Battlegrounds aren't skill based, it is pure luck

Thats very cool.

Now why doesnt blizzard have this function on the website?
There is so many small things that blizzard can do to make the experience better. But for some reason they dont want to do any of it.

Why would i pay 15$ (yes its not much these days) if blizzard cant even be bothered to make a functioning highscore list where players can look up themselves,preferably with some stats added.

And the few stats that they have added to the interface are mostly useless. It doesnt show many stats that i would be interested in. It feels as if they put in the least possible amount of effort needed to keep the game running.

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I would settle for them taking a good hard look at the current hero roster. They either need to buff 50% or more of the hero powers or slap on 10 more armor to each. The disparity between many of the heroes is night and day.

The other day i got into a lobby with 2xtop 10 players. While beeing f2p and something like 9200 myself. Thats like 8k elo difference.
But this rating i dont find interesting at all,what i would like to see is the hidden mmr. Then the spread will be considerably smaller though still quiet large overall. (since those players are clearly better then me).

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I really want to know the same thing because it seems like it would have been insanely easy and insanely useful.

My guess is that they did it so that other sites would link to them, driving traffic and clicks to their partners.

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Players would probably start questioning how groups are created and want the internal MMR rating to be released as well. With the system they currently have they just take from wherever regardless of score whenever to fill slots.

Have to disagree here.

Increased variance in any game of skill = increased # of trials (i.e. time) before reaching a “rating” that is representative of that player’s skill, this rating is of course NEVER in a vacuum but always a relative measure.

That is it.

Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.

If a game truly has no skill component, then what you say is true. Basically you would never (or at least with negligible probability) have the case where the same players repeated win (pretty much like a lottery.)

If a game has a skill component, and the relative importance of skill to variance ratio is UNKOWN (as is the case for hearthstone), the only conclusion you can safely make based on the observation that the same players repeatedly reach the top is:

  • These players can suppress the effects of variance to consistently win.

Now you should closely examine the statement above, there are several different possibilities that can explain the above conclusion, each is just as likely as each other without further (a priori information). Also note I don’t make an exhaustive list below (as there are far too many possible explanations) but give some wildly different explanatory effects that should give the astute reader appreciation for how nuanced things can get.

  1. The variance component in the game is actually very high, the skill component is very low (for example a brain-damaged monkey could win by making correct decisions if variance was removed.) In this case, simply by putting in much more time into the game than the casual player the top players will come up ontop in this game of little to no skill. Many people don’t want to play a game as a job, but some dedicated people might be.

  2. The variance could actually be very low, skill component very high, and these players are just masters of their domain. This explanation aligns with what you write.

  3. The variance-skill mix could be any any combination (low-skill, low-variance) or (high-skill, high-variance) and in each of these different cases these same players would somehow be able to conquer the effects of variance (which in some cases would require a lot more time than in others.)

So I hope you can see, you are drawing a hard conclusion from an observation that can have many many different explanations, each equally likely, without further information. It probably wouldn’t kill you to be nicer tho those who voice that their opinion on the actual explanation differs than your opinion.

Being somewhat of a avid chess player myself, as well as taking a passing interest in the details of chess engines, I can say that knowledge actually plays a minor part in their success. Knowledge is used in two ways in chess engines:

  1. Opening books that have “solved” positions for various configurations. A computer then doesn’t have to waste time calculating if a configuration matches the current position and can move instantly with confidence.
  2. Transposition tables use in end-games: the idea is that endgames have few enough configurations that if a set of forced moves can reach a “solved” end-game that is favorable the engine will use it.

Other than that knowledge is rarely used.

Where a chess engine really excels over a player is their analytic ability to work out massive search trees that tactics create, and they due this far faster than a human and with less error.

The equivalent to a (deterministic) search tree in chess in a game of skill + luck such as Hearthstone is the notion of random search trees, where random effects and their relative probabilites of affecting the game are included in the search process. The latter type of tree is usually impossible to enumerate entirely even for simple random games, and so things like markov random search trees (better know as “Monte Carlo tree search”) are used instead as an approximation (think of it as the computer creating many many simulations of possible futures.)

The computers ability to simulate these possible futures with high accuracy is what would give a computer an strong edge over a human player. The human player would have to rely on “experience” to approximate relative probabilities of different futures given a game-state, and this is obviously much more error-prone.

Anyhow, game-playing engines have actually reached an interesting inflection point, where now even chess engines are using Neural-Networks to evaluate positions (i.e. resulting game-states from a series of moves) instead of relying on hand-coded human evaluation functions, which can sometimes not capture enough nuances of a position to be accurate and can cause the engine to blunder.

