Fan outrage causes Blizzard to walk back on changes to weekly quests in Hearthstone

Sometimes there’s a change so bizarre that it leaves you too stupefied to be mad. Maybe that’s part of the intent.

Blizzard’s Hearthstone team decided that weekly quests needed to be three times as grindy. The reward, however, does not match the effort. And I don’t understand why.

The knee-jerk reaction here would be to assume to milk more money out of people. But, you can’t buy tiers on the Tavern Pass. Nothing you can spend money on is going to help you finish quests faster. So why would they increase weekly quests? I’m sure some math somewhere shows that players spending more physical time in the game equals more money spent on packs somewhere. That just doesn’t sound like a human’s behavior to me. That sounds like some kind of misinterpretation of statistics, if it’s even true.

What I know IS true is that a lot of people aren’t planning on taking this change. Go over to the Hearthstone subreddit right now and you’ll find tons of posts from people thanking Blizzard for giving them the push they needed to break away from the game. Plenty of screenshots of people uninstalling the game must have spooked someone, because Blizzard IMMEDIATELY put up a news post to say they were going to change the requirements. And they did. The hotfix is live as of right now. But it’s not enough.

Let’s look at the math to see why. Originally, there was always a weekly quest to win 5 ranked games that rewarded 2500 experience on the Tavern Pass. Then, Blizzard decided to make it 15 wins worth 3000 experience points. So 300% effort for 20% more reward. I’m not a math magician, but those numbers look kinda funky to me. (Note: You’ll see in the image above that the number is 3450 experience, that’s due to an experience buff from purchasing the tavern pass.)

Blizzard’s solution to fix this? To reduce the number of wins from 15 to 10, without changing the experience rewards. So now it’s only 200% more effort on the part of the player, for 20% more reward. The most cynical people would say this was always the plan, but even non-cynical people have to be left utterly confused by this whole plan.

I haven’t finished a tavern pass in about a year now because I’m a busy person who plays a LOT of different games. And that’s on me. But what conceivable viewpoint could anyone have that makes this change seem beneficial? It’s clearly not for players, so who benefiting? Even in a roundabout way, I don’t see it making money. It’s a huge letdown for the card game’s 10th anniversary. What a way to celebrate.