Who made you the forum police? I can say I suck if I want to.
Or did you miss the part where I am low rated? My MMR is barely 4k.
I’m referring to MYSELF, here. Touch grass, sir.
Furthermore, I’m asking for HELP. And you’re refusing to explain. You think I’m arguing AGAINST pay to win? Did you even read this topic AT ALL?
Just. I don’t know. I don’t even know.
Strictly speaking, casino slots ARE rigged. They’re mathematically formulated to generate about a 60% payout and there are copious regulations and laws in place to govern this.
Additionally, blizzard COULD, theoretically, rig their games in any myriad number of ways and it’d probably be legal as long as they document it in a report somewhere that nobody will typically ever read unless it’s thrown in front of them via some sort of court proceeding. And even then, “the law” is usually intentionally opaque; the average person won’t be able to understand the parlance.
All that said, Occam’s Razor would suggest most people just kind of suck at this game as a general rule. It’s a casual game and it will invite casual players. There’s nothing wrong with that, no matter how much Dallaen might express faux outrage at my self deprecation. Not everyone is a winner.
Adjusting the base probability of an event, in a consistent way, IS NOT RIGGING.
If it’s not fraud, IT’S NOT RIGGING.
Rigging would be setting the game to only allow players to win their matches by changing things in such a way that no other outcome could ever have happened.
Now these conditions could also exist outside of any changes made by them by the nature of the deck player A brought and Player B brought. There could just not be another outcome than how A vs B plays out based on their decks. regardless of skill or draw.
That scenario is merely the base probability of that particular match. Rigging would be to have Player C’s deck somehow get changed into Player B’s deck so that the same “no other possible outcome” would occur.
Since no one is complaining their decks arent their decks then I put the idea of rigging in the incredibly unlikely and wouldnt help the company in any way category.
Are we getting into the semantics of rigging now? If whale A gets easier/better card draws than Free player B, that’s “rigging”, or better hero selection, however minuscule, is by all intents and purposes “stacking the deck”. Do we know it happens for certain? Probably never unless someone leaks something saying otherwise…but looking at Blizzards track record lately, along with how scummy free to play modeled games are, siding with the “it gets rigged or the needle moves in favor based on X” is the most likely scenario. If you don’t think Blizzard, or any free to play game model has code in it to try and incentivize people spending and becoming whales, than I have a bridge to sell you.
Building incentives to get people to spend their money with your business is now scummy and considered rigging? Sir, I’d like to introduce you to a thing called an economy and how one of the main aspects of it consists of methods to get people to engage in it to your company’s benefit. If this is scummy I know you must also think the candy always stacked up by the registers and self checkouts must also be scummy, preying on people’s impulse controls to get them to buy their products by placing them where you’ll most likely buy them when you wouldnt have otherwise… and dont get me started on endcap displays and mid aisle stacks with promotional prices… did you hear they even have …* whispers * “sales” and “ad flyers” and even… “coupons”? The audacity of them to engage in a business practice that incentivizes people to spend money in their business! * clutches pearls *
Imagine being a business that preys on the fact that people need food to survive and that once consumed they will eventually need more… how predatory! I can’t imagine a company who’s products are for leisure activity and disposable income could possibly engage in similar ideas in order to sustain their company… how scummy that would be indeed… /sarcasm
You are putting words in my mouth and building a strawman argument my guy. Did I say it was scummy? No. I said this free to play game is in incentivized so players come back, get addicted and spend money. I’m just noting that this game has a lot of methods to sway the favor of winning/losing to increase people to spend money. It would be scummy if this were a true gambling game, or if it cost money upfront. But to believe this game is 100% skill of the player is asinine
Also, you sound insufferable to be around typing like that lmao. I think you’d fit right in as a discord mod or reddit mod
So how do the same players always rise to the top of the ladders each season?
Do NOT say “Because Blizzard gives them a hidden advantage”. You have no proof.
Luck is like water. Skill is like something that dissolves in water. Time is like, well, time, but let’s say it’s under a heat lamp — something that evaporates water.
If you have a game that’s mostly luck but some skill, then with enough time all you’re going to have left is skill. Time evaporates luck, assuming that the luck is fair.
To put it another way, let’s say that I made a game where every match was best of 5, 4 of the rounds were pure coin flips, and the last round was a game of 100% pure skill. One individual match might be decided by luck, but after hundreds of matches it would be the skill rounds that decide the leaderboards. That’s with an 80% luck game.
I think an individual game of Hearthstone is theoretically about two-thirds luck, and in practice is closer to 90% luck (because when players are matched by skill, the skill difference between players is artificially reduced). But in the long run, that’s irrelevant.
In the long run, poker is 100% a skill game. In the short run, it obviously isn’t.
The core issue here is what that code looks like. There are a lot of people who, despite absolutely zero evidence for such a position, believe that non-randomness is somehow more insidious, more manipulative, more of a mind melter than randomness. Instead, what the psychological evidence suggests is that randomness is to the human mind what radiation is to the human body, and that prolonged exposure to high levels of randomness is cruel, disorienting, and above all profoundly addicting. Randomness also has the fringe benefit of being extremely cheap and easy to program, qualities that would obviously be very attractive to Blizzard developers based on what we know of their work ethic.
