Two weeks later: Pop!_OS is still fine

It's been a couple of weeks now since I switched from Windows 7 to Linux. If you're thinking of making the switch yourself, and wondering what that's like, I feel like I've now got enough experience to tell you what you can expect.

How to kill a golden goose, the Blizzard way

A while back, I deleted my Battle.Net account, and all my Blizzard game licenses with it. I was done with Blizzard's bullshit, and had no intention of ever going back, and certainly no intention of ever spending money on another Blizzard product. There was still one Blizzard game that I kept an eye on, though, one game which looked to be something that might potentially lure even a die-hard downer like me back into Blizzard's orbit.

That game, of course, was Hearthstone.

Free to play, or at least free to try, Hearthstone was a real departure from the rest of Blizzard's stable of games. While their other franchises seemed to be locked into the AAA death spiral of searching for new ways to extract increasing amounts of revenue from diminishing player bases, the Hearthstone team seemed to be keenly aware that a game like theirs can only thrive if it keeps attracting new players. The Whispers of the Old Gods expansion, in particular, gave every player at least one of the set's fun legendary cards to play with, along with a handful of essential support cards for that legendary, and then strung together a series of "free pack" reward quests for those players who actually decided to play the game afterwards. And it was fun, like really fun; fun enough that I actually bought a few Hearthstone packs just to show my appreciation.

That was before I deleted my account information, of course, but I'll admit that I kept an eye on Hearthstone anyway, just to see if Blizzard managed to keep it on this same course. Maybe, I thought, they'll convince me to buy back in, at least for this one game.

I needn't have bothered, though, because Blizzard have done nothing since WotOG that hasn't served to screw up the new player experience. And results have been predictable; the game's active player population has dropped sharply, fewer new players are entering the community, and the players who are still around are spending less. F2P games like Hearthstone really do need to keep luring in new players; Hearthstone isn't doing that anymore, and revenues are down as a result.

Blizzard's solution? Why, to make it even harder for new players to get into the game, of course. How AAA of them!

From The Independent:

With Journey to Un’Goro, Blizzard has released their first back-to-back Expansion. Importantly, this happened following a price hike as well, two packs previously costing £1.99 as opposed to £2.99. These two factors have led to outrage among Hearthstone fans.

A price hike was always going to cause issues; who wants to spend more money on the same product? Releasing back-to-back expansions is a less obvious problem, but something that has affected players quite deeply. For an extended period of time, we’ve been purchasing packs with no guarantee of a card they actually want. Adventures gave stability — core cards every player could use — and often form deck archetypes.

[...] Singular cards have never dominated deck archetypes as heavily as with the introduction of Legendary Quests, a new card-type singular to Un’Goro. These cards require you to build decks around them and will no doubt help define this year’s meta. However, to gain a Quest — like with all Legendaries — you need to be very lucky with your card openings, spending huge amounts of money.

The argument can be made that Hearthstone requires you to eventually earn these cards as time goes on. But, considering there are nine of these Quests, and each is basically a requirement for the majority of new deck archetypes, these have become almost essential additions to your collection.

By introducing so many Legendary-but-pretty-much-necessary cards, Hearthstone now commands you spend your savings to make the most of the game. We’re not even talking about £49.99 you would spend on an AAA game — that would likely only get you one of the Quests. Plus, in four months when another expansion is released, you’ll need to spend the same amount again to stay on top.

These Quests should probably been released differently. Perhaps through an Adventure-like system where you complete challenges to win them, therefore not forcing your wallet to empty itself unnecessarily. Whatever the case, Hearthstone currently feels like a huge cash grab when it hasn’t before, and that’s putting off casual players like me.

This is looking more and more like the consensus opinion, too. Take Polygon:

WHY SO STINGY, BLIZZARD?

While the issue of quests is specific to the Journey to Un’Goro expansion, the question of how much value packs provide (and how frequently) is a much bigger question that players have struggled with for a long time now.

