It is, and you are full of cope.
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Whatās ironic about this is that the BG mode literally IS pay to win, just not in the specific way youāre whining about. Youāre a conspiracy theorist pointing to contrails and going āGOVāT IS MAKING HAPPY CHEMS TO CONTORL OUR LIVEZā when in reality, governments DO make tons of medicine and DO experiment on people and DO actually make artificial clouds. But the exhaust trail from a jet plane, is NOT any of that. Itās just you not knowing how science works.
Same thing here. BGās literally ARE pay to win. You get two extra hero choices per game, for the entire season, if you buy the premium pass. LITERALLY pay to win. But instead youāre acting a fool over streamers. 
Hero choice matters far less than most people think it does. Of course more choices better, but itās not that much better.
I would disagree, but the pedantic semantics of that donāt really matter because hero choice DOES matter. Weāre just disagreeing on the degree to which it does.
But it still matters, and is still therefore P2W.
The overall average for placement in BGs is 4.5, so halfway between 4th and 5th place. I think the average placement if you have four hero choices is about 4.4 and if you only have two is about 4.6. Itās almost irrelevant.
But still relevant.
Again, if you had the option of two choices, versus four, which would you pick?
EDIT: Furthermore, if weāre talking about high level play, those minute āalmostā irrelevant differences become all the more pronounced. And I do believe this is the essence of what was being discussed - high MMR play.
Nobody cares if you take the 4.4 placed hero and beat up a bunch of newbies. Everyone cares if you take the 7.9 placed hero and beat up a bunch of pros.
That would be true if the Heroes were roughly balanced. I donāt think they are even ROUGHLY balanced; e.g. I almost never see the Darkmoon Prizes hero going below top 4 (itās probably related to getting massive gold discounts in most of their games); also some Heroes are extremely unfavored in specific seasons (e.g. a Hero that only does stuff in very-late rounds and the season is fast (like this one again)).
So if you have roughly 1/3rd of the Heroes being OP and 2/3rds being BAD compared to them then 4 choices can be OP because itās DOUBLE the choices in a very volatile part of the balancing.
The primary way in which choosing between heroes is balanced is simply by having so many of them in the pool. Your chance of having Silas as a hero choice when you have two hero choices is very low, so when you double that chance that heās available, itās still very unlikely. The same concept also applies to the heroes in the short list of significantly powerful heroes ā they might be meaningful when offered, but the vast majority of the time theyāre NOT offered, and thatās true whether you have two hero choices or four.
A tiny chance of a significant impact averages to a tiny impact. Double tiny is still small.
You donāt. Itās not even close to that.
This is the very problem we run into every patch and why the fun of the game has progressively declined every patch. You take a game that basically an RNG slot machine and introduce all these fence mechanics like Tribe heros, Quests, Trinkets, etc. There is a fundamental conflict between the game and itās seasonal mechanics. You either get super lucky and get great mechanics that synergize with the minions the game gives you, or you lose. Even the most skilled player, making all the right decisions, is still at the mercy of 17 different instances of RNG before turn 8.
Either the game is a strategy/skill game, or a glorified slot machine. The developers need to pick a direction and stop trying to have their cake and eat it too.
The only meta where the hero choices is of paramount importance and determines how well you will do is when Buddies are in. All the other metas the hero choice is of far less importance.
Does having 4 choices at all times feel nice? It does for the vast majority because they are below to 8K threshold and the armor on the heroes is a big factor in how they place.
The bigger question should be. Does $15 four times a year really effect your finances? If it does then you should evaluate why you are playing a game and not working on your finances. If itās for another reason then that is your choice to limit yourself not the game for three months a year.
There are plenty of us that play at or higher rank than streamers and we donāt have some magic cheat code to play the game. We just know how to play the mode. Full transparency i also play TFT and that game is WAY more complex than BGās and itās the same type of game.
I donāt understand. What makes BGās different from literally any other type of competition ever to exist? Iāve never heard of any single competitive scene - not from sports, not from games, not from martial arts, not from races, LITERALLY nothing else - wherein a slight advantage doesnāt mean MORE at higher levels, instead of less.
So it really confuses the hell out of me when you say āthis advantage only matters when people suck.ā
You said they āsuckā. I was eluding to being inexperienced with the format. More armor allows for more mistakes to be made without disaster happening. Thatās specifically why at higher rating the heroes have different armor(many have less than what you get at lower rating).
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Drop the pedantry. Weāre talking high skill vs low. And for the record, IāM in the low camp so donāt try and champion something YOU arenāt.
