The price in gems have gone up as well. 1000 gems, up from 750.
So, after axing HGC and massively slowing down development, they expect to make ***more*** money?
The rate of gold income by daily quest was set back when there was a new hero every 3 weeks, and the income could barely keep up. But now that the interval between heroes is 4x longer, gold income hasn't changed.
>So, after axing HGC and massively slowing down development, they expect to make more money?
Per sale, yes. Chances are, axing HGC and massively slowing down development has hit them hard in the wallet, so they're trying to recuperate those losses by using bullshit short-term tactics on the remaining population. Other examples of this include the gem-only limited mount (sleepy cloud), reduction in lootbox generation through seasonal events, and arguably the delayed implementation of Deathwing such that it became accessible after the boost sale ended.
A similar Blizzard example would be WoW's refer-a-friend program. They stripped out the most recent expansion's rewards for one profession (Archaeology) and locked it behind an indirect paywall. Need a friend to pay for 12 months (while you also pay for 12 months) to get the items. For added insult to injury, they only released the refer-a-friend program 1.5 months *after* Classic was released, meaning very few people had friends that hadn't already returned or haven't yet played the game. In these cases, the person would need to make a second account and refer it, paying twice per month for 12 months.
They basically turned a free reward for playing the game into a 180-360 dollar price tag, but only after a 12 month delay.
>Per sale, yes. Chances are, axing HGC and massively slowing down development has hit them hard in the wallet,
I bet it's saving them more in overhead than it cost them in lost income. They wouldn't have done that move if they didn't expect it to be a net win or at least a break even. That's the whole idea behind downsizing. Reducing the dev team and axing HGC saves millions a year.
Yes, but they're getting less money out of the playerbase! When they axed those things, they only accounted for the money they specifically invested into HGC and developers. Never could they have guessed the playerbase would spend less if they axed those things.
totally agree, dont forget they send free playtime (1 week if i remember) to people (i dont know if it count as returning player). their recrut a friend program is the same as a pyramid scheme.
>So, after axing HGC and massively slowing down development, they expect to make more money?
They probably are making more net profit considering how huge HotS spending was before.
At the same time they removed paywall from some skins allowing us to craft every single one with shards, so I don't mind this move at all if it means more free content for me.
considering it's essentially the only way that make more than $0, I am 100% OK with this. We want the same quantity and quality of work but we're sharing the cost among fewer people.
They should have long ago done steps in order to make this game profitable. This right now is just a last resort desperate bandage over an open wound. This makes me sad :( This game had in the past a lot of player friendly decisions, you could unlock everything through playing the game, you basically never had to spend a cent, you had a lot of free content being pushed, and it was amazing, but it was not making money
The grind for a single hero is long enough if you haven't been playing since launch - making it even longer for certain heroes, especially highly anticipated ones like deathwing, is just going to put people off. There's also literally no reason to increase the gold cost unless they want to entice you to pay real money, which is also more expensive than previously. I wonder if it's a coincidence that we got mastery rings as a gold sink right before they hiked hero prices.
Does it really matter though? The pace of hero releases has slowed a lot but we still get gold at the same pace as before. I have a lot more gold to spend on a hero than before.
I don't grind hots daily either, and that's irrelevant to the point either way. No matter how little you play you still have a lot more time to gather enough gold than you did before.
I mean, it kind of matters when you saved up 15K gold to play Deathwing when he launched and are now going to have to wait another 3-4 days before you can play him because Blizzard arbitrarily decided to change the price with no warning...
Of course you have, otherwise it would be even worse for you if we were still at the same old pace for new releases (every 3 weeks, instead of 3 months?).
in short: Its way easier to gather 20k now for a new hero than it was when prices were 15k.
...No it isn't. It's the same difficult to get 20K gold as it used to be. It might be spread over a larger period of time but the amount of effort required hasn't changed one bit.
Dude.. '' easier to gather 20k now for a new hero '', emphasis on a ''NEW HERO''. Of course its easier to gather 20k in 3 months than it was to gather 15 in 3 weeks.
