Power Creep in Hearthstone (and other CCGs)

[Pixels]

Really? I haven't played Path of Exile since the beta, but back then all the paid upgrades were purely cosmetic.

There are plenty of true free-to-play games-- but it's quite rare in multiplayer games. It's also pretty barren if you're looking for visual spectacle.

[shlominus]

You don't know what pay-to-win means.

so what does it mean? as far as i know there is no widely accepted definition and without one your dispute is a bit silly. to me a game is pay-to-win if players cannot compete at the highest level unless they pay. this doesn't seem to be the case in hearthstone.

is there a f2p game out there that is not considered pay-to-win accoring to your definition?

Dwarf Fortress.

dwarf fortress has pvp?

[Username17]

Pay 2 Win means that one player can gain a substantial advantage over another player by spending money. That is all it fucking means. Lots of games like Dominion or Brawl are not Pay 2 Win, because there is no outlet for spending moneys to make you better. All trading card games, by definition of being trading cards, are Pay 2 Win. Some trading card games are more pay 2 win than others, while others are less.

Since absolutely everyone agrees that spending moneys on cards gives you a substantal advantage over not doing that in Heathstone, it's a pay to win game. That's not even up for debate.

The only question is how much of a Pay 2 Win experience it is. And since most people seem to agree that the game is not actually very difficult and that a lot of the upper end decks pretty much play themselves, it sounds like the answer is "kind of a lot."

-Username17

[shlominus]

so any "outlet for spending money to make you better" means the game is pay-to-win? not so sure about that definition.

[GâtFromKI]

GâtFromKI, 'farming' is playing the game in Hearthstone, I'm not sure what exactly you expect?

No, 'farming' is 'playing the game against decks that are far better than yours'. You're farming because you have only the starting cards and you need better cards; but it appears that your opponents already have better cards. So you're playing against decks that have no strategy or synergy or anything, just cards that are plain better than yours.

And I forgot, many of the opponents seem to be braindead. They could wipe my deck by playing any of their card, and still they take forever before any action.

In the other computer ccg I know, either you can farm against the IA (so the games are quick at least), or you can farm by losing against a human opponent (so after 30 minutes against a braindead opponent, you actually gain something).

If you doing Arena you are guaranteed a pack and some random reward even if you lose 3 games. You get better rewards with more wins (up to 12). It cost 1.99 or 150 gold to enter the Arena and you break even with 7 wins.

Oh yes, it's not pay-to-win since you can pay to do the interesting part of the game.

Wait; what ?

There are 9 classes. You can do daily quest to get gold, and for every 3 wins you get 10 gold (max at 100 gold per day), and some quest give you a basic pack.

So what ? Are you saying that my memories aren't accurate ?

Well, I remember something very accurately: I played the game for two or three weeks, it what fun the first week and then it was boring as hell.

I know another thing : when I do something boring, I have a tendency to forget details. Because it was boring and I don't even try to remember. So maybe there are 9 classes or there are 10, I don't really care; the point is you have to play too much to gain too few cards, and most of the card you gain can't go in your deck anyway.

[Username17]

so any "outlet for spending money to make you better" means the game is pay-to-win? not so sure about that definition.

Your face.

The gauntlet has been thrown. It has been thrown at your face. Present another definition that makes any sense and conveys any meaning and actually describes anything in the real world or shut the hell up.

-Username17

[Pseudo Stupidity]

This sounds like as good a time as any for an Internet challenge.

Hey anyone who says basic cards are any good: build a basic card deck and I'll run zoolock, face hunter, control warrior, or mech mage against you. Guess who's going to win 70+% of the time? Me! Is it because I'm better? No! You'll fucking lose, and you'll lose almost every time because those are good, reliable decks full of good, reliable cards.

Note: Please do not actually accept this, it would be boring for everyone involved. I'd totally stream it though.



Also, XZM is fucking amazing and was in literally every Shaman deck (note: the only good Shaman is mech Shaman) worth playing before TGT. It being picked in Arena a lot just shows how good it is even when not using mech synergies.


Additional note: Grinding arena sucks. It is a long and boring process (especially if you get a janky deck). Drafting in MTG is fun because there's a lot of strategy and you're sitting around a table with your friends, Arena drafting is just boring and occasionally frustrating.

[Leress]

Oh yes, it's not pay-to-win since you can pay to do the interesting part of the game.

Wait; what ?

Did I say it was not pay to win? I was correcting inaccurate information.

[hyzmarca]

GâtFromKI, 'farming' is playing the game in Hearthstone, I'm not sure what exactly you expect? Free gold and cards just for having an account so you never have to actually play a game farm?