Yea, I get that. Not my point.
Once again, NOT my point.
VERY SPECIFICALLY, you STATED:
My question is, WHY are āslight advantagesā NOT important at higher levels?
EDIT: For example, if a hero at āsuckā MMR has 15 armor. And at āskilledā he might have 2 armor. Just made up figures.
But then a different hero may have 13 at suck levels, and ONE at good levels.
How is that not an advantage? Does nobody ever win games via 1 health?
Okay if you want to go down that road be my guest. Iām done conversing with you. You seem to think itās okay to be belligerent on these forums and that is just not acceptable IMO. When you decide to be civilized and have a more adult conversation let the rest of us know.
I do NOT think players of any mode in the game are inferior. Less skilled does not mean you are somehow inferior. Everyone has the ability to become better at something given enough time. Giving those players a slight advantage early on to learn is fine.
Your biggest problem is that you are focused on this āPay to Winā idea. If you donāt enjoy the game then go play something else. This is a business and they need to make money. How they do that is their choice just like you have a choice not to engage with it.
Because itās rigged. No, really. You think this game and algorithm doesnāt drum up scheduled wins and losses to increase whales and people buying things in a āfree to playā game? You think casinos slots are random too? Lol
All yall stating ridiculous high ratings like 6k 7k and 10k and higherā¦
When the actual average player, (not average for here, yall live in a bubble of what you think normal is) is closer to 3k to 5k. Its just astounding sometimes how skewed a perspective can get and how pessimistic it can be in tone towards anyone not meeting a ridiculously high rating.
Let us all remember that not everyone is you, and thus not everyone has your āamazingā um, āskillsā at hearthstone. Despite how bad the RNG can be, how highroll some players can luck out to, the vast majority of players experience none of these in the average match. Most people in my bracket (5.5k floor) are mostly all dead or dying by turn 7 or 9 and taking 15 dmg per turn if they take any dmg at all.
There exists everyone that plays, and each person is at any specified skill level because numerically someone has to be at that skill level. Its poor form to defecate all over the ones below your rating.
Kudos to all that can reach ridiculous high ratings like 6k and 7k and 10k and higher. Muchos Kudos indeed. and even if you dont, even if you struggle to break 1k, i send my grats to those people too. because even tho some of you would go number 2 all over them, those people earned some congratulations for what they were able to reach.
Thatās accurate, as of the time of this writing. Average is currently 4k.
It will NOT be accurate near the end of the season. The average player will be 6k by then. Itās not that hard to gain 500 points to get from one floor to another, especially once the better players have already climbed out. There is nothing ridiculous about 6k because of the floor system.
Near the end of a season, 30% of the playerbase will be between 6000 and 6200. Average really has trouble getting off that last floor. I roughly agree with you about 7k+.
Of course they are. Randomness is more addictive than any rigging.
Part of it depends on TIME invested. I have a certain skill that puts me around 6.5K if I take BGs not that seriously; e.g. I drop Heroes if I have 1st achievement; sometimes I just experiment with weird stuff like "letās see if I can get that 30 Hats achievement (what a stupidly overtuned achievement (I rarely even have 20 in total)).
But I doubt I can EASILY go above; maybe I can go above 7K or 8K if I try-hard it; but itās already kinda challenging in 6.5K with the way I want to take it casually that I donāt care and it doesnāt even have practical rewards (part of why I often just stop entirely the moment I go d5 in constructed and just go do achievements for XP).
Where are these figures coming from? Blizz themselves? HSReplay? Unless its the former, then the dataset is only coming from the ones utilizing the HSReplay in order to report those figures to themā¦ its hardly an accurate picture of the entire playerbase as a whole, just a small subset of pc-only players in the try-hard competitive bubble. Unless thereās some other data scraping going on from some third party that doesnt involve any of us needing to provide them any info voluntarily like we do with HSReplay.
Im not knocking the data that they do get and provideā¦ im just saying that they are only getting a subset of the entire playerbase and while some things can reasonably be deduced from that sample, i hardly think the entire playerbase average can be from such a small sample. Im thinking of the casuals that might play a single BGs in a week, must be millions and millions of those people. Then those that might play 3 times a weekā¦ hundreds of thousands of them, then there;s those that play at least once a day, again hundreds of thousands id assume but far fewer than the previous. etc. HSreplay users would at most constitute maybe 100k users? 200k? Im throwing numbers out like noodles at a wall here but its the proportions Im thinking of that im trying to get across. The average consists of all these categories of players , not just the HSReplay tryhards lol.
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