If I had to put my finger on one thing that I truly love about Hearthstone (Free), it’d be that the team is totally into trying just about anything. Tavern Brawls, the weekly rotating game mode that hits every Wednesday have turned into my favorite part about the game, and today Blizzard announced another spin to this game mode. It’s called the “Heroic Tavern Brawl" and it’s sort of like if you took the idea of the Tavern Brawl and mashed it up with the idea of Hearthstone’s Arena. Players will have the option of weekly Standard deck tournaments against other players, with the stakes have been significantly raised over just playing normal ranked games.
First off, the “bad" part- It’ll cost $9.99 (or 1,000 gold) to compete in each Heroic Tavern Brawl attempt. It’s high risk, high reward, as if you manage to win 12 games in a row you’ll get 50 packs, tons of gold and arcane dust, along with three golden Legendaries. All in all, it’s significantly juicer than an arena run, but also way more expensive. There’s a cap as to how many times you can attempt a Heroic Tavern Brawl run, you’re limited to five tries in any particular week. If you lose, you get one pack of cards as a consolation prize, assuming you just go 0 and 3. They’re not kidding about the high risk thing.
I’m sure there is going to be an incredible amount of griping over the price of this new game mode, but I think the whole idea is to make playing the game even more exciting as you risk ten bucks to play. I’m stoked to give it a try, as the one thing Hearthstone has kind of missed for me over playing Magic the Gathering is easily getting involved in tournaments with big entry fees that you can (potentially) totally scrub out on. It’ll make you play totally differently when you’ve got something riding on your games beyond just losing a star in ranked.
It sounds like the Hearthstone team is waiting to see how this goes before committing to future spins on the Heroic Tavern Brawl, but I could see it being pretty hilarious if they eventually add weekly crazy game modes to it. Ten bucks to roll the RNG dice on a Heroic version of the Too Many Portals brawl? I’m in.
UPDATE: Blizzard sent us the prize distribution of the Heroic Tavern Brawl, which actually makes this whole thing seem even sweeter- Particularly to players who have experienced playing in a “real" CCG tournament like a Magic the Gathering event or something where typically at best the bottom half of the players won’t get anything or at worst prize payouts will only go to first, second, third, and maybe fourth place. Comparatively, this is really generous.
Pretty sure every big game now wants an app to "somehow interact" with their game. Still waiting for Guild Wars 2's app years after they mentioned they wanted the same thing...
That is if people are still playing go by the time another Pokémon game comes out. Seems after each lame update there is another fallout of players.
I think they'll just keep updating it with newer generation Pokémon (Gen 2, Gen 3 and so on) whilst adding new features at the same time.
You've got to remember that the app initially exploded because of Nostalgia and Viral talk between friends. Once people got their Nostalgia fix and the fad wore off between friends then you're left with the people who actually like and actively play the franchise which is obviously much lower number base than the initial load out.
I know in my circle it went from 20-30 of us frantically playing the game down to 10 or so after the initial hype died down with the occasional mention of catching something now and then.
You also have the people who still play hardcore getting either 1. Mad at meaningless updates or nothing to do. 2. Updates that break the game and make it a pain to play. So at this rate they'll be losing a lot of the hardcore too. Last I checked the app was currently at 2 1/2 stars on the App Store .....which isn't good. It had climbed up from the 1 star fallout to a 3-4 and now has plunged again.