Deck rating vs player of similar skill?

Community Discussion
1

I get that blizzard wants to make a reasonably fair match making system, but given the longevity of the game, the down rankers, it appears obscenely inferior to match players by wins/losses, rather than deck value.

Why haven’t they made this change yet?

They already have the deck/card values built in !!! It costs a certain amount to craft a card, and the amount is commensurate with its value in a deck (or OPness) as Bliz determines. There is no reason why they can’t weight a deck based on the cards in it and their respective crafting costs, and find opponents with decks that have a similar crafting cost rather than wins/losses.

I dunno, I just view it like if you gave 10 US army soldiers water pistols, and 10 boys scouts actual firearms with low recoil, unlimited ammunition, high capacity magazines, start them 100 yards (300’) apart, in most cases, even inexperienced boy scouts would be able injure or eliminate 50%+1 of them. They just need to wait until they are close enough. Worst case it would be a stalemate.

In this example US army VS boy scouts == deck quality comparatively, and 10/10 each side is the wins/loss (or as bliz says, a similar skilled opponent).

2

No, under deathmatch rules the soldiers would wipe the floor with them. In combat you can take your opponents’ weaponry, and more importantly, without routine marksmanship training a firearm is not an effective weapon. People who keep a firearm in their home are, on average, more likely to die to home invasion, not less likely, because people who keep a firearm in their home and don’t train with it are much more likely to die in a home invasion. At least one of those ten boy scouts is taking friendly fire.

That said, I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy. If it’s skill or deck, I say do matchmaking by skill. But is it really one or the other? Why not both?

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3

They’re 300 feet away. You don’t believe that 1/10 boy scouts (or more) would be able to injure or even kill one of the soldiers before they close the distance from 20’ to 1’ to be able to take the weapon from them? Even if the soldier managed to close the distance to 1’ to be able to grapple for the weapon, you have a potential of multiple other boy scouts able to fire upon him. if we inject a back to back circle defense, it just makes the odds that much worse.

I agree that grapple and weapons changing hands is a big concern. They need to close the distance of 300’ to with range to wrestle for the weapon, there is a higher probability that at least one of the ten boy scouts will hit one of the ten soldiers with a higher probability the closer they get, though any that succeed to pass the 10 ’ barrier will likely have an advantage. How many are left once one reach the 1’ barrier? 10 boy scouts vs 9 - 8 or worse soldiers? if you leave any armed boy scout uncontested within 1-2’ feet of an opponent, there is a high probability they will succeed in their shot. it’s a slanted battle. Not impossible, but less than 50% success view from the soldiers situation.

Yes, I agree friendly fire is totally relevant once the 300’ to 3’ barrier is breached.

Not totally imo, though it was an exaggeration to convey the point. Skill can be faked, skewed. Card/deck value can not.

I can have an uber deck, and purposely lose 5000 matches in a row… will I be matched with a similarly skilled opponent?

Conversely if my deck is worth 4k in crafting costs. regardless of how many matches I win or lose within a specific plateau, If I am matched based on my deck value, will I face a 7k deck opponent or a 2k deck opponent? depends on how the threshold is dialed in I suppose. But there is no reason (imo) that on a season restart (and everyone is starting at bronze x ) a 2k deck player who just bought 3 days ago (not portraying that as me), should be facing a player that has 7k worth of cards in their deck at bronze x. I’m sure there are many other players at season reset that have similar valued decks the 7k deck player could face.

4

You assume they don’t; the code of the game is a complete black box; the statements of the devs are always extremely vague in this company and they might as well match by deck too under certain conditions.

I currently don’t suspect it’s that possible to be rigging the system in a way that is unfair to players on a total Ladder ranking level but they may be rigging it to maximize TIME PLAYED.

Too many times I get the impression if I win twice the 3rd is easily harder and if I lose twice the 3rd is easy to win and deck rigging or DRAW rigging might be the best way to do it.