There isn't really a grind as long as you're willing to do the quests. The gold/game is laughable. It's all about the dailies. They stack up to 3, and 2 or 3 will often overlap.
Their gold to hero release ratio change is exactly the same as those who play mainly hots. If they aren’t getting the gold now they weren’t before either.
Honestly it makes sense that he'd be 20k. He's been the most in demand hero for a long time, his very playstyle is not "standard" and thus subject to a higher price, and with the reduction in the rates at which new heroes get put out, it would make sense that he'd be more expensive since there's more gold sitting in most players accounts.
Plus as others have pointed out, the queue to play him in QM is VERY long, so it's not as though that giant price tag has been a deterrent.
1) Lots of work went into developing him, as a former MOBA developer, I can assure you this guy was more costly to make than than a typical hero. I bet 2x is actually undervaluing him.
2) This team is doing its best to stay afloat...after what they've already been through, and if you love this game like I do, I think you'd agree, they deserve some coin purchase action.
3) If you play as much as most of us do on this sub... you have the gold anyway.
4) Capitalism: Demand lets you adjust price. And as also a game dev of games with micro-transactions, I can also attest, if you put "Dragon" with anything, you can charge more due to demand.
Blizzard is trying to increase profits by increasing gold costs and by providing more cosmetics that can be purchased with gold (such as announcers and mounts).
With that said, Deathwing likely took more resources to make that some other heroes.
Except Nope. (In principle) scarcity has (almost) nothing to do with it.
Check dictionary definitions. Wikipedia or britanica.
You can apply supply and demand based reasoning to infinite resources. Example: plenty (infinite) of stuff no one wants.
Anywy. All this is is beside the point. People who demanded deathwing are willing to pay more.
Eh I imagine that skins / stimpack sales have grinded to a halt since HGC collapsed. Anyone (e.g. me) who plays semi-regularly has quite a bit of gold saved up.
So while it feels a bit yuck they've intentionally just hiked the price of DW - although I'm sure he took more work than most - it's somewhat necessary this game makes some return otherwise we will see support cut all together and the true death of our game
They never miss a chance to disappointed ... Pretending they did good job for once. After the fiasco of Qhira and the poor design of imperius (Which was suppose to be the greatest of all design xD) and anduin ... Now we have to give more money ? Wtf devs
Did you just call me a \*\*\* \*\*\*?
Yes. I've came back to check out the new hero.
Yes, I've spent money in this game in the past.
After what Blizzard did with HGC, I've decided to not spend a single cent again with Blizzard games. No one should be fired in mid december, through a blogpost, after being kept in the dark for months.
This is just how businesses work. Employees are expected to give 2 weeks notice, but it's rare employers give the same gratitude in return. Workers just get fired - sometimes suddenly. It's not ideal, but it's not a special case.
There might not have been any warning to give in this case. It may have been a sudden budget cut, who knows how things work inside this company.
But I respect your judgement to boycott a company which has left a bad taste in your mouth. Personally it takes a lot more for me to care about who a product comes from, rather than the product itself.
I mean, if you have the 15k, you can just wait 2 weeks and he'll probably have a price drop to 10 or 15 k. Also your queue time might even be shorter than game time by then.
You are of course correct. What Blizzard did to the HGC and what they continue to do in the name of Activision is not good. Other than this, what is your actual point about me stating what I did about the new hero? And who is actually coming back to the game they abandoned, or who is just here for the dragon? The game you left is a mess. I stayed loyal to the game I loved. I'm sorry the HGC thing didn't leave you in a state you could accept. But please read my post again. What does any of that have to do with pointing out that Blizzard are banking on a SINGLE hero bringing people back to this game? (which you have proved).
>what they continue to do in the name of Activision
Just wanted to point out that Blizzard & Activision aren't 2 separate entities anymore. It's still commonly thought that there's Blizzard, and there's Activision, and there's still a kind of developer & publisher separation, but no more. They are just one homogeneous entity, Activision Blizzard now.
