple times because of all the profanity
Get bent Blizzard