Yes and no. Sometimes patents exist so that other companies either cannot use them or have to pay to use them. The latter COULD be true. However, the other use of patents is to, you guessed it, use them. If they wanted to protect a method of enticing players to make purchases and was convincing enough for other companies to pay to use a patent, it stands to reason that it’s good enough for the person creating the patent to also use it otherwise there’d be no sense in a multi-million dollar company with the interest of making money not to.
How do you know?
Also doesn’t mean it’s not being done, but this is a question of burden of proof, so I won’t say strictly that it is being used. In fact, I never once said in my prior post that it was being used. I was giving evidence that it COULD be used right now, what the evidence is, and explaining it briefly to people whose first language isn’t English OR to people who have difficulty navigating legal jargon.
Chinese bots have literally ruined arena because they’ve found ways to make better than constructed decks in the format (manipulating legendary rates and rates of specific cards). This is pretty well documented for the region [Asia] despite the current Blizzard-Chinese relations because people are using VPNs to play and the vast majority of boosting sites are Chinese or Chinese hosted. The game is literally being manipulated now. In fact, several months ago there was a manipulation regarding hero portraits and hero powers not matching the queued class.
My point here is that the integrity of the game being manipulated isn’t beyond what’s currently happening now, has happened in the past, and feasibly will not stop future technology implementations within HS or other Blizzard IPs. They’re not going to stop developing any of their games on the chance that people will exploit changes. Instead, they will do what they can to suppress these exploits because new product is how companies make sales. Hearthstone is not strictly a card game anymore – it hasn’t been for years.
Correct.
This is not necessarily true. Firstly, this line of reasoning ignores (1) deck population and (2) deck strength. If there are ten tier 3 decks for every 2 tier 1 decks, you might see winrates of those lower tier decks rise because usage GENERALLY (as in not always) correlates to higher win rates as well. We’ve seen this in YGO, we’ve seen it in MTG, we’ve just seen it. Conversely, we might also see those winrates drop depending on what the relative efficacy of those same hypothetical decks in question drop if they are hugely below performance of whatever the tier 1 decks of the time are.
I don’t have time to mull over the playrate of every deck (some decks aren’t even represented on these sites, such as Undead Shaman), but I would speculate that the proportion of meta to non-meta decks is roughly 50/50. Even if higher turnout of non-meta decks always meant higher winrate (which it doesn’t), there’s not enough of them going around right now to really disrupt data showcasing the winrates of meta decks right now. The metrics you are trying to suggest here would be impossible to determine whether or not matchmaking rigging is taking place.
I’m merely suggesting that it could be taking place and I think the literature being known regarding the patent is important for players to be aware of.