Randomness is more evil than rigging, while also being 100% more legal.
I… don’t know if you’ve ever had any experience in programming. It’s RIDICULOUSLY difficult to program true randomness.
EDIT: though, I think we’re getting lost in the weeds here. True Random would definitely be more insidious to a tin-foil-hatter, but really only because human beings REALLY struggle with hallucinating patterns. We convince ourselves they exist when they don’t.
To whit, I seriously doubt Blizz is anywhere CLOSE to True Random, but I also doubt they’re intentionally screwing with things like the conspiracy theorists often claim on here. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
You mean the same guys who play this game like it’s their job? (usually because they stream)? Again, I didn’t say 100% luck, or 100% skill. Obviously the ones who play this game as a job are going to go in with more knowledge of the meta.
And a poker analogy is irrelevant. You aren’t playing against the house. It’s luck, and skill, but with cards and no algorithm. You can win having bad luck, but obviously getting dealt good hands is a benefit. As with any algorithm coming from a computer program, it’s not truly random. In terms of hearthstone battlegrounds, there are 4 facets to how the game can sway wins or losses. Cards delt, heroes, trinkets, and who goes first. Obviously better players can overcome these, and paying for more heroes makes it so only 3 come into play…but whose to say they take this out at higher ratings? Blizzard gives early access to streamers to increase sales, and other benefits. You think they can’t or won’t do this for other games?
I don’t know if you have me on ignore, but I do want to publicly apologize. I was in a bad place in recent weeks and I took a couple days to really sit down and figure some stuff out. I’ve been increasingly toxic on here, and there was no call for it.
Except i am a 11-12K player and i do not stream or play the game for a living and get back to my rating every season. I play the game casually a couple times a week on my downtime. There are lots of us that play over 10K+ and don’t get any “benefits” from blizzard. We just have a better understanding of how the game is played out.
I also play TFT so perhaps i have a leg up because i enjoy auto battlers because i can be creative in my design each game. BG’s is a highly rewarding game for playing outside the box in your builds.
I have no comment about the gambling section. I am not a big gambler so i have no familiarity in that area. Beyond an above average understanding of probability.
No the only people i ignore are the ones that are trying to sell something or advertise on here. Everyone else is visible. I just choose not to engage with that section of this thread any longer.
That is understandable at times to have rough patches in life. Take time for yourself and get better.
Isnt this you?
Also, you are so close to getting it but still somehow miss the point entirely with this:
They arent swaying people’s wins or losses, they are attempting to sway people to spend money though. To enter any free to play game with microtransactions within it and not accept that those are the terms you are accepting as the standard is just so naïve and to suggest they are swaying individual wins and losses is just tin foil hat territory.
It is not 100% skill, RNG is a thing, the initial starting position of the players’ deck construction is also a thing. The length of time a player has been collecting their cards for said decks is a thing.
The only person putting words into anyone’s mouth is you claiming that I suggested in any way that the game is 100% skill. I can verify I never even alluded to that let alone actually said anything remotely like it.
That’s like saying it’s ridiculously difficult to get a screen to show a “true” picture. Yes, I understand that, technically, I’m looking at a 1920x1080 grid of pixels, but on a biological level my crappy human brain cannot tell the difference between that and smooth shapes. I can’t distinguish the pixels on an individual level. In the same way, pseudorandom number generation is more than close enough to random to induce the same psychological effects as true randomness.
As I was saying above, it’s impossible for any human being, without the assistance of specialized tools, to distinguish between pseudorandom number generation and true randomness. The random in Hearthstone is true enough.
I mean, if your point is merely that people can’t tell, then sure, you’re absolutely correct.
My point though, is that Blizzard could easily manipulate things, precisely because we’d never know the difference without tool assistance. But, again, most people who cry wolf over this are merely tilted or trolling, so I’m unsure if this particular hair must needs be split.
We have data aggregator websites. Do these websites publish the raw data? No; that’s a bought and sold product, with confidentiality agreements etc; we look at summaries instead of the raw data. But those websites have the ability to analyze that data they have access to, and would be able to detect any significant deviation from random. They have the order in which cards are drawn, which cards are in the starting hands, the results of millions of Discover options.
So what you’d have to convince me of, is that despite a large and ravenous potential audience of thousands of rigging believers, that they would rather not get all that sweet ad revenue. Nah, I think they’ve done the analysis and the results were, unfortunately, boring.
I don’t know how often they redo the analysis though. And if it’s something very minor, like Blizzard giving only a dozen accounts VIP favorable RNG status, then that’d be too few games to make a detectable difference.
But we can conclude with a high degree of certainty that there is no long-lasting, widespread, pervasive rigging of Hearthstone. If it exists, it’s a less than 1% type of thing. Which means all the typical rigging believers are delusional.