heroes Upcoming Changes to Hero Launch Skins and Bundles

[Lambdadelta 5]

I just hate it how they're approaching this... I mean, they clearly are doing it because they want more money so why they don't just make EVERYTHING available at chests, craftable with shards and purchaseable with gems???? Everything will be easier for everyone and they'll actually get more money from people who are willing to just buy something instead of accumulating a huge sum of shards to craft something they want.

[Irmos 0]

In order to make this change, Hero launch skins starting with Alexstrasza will be classified as “gem-only” skins. Gem-only skins will not drop in Loot Chests and cannot be forged with Shards, but they will remain permanently available for purchase using gems

 

[Paracel 165]

I think it isn't half as bad as you guys put it, to be honest. Current lootbox system has its own boons and flaws but a couple of things were out of place, e.g. you couldn't spend your real money in a way you really wanted and there was no premium reward thing - you couldn't tell who is a f2p player and who is a whale. 

From what I see, it's a quality-of-life change that affects people who spend money on HotS. I don't see how it realistically affects you if you don't spend money.

[Caldyrvan 377]

No one here said they have a problem with it if all things always could be obtained with gems. That's totally fine.

And why the hell do you have to tell if some one is a F2P or a payer? :D

And "quality of life"? oO. Someone who wants to pay for things gets them directly the F2P has to put time into and farm shards, gems etc. Both is ok, imo.

Making content "pay only" pisses the majority of the ppl off that is all that gives ... well and money for Blizz :D

Edited November 8, 2017 by Caldyrvan

[Abom 31]

It's nothing new. All the mobas have pay only skins. It's in-line with the business standard for mobas. as long as they have a pool of obtainable skins with ingame currency for a hero along with the pay only skins its fine. purely cosmetic pay only items is a hell of a lot better than adding in abilities or on use items that can only be purchased with real currency.

one of the things i love about hots is the art team. i have no doubt other game teams see the art those guys put out and get ideas.

Edited November 8, 2017 by Abom

[MZLICH 43]

10 hours ago, Abom said:

It's nothing new. All the mobas have pay only skins. It's in-line with the business standard for mobas. as long as they have a pool of obtainable skins with ingame currency for a hero along with the pay only skins its fine. purely cosmetic pay only items is a hell of a lot better than adding in abilities or on use items that can only be purchased with real currency.

one of the things i love about hots is the art team. i have no doubt other game teams see the art those guys put out and get ideas.

Problem is they told us about 2.0 update and new cosmetic system which changes the old one (which you said) and then are they beginning changes again? I think 2.0 was just a lie to make people back to a runied game then start messing up on shop again to get money!

plus if even all moba games have such things, hots isn't a popular moba game between moba players and most of people play games like as LOL or Dota2 ..

blizzard just has to think about keeping players in hots not making remaining players mad!

So they easily can get much money If they focus on other games like overwatch 

they just have to keep hots alive with acception of earning less money or they should lose their players and accept their defeat to other mobas by real mean!!!

Edited November 8, 2017 by MZLICH

[CyberDVonaven 82]

TL;DR : Blizzard over charges us for everything and doesn't give us the option to even spend our money on anything we want anymore. We'd all be happy to buy stuff if the prices were fairly priced for all the little things separately whenever we wanted them. Rather then only certain things or in one big bundle of crap for a ton of money for only a limited time. Then you can't give them money for it ever again (till maybe a year later in another big bundle with shit you don't want for another month if they feel like it). Give us the option to buy what we want, when we want and we'll spend our hard earned money for you on a game we love to play

 

Well, hmm... I'm not totally against this move. Although I'm not totally for it either. Why didn't they just add the ability to always allow people to do both. Make it with shards and keep it at 2400 always and also you could buy it with gems too. That way it's a huge amount of shards for one skin color or you could just spend some actual money and get it now. In fact I don't know why they don't have all skins available to purchase for gems if you want even if you could make them with Shards or get them out of loot boxes. I mean isn't the point of the loot box system suppose to be like; 'Hey you could gets tons of loot boxes and you might get what you want... or you could just spend some money now and get exactly what you want'. I mean it's risk vs reward with loot boxes. For the system to give more incentive to spend money the option for both should always be there. Rather then limiting the options, especially after the fact, you just make the customer feel like you're taking something away from them. Which just pisses them off and makes them feel like you're trying to take advantage of them and milk them for all you can get. Rather then giving them another way to get what they want.

If they want to exclude the legendary skins from loot boxes and only make them able to be bought with gems or made with shards for a high shard cost then that would actually make it easier to get heroes and mounts as legendary drops in boxes. Rather then a ton of legendary skins I either don't want or already have.

 I did notice on the PTR that what we think of as 'Master' versions of skins will now be 400 shards rather then the low cost of 100 they have been since 2.0 came out. Or at least this is the case for Alex's ones. I didn't look to see if it was the case now for all heroes. But I'm sure it will be for any that come out after this. I don't mind that so much if, again, you could get any and all skins & mounts other then the main and master versions with gems too.