For a PVP game, I'd expect all cards to be available at the start, or else restricted by player skill level. That is to say, all players at the same skill level have access to the same cards with the same restrictions. So playing the game becomes a matter of skill. Skillfully building a deck, and skillfully playing it.

[Leress]

hyz, it's a CCG, it was always advertised as such. It is not a Living Card game.

[hyzmarca]

hyz, it's a CCG, it was always advertised as such. It is not a Living Card game.

At a competetive level there really shouldn't be a difference. Seto Kaiba shouldn't be able to win any tournament he enters just because he was rich enough to buy every copy of Blue Eyes White Dragon.

[RadiantPhoenix]

According to my research, TF2 is almost not P2W.

... Hat Fortress, though, is apparently pretty P2W.

[Manxome]

On the topic of bad cards MaRo wrote a pretty seminal article on the existence of bad cards here. One of the main points he makes is that cards are only powerful or weak in comparison to other cards. In any given pool the players will find the top 30-40% of cards and make decks from those. You literally can't avoid the existence of bad cards because making some cards better will make other cards bad.

So, it is your contention that:

1. If I make a CCG with 100 unique cards, players will only build decks with 30-40 of them.

2. If I then delete the bottom 50 the cards (ones that players weren't using anyway) in the next printing, players will stop using 15-20 of the cards they were previously using, even though those cards are still available and I have not added anything new to replace or counter them.

Humans will do some pretty crazy irrational crap under the right circumstances, but that still sounds like crazy BS to me.

More generally, if you publish a bunch of cards, then ban all the ones that people aren't using after the game matures (without adding or changing any), I think you are pretty likely to end up with a set of cards that pretty much all get used. There are situations where that might not be the case (cards that don't get played could still affect the meta-game merely because the threat that they might get played is so strong that it forces you to bring a counter, or something like that). But in general, removing cards that no one uses does not seem likely to make them stop using the cards they are already using.

Someone posted that no matter what set of 1500 Magic cards you decide are legal, people will only use 400 of them in top-level tournaments, or something like that. I honestly have no idea whether that's true, but even if it is, it does not follow that if you declare 3000 cards legal that people will use 800 of them, or that if you declare 750 cards legal people will only use 200 of them. It probably means that Magic has a sufficiently rich ecosystem to support about 400 cards at a time in its tournament scene, and that they will continue to use about that many whether you publish five hundred cards or five thousand.

I would conjecture that the number of cards people will use is probably determined mostly by:

1. How complex the game is (how many different cards they need just to have a basic working strategy, and how many tactical niches the system supports)

2. How tightly balanced your cards are (I'm sure you can get people to use only 1% of your cards if that 1% is technically enough to play with and the other 99% are all obviously and vastly worse)

3. The total number of cards people feel comfortable learning and keeping track of (people are not going to play with a billion different cards no matter the specific rules of your game or how many cards you publish)


A designer can't really control #3, and may have little control over #1 if they're expanding an existing game, but they can absolutely influence #2. More importantly, they can also choose to release more or fewer total cards.

If someone wants to argue that it is impractical to publish a few thousand unique cards and also guarantee, in advance, that all of them will be useful in high-level tournament play after players have a few years of practice with them...I can get behind that.

But arguing that "you literally can't avoid the existence of bad cards"...even if you were a god of design with unlimited playtesting resources and unlimited design freedom? That's ridiculous.

[shlominus]

so any "outlet for spending money to make you better" means the game is pay-to-win? not so sure about that definition.

Your face.

The gauntlet has been thrown. It has been thrown at your face. Present another definition that makes any sense and conveys any meaning and actually describes anything in the real world or shut the hell up.

-Username17

i actually did that already.

to me a game is pay-to-win if players cannot compete at the highest level unless they pay.

like i said, there is no single widely accepted definition (unless you accept "urban dictionary" ). you gave one, a highly subjective one. what's a "substantial advantage" anyway?

i like the following definitions better:

a player cannot compete at the highest level without spending money - not true in hearthstone, as there are several f2p decks that have been taken to legendary.

there is content that is only available to paying players - not true in hearthstone, everything can be earned in game.

[Username17]

so any "outlet for spending money to make you better" means the game is pay-to-win? not so sure about that definition.

Your face.

The gauntlet has been thrown. It has been thrown at your face. Present another definition that makes any sense and conveys any meaning and actually describes anything in the real world or shut the hell up.

-Username17

i actually did that already.

to me a game is pay-to-win if players cannot compete at the highest level unless they pay.

like i said, there is no single widely accepted definition (unless you accept "urban dictionary" ). you gave one, a highly subjective one. what's a "substantial advantage" anyway?

i like the following definitions better:

a player cannot compete at the highest level without spending money - not true in hearthstone, as there are several f2p decks that have been taken to legendary.

there is content that is only available to paying players - not true in hearthstone, everything can be earned in game.

