Pay to win Hearthstone

[Rumblecrush]

Did you just try and compare two very different types of games?

Did you just try some hard as hell deflecting because it's apt and you got nothing?

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As stated many times in this thread ... you can get to legendary with decks you can build in a week or two of farming. Anyone who makes the p2w argument surprisingly is not talking about winning in the game, but omg legendaries ... I want.

If all you care about is winning, you don't need to spend a penny on HS. If what you care about are decks full of golden legendaries, then yeah ... you can win those by paying.

You can get mythic gear by the 2nd week, and it doesn't win you the game either. Put it in the cash shop

[Repefe]

You can get heroic gear by the 2nd week, and it doesn't win you the game either. Put it in the cash shop

I though you were talking about HS, what heroic gear.

[Deleted]

Playing from the beginning. Bought 2 Packs. 2nd time legendary in a row. Everything else came from gold, even Naxxramas was and will be bought with gold.

[Amerissis]

Thread logic: It's not P2W as long as anything you can buy can also be earned ingame. I'll let Blizzard know they can start selling mythic raid level gear in the expansion and nobody will complain.

Complaining and not being P2W are not comparable. Of course people will complain, people complain about everything. That doesn't make it P2W though.

You can win in HS without every paying a dime. You can even get every legendary and every golden card without paying a dime. It's a collectible card game, wouldn't it be weird if you couldn't buy cards? However, unlike in traditional cardgames, where you have no choice then to buy every card you need, you can earn every card for free in this game. So, not P2W.

[Temp name]

Thread logic: It's not P2W as long as anything you can buy can also be earned ingame. I'll let Blizzard know they can start selling mythic raid level gear in the expansion and nobody will complain.

And before the sub fee comes up, you pay sub for server access, nothing more.

Buying Mythic gear would be along the lines of buying Legend rank, not buying cards.

[Nikkaszal]

Thread logic: It's not P2W as long as anything you can buy can also be earned ingame. I'll let Blizzard know they can start selling mythic raid level gear in the expansion and nobody will complain.

And before the sub fee comes up, you pay sub for server access, nothing more.

A better analogy would be paying for a WoW levelling service. Which, it so happens, Blizzard is actually offering.

You can buy all the packs you like, all it will save you is time. It won't win the game for you. If you're shit, you'll be the shinest, goldenest, legendary-est player at Rank 20, and people with cheap basic decks will STILL walk all over you.

[Deleted]

I own all cards, and am now working to craft golden cards from more bought packs. I have spent maybe £150 - £200 on card packs (most in the first few weeks, OCD is a killer!).

My point? I'm shit at this game. Most wins in arena is 8 or 9, and I have never gotten above rank 10. There is no pay to win, and while we are on the subject where the fuck is my legendary card back for all that cash?

[Deleted]

Did you just try some hard as hell deflecting because it's apt and you got nothing?

"deflecting" is that what I did? I thought I pointed out the obvious, that comparing two very different type of games with two very different models is stupid...

You have to pay money to play WoW.

You don't need to pay money to play Hearthstone.

Any talk trying to draw a comparison between heroic gear and cards doesn't work, now what were you saying?

[Temp name]

I own all cards, and am now working to craft golden cards from more bought packs. I have spent maybe £150 - £200 on card packs (most in the first few weeks, OCD is a killer!).

My point? I'm shit at this game. Most wins in arena is 8 or 9, and I have never gotten above rank 10. There is no pay to win, and while we are on the subject where the fuck is my legendary card back for all that cash?

8 or 9 wins in arena isn't shit, that's good.

[Deleted]

8 or 9 wins in arena isn't shit, that's good.

In my defence (at calling myself shit), the amount of cards you have bought really has no bearing on arena matches (how many times do you draw legendaries in an arena draft? I've had it happen twice....) Average arena run tends to be "win, lose, lose, lose / retire when I realise my deck is pure shit".

I stand by my remark that I suck at this game though, it's just too much fun to stop playing

[Temp name]

In my defence (at calling myself shit), the amount of cards you have bought really has no bearing on arena matches (how many times do you draw legendaries in an arena draft? I've had it happen twice....) Average arena run tends to be "win, lose, lose, lose / retire when I realise my deck is pure shit".

