Blizz pls

Recently, I've been playing a lot of Heroes Of the Storm & Hearthstone (as soon as Overwatch comes out I'll finally complete the trifecta & play nothing but Blizzard games) and as I said a couple of posts ago I've got some stuff I wouldn't mind getting off the ol' chest.

Hearthstone is a game I play at least once a day, and often times it'll be more than that. Sometimes I'll get a couple of buddies together and trying to get 12 wins in arena will be our evening. It's a really solid game. You can pick it up for ten minutes and play one game, or get sucked in and spend a good couple of hours on it. The art is fantastic, the varied styles & modes of play are really exciting too. Even the little descriptions of the cards a cool little nods to the larger meta world of World of Warcraft. Still though, the game still needs to make some changes - and I think at this point it's a little too far gone in its current direction to make them.

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Better people than I have deconstructed the larger issues at hand with hearthstone, down to making very successful arguments about why card X should cost X more mana with theory crafting to make the most hardened Dark Souls fan weep but my biggest complaint was something I didn't even know was a problem until I saw someone else play the game.

If you're new to Hearthstone you're screwed. The game itself isn't particularly pay-to-win, everything you need to do well can be earned, nothing you need - even at a top tier level of play - has to be bought with real world money. The only stuff in this game you can only get by paying is cosmetic, so far anyway. Even the single player adventures (that award cards ONLY available though beating them) can be purchased with the in game currency. So far so good right? Well, perhaps not.

At this point in Hearthstones life we have 2 single player expansions, the curse of Naxxramas & Blackrock Mountain, each bringing 30 & 31 new cards respectfully. This content doesn't have to be paid for, you can unlock it with in game gold if you wish. For now, lets assume you're going to purchase both of these with real world money. Both expansions have 5 wings, similar to how a raid works in WoW. Each wing has a particular set of challenges and a boss. It's possible to purchase each one for £4.99, or all 5 (from a particular adventure) for £17.49.
Now, it isn't required to have these sets, and it's even possible to make it to legend status in the ranked mode with nothing but the basic cards, but most of popular decks require them now days. Assuming you do buy them both, you've already sunk £34.98 into a free game. Wait, I hear you cry! You don't have to buy them, you can earn them with gold! True. Each wing can be bought for 700 gold. a total of 10 wings from both expansions is 7000 gold. There's a lot of variables that you would have to consider to work out how long that would take to earn, daily quests can net you anywhere between 40-100 gold. One quest can even earn you a card pack.

7 of the 12 possible quests you can earn will earn you 40 gold, with this being the most likely type of quest you can earn I'll use that gold as an example. Every week you could earn 160 gold, and every 3 games you also earn a 10 gold win bonus. This means that you'll need 126 wins to earn enough gold to buy one wing. If you assume a ten minute game, for every game, you're looking at a total of 21 hours. 21 hours a week, to earn enough gold to buy one wing. That isn't the half of it though.

All of this is assuming you win every single game.

You won't of course, hell you might not even have quests for a class you like playing or are even able to play.

Another way for players to earn gold is to play in the arena. This is completely random and can end up wasting gold if you're really bad, or being MORE productive than your wildest dreams. Thing is, to be good at arena you need to be good at the game. If we're talking about new players I don't think that's particularly likely, but I wouldn't mind going into it. Next time, of course.