Eh, they increased the amount of time you needed to invest at the bare minimum to keep getting free stuff. They didn't reduce the minimum amount of free stuff, just amount you could get with the minimum amount of effort. I've probably got about a 50-60% battle pass clearance rate at this point, so people should stop blindly assuming that my position on the matter is wholly dictated by experience on the matter because it's annoying.
You're not doing much to dispel the notion, I'm afraid.
If someone buys the battle pass, they're earning rewards they paid for. So this idea that "they increased the amount of time you needed to invest at the bare minimum to keep getting free stuff." is bullshit. You are objectively wrong if you're only looking at it that way.
Altering the way users can earn those rewards, specifically users who have paid for a battle pass, stops/breaks the ability for those players to complete the battle pass they paid for, while also drastically increasing the time needed to get anything accomplished in the game.
If you're only a F2P player and haven't put money into the game, then blizzard making it harder to complete quests may not make a difference because you aren't engaged in the same way that a player that is paying for a battle pass is engaged. But this negatively impacts people who are paying money into the game because the battle passes expire and the rewards within the passes expire if you don't achieve the levels required, which blizzard just made exponentially more difficult to obtain.
These changes also negatively impact F2P players because those players who were engaged to get the "free stuff" as you described it, will have to put in double or triple the amount of time for only a 20-30% gain in rewards. Eventually that massive increase in time for such little return will cause those players to play less or leave entirely.
It's not difficult to see why these changes are bad overall and it's unclear what blizzard's goal really was here. If it was to stop f2p players from being able to get as much "free stuff" then they could have limited that in 3000 different ways. Instead blizzard made these broad changes that are going to fuck everyone and hurt the health of the game. There is no spinning this, even if it doesn't bug you. This is a HORRIBLE decision.
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