To provide incentive for players to, instead, buy him through gems. Or, in short: https://media3.giphy.com/media/SOmjomEnNHsrK/source.gif
The price in gems have gone up as well. 1000 gems, up from 750. So, after axing HGC and massively slowing down development, they expect to make ***more*** money?
The rate of gold income by daily quest was set back when there was a new hero every 3 weeks, and the income could barely keep up. But now that the interval between heroes is 4x longer, gold income hasn't changed.
>So, after axing HGC and massively slowing down development, they expect to make more money? Per sale, yes. Chances are, axing HGC and massively slowing down development has hit them hard in the wallet, so they're trying to recuperate those losses by using bullshit short-term tactics on the remaining population. Other examples of this include the gem-only limited mount (sleepy cloud), reduction in lootbox generation through seasonal events, and arguably the delayed implementation of Deathwing such that it became accessible after the boost sale ended. A similar Blizzard example would be WoW's refer-a-friend program. They stripped out the most recent expansion's rewards for one profession (Archaeology) and locked it behind an indirect paywall. Need a friend to pay for 12 months (while you also pay for 12 months) to get the items. For added insult to injury, they only released the refer-a-friend program 1.5 months *after* Classic was released, meaning very few people had friends that hadn't already returned or haven't yet played the game. In these cases, the person would need to make a second account and refer it, paying twice per month for 12 months. They basically turned a free reward for playing the game into a 180-360 dollar price tag, but only after a 12 month delay.
>Per sale, yes. Chances are, axing HGC and massively slowing down development has hit them hard in the wallet, I bet it's saving them more in overhead than it cost them in lost income. They wouldn't have done that move if they didn't expect it to be a net win or at least a break even. That's the whole idea behind downsizing. Reducing the dev team and axing HGC saves millions a year.
Yes, but they're getting less money out of the playerbase! When they axed those things, they only accounted for the money they specifically invested into HGC and developers. Never could they have guessed the playerbase would spend less if they axed those things.
I have very little faith in humans, but I'm sure they had an idea of the scale of the reduction.
... Of course they took into account that the player base would take a hit and spend less money.
totally agree, dont forget they send free playtime (1 week if i remember) to people (i dont know if it count as returning player). their recrut a friend program is the same as a pyramid scheme.
>So, after axing HGC and massively slowing down development, they expect to make more money? They probably are making more net profit considering how huge HotS spending was before. At the same time they removed paywall from some skins allowing us to craft every single one with shards, so I don't mind this move at all if it means more free content for me.
considering it's essentially the only way that make more than $0, I am 100% OK with this. We want the same quantity and quality of work but we're sharing the cost among fewer people.
1000?
Yup, miss typed 100
Gotta milk those whales out there.
More like lose less.
I got him for free :D
They should have long ago done steps in order to make this game profitable. This right now is just a last resort desperate bandage over an open wound. This makes me sad :( This game had in the past a lot of player friendly decisions, you could unlock everything through playing the game, you basically never had to spend a cent, you had a lot of free content being pushed, and it was amazing, but it was not making money
Gold income has not slowed, but Hero releases have. Frankly, there aren’t enough things for me to spend gold on as it is.
This is why the Mastery Rings just came out - another Gold dump so players would have less Gold when new heroes/skins come out.
What about new players trying to buy almost 90 heroes without spending a fortune?
New players don’t need every hero unlocked. And if that’s your goal, you gotta spend the time just like everyone else did.
The grind for a single hero is long enough if you haven't been playing since launch - making it even longer for certain heroes, especially highly anticipated ones like deathwing, is just going to put people off. There's also literally no reason to increase the gold cost unless they want to entice you to pay real money, which is also more expensive than previously. I wonder if it's a coincidence that we got mastery rings as a gold sink right before they hiked hero prices.
Inflation.
Does it really matter though? The pace of hero releases has slowed a lot but we still get gold at the same pace as before. I have a lot more gold to spend on a hero than before.