The problem with your definition is that it's stupid and wrong. It conveys no information. All freemium games are not pay 2 win by your definition. All games where you you have to buy a physical product to play the game are pay 2 win by your definition. It's retarded.

So in an LCG, everyone who buys a card set gets the same cards and can make the same decks. By any sane person's definition of pay 2 win, that isn't it. But by your definition, it is, because of course you have to pay to get the card set and be able to make decks at all.

In a freemium game (other than shit like Hat Fortress), you get some game elements for free and can pay money to add additional game elements that give you an advantage. You can pay money to win more and thus by any sane person's definition that's what fucking Pay 2 Win means. But by your mouth breathing definition, that isn't because the free stuff player has any chance of victory at all and thus does not "have to" pay any money to "compete."

So if it seems like maybe people are being mean to you, it's because people are being mean to you. You have put forward and continue to defend a definition of Pay 2 Win which indicates that you are either a drooling idiot who should be kept away from sharp objects or a disingenuous shill who is attempting to destroy communication by trying to make words and phrases become contextually meaningless.

Jesus fuck, in Magic the Gathering, the best modern tournament decks full of rare cards from six different card sets have a win rate of about 70-80% against a pile of cheap aggressive creatures and burn spells. Does that mean that Magic is no more or less pay 2 win than the Game of Thrones game where all players have access to all of the game elements and no player has a financially mediated advantage? Or does it mean that you are a mouth breather whose ideas are bad? I'm leaning towards the latter.

-Username17

[zugschef]

How does this rant contradict my claim that hearthstone doesn't require you to pay to win? Hint: it doesn't. Because you really don't have to pay to win in Hearthstone, unless you consider time-investment a payment.

Here's a challenge to shut you the hell up: define pay-to-win and name a game which is an example of pay-to-win. You will do one of these things:
1) Eviscerate your bullshit in exactly the same way I already have.
2) Redefine pay-to-win to mean something it has never meant, in exactly the same way I have already mockingly suggested. Except that you'll be doing it for reals, making it 200% funnier.
3) Say something stupid about how if you really really really really want to you can quit your job, move into your parents' basement, and spend every waking hour playing Hearthstone for half a year until you have a respectable and competitive collection of cards (and going forward you'll probably only be a couple weeks behind people who crack open their wallets every content update).

Seriously, just shut up. You are as equipped to have this discussion as my grandmother, who has never touched a computer in her life and would probably think CCG's are satanic. You don't know what pay-to-win means.

You are so dumb it makes my brain hurt. But that's not the first time people have noticed that... Welcome to ignore.

[zugschef]

Pay 2 Win means that one player can gain a substantial advantage over another player by spending money. That is all it fucking means.

My definition is that you can't win in a pay to win game without paying or that you automatically win as long as you pay. And you can win without paying in Hearthstone (and you don't automatically win by paying). You can't in Magic. Because without paying you don't even have fuckin' cards in MtG. In Hearthstone you don't need to play that much to have a deck that can take you to rank 5 in Hearthstone, which is btw pretty good, because there is the crafting mechanic which lets you disenchant cards to dust which you can use to craft any card of your choice. And getting better than rank 5 is a grind... every month... so that's where the real time investment starts, regardless of how much money you've sunk into that game.

[Omegonthesane]

Pay 2 Win means that one player can gain a substantial advantage over another player by spending money. That is all it fucking means.

My definition is that you can't win in a pay to win game without paying or that you automatically win as long as you pay. And you can win without paying in Hearthstone (and you don't automatically win by paying). You can't in Magic. Because without paying you don't even have fuckin' cards in MtG. In Hearthstone you don't need to play that much to have a deck that can take you to rank 5 in Hearthstone, which is btw pretty good, because there is the crafting mechanic which lets you disenchant cards to dust which you can use to craft any card of your choice. And getting better than rank 5 is a grind... every month... so that's where the real time investment starts, regardless of how much money you've sunk into that game.

The vast majority of players have neither the patience nor, really, the time to grind for any meaningful period.

Your definition also makes Steam's version of Small Worlds pay-to-win, in that you have to pay to own a copy and therefore to play at all and therefore to win at all. If you can't usefully distinguish between games that you pay for once and games which you keep paying for, your definition of pay-to-win is useless.

[Red_Rob]

My definition is that you can't win in a pay to win game without paying or that you automatically win as long as you pay. And you can win without paying in Hearthstone (and you don't automatically win by paying).

