Goodbye After This Climb

Multiplayer Discussion
42

I agree with Mal here. The guy posted some fairly constructive feedback on what he doesn’t like about the game. Was it a little obnoxious? Yeah. But still generally constructive. My opinion is that “doomposting” is claiming on the day the nerfs/buffs are released that they’re useless and will do nothing. Or claiming on day 2 of an expansion that a particular card or deck is OP and needs to be nerfed IMMEDIATELY!! Or this meta is going to be the end of Hearthstone!!! That’s doomposting.

Now, I happen to disagree with the feedback offered. I’m enjoying the game, just as much as I always have. I’ve always been able to find interesting decks I like and have fun when playing them. But I’m also not so fixated on win rate and climbing, so I don’t mind playing a T2 or T3 deck if I’m having fun.

But people can disagree and certainly Duke is merely sharing his opinion. I may not appreciate terms like “braindead” and “brainless”, but I still think he conveyed his opinion fairly well in his original post and I respect it.

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43

Well said - I am not finding the turn 5 board swings much fun either.

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44

I’m someone who used to enjoy two distinct but interrelated aspects of this game

  1. Deck piloting and minimizing misplays, which used to be fairly correlated by rank.
  2. Deck building, refining and discovering previously unknown or underutilized interactions.

The former of the two is in a dire state. What is described in this thread is not far off from reality of modern Hearthstone, if a little embellished.

There used to be a very strong correlation between play strength and rank, now, due to power creep and outlier power plays, rank is randomly decided by which player rolls higher more consistently. Skill still plays a role, but it is so diminished that the randomness of draw the power outlier first on curve will trump everything else.

The second part, deck building for fun, is alive and well. This type of fun is more akin to finding inefficiency in markets before other players, and leveraging that, and is a peculiar type of fun that takes a special person to enjoy. Try as Blizzard might to make this game awful, I don’t think they will ever be able to make this aspect of the game completely unfun. More frustrating, sure, but if you are the type to enjoy this, you are likely the type to stick through a whole bunch of suck to experience the thrill of discovery.

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45

The mana cheat isnt balanced though… take the design for deathrattle warlock… you’re supposed to play that spell that deals 4 and discounts in order to play a turn 5 4/4 (that doubles into 2 4/6s.) or a 5/8 that turns into a 5/5… but now with the ‘normal’ turn 5 play being deal 12 damage and summon a 12/24 over 4 bodies or deal 10 and summon an 8/8 warlock mana cheat isn’t even feasible anymore.

Plenty of other classes suffer from the same issue… dh and hunter are slow and well cherry pick your own examples from other classes.

Its not so much that the mana cheat is boring (although it is) its that it isnt even between classes and even if it was the game devolves into who goes first to be able to do their mana cheat play (like current mage vs. mage mirror).

I understand evolving game and this is just how it goes in a game thats 10 years old but at least give every class the same power level options if you’re going to go down that route.

Also deckbuilding is dead… you used to be able to make off the wall decks that arent going to get you to rank 1 but can still hang in there competitively but with everyone playing turn 5 tsunamis or turn 5 renos/zilliaxes being able to build a ‘fun’ deck is impossible as theres only a narrow range of cards you can build around to counter these mana cheating plays.

46

That’s not really true, though

It depends on the combo in question - sometimes you’d like your opponent to go first, instead.

For example, it’s advantageous as BSM to go 2nd with your 1st combo, so that your minions hit more enemy minions and less face, because having board control is crucial in mirrors. This is especially so if you’re hoping to get your minions killed so you can open up board space for more xD

It’s not like you can count on any dmg from hand - you can choose 3 dmg for 3 mana (metal detector) or 5 dmg for 6 mana (Norgannon).

In chess, that situation, when you don’t wanna make the first move, and same works for both of the players, is called “Zugzwang”.

Similar situation occurs in Insanitylock mirrors, as well, with fatique ramping.