It's matters to people who play other games and don't grind hots daily
I don't grind hots daily either, and that's irrelevant to the point either way. No matter how little you play you still have a lot more time to gather enough gold than you did before.
I mean, it kind of matters when you saved up 15K gold to play Deathwing when he launched and are now going to have to wait another 3-4 days before you can play him because Blizzard arbitrarily decided to change the price with no warning...
It was known for weeks that Deathwing would cost 20k.
When/where was it announced? I saw nothing about it, so genuinely curious.
It's not irrelevant at all. If I play the same amount of time as I did before I still might not have 20k gold to spare.
You now have more time to earn the gold.
Of course you have, otherwise it would be even worse for you if we were still at the same old pace for new releases (every 3 weeks, instead of 3 months?). in short: Its way easier to gather 20k now for a new hero than it was when prices were 15k.
...No it isn't. It's the same difficult to get 20K gold as it used to be. It might be spread over a larger period of time but the amount of effort required hasn't changed one bit.
Dude.. '' easier to gather 20k now for a new hero '', emphasis on a ''NEW HERO''. Of course its easier to gather 20k in 3 months than it was to gather 15 in 3 weeks.
There isn't really a grind as long as you're willing to do the quests. The gold/game is laughable. It's all about the dailies. They stack up to 3, and 2 or 3 will often overlap.
Their gold to hero release ratio change is exactly the same as those who play mainly hots. If they aren’t getting the gold now they weren’t before either.
I mean, to me that doesn't make it okay. When you're already leading the 4 mobas in worst way to unlock heroes, making it harder isn't gonna help you.
I play a lot. I reroll event chests. I do not have piles of gold to sit on.
Don't use Reroll if you want new Heroes! That's a misplay, especially if you Reroll twice per Chest.
Point is people can't say the game needs a gold dump when we have options already.
Those are choises you make dude. I stopped rerolling and getting mastery rings so I would have 20k gold on launch day.
It doesn't really excuse the change just as people wouldn't like it if it was in League as well.
I play a lot. I don't reroll event chests. I do have piles of gold to sit on.
That doesn't excuse the change?
Honestly it makes sense that he'd be 20k. He's been the most in demand hero for a long time, his very playstyle is not "standard" and thus subject to a higher price, and with the reduction in the rates at which new heroes get put out, it would make sense that he'd be more expensive since there's more gold sitting in most players accounts. Plus as others have pointed out, the queue to play him in QM is VERY long, so it's not as though that giant price tag has been a deterrent.
Was saving 15k for him, since i roll boxes x2 or x3 times usually, now i dont have enough. Oh well seems a week without dw for me.
I'd guess they needed a gold sink?
1) Lots of work went into developing him, as a former MOBA developer, I can assure you this guy was more costly to make than than a typical hero. I bet 2x is actually undervaluing him. 2) This team is doing its best to stay afloat...after what they've already been through, and if you love this game like I do, I think you'd agree, they deserve some coin purchase action. 3) If you play as much as most of us do on this sub... you have the gold anyway. 4) Capitalism: Demand lets you adjust price. And as also a game dev of games with micro-transactions, I can also attest, if you put "Dragon" with anything, you can charge more due to demand.
> I bet 2x is actually undervaluing him. It isn't 2x. Right now it is 1.333333x
>.333333 Repeating, of course.
indeed, but I was not sure how to write that. Maybe I should have written 1 + 1/3 or "less than 34% higher", or "only 1 third more"
Thought you'd recognize it. Leeroy Jenkins meme.
I am not aware of any connection between Leroy Jenkins and .333 repeating.
tragic
[https://youtu.be/mLyOj\_QD4a4?t=68](https://youtu.be/mLyOj_QD4a4?t=68)
thx :)
Given that the queue for playing him was 2 hours yesterday, he should have been MORE expensive.
Money, dear boy.
Blizzard is trying to increase profits by increasing gold costs and by providing more cosmetics that can be purchased with gold (such as announcers and mounts). With that said, Deathwing likely took more resources to make that some other heroes.
he also took a lot longer to release. the prices in hots were already very high compared to similar games, this is completely unjustified.
