I only spend money on this game for the expansions (and that one time welcome pack) but I’d have given this a run or two if it weren’t so stingy at normal levels. The only people who are going to win the big prizes are legend players who probably already play a ton and have most of the cards.
At c.100 dust per pack, 5 is technically breaking even plus a bit, but wow am I not going to go there.
Most packs are 40 dust (4 commons + a rare), although I wouldn’t even value dust that highly because the craft cost is much higher.
Apparently the mean amount is 100 per pack if you just dust everything (at least based on a couple random reddit threads that google popped up).
Expected dust value per pack also takes into account the chances of drawing higher value cards.
The mode is probably 40 per pack though.
Having thought about it, this is a really bad idea. The reward structure. They’re floating this to test to see if a high priced arena format like this could be viable in the future. But they chose a reward structure that’s going to leave about 95% of players unsatisfied. Just inherently. For anyone to make 8+ win runs, that means that a whole lot of other people have to have 0-2 win runs. But even if average players can manage to hit 3-4 wins (unlikely), they’re not even coming close to breaking even on their investment. Only a few percentage of players will actually get rewards worth what they put in.
But the thing is… the rewards aren’t cash or physical merchandise. Blizzard is giving them virtual rewards that cost nothing. So why be so incredibly stingy with them? They could double or triple all the rewards and lose nothing, and make people happy with their result.
Or, to put it another way, if someone spends $10 in cash and buys $10 worth of card packs, Blizzard wins, right? I mean, that’s their whole business model. So why not give the average result (3 wins), which by definition is what the average player will hit, $10 worth of rewards? That way no one feels ripped off, and Blizzard is basically giving everyone an alternate route to give them $10 for $10 worth of in game rewards.
Even worse is that they are actually only returning 71% of the entry fees in prizes.
The math behind the new Heroic Tavern Brawl
Most of the reaction I’m seeing is extremely negative. One thing I suggest to Blizzard is that they give everybody (at least) one free entry.
Right, the part you quoted is what I was saying they should do, not what they are doing.
For arena, the average win count is 3, and that pays you 50 gold. Which puts it in parity with just buying packs - you get your 3 wins, and you get a pack (100 gold) + 50 gold for a total of 150. So 150 gold in arena gets you the same value as buying 150 in packs on average.
So why is this new superarena only giving you back 70% of what you pay in value? That’s equivelant to arena needing 6 or 7 wins to break even vs buying packs. Very few people would play arena if this were the case, and lots of people are going to throw down $10, get their 3 wins, and get $7 worth of value for it. This is a recipe for resentment. It makes no sense. Why make their new, featured product the worst way to spend your money?
Entertainment value is why it doesn’t give you back 100%. Plus Blizzard needs to make money and getting the average result a break even amount isn’t the best idea. And $10 isn’t that expensive. I’ll probably try 2-3 runs. And probably average 3 wins lol.
Entertainment value is what I’m already playing the game for and giving them money for. Is the game not entertainment, or is the super arena disproportionately entertaining?
The reason they have parity between arena runs and buying card packs is that they want to give people different viable options to give them money, all of which give roughly the same value for the money so no one feels ripped off.
Especially since this one is so top-heavy, with so few winners, it’s disproportionately punishing to the average player. Not only do they not get a big share of the available loot, but the available loot is significantly less than it is with the other ways of spending your money. Almost everyone is bound to come out disappointed and feel like they wasted their money compared to arena runs or buying packs.
Here’s the way I figure it –
After the next to the last adventure there was a very long delay before releasing Old Gods and lots of players saved up lots of gold, then Blizzard gave away a lot of free cards and a lot of the must have legendaries so lots of people were left with excess gold. Now the new adventure means everybody got all the cards so nobody had to spend all their saved up gold … so there are a lot of people who have been sitting on gold for a long time (I have around 5000) and this is a gold sink to try to grab it up before the next expansion, in hopes people will then be back to spending cash for new cards.
Why such a poor payback? I’d bet that nobody at Blizzard is even capable of making the calculation; they just took a guess. A very small number of players will be happy with a big win, a few will spend their money or gold without realizing (or caring) that they would be far better off to just buy packs, and a whole lot of players will be pissed to see Blizzard make such an obscene gold grab.
The prizes cost them virtually nothing. Taking such a huge chunk of the buy-ins for themselves represents either incompetence or greed … I lean toward incompetence … and figure there will some adjustments made before the thing goes live.
In case anyone else was confused about this, note that this week’s tavern brawl is NOT the heroic one, so you can still get your randompack.
Also, with the new patch today come some new quests, apparently. I got one for “summon 10 minions with divine shield.”
Apparently the full list of new quests (there are a lot of them, including two new 100 gold quests) is here: Hearthstone Patch 15181 - Murloc Card Changes, Bug Fixes, New Dailies, and More! - News - HearthPwn
Nah. They wanted to make a tournament, and this is typical for a tournament payout. Better, even - if you go 0-3 in a tournament, you’re never going to get anything. Even if you go 3-3 you’re not likely to be in the money yet.
People just don’t know what they want. The same people that were begging for tournaments… I dunno what they really wanted, because this is a tournament, or as close as can be without actually being in a tournament.
The 29% rake is excessive; outrageous may be a better word since the payouts are at no cost to Blizzard. If anything other than 100% payback, they should be adding to the prize pool, at least for the trial run.
Also note that 9, 10 and 11 all pay the same, with the big jump coming at 12 … not like any tournament I’ve ever seen.
This isn’t a tournament. It’s a high-cost arena run with standard decks. There’s no structure that indicates a tournament. There’s no brackets, there’s no limited time period, there are no announced winners, there’s no ranking to the structure at all.
And the reason tournaments take a fee/rake is because they’re taking in cash and then handing out cash. They need to recoup a fee for the costs of actually running the tournament. So in a poker tournament, if 1000 people enter for $1000, the prize pool is one million. Obviously they can’t pay out one million dollars, or they’re running the tournament for no profit. So they pay out, say, 850,000 and keep 150,000 for themselves. Makes sense.
What Blizzard is doing is nothing at all like that. They’re taking in cash and then not redistributing that cash at all. They’re taking in cash and exchanging it for virtual prizes that have no marginal cost to them. It costs them no more to give back 100% of the market value of these virtual prizes than it does 70%. The idea that because it’s a tournament they somehow need to take a rake makes no sense at all - they’re already taking 100% of the cash going into this tournament, that’s their business model. They don’t need a “virtual goods rake”, reducing the payout by 30% compared to their regular products.
I honestly don’t even understand how people are coming to this conclusion, except a misleading idea that this is a tournament, and an illogical jump that if it’s a tournament, it needs to charge a fee like other tournaments.
This is a product they want to sell. Just like card packs or arena runs, they want you to give them cash in exchange for virtual goods. That’s their business model. But they provide the same value with their other products - arena runs and buying card packs give you the same return on average - and so creating a new product which gives you 30% less value than that just makes you feel like you’d be ripped off if you try it. That’s on top of the fact that it’s already top-heavy - that means that most people will already be losing because their share of the prizes are going to very good and/or very lucky players. You don’t need an extra 30% reduction in payback in addition to that.
They aren’t trying to take money from the rational. They are exploiting the same psychology that makes lotteries successful.
And yet obviously they fucked up because they had to pull the thing due to backlash because people were rational.
Where do you see that at? It’s not on Reddit, Hearthpwn, or Battle.net that I can see.
I don’t think they pulled it, it just hasn’t gone live yet. Don’t think a date has been announced.