Really? I assumed that position was a stupid strawman that noone actually held. A game where you automatically win as long as you pay? That is insane! Can you name such a game? Here's a hypothetical for you. What happens when both players hit the "I win" money hose? I don't even.

On the flip side, a game where you can play for free but can pay money to gain a substantial in-game advantage isn't pay to win? Here's a section from the Wikipedia page on free to play games:

In some multiplayer free-to-play games, players who are willing to pay for special items or downloadable content may be able to gain a significant advantage over those playing for free. Critics of such games call them "pay-to-win" games.

And yet you accuse DSM of being "so dumb it makes your brain hurt" for taking that exact position.

Pay to win has a specific meaning. It means you can play for free but paying money gets you an in-game advantage. Contrast, say, DOTA2 or Counterstrike where the game is the same for all participants and the only thing you can buy are cosmetic alterations. Those are not pay to win. Pretty much every CCG is pay-to-win by definition.

[karpik777]

In Hearthstone you don't need to play that much to have a deck that can take you to rank 5 in Hearthstone, which is btw pretty good, because there is the crafting mechanic which lets you disenchant cards to dust which you can use to craft any card of your choice.

If you don't play that much, you won't have nowhere near enough disenchantable cards to craft more than a few commons. The standard pack is worth a total of 40 dust (it may be worth more if you're lucky enough), which is exactly what a single common costs. Single rare takes 2,5 packs worth, single epic 10 and a single legendary costs you 40 packs worth of dust. And this is assuming you don't keep any of the cards you get.

[Chamomile]

You can't in Magic. Because without paying you don't even have fuckin' cards in MtG.

The model you are describing here is called "buy to play," not "pay to win."

[zugschef]

Really? I assumed that position was a stupid strawman that noone actually held. A game where you automatically win as long as you pay? That is insane! Can you name such a game? Here's a hypothetical for you. What happens when both players hit the "I win" money hose? I don't even.

It's not a strawman only because you say it is. And rolling your eyes doesn't change it either. The European Champion's League is pay to win or any European football league for that matter. It's the same teams every year, and it's no coincidence that it's the teams which spend the most $$$. There are team sports where that's different. The NFL is a good example. So yes, there are games where you pay and you win because you pay.

In a game between two Hearthstone players having paid or not having paid doesn't affect the outcome of this particular game. The only difference is that you can build more decks earlier by paying. But it is a fact that you can grind to legend with a fuckin' face hunter deck, and face hunter decks don't even have a single epic card. You don't have to pay to win in Hearthstone, but you can to win earlier. It's not like there aren't any F2P-legend-players in this game. Heck, I don't pay for this game and I do win in this game. And that's all that I'm saying. Also, Play Mode isn't the only mode in Hearthstone. You can play Arena or Brawl. You can't play a booster-draft in Magic without buying the cards with real moneys.

I respect that other people have other definitions of "pay to win" and that obviously leads to different conclusions.

[karpik777]

But it is a fact that you can grind to legend with a fuckin' face hunter deck, and face hunter decks don't even have a single epic card.

And just about every face hunter I've seen mentioned to reach legend uses Mad Scientists, a card you get after spending 2800 gold on Naxxramas (2100 if you were around when it launched and got a wing for free). The deck is playable without those, but they make it far better and more consistent.

[hyzmarca]

What happens when both players hit the "I win" money hose? I don't even.

To be fair, a lot of pay to win games are non competitive. Many of them don't even have actual win conditions.

With a fremium clicker game, the only thing you do is collect bigger numbers until the memory overflows and the game crashes. Paying more money just lets your numbers increase exponentially faster. The player gets absolutely nothing out of it but the satisfaction of watching their numbers grow bigger. There is no competition. They're single player. Those sorts of games are still pay to win.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

There's also the fact that the existence of exactly 2 decks that do NOT rely on a huge pile of legendary/epic cards (but still require well over 3,000 gold worth of grinding EVEN IF YOU ARE LUCKY) being competitive doesn't change shit. You still pay to get those cards, and you still only have one competitive deck until the meta changes and then guess what? Cha ching motherfucker or go back to losing.

Remember when beast hunter was good? I was rank 3 (I forget exactly, it was way the fuck up there) when it was meta because I happened to have it. When the nerfs hit and the meta changed I couldn't win because I had no answer to control warrior. I grinded arena until I got a control warrior deck, and then the meta shifted again and all of a sudden I needed to get fucking GvG and then brm to have a competitive deck.



Thanks to Zug and Shlo though. I did not think I'd ever find somebody who'd say "Hearthstone isn't pay to win, but Chess is."