Before the holiday break, Blizzard moderator Aratil went into a little more detail about the slight Hearthstone: Curse of Naxxramas pricing delay.
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In a forum post, Aratil stated that she had spoken a bit too soon regarding the pricing announcement for the upcoming, highly anticipated Naxxramas expansion. "With that said, when I originally announced that we were targeting to announce Naxxramas pricing details on July 1st, I did not realize that we were still going through one last round of internal review regarding the pricing details, so you can definitely blame that one on me. We're close though!"
The apology is a welcome bit of transparency on behalf of the forum mod. We all make mistakes, and it's fine. The price will be announced when it gets announced. Furthermore, Aratil stated that the expansion is proving to be a bit of a tricky thing for the developers, not only are they bogged down in creating the brand new Adventure mode, but they're also racing to fix numerous bugs they have discovered in the game.
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"The team has fixed over 200 bugs just in the last week alone, and new bugs continue to be discovered. After all of the identified bugs have been addressed, the game will still need to undergo several rounds of quality assurance tests to ensure that the game is ready."
And additionally, "Adventure Mode is a completely new thing for us; in fact, Hearthstone itself is still quite new. There are a lot of factors to consider when determining pricing and we want it to feel accessible to newer players as well as obtainable by players who do not wish to spend real money. This requires not only a lot of research on our part, but also a lot of back and forth on what could work and what won't. In fact, it took us a while to even determine that we wanted to separate the Curse of Naxxramas Adventure Mode into different wings." said Aratil.
One must have appreciation for the scale of the game the Blizzard team is attempting to create. Blizzard is one of the most successful video game companies perhaps ever. Nearly all of their titles are immediate best sellers and are voraciously sought after and nitpicked. I would also point out that it is precisely because they create such good product that they are often delayed. How long did we wait for Diablo III or Starcraft II? We, the players, only receive the final product and as such, are only used to seeing the final evolution of a game; but game design has always only ever been about tinkering.
Add in that Hearthstone is a F2P game with heavy P2P options and you have to further balance the new cards and modes to make it an enjoyable experience to players who opt not to pay.
Yes, it sucks that we don't know the pricing details and all the little bits of Naxxramas lore are just dragging this whole thing out. What is important to remember is that when they figure out the basic design of this upcoming, brand new mode, future expansions are going to roll out much quicker.
Blizzard might have a very secretive process, but it is a process that brings results. We complain, we post angry forum missives, but at the end of the day, we all play it because what they make is good. Really, really good.
