Preface
I’ve been playing Hearthstone casually now for a couple of weeks, and felt like I’d been making some solid progress.
Now, I do not.
What’s going on?
I tried “The Arena” which I loved, a real test of skill, building a deck out of a selection of cards (you pick each card from a selection of 3, until a deck is complete) and then taking on others who have done the same. You see some really interesting decks this way, and people are clearly focused on winning this thing, what with there being reasonable in-game prizes for winning so many rounds.
I look at it like the equivalent of Destiny’s “Trials Of Osiris”, good people are playing their best to earn rewards, and ideally stomping people like me for easy wins. I didn’t do well……
There’s an entry fee which is in-game coins that you can earn through playing and meeting certain objectives, or you can pay real money to enter.
I used my 150 gold coins that I’d earned, and never saw those again.
Then I saw that I still don’t have access to “Tavern Brawl” and felt like I was missing out. Why can’t I try this yet? Well, I don’t have a character up to level 20 yet! So, I’ve been working towards that, I pick out the Shaman as he was already the highest level, and I’ve just been grinding through matches ever since.
The grind
Honestly, gaining XP to level up isn’t exactly new, and I’ve played games where I’ve had to grind to get to stand a better chance or to equip new items, or unlock areas, many many times before. This is taking it’s toll though, I don’t have a high enough win rate to consider this a straight-forward task, and playing through loss after loss for less XP is rough.
Sure, I get some wins, but not enough.
Granted, this is down to my deck and my making mistakes when not paying full attention to a match. But re-building a deck after I’d had a run of good games with it, it doesn’t appeal to me, particularly on a mobile phone. Perhaps half of my problem is that I should try it on a computer of some kind?
I know how to improve, I know I don’t have much further to go, but the joy of the game has been kind of taken away from me.
I’ll keep going, and I’ll try the Tavern Brawl, but I wonder if that will just end up putting me off even more?
I like the game, and it’s been fun, but perhaps this isn’t for me as a full time go-to online game?
We shall see!