Popular Hearthstone streamer Kripparian lays out the problems elegantly in the video above [link]. He makes a living off of playing and making videos about this game. He played Journey to Un’Goro for 17 hours on the day it launched and opened over 1,100 packs on stream, so obviously he’s not concerned about missing cards.

But Kripp also plays others digital cards games, and he’s noticed a clear trend: Every other major digital card game is much more willing to provide players with free packs, doling them out as daily login rewards, event celebrations or as a gift for even the briefest of server problems.

Blizzard, by comparison, is downright miserly. When the developer announced the details of Hearthstone entering the Year of the Mammoth, I praised the news that the game would implement daily login rewards for the first time ever. In addition to the regular quest rewards, players could get gold, dust and even full packs just for logging in each day.

It was a big, smart step forward for the game. Unfortunately, it was also short-lived. The login rewards were only offered for a couple of weeks, as part of the celebration of the Year of the Mammoth beginning. As of the launch of Journey to Un’Goro, they are no longer in the game.

There’s no easy fix to the issues Hearthstone is facing, but I have no doubt that Blizzard needs to fix them. The game certainly isn’t at any immediate risk of failing. As of last year, it had reached a milestone of 50 million players. But to keep that number climbing, it needs to pull in new players.

Some people have pretty definite ideas on how Blizzard can fix some of these issues, and do so pretty much immediately -- por ejemplo, Paul Tassi at Forbes:

'Hearthstone' Should Dump 50 Free Un'goro Packs On Every Player (Seriously)

I’ve been thinking a lot about Hearthstone this week in the wake of the Un’goro expansion. It’s a game that I’ve sunk a lot of time and money into, with more hours played than anything else in my library other than say, Destiny or Diablo 3 these past few years.

Yet it’s hard to feel like the game isn’t in a bit of a downward spiral as of late. Revenue has been falling pretty sharply on mobile, and a bit on the desktop version as well, which has led Blizzard to try and extract more and more money out of Hearthstone to compensate. Now, that’s led us to a point where Adventures no longer exist, and old drop rates and duplicates now feel oppressive due to the fact that there’s an extra expansion per year, and this latest one is designed around must-have legendaries that are hard to get.

My solution? Blizzard should dump 50 free Un’goro packs on every player, full stop.

This is not me saying “Blizz messed up, give us free stuff plz.” Rather, I genuinely believe this is the kind of gesture that Blizzard needs to consider for its fans, maybe for this expansion especially, yes, but possibly for all future expansions going forward, for the sake of the overall health of the game.

For what it's worth, I think Tassi and Kripparrian are onto something, here. Rather than doing the AAA-standard thing of strangling your player base by extracting as much money as possible while giving back as little as you think you can get away with, Blizzard should really look into how much they can afford to give away, and trust that the benefits of that, in the form of new and returning players that add to the enjoyment of the game even for their regular players, and who might even spend some more money, too. Sadly, Blizzard seem to only care about pulling as much money as possible out of their remaining "whales," even if it harms the long-term prospect of the game.

I am not surprised to see Blizzard going down this road; there's a reason why I cancelled my account, after all. I have, however, still managed to be slightly disappointed. Hearthstone looks like a potentially fun game; it's a real shame that Blizzard's corporate overlords seem so intent on spoiling it. There's nothing inherently wrong with the Free2Play business model; I'm still a long-time and active Path of Exile player, after all. But there is a point at which your game stops feeling like it's F2P, and starts feeling like it's Pay2Win, and Hearthstone would seem to have strayed a long way into P2W territory, apparently with no idea how to find their way back... or any desire to do so.

GG, Blizzard. GG.

Esports can giveth... but will it?

Esports are so hot right now.