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5

PS I’m not describing a hypothesis on a common MMR, but that the MMR might be accelerated in bursts to maximize time played. E.g. it might jump suddenly to a high number after two wins (or it might rig the decks matching related to your thread) to maximize time played or it might jump to a much lower after two losses to make the next match an easy win to keep it fair on a “total Ladder ranking” level but still maximize time played.

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6

Funny cause I have that impression too usually. But… I’m currently testing a deck that in my op is way op. So much so that I can end up playing Photographer fizzle 3x in a row, with 4+ snapshots in deck with zilliax in each that shield,taunt,rush,lifesteal,shuffle to deck on death, and/or marin, yogg-saron, and yet somehow even though I control the board have 30 cards to their 10 or less, they always seem to pull a magic horseshoe from nether regions and win. It’s running less than 30% atm, so it kinda blows that out of the water unless they are skewing deck values into the ‘matched by loss/win equal skilled opponent’ scheme.

18 games today, 14 losses, 1 loss streak of 5 and another of 7. the other two interspaced between the 4 wins.

just strange.

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7

Yeah, though don’t be so sure your deck is OP. It’s probably in the nature of “combo mid-range” and those are usually killed off by fast/aggro decks; there might still be rigging (hypothetically or maybe); just saying it’s not necessarily in need of too much luck by the opponent for it to lose (maybe only the deck type of the opponent has to be certain).

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8

Oh yes, bliz skews your opponent matchup by deck class. That is very apparent.

Next to DK’s being at around 18% regardless of class played the 2nd most prevalent class faced changes depending on the deck your using.

I do understand the fast/aggro issue. 21 of my cards are 3 and below.

edit 3: it also seems to be a major problem that consistently at start of match I almost always draw 2 cards 5 or higher, when there are only 7. shuffle 1 or both and get another or one of the same back. it’s uncanny how many games I start with Yogg or Marin even after shuffling them back in. (addendum: of course now the last 3 games, nothing over 3)

Biggest hurdle of the deck, is too many cards in hand.

ie: 2x yogg, 2x marin, 2x photo(add the 6 cards to your hand) a ziliax in hand and 3 in deck 1 on board (combined with carnivorous cubicle is brutal) and two more return to hand cards. I kinda get locked into if I play it I’m wasting cards. especially when the photo has copies of the cards I mentioned above.

edit: I’d almost be willing to friend you and have a few matches together to get your opinion. since your replies are not slanted in the ‘you just suck’ demeanor but I don’t really do the friends thing.

edit 2: and of course, just started a game - rope burn opponent.

Final edit: I’m as far down as I can go in my plateau, so it makes no real difference as to if I win or lose, because I can’t drop any further. It’s great for harvesting data and statistics.

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9

This doesn’t really matter. If you have a black box, but you can analyze every detail of the output, and you can feed it unlimited input, then you know what it does for all practical purposes. Data aggregator websites have billions of games of input and output. It’s not a black box to them.

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for arguments sake

if: based on the laws of mathematics and the universe in general
then: the above assertion it is not entirely accurate

-inject the chaos theory (and law) . Brian Cox touches on this in one of his episodes (sand castles is his example)

a)

This is not possible. Our sun will eventually die, eat up the earth (and everything on it). More importantly, your theory is based on the fact (how ever it is accomplished) at least one human at any given time, will be around to feed the unlimited data to the black box.

That is not reasonable or realistic as it is highly unlikely that at least one human will exist for eternity to feed this unlimited data to the black box to accurately correlate with increasing degrees over time the prediction of output.

b) Aside from all of that, the example you’ve provided:

Really… Multiple websites all each with data for billions of games…???

Even Steam/Valve only has around 73,000 games available (give or take 1 million lets say). Where are the other 998,000,000 coming from that you proclaim are being aggragated?

Like just to add insult to injury here. you would need every, **I MEAN EVERY ** single citizen of China, regardless of age, to at least have produced 1 game that these multiple websites are aggregating data on to reach under 1.5 Billion games. but you’ve said “Billions” so we still need to come up with at least another 500 million, and even if the 73K offered by steam are not made by any Chinese citizens, where are the other 499 million games that these sites are processing coming from?

