I think the way games are priced is just changing. I'm just getting upset with Blizzard overall though.
They're neglecting the stuff out of WoW for the last 7 months of this expansions life cycle after they said that was a huge mistake to do with MoP. They want to switch to 1 year release cycles but the next expansion is gonna be the regular $50 and the monthly fee is still the same.
They pretty much did nothing to help SC2 develop an E-Sports scene, it had a lot going at launch and has been just dying ever since. Both Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are F2P but it's absolutely tedious to earn anything in those games.
In Heroes of the Storm you can live with a default character at least. The grind in Hearthstone is absolutely loving horrendous though. You need cards to do anything, and it's 100g per pack of cards that can have absolute stuff in them. That's 30 wins for a pack of cards, or a quest and 7 more wins. The price of packs of cards is pretty high for no guarantee of anything good. Expansions for that game are $25 which is a lot of money or an even more ridiculous amount of gold.
It's not like they're doing amazing either, the latest stats for WoW showed lots of decline and they announced their no longer publishing numbers for it. They seem to never learn from mistakes, or if they do they seem to forget it up in a completely different way. I want Overwatch to be fun but Blizzard is starting to disappoint more and more.
WoW is still getting content patches and bonus weekends to tide people over, I can agree however as a WoW player that Blizzard made a lot of mistakes with WoD, and this next year and a half of HFC will be worse than siege
SC2 I can't say much about
Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are
FREE TO PLAY. as in, they still want to make a profit. of course they're going to be grindy?
In Hearthstone if you're a good player you can get to rank 10 within a week of making your account without paying a dollar.. it's a card game, if you want it to be worse they can just remove disenchanting and crafting of cards and make everyone that's free to play have no chance of ever makin a deck they want again?
Blizzard's most profit right now is coming from Hearthstone. A free to play game that people choose to spend money on. Next up will probably be Overwatch when it's released, they're taking a lot of feedback into consideration as well for their upcoming content (in regards to WoW and Overwatch)
That article I linked explains that Overwatch will not gate heroes behind a paywall as it seems
Legion is not doing garrisons again. More mission, less garrison.
More diverse gear, world drop legendaries
much focus on individualizing yourself as a class.
they made professions different and to have less of a go to a vendor and more of go out and find it yourself
go read mmo-champ or overpwn if you want a full list