On June 2nd the arena mode in Hearthstone was revamped [Hearthstone Arena Expands With New Underground Mode — Hearthstone]. With this brought a quicker way to play very similar to old arena and a new way to play in underground arena.
Old Arena: Costs 150 gold to enter, play until you reach 12 wins or 3 losses.
New Arena: Costs 150 gold to enter, play until you reach 5 wins or 2 losses.
Underground Arena: Costs 300 gold to enter, play until you reach 12 wins or 3 losses, draft 5 optional new cards each loss.
These changes were not particularly liked early on by the always angry r/hearthstone subreddit (me included). Now, after playing for 2 weeks I have come to enjoy the new drafting system of underground arena. I like that I can see 15 new cards, pick 5 and then get rid of my bad cards. I still am not fond of the new shorter arena, but that is fine as not everything needs to be for me.
The only issue is, each underground arena loss felt so much worse than what I was used to. Since it cost 300 gold I felt I needed to make much more in rewards back and that wasn’t happening. I wanted to understand why I was becoming poor. [hs_arena | Tableau Public]
Underground arena is double the price of old arena, so it is important to take that into account when looking at these charts. I see however that the high end of underground arena is very rewarding (but also very hard to achieve). The other thing I noticed is that the return on investment is about even at 3 wins for old arena and 4 wins for underground arena, meaning for the lower value of wins, I receive less. The last thing I noticed is that I don’t really care about things like hero portrait (dark green), which provides a lot of value for the 12 win columns in underground arena.
I filtered my charts for what I thought was valuable to me specifically: gold, packs, and tavern tickets(which are now how you enter an arena run, with each costing 150 gold). This made 11 wins more valuable to me than 12 wins! That was a little odd but not unexpected. Again the return on investment for the lower amount of wins slightly favours old arena but not by much.
Something that I have not mentioned yet is that the above charts use the expected value to display how much each column is worth. This is important to know because in underground arena starting at 6 wins you have a chance to win “Crowd’s Favor”. This is a chance at 2000 gold, starting at 5% with the chance increasing by 1% each win past 6.
Who cares about rewards? I want to play games!
Rewards are nice but really most people who play arena do it because it’s fun! The point of rewards for them is so they can continue to play. There have been multiple times I draft a bad arena deck, lose twice, then decide to give up and start a new run. Since the cost of underground arena is double the cost of old arena and the rewards are about double that of old arena too, I would expect to play the same number of runs right…?
I guess not. I quickly simulated a run from each system starting at 1000 gold, with a win rate of 50% and underground arena quickly ran out of gold twice as fast as old arena. This was just 1 simulation though, it does not help with randomness or see a long term trend. So I ran it 10000 times, starting at 5000 gold, still with a 50% win rate.
New Rewards:
– Mean: 23.5242
– Median: 22.0
– Mode: 21
– Std Dev: 5.437758210880657
– Min: 16
– Max: 68
Old Rewards:
– Mean: 48.2193
– Median: 48.0
– Mode: 41
– Std Dev: 4.214191204727189
– Min: 38
– Max: 69
That is about half, I am now expected to play half as many arena games with the same amount of starting gold. That does not seem very good to me. A lot of this can be contributed to the “Crowd’s Favor”, as it increases the variance in the rewards you get back quite a bit. That is shown in the standard deviation where underground arena has 5.4 compared to old arena’s 4.2. The random chance at receiving 2000 gold also explains why the new run distribution skips like a stone. If in one run the 2000 gold is gained, then that feeds into approximately 10 more runs, but that is far from common.
F-statistic: -358.9443684208948
p-value: ~0.0
Reject the null hypothesis: The two distributions are significantly different.
All these stats back up the claim that even though the rewards are about equal, the rewards that are able to be put back into arena are much worse, resulting in less runs, trying to get players to chase the chance at 2000 gold.
It doesn’t feel great to me trying to chase a low percentage reward just to keep playing. And it doesn’t feel great that this probably targets people to have them run out of gold faster and pay real money to chase the chance.
I liked the old arena rewards but they likely made Blizzard no money. There is likely a good middle ground where I can justify spending my hard earned gold on arena again, but not currently.