This is Exactly what BG’s are. They have lower variance than most of the player base think. Taking the best of what is offered and utilizing it to the maximum without wasting resources on rolls is a major BG skill. You get that skill by putting in the time to learn what works best with each card. Time spent playing the mode in theory should give you a greater knowledge of the game mode and how it plays out. The REAL variable in this whole equation is how fast a specific player can acquire that knowledge and put it to use thus increasing their rank up the ladder.

Also just in case someone believes you can completely master BG’s you are wrong. Even the best players will make small mistakes that will be compounded later. The biggest thing though that keeps players constantly learning is how each new season and the small changes blizzard makes in between changes the game. Adjustments in BG’s are massive and far reaching beyond the changes Team five makes in Standard.

I would highly recommend anyone seriously interested in BG watch a Lobby Legends tournament. These are the very best players in the world and they will teach you interactions as they play you almost certainly didn’t see or weren’t aware of.

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Yellow, what you wrote was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.

No, there is no “brain damaged monkey” scenario.

If Battlegrounds had a skill ceiling, and that ceiling was achievable by X players on the server, then what we would see at the top of the leaderboards would be X names randomized. So if a thousand players could hit that skill ceiling, then Waterloo’s name would be essentially randomized among the top thousand. This is not what we see. He’s basically randomized among the top ten.

The leaderboards over multiple seasons can only be explained by one explanation: less than a hundred human beings on the planet have reached the skill ceiling for Battlegrounds. “Less than a hundred” could be zero.

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This is interesting. Because there is only one single way to suppress variance relatively (it will always grow in absolute terms). And that is by playing more games.

There is difference in skill at the top level. Players who consistently get into top 5-10 are clearly better then players who get to rank 25-50 every season. You can clearly notice this difference when watching various streams.

1-high variance component low skill component is something that is relevant for one single game only. But the more games you play,the lower the impact of the variance compoment.

Variance in hs is quiet high though. In poker 50k or 100k hands are not considered an extraordinary amount to erase variance between two players and when one player has a relatively small edge over the other player.
The smaller the edge,the more games will be needed to “erase” variance. Or to bring variance down to such a level that it becomes much less relevant. In BG many players dont get to this amount of games so there will be some variance in BG.
And there is also the thing of players finishing the season on a winstreak and then stop playing to preserve their ranking. Not everyone will be on a winstreak near end season so this also does have some effect.

And then there is the thing that the mmr is a grind,and not 1-1 related to the actuall skill level which would be the internal elo/mmr. So playing more reduces variance,and gives you an extra bonus on the highscore list.

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…
Do you have an exhaustive list of solved positions for all known configurations in your head? How close do you think your knowledge of the topic is to the total domain contained in the computer?

Ask yourself the same questions about transposition tables and iterations to solved endgames.

Your whole position that “other than that” sort of completely makes Schyla correct and you incorrect because of the sheer volume of knowledge required in your example.

“Well, I know just as much about medicine as a physician… except for the four year undergaduate study of biology and chemistry, the four years of medical training, the additional six years of specialization resident training, and the 20 years of surgical experience. Other than that, it’s all just luck if the patient survives.”

Apparently you don’t think some bg players do this better than others, which is, you know, why they win and others don’t.

This. Understanding how to cope with low roll is how one climbs.

THere’s a point where “force murlock or beast” fails hard.

Since you brought up the subject…

In all card games, there is “luck” (or not).

At the casino, if you count the cards (you obviously know in advance which ones are in the pile), it is considered “cheating” and you will be banned from the casino.
In the movie “Rain Man” there is a very good example.

So yes, there is the chance of having the right heroes, the right draws in the tavern with the right servants.

However, having seen it with a random partner, there is the choice of upping your tavern or not, of seeking to triple “useless” cards or not and the choice of placements.

If there is no “skill” in the game, in any case, there are those who don’t have any. For example, the one who places a servant on the far right who causes an ally’s death rattle when attacking, you tell yourself that he has NO skill.

Examples of bad investments, selling an essential servant for a useless servant and others often exist.
Update when not necessary or the opposite, too.

Necro aaside, there is a degree of luck to it fo sho since that’s the nature of all card games (at least i never seen one that don’t rely on CARD DRAWS which are always randomized be it physical or digital card game), but there’s also enough skill involved

If you go out of your way to pick the worst cards from the tavern then you gonna lose lol

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bg is like1 percent skill for knowlege and the 99 percent is dumb luck. you can have all the skill in the world but if say you play that element hero, and the first 4 rounds, no elementals then your srcewed… yes i even spent turns refreshing the board, and turn 5 the guys has a all beast or some other genres they were going for… yea it lots of luck in pool draw

Necro a thread and a bad take. That’s got to be some kind of record.

FYI: That hero is rarely if ever used to play elemental builds. Also i guess the same players ALWAYS getting to the top of the ladder are all just “lucky”?

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