Hearthstone Progression Update improves Tavern Brawl rewards but reverts positive quest changes

About six months ago, we went through a rollercoaster with the Hearthstone team making some terrible changes to daily and weekly quests, but later salvaging the situation and ultimately landing into some very positive changes. Well… now they’re reverting all of that and going back to how quests were before all the changes started — for no apparent reason.

In a blog post, Hearthstone Game Director Tyler Bielman stated that they “wanted to see how [their] 29.4.2 changes impacted a full expansion cycle to make better-informed decisions,” which “gave [them] time to evaluate a plan for this next expansion.” He added that “making the Weekly Quest change at the 31.0 patch meant that [they] can also make the adjustment to the Rewards Track at the same time,” which would allow for “a better overall experience for you.”

I remain thoroughly unconvinced, however, that losing the “play 10 games” style of quests that we got after those changes were finalized — and going back to “win 5 games” — is going to provide a “better” overall experience for players. The blog post says that “some of you have been asking for this quest reversion for some time” — but that was only the case until the final round of changes. In the end, they not only fixed the issues pointed out by players, but actually landed us on a spot that was considerably better than the original quests — which makes it quite baffling that they want to go back to the older model now.

In considerably better news, however, there’s also an incoming change to Tavern Brawls that is quite positive: instead of providing a Standard pack as a reward, the game mode will now give a pack from the latest expansion. This is certainly a much better reward, no question about it, but it doesn’t really make the quests change sting much less.

Either way, we’ll keep an eye on this situation over the next few days and weeks — feedback to this blog post has been pretty negative, once again — so we can only hope that Blizzard will repeat what they did last time: listen, and make changes to accommodate the best interests of their playerbase instead of prioritizing only their engagement metrics.