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11

I meant over a billion Hearthstone Standard Ranked matches. Not different video game titles.

In order to believe that Hearthstone matchmaking, draw order, or Discovers are rigged, you pretty much have to believe that HSReplay and Vicious Syndicate know about it but won’t speak the truth. Because they would know.

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12

Mmmm did you? I’ll bite lets take 1 Billion matches (not multiple billions) as the base line.

Lets say on average, a match lasts 5 mins (some are less, some longer, I find most are 10-12 mins now)

When you do the math, it breaks down to 3,472,222.222~ days or 9,512.93 years worth of matches cumulatively.

Given that " Hearthstone was first announced at PAX East in March 2013, reached beta in August 2013, and was fully released in March 2014 , roughly 6 years after development began."

It’s been around 10 years roughly (hey look that 10 year coin!)

So lets do the math on that. Works out to be 8,333,333.333! matches a year, 22,831 matches a day, 951 matches an hour.

Non-stop, no outages, inet disruptions, power outages, player/web router lockups, fibre cuts, for ten years straight.

edit: god I hope my math isn’t wrong. might double check it.
edit 2: yeah my days/years of matches is accurate.
edit 3: heck you should be able to up your posts from 12k to over a billion, as long as you do 15.85 concurrent posts every 5 mins each, each hour for the next ten years.

THAT would be an achievement.

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13

Scr0tieMcB’s argument is good and the game is probably not rigged for the purposes of the Ladder ranking, however I still suspect it might be “rigged” at the level of increasing game time played by the players.

This can be done in a technically “legitimate” way; e.g. the MMR might be accelerated so to speak if you have a very small win streak or a very small loss streak; then it would yo-yo you closer to ~50% win rate.

PS This might NOT be easily detected by the stats third parties as manipulation,

that’s because they look at the big picture and not between small streaks.

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14

I’m not bothering to check your math, because the amount of time it takes two people to play a billion matches is irrelevant. It’s not just two players, there are more than ten thousand times as many as two Hearthstone players; there are lots of matches occurring simultaneously.

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15

That’s fine i’ll finish it. 951 matches need to occur each hour to hit 1Billion matches over 10 years.

If each match lasts 5 minutes, that’s 12 per hour, back to back.
to achieve 951/hr you need approximately 79 matches running concurrently with no interruptions for ten years straight.

Similarly these multiple websites that have aggregated this data you mention, must also be capturing this data for 10 years straight, off loading data in chunks for processing and correlation, and have it all finished ready for you to access via website (approximately 10 years and 7 months later) if they all went live with the billions of games worth of data, yesterday (which is when you said such a statement)

I find it hard to believe such a scenario. I find it much easier to believe you mean millions instead, as with todays use of billions is so common place, with out a complete understanding of what the number means in relationship to the subject it is used with.

It’s akin to when people say “There’s a ton of mosquito’s out here!”. Generally we know they only mean the ones in the local area that are interacting with them. But a ton? No I think not when the average mosquito has a mass of 2.5mg. Even if you said they had the same density as water (which is kind of high) to have a ton of them out all in the same area bothering that person? Hmm there is on average 150K per acre.

That’s 0.000413366742 tons . So all the mosquitos for 2500 acres around, have all descended upon this poor person to exclaim " There’s a ton of mosquitos out here!"

But hey, maybe next time someone says ton in relationship to the mosquito’s they are observing, does mean a ton. Just as you might actually mean billions instead of millions.

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16

You are behaving like a complete moron.

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If by proving an exaggeration or misuse of measurement with actual math is being a moron, sure. OK.

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18

All all that you are proving is your inability to understand.

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19

HAHA. Oh I understood what you meant. I also understood what you said.

They were not the same.

“If you don’t say what you mean, you will never mean what you say.”

edit: Hey only 4 more posts and you break the 13k posts barrier!

20

I don’t think you do.

Look up the Law of Large Numbers. Now look at how long Hearthstone deck trackers have been around for.

Occam’s Razor would suggest you are being willfully obtuse, but you could just be accidentally obtuse instead. Feel free to prove me wrong.

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