I've mentioned before in comments that before the change over to '2.0' I had been getting on average each week one of the weekly 50% off sale items for heroes skins that I liked. I had only in the last few months before '2.0' been doing that. And as such I would really look forward to see who's skins were gonna be on sale each week. I had gotten use to doing that and was tempted to even get some of the skins that I thought were ok, but not something I definitely wanted because I got into the habit of 'Ok, so what do I feel like spending $5 on in HOTS this week...' And I did get a few like that too. Once '2.0' came around and the skin color variants all got split into separate items my 3 skin variants for $5 a week became 1 for $5. So of course I was like '...ummm... well I guess I'm saving $5 a week now...' Cause I'm not about to spend $5 (or $3.75) on ONE skin color variant. If they would return to the way it was before with the option craft each for shards OR buy all 3 base color variants with real money I'd be happy to spend money on those 3 on sale each week if the price was fair enough again.

 I guess they weren't making enough money before the way they were doing things or they wouldn't have had to make the big change over to the way it is now in '2.0', but from my experience with my friends in HOTS it sure feels like that they don't make as much money NOW as they did with the way they had it before.

So many of my HOTS friends would get the skin bundles with the new hero just about every time they came out. Now on the other hand, those same friends rarely to never pay real money for anything anymore. They just wait to either get it in a loot box drop or they save up shards and gold. Which because they always payed for so much before they are always getting shards out of boxes. And they already have all the heroes up till 2.0 cause they bought them all so they have plenty of gold as well. I would imagine this is the case with far more people then Blizzard would like. I myself rarely have any gold or shards cause I use all my gold on rerolls and the shards on skins & mounts I want. So I would be more inclined to spend a little money on skins I want if they were able to be bought other then in some $20-$50 bundle bullshit with a bunch of other crap I don't want.

People are more likely to spend little bits here and there on a constant basis rather then BIG purchases all at once. You don't make a fortune on big sales. It's the big amount of tiny sales that really makes you all the money. The mobile market figured this out YEARS ago. Some of the other video game companies have figured that out too.

From what I hear LoL skins are fair priced and a lot of people are quick to buy them. And of course aren't split up into paying for each color of the same skin if you're paying real money. And in respects to buying each color skin separately; I wouldn't mind that either IF the cost for each was fairly lowered to be equal to the cost split in 3 for each rather then the same for one now as it was for all 3 before.

 Blizzard over charging for everything rather then giving us reasonable prices with a wide variety to choose from equals less sales for them. How do you think candy companies make so much money. Because they give you so many options for little prices. All the little bugs of the world are the reason we're not all up to our necks in dead bodies and shit. All those little mouths eat it all up slowly but surely. So come on Blizzard, give all our little months something to eat worth our whiles rather then just trying to stuff it full of all the shit :p

Edited November 9, 2017 by CyberDVonaven
Added a TL;DR

[Esmer 13]

On 11/7/2017 at 3:54 AM, Dejo93 said:

So basically Blizz saying : "Fuck you, give us money"

They've been saying that at least since HotS 2.0 launched. The last Blizzcon was one huge "Fuck you" to the community, and I am not talking HotS - that shit is dead anyway.

I am talking about Diablo, Warcraft (you know, the game that was before WoW), or at least anything new.
Instead we got more skins for HotS and Overwatch, new RNG cards for Hearthstone and a filler WoW expansion with no new features aside from the lame subraces.

Ofc, everything was as expected, but it still feels bad.

Edited November 9, 2017 by Esmer

[MZLICH 43]

9 hours ago, Esmer said:

They've been saying that at least since HotS 2.0 launched. The last Blizzcon was one huge "Fuck you" to the community, and I am not talking HotS - that shit is dead anyway.

I am talking about Diablo, Warcraft (you know, the game that was before WoW), or at least anything new.
Instead we got more skins for HotS and Overwatch, new RNG cards for Hearthstone and a filler WoW expansion with no new features aside from the lame subraces.

Ofc, everything was as expected, but it still feels bad.

What should we exactly  get except heroes and skins for hots n ow??

and I don't know why they had to do anything about warcraft 3 since it's 2002 game and if you mean warcraft 4 I should say they stopped warcraft and continued warcraft story on wow and blizzard is developing starcraft as its main strategy game

plus i think they wont be able to make a better warcraft game .. personally i call warcraft 3 the best strategy game in history however I got sc2 I still play w3 on gameservers or via Lan with friends 

and about diablo! They already added necromancer in 2017 I don't think they r Not going to add new stuffs soon

[Hjaldren 2]

Remember the good old days, when you could just whip out the card and exchange a set amount of money for the shit you actually wanted? i remember. It is absolutely disgusting that now you have to gamble for your fucking cosmetics. I returned to HotS after the 2.0 update and saw that the judgment Uther skin had finally been released and i was excited to get it. Then i noticed that i would have to buy gambling boxes for upwards of 50-100€ based on my luck in order to get it. 