League of Legends, DOTA2, CS:GO, Hearthstone, StarCraft 2... with a few high-profile titles making esports look more legit every day, suddenly everyone wants some of that sweet, sweet esports action:

Per a release from the Pac-12, the athletic conference will become the first to run and broadcast officially sanctioned esports competitions. They haven’t picked a game yet, but they say they will pick one soon and broadcast some gaming starting next year:

Intercollegiate competition in egaming is in its initial stages, but Pac-12 universities are increasingly involved through passionate student groups competing in competitions with popular games. Esports is also closely tied to academic departments at Pac-12 universities such as computer science, visual and cinematic arts, engineering and others.

And they're not the only ones. Activision Blizzard recently "scaled back" their licensed properties division, even as they were acquiring Major League Gaming; they've since partnered with Facebook to deliver esport content worldwide.

They're not alone, either:

Turner Broadcasting and WME/IMG announced that they were forming an eSports league that would debut on TBS. Amazon-owned Twitch, one of the pioneers in this space, receives over 100 million monthly unique viewers, and 1.7 million monthly unique broadcasters. Users view approximately 422 minutes of programming on Twitch, which is more than YouTube’s 291 monthly minutes, according to TechCrunch.

Yes, it's the new videogame gold rush. In the same way that everyone wanted to be making MMOs (only to discover that there really only was room for one World of WarCraft), and then MOBAs (only to discover that there really is only room for one League of Legends), and then free-to-play games (only to discover that people are only willing to drop so much cash on microtransactions for ostensibly free games), now everyone wants to be in esports.

Is this realistic? Maybe not:

While some publishers establish their own eSports divisions and appoint chief competition officers, Take-Two is approaching the competitive gaming trend with a bit more caution. Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz in advance of the company's financial earnings reporttoday, CEO and chairman Strauss Zelnick said the field was promising, but still unproven.

"eSports we find very interesting," Zelnick said. "It is, however, still more a promotional tool than anything else. And most people see eSports as an opportunity to increase consumer engagement in their titles, and depending on the title, to increase consumer spending within the title."

That more or less matches my thinking on the subject. Riot Games didn't design League of Legends to be an esport -- they were just making a game, that they were hoping players would enjoy enough to support with online purchases. It was always an online multiplayer game, and it always had its competitive elements, but there are a lot of competitive online multiplayer games, and almost none of them have become juggernauts of esports in the same way that LoL has.

The same applies to games like Hearthstone, the popularity of which was something of a surprise to Blizzard; players were organizing their own tournaments long before Blizzard got involved. Even Blizzard's StarCraft and WarCraft III, which basically established the current eSports template when it became a cultural phenomenon in South Korea, were not designed as esport titles. Just as with regular, athletic sporting events, the biggest esports grew organically, from games that people just loved to play.

The same applies to almost every big, athletic, sports league. Soccer (or Football, for readers outside NA) was a game long before FIFA became a sporting juggernaut. Football (or gridiron football, for readers outside NA), was organized into the massively profitable NFL long after its popularity as a game had helped it to spread. Baseball is big business, but that's because it was everywhere in the USA at the start of the 20th Century, and not because some corporation decided that their strategy called for a strong position in pastoral past-times.

Conversely, more recent attempts to manufacture new sports have largely flopped. Do you remember when Roller Derby was huge? Do you also remember watching moon landings on TV as a kid? Roller Derby is still around, and experiencing something of a renaissance in the last two years, but it's a long way from being the pop cultural touchstone that it briefly became, back in the 1970s. 

Even attempts to popularize already-existing but lesser-known sports, like Lacrosse (yes, there's a pro Lacrosse league) have met with only moderate success; and other contenders only meet with fleeting success before fading into obscurity, living on like zombies in the wasteland of daytime weekday ESPN. Meanwhile, Professional Darts has gone from daytime ESPN broadcasts out of croweded pubs to packing good-sized arenas, much like esports... again, I think, because it was already a popular game.

I have a feeling that esports are here to stay, but even absolutely dominant titles like LoL can only remain on top for so long; it's the nature of the medium, for new games to eventually supplant older ones at the top of gaming's zeitgeist. But companies that are revamping their entire business models around chasing esports gold? I have a feeling that even the even the AAA prospectors might end up with more fools' gold, than real stuff.