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47

It seems your point is that skill is so diminished in it’s impact on win rate (as compared to “luck”) as to be largely insignificant. If that’s the case, why do we continue to see the same names in Legend ranks? If skill is barely relevant, wouldn’t those ranks be much more random? Wouldn’t it be almost just as likely for a Mr. Yagut or JAlexander or McBanterface or Photon or NoHands to be at rank 1000 or 2000 as opposed to top 100 like they always are every month? Is it possible that skill still plays a much more significant factor than you think? It may be less of a factor than it was, say, 5 years ago, but it still matters quite a bit.

And I don’t want to suggest that anyone’s feelings about the meta are invalid. You feel how you feel. If you dislike the playstyle of the current meta, then that’s valid. But I think we need to be careful with suggestions that the game has completely devolved into high rolling and luck of the draw. To be fair, Yellow’s thoughts are clearly a lot more tempered that some of the hyperbolic “sky is falling” comments we often see in this forum.

So here’s a deck I saw this morning from Funki that’s definitely NOT mana cheat high roll. It’s a token deck that you might not have expected to be competitive. It kicked a Mage’s butt. Heh heh… stupid Mage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjCfwUGxcZ0

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48

You do not want to go first in the BSM mirror if you have King Tide. You pretty much get to Time Walk the other BSM since it completely locks them out of their coins and combo. The only way to counter is with Cult Neophyte or similar effects. It also depends on your draw. You 100% want to go 1st if you have Greedy into Seashill into Skyla.

This leads into the serious problem of the game. Draw plays such a massively important roll it is insane. This is 100% because of power creep. If I have Conman and the other mage does not, I win. There is nothing they can do about it.

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49

Cheating is an American staple. You just have to get used to it. I find games after a balance patch to be fun for two weeks, and then it becomes cheating through copying, which makes me feel sick.

I’m waiting for the next balance patch to make things fun again, although there might not be one recently. I’ve already hit Legend, so I’ll probably play other modes.

50

The obvious and simple answer is that those players clearly play hundreds of games more than the average player. The more you play the likelier it is to climb as if you assume a 50% winrate vs. the “highroll decks”, you will come across people playing off-meta or sub-par decks which can somewhat be considered auto wins. Hearthstones legend climb is now very, very comparable to the climb in a game like Marvel Snap. More games = a generally higher rank. Diamond - Legend climb used to actually be a wall for people with a skill level that was too low for legend. Now, it’s mostly just a time sink.

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51

See this response

Why would we assume that your observation that the same group of players repeatedly reach the top ranks immediately implies that establishes a casual relationship with skill and rank?

Clearly data aggregation sites gather raw information on deck winrates, where the players are marginalized out, meaning these win rates are irrespective of the pilot, they can be assumed fairly accurately to be the decks winrate in the current meta. These websites are measuring something real, and those decks, the highest performing ones have winrates above 50 percent.

Any winrate above 50 percent, it stands to reason, will result in steadily improving rank, it’s just how many games it takes to see a certain level of improved rank. Another factor at play is the variance in that winrate (which is incredibly high in today’s Hearthstone) and that itself contributes even a stricter requirement on the number of games needed to see rank improve.

That’s all before we get into one of the main reasons why the same group of people end up in top ranks, and that’s because, once you’ve made the climb once every subsequent climb is trivial in comparison due to what rank you enter legend at. The players you mention, even if they enter near the end of the month, they will enter top 500 if not top 200. That clearly makes maintaining rank trivial after the first time finish. I know this because I’ve been a person that finishes near or top 100 consistently at one point, and combined with the star system these two things trivialize the journey in future months.

There are also examples of players who should end in top 100 every single month and beat most if not all those players you list quite handedly, but they don’t. Why is that? To give a concrete example, Kibler is one such player. The guy is a multi time world champion at MTG, a significantly more complex game than Hearthstone, also a TCG.

Why does Kibler not finish any where near top 100? It’s not for a lack of skill, I hope we can agree upon this.

