Blizzard's Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft has just launched another successful expansion in the Journey to Un'Goro content addition, which features 135 new cards and some exciting new mechanics. Despite being relatively well-received by Hearthstone's competitive community, however, the new launch hasn't been without its issues. There was a game-breaking Hearthstone bug present in the first few days of the Journey to Un'Goro release, and now players have begun to suspect that the rate of duplicate cards being given out in the game's packs is higher than it was previously.
While it might not seem like much, a higher rate of duplicates means it will take longer for players to complete their collections, increasing the overall amount competitive players and collectors will need to sink in to Hearthstone's latest expansion. A redditor by the name of Seaserpent02 took it upon themselves to prove just how expensive an increased duplicate rate would be, and after using data from 1,101 pack openings, the total is staggering - according to Seaserpent02's findings, Hearthstone's Journey to Un'Goro could cost players an average of $400 USD to complete.
Seaserpent02's findings come as a result of extrapolating 1,101 pack openings' worth of data and applying it to code in Python, which in turn simulated pack openings to discover the average number a user would need to open in order to complete their collection. The average total of packs needed to complete Journey to Un'Goro was about 316 packs, and those packs, if bought in the discounted bundles Blizzard offers in Hearthstone's online store, would still total $399.92 in total. Given that Blizzard recently adjusted Hearthstone pack prices for inflation, the idea that players will need to purchase more packs on average is unlikely to sit well with the community.
While it's true that many of the longest lasting card games in the hobby's history have featured collections that are worth well over $400, Blizzard is by far the most successful card game without a secondary market to speak of. While players of Magic: the Gathering can resell cards they invested in to recoup some of the cost, Hearthstone players aren't even able to trade with each other to get cards they don't already own, meaning that $400 is essentially locked in to their own Hearthstone collection only.
Of course, Seaserpent02's code doesn't factor in the Dust resource that Hearthstone uses, which lets players destroy duplicates of cards to create a resource that lets them craft cards they don't own once they collect a certain amount. That likely reduces the cost by a fair bit, but even if the average cost to complete Un'Goro is something like $350 instead of $400, it's yet another major problem for Hearthstone that will add even more concern to a community that already feels as though Blizzard has failed to adequately address the game's pre-existing issues.
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is available now for PC, Mac, and iOS and Android mobile devices.
Source: Reddit