J1M
Arcane
- Joined
- May 14, 2008
- Messages
- 14,721
There are two (not so evil) reasons why they did this with hearthstone.All of the heroes are well guarded behind paywalls and even the game modes are locked. I don't understand what is the fascination with locking different game modes. They even advertise in the trailer how they'll force you to go into a tutorial against AI opponents the first time you play - as though no one has played a MOBA at this point.
1) Unlocking game modes through advancement serves as a tutorial phase so everyone enters the standard play modes with a basic idea of how the game functions. You may not know how to win yet, but you will at least know why you lost.
2) By forcing this somewhat time consuming tutorial onto people they reduce the number of fake accounts that get created for exploiting ladder and currency systems.
As much as I would like the option to pay a flat fee and have everything unlocked forever, Blizzard has been quite generous with Hearthstone F2P mechanics. They recognize that other players are part of the content, and the marginal advantage for spending money Hearthstone is extremely small. They even have a game mode where that advantage will always be zero. They don't need to exploit you, because there are enough people that throw money at their games for no reason.
I also think the rotating set of free characters will have positive effects on this game not relating to payment. It will keep the metagame (at least at the tiers below tournament level) fresh.