It is gambling. There is no other way to put it and i hope that various countries around the world finally recognize it as such. I would much rather just pay 7,49€ or 9,99€ and get what i want instead of paying for mountains of gambling-boxes filled with garbage until i get what i want. I will not support HotS or Overwatch personally until this is fixed, i wish more people would do the same.

Edited November 9, 2017 by Vinterlig

[Caldyrvan 377]

As I said, both should be possible, go F2P and grind a lot for loot chests, gold and shards or pay directly to get what you want.

Edited November 9, 2017 by Caldyrvan

[Banard 61]

46 minutes ago, Vinterlig said:

Remember the good old days, when you could just whip out the card and exchange a set amount of money for the shit you actually wanted? i remember. It is absolutely disgusting that now you have to gamble for your fucking cosmetics. I returned to HotS after the 2.0 update and saw that the judgment Uther skin had finally been released and i was excited to get it. Then i noticed that i would have to buy gambling boxes for upwards of 50-100€ based on my luck in order to get it. 

It is gambling. There is no other way to put it and i hope that various countries around the world finally recognize it as such. I would much rather just pay 7,49€ or 9,99€ and get what i want instead of paying for mountains of gambling-boxes filled with garbage until i get what i want. I will not support HotS or Overwatch personally until this is fixed, i wish more people would do the same.

It don't take that long until you have enough shards to craft anything you want for FREE. I used wow gold to buy a wow token to buy loot boxes couple times....and that was a huge boost in shards. Yes, i did't get the skin i wanted but i got enough shards to build craft 2 leggo skins. 

Just play the game and you will get enough shards to get anything you want. 

Edited November 9, 2017 by Banard

[Caldyrvan 377]

It all depends on how much you play and if you don't use something like the wow bonus and play not hours per day it takes a while to accumulate shards not to speak of gems :D

[MurkyFelix 51]

Not sure what experience people have here with different MOBAs, but Smite is notorious for this crap. Everything cosmetic is shoved into your face as a transaction before it being shown as buyable with in-game currency (if even) and most skins/cosmetics are tossed into a loot box that you only get through real money transactions and then they have so called "events" where you play x games doing this to get a "shard" or something and when you have all of them you can use them to get a special event skin...but only if you have this other "key" that's pay-to-get only.

Personally it seems like a crap choice to do this. People complaining that it's "harder" to get skins from chests/shards than to buy them doesn't mean make them just buyable. Sometimes I wonder what they're thinking...bet if someone was like "oh this part of the UI is in the way during the gameplay" some high-up idiot in the Blizz/HoTS management (note; not dev or design) team would be "Get rid of the HUD!"

[Godeyes 25]

3 hours ago, MurkyFelix said:

Personally it seems like a crap choice to do this. People complaining that it's "harder" to get skins from chests/shards than to buy them doesn't mean make them just buyable. Sometimes I wonder what they're thinking...bet if someone was like "oh this part of the UI is in the way during the gameplay" some high-up idiot in the Blizz/HoTS management (note; not dev or design) team would be "Get rid of the HUD!"

Its not that they make weird or stupid decisions. It is all calculated. Lets tell those idiots (players) that we are doing this for THEIR GOOD and on THEIR DEMAND. That way they can't blame us. At least not as much as they normally would.

Like @Caldyrvan said in his first post - they worded it like they are giving us another cool thing/feature on OUR demand :D

Edited November 9, 2017 by Godeyes

[Caldyrvan 377]

There are definitely players who demanded this and I always thought "why can you purchase items which are normally crafted with shards only with gems while they are featured?". If all items would have been obtainable for gems when Heroes 2.0 launched a lot of ppl would have used that option, I am sure. Blizzard wasted this opportunity to earn money and now they want to make up for it.

The great announcement before Heroes 2.0 launched "Earn everything in the game just by playing it!!!" well, now you can point at that guy in the video and call him a liar :D

Edited November 9, 2017 by Caldyrvan

[mada7 29]

17 hours ago, Caldyrvan said:

There are definitely players who demanded this and I always thought "why can you purchase items which are normally crafted with shards only with gems while they are featured?". If all items would have been obtainable for gems when Heroes 2.0 launched a lot of ppl would have used that option, I am sure. Blizzard wasted this opportunity to earn money and now they want to make up for it.

The great announcement before Heroes 2.0 launched "Earn everything in the game just by playing it!!!" well, now you can point at that guy in the video and call him a liar :D

Technically still not a liar as you can earn gems in game albeit at a very slow pace.

There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to buy all items with gems all the time though. The framing of this as something players wanted is such a deliberately obtuse interpretation of what was being asked of them

Edited November 10, 2017 by mada7

[XeaKon 23]

What upsets me is that Blizzard's reasons are lies. I get tired of seeing stuff like: "Because we want to make this hero more dmg oriented we will reduce his damage output". This is the same thing :"be happy because now you will have to pay instead of getting it free".

[Caldyrvan 377]

They must think we are stupid. "Word it nicely and they will eat it and thank us for it".

"Hey bro, if you help me with my work you may invite me to launch afterwards" :D