Hearthstone players go into meltdown as Blizzard confirms the next expansion won't have a new cosmetic board

Hearthstone's next expansion, Perils in Paradise, won't have a new game board, and what might seem like a minor miss to you or I has quickly snowballed into doom-and-gloom predictions about the future of the game among quite a number of fans.

Game boards are exactly what they sound like: Different backgrounds on which Hearthstone is played. The game currently has 36 boards, though some of these are only available in the WIld mode, and aside from some cosmetic interactivity—on the Naxxramas board, for instance, clicking the spider eggs will make a squishy noise and eventually release some spiders—they have no impact on gameplay.

Nonetheless, the absence of a new board in Perils in Paradise is clearly being felt. The missing board itself isn't really the issue, though, but rather what it's perceived to reflect about the state of the game, exacerbated by the fact the audience has some real trust issues with Blizzard, as was notably seen with last year's quest XP debacle. 

Hearthstone is of course 10 years old now, and perhaps no longer the apple of Blizzard's eye—or at least its accountants—leading some to worry that the game is slowly but inevitably moving towards some kind of maintenance mode, where it will continue to operate but future updates will either be minimized or halted altogether.

«I’m honestly shocked,» redditor daddyvow wrote. «This seems like such a small thing but it’s so meaningful. It’s a sign of things to come and how much effort they want to put into this game. It feels like they have their priorities all wrong.»

«I don't think it's going into maintenance mode anytime soon, but I do think it's heading towards lower creativity and no new surprises, like new classes/modes or crazy new mechanics,» Gram64 wrote. «Just going to be three standard expansions every year with no real innovation, soulless.»

A few made comparisons to Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's 2015 MOBA that was slowly bled out after Blizzard decided to move some developers to other