I stand by my remark that I suck at this game though, it's just too much fun to stop playing

Oh yeah, it's a good game, even when you're bad. I stopped being bad and started being just above average though, averaging around 4-5 wins per arena now, and normally ending around rank 10 or so, depending on how much I play at the end.

On the note of legendaries in arena, I've found that around every 5 or so runs I get one

[Shawaam]

The truth is that you are simply a bad player.

[McNeil]

''Pay to skip the grind'' is probably a better term for this game, as you can still win a lot of games with a completely free deck. Done it myself aswell, never spend a penny and hit legend a few times. Legendaries aren't neccesary either, though in some cases they can come in handy.

[kaiadam]

Thread logic: It's not P2W as long as anything you can buy can also be earned ingame. I'll let Blizzard know they can start selling mythic raid level gear in the expansion and nobody will complain.

And before the sub fee comes up, you pay sub for server access, nothing more.

Different things. First, legendaries in the game isn't equivalent to gear in WoW. In WoW, you need the gear from the previous bosses to progress to the next. In Hearthstone, legendaries (for the most part) are worse-than-average cards but with unique effects.

Giving a bad player full mythic gear in WoW will increase his dps/hps/tanking, the numbers are simply higher. Giving a bad player a full set of legendaries will probably weaken his ranking given that he'll want to use many of them in his decks and well, they mostly suck.

Hearthstone is more like pay-for-variety/convenience. There are several top tier decks that cost maybe a week's worth of dust farming, but you are restricted to those 3-4 decks. If you want a larger deck pool to play from, then you gotta grind or pay.

I make this offer every time a p2w thread comes up, but here goes - if anyone truly believes legendaries are amazingly powerful and if you just throw a bunch of high quality legendaries together in a deck, you get legendary rank ... then feel free to send me a pm and I'll let you play my account (with all cards unlocked) by proxy, see what happens.

[Verain]

So... I think pay to win has some unambiguous cases, and I think most developers try to obfuscate the situation. Hearthstone is "pay to win" only if you use some expanded definition, which is, I'm sure, what the devs were going for.


Top decks wouldn't use legendaries if they weren't good, for instance. The existence of some peasant decks that can get top rank when piloted by exceptional players doesn't change shit, however.


The fact of the matter is, this is a game that has some expensive pieces, and without those pieces, you are playing a subset of the game. You can cheer all you want that some ghetto warlock deck is viable at top rank or whatever, but at the end of the day unless you can meaningfully play any part of the meta as well as someone who, like me, has put money into the game, then you only have access to a fraction of the game.


Which is no damned surprise, really, given that the game is sold in pieces. It's a similar model to lots of other card games, physical or otherwise. The fact that you can slowly earn cards through play is rather unremarkable to me.




If whether the game is "pay to win" is determined by whether the meta rewards decks with cheaper cards or more expensive ones, I'd say that you don't have a very real definition of pay to win in the first place. If you decide that slowly earning enough gold to slowly earn enough dust to craft every legendary compares with the ability to just drop a hundred bucks and pop eighty packs, I'd say that you are also working on a pretty shifty definition to begin with. But certainly, certainly, if your definition just involves looking at what is viable on any given day and raising or lowering the flag based on that, that's not any manner of definition.

[barial]

[Verain]

https://twitter.com/HeathStone

???

[Coraulten]

I got a piece of heroic gear off the black market AH therefore WoW is also pay to win, right?

[Bigcountry11782]

Hearthstone is very much so pay to win that is true.I have been playing since alpha and i have not paid for a single pack and i play regularly ever since then i have a decent druid rush deck and hunter control deck.i have some rare and epics in there mostly from disenchanting everything i get from packs from gold just to get those 2 decks yet still not one good legendary card yet.i have made it to rank 10 a couple times recently but once i get there or try to get past that there comes the leeroys and the ragnaros and all the other cards that are hard to get.I still love the game but it is annoying that after all this time i have not seen a good legendary card from packs yet.

[Frizzlewits]

i got to rank 7 with a deck that has 1 epic card and no legendary card at all.
and playing since late beta.

yeah i got rag ( crafted) and couple others.
and bought 0 packs with real money.


you horn freak you just got unlucky opening packs.