Well a very reasonable explanation that explains both your observation and mine is, Kibler loves deck building and playing jank. It’s very understandable from my point of view as this is the only fun portion of the game remaining IMO.

Those decks have a massive disadvantage when played over a long period of time.

Anyhow FWIW , some of those players you listed are definitely not that good, for example Mr yagut or jaleclxander, from personal experience playing them they make misplays quite a bit.

On the other hand some of them are really good like mcbanter.

This last observation has always confounded me, how do players like the former play at the same rank as players like the latter.

The simplest possible explanation is the one written above.

Just to be clear, my ranking of the players is roughly

Mcbanter, nohands > photon > jalelxander, mryagut where the differences in skill sold be enough such that if skill is correlated with rank and that is a dominant correlation, they should be well above in their own rank.

53

I’ve played 35,000 games and generally hit top 1000 every month.

54

Sorry my use of your reply was to use yours to reply to auto squelch. I can see how that is confusing.

I actually very much agree with what you wrote.

55

“Old” is subjective, but it’s dumb to say there’s no agency to have mana cheating.

Are you saying you can’t have higher skill at mana cheating decks than others?

56

Frankly speaking. No. You can’t. If I get my King Tide out on turn 4 on the play against another BSM, they lose. The end. If We both get an early big spell and I have Conman and they don’t, they lose. Same thing happens with Druid. I had ramp into Trail Mix into Dungar and they didn’t? They lose. There is no outplaying the opponent in these situations. They got to do their big dumb thing first/more. That is what decides that match ups.

Druid vs agro? Ramp into Ramp intro Ziliax/Marin/Yogg/Dungar and you can completely and utterly delete the first 4 turns of the game from mattering. I have done it countless times. I was at 8hp going into my 5th turn as druid. All I did was ramp and play Cactus for a 1/1. I then proceeded to get over 20 mana worth of minions on the board and theire was nothing the opponent could do. I did not outplay them. They were beating my face in for 4 turns and I got to instantly win with 1 card. I did not make any tough decisions, be smart with removal, or make amazing trades on board. I simply got to have access to almost 30 mana of value on turn 5. No thought needed.

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57

Wait for the fan boys to stop boot licking and chime in; “it’s all subjective, game is balanced, highest played rates among classes is fine etc.”

That it’s over by turn 4/5 in majority of cases? Who cares, can’t expect people to think that far ahead in any case.

58

Oh dear…tell me you’re not playing in top legend without telling me you’re not playing in top legend

I thought even in dumpster legend they knew better.

Not only is that play bad if you go 2nd, but it’s bad in general because it can be countered with Cult Neophyte or Norgannon (if the shill was played a turn before, as it commonly is).

59

Stop bringing up top1k. It is a stupid thing to bring up. Talking about games that 0.01% of players play means nothing to the average player. I also already brought up Cult Neophyte and similar effects. I am not going to mention it in every hypothetical. I am going to talk about the average player experience.

Seriously, every time you bring up top 1k or top 500 play outside of that specific topic it makes you look insufferable and pedantic. Especially since I HAVE played in those ranks. Unless I am specifically talking about those ranks, I am addressing the average player.

EDIT - I try very hard to be charitable when discussing things with you. But, this type of post is why so many people here have a problem with you. We get it, you grind this game hard and are good at it, you bring it up CONSTANTLY. I have been in the top 5 best in the world at a game before. Winning countless tournaments. You know what I learned very quickly? Bringing it up all the time makes people get sick of you very fast.

60

Yeah it was stupid to talk about rank since rank doesn’t prove skill (only indicates a possibility of skill), but you’re completely wrong anyway. RNG is a zero sum game given enough games because randomness is a common variable between two opponents; what is not shared is your skill in comparison to the average skill you’re facing; hence yes RNG looks brutal in ONE game but given enough games it’s a zero sum game because you lose some and you win some and what remains is what your skill was in comparison to others.

61

What? Where?

Note: Wild doesn’t exist

62

More than 1% of the playerbase is top 1k. More than 25