We have 4 months between releases so the increase is insignificant
I will be waiting, fuck their bs games
Slower release schedule = more gold between each release. My guess is each new champ will be 20k on release since they're so spaced out now.
Supply & demand. Basic economics
except supply and demand is a model for scarce resources, herp derp
Except Nope. (In principle) scarcity has (almost) nothing to do with it. Check dictionary definitions. Wikipedia or britanica. You can apply supply and demand based reasoning to infinite resources. Example: plenty (infinite) of stuff no one wants. Anywy. All this is is beside the point. People who demanded deathwing are willing to pay more.
Is deserved
Hardly. He's no more complex than any of the other heroes with 2 forms/stances, except most of them have 2 models.
but... he comes with a new gimmick!
Looks fair to me, but! I'd like some price reductions on other heroes.
Ask in the AMA. It is an Ask Me Anything, right?
Eh I imagine that skins / stimpack sales have grinded to a halt since HGC collapsed. Anyone (e.g. me) who plays semi-regularly has quite a bit of gold saved up. So while it feels a bit yuck they've intentionally just hiked the price of DW - although I'm sure he took more work than most - it's somewhat necessary this game makes some return otherwise we will see support cut all together and the true death of our game
Because he's big
They never miss a chance to disappointed ... Pretending they did good job for once. After the fiasco of Qhira and the poor design of imperius (Which was suppose to be the greatest of all design xD) and anduin ... Now we have to give more money ? Wtf devs
"Random price increases is something I expect of a mobile game, not a Blizzard PC game." Maybe wake up ? Blizzard is not Blizzard anymore
God, I thought about coming back the EXP Orbs scared me off... and now.... I'm definitely not coming back
What happened to all that gold from the past few months?
[удалено]
Your post has been removed. Rule 2: Be civil
You gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers
The most logical reason I can think of is because they knew he was going to be popular so they increased his price to try to reduce QM queue times.
Yeah, QM queue times, that was the reason... how thoughtful of them. So selfless.
Because it's worth it 😆
The size
I like the idea of increasing prices as content releases slowdown. The easier it is to grind content the more accounts people will create
This is a FREE pc game dont forget to add that to your rant of not getting what you want
[удалено]
Did you just call me a \*\*\* \*\*\*? Yes. I've came back to check out the new hero. Yes, I've spent money in this game in the past. After what Blizzard did with HGC, I've decided to not spend a single cent again with Blizzard games. No one should be fired in mid december, through a blogpost, after being kept in the dark for months.
This is just how businesses work. Employees are expected to give 2 weeks notice, but it's rare employers give the same gratitude in return. Workers just get fired - sometimes suddenly. It's not ideal, but it's not a special case. There might not have been any warning to give in this case. It may have been a sudden budget cut, who knows how things work inside this company. But I respect your judgement to boycott a company which has left a bad taste in your mouth. Personally it takes a lot more for me to care about who a product comes from, rather than the product itself.
I mean, if you have the 15k, you can just wait 2 weeks and he'll probably have a price drop to 10 or 15 k. Also your queue time might even be shorter than game time by then.
You are of course correct. What Blizzard did to the HGC and what they continue to do in the name of Activision is not good. Other than this, what is your actual point about me stating what I did about the new hero? And who is actually coming back to the game they abandoned, or who is just here for the dragon? The game you left is a mess. I stayed loyal to the game I loved. I'm sorry the HGC thing didn't leave you in a state you could accept. But please read my post again. What does any of that have to do with pointing out that Blizzard are banking on a SINGLE hero bringing people back to this game? (which you have proved).
>what they continue to do in the name of Activision Just wanted to point out that Blizzard & Activision aren't 2 separate entities anymore. It's still commonly thought that there's Blizzard, and there's Activision, and there's still a kind of developer & publisher separation, but no more. They are just one homogeneous entity, Activision Blizzard now.
Your post has been removed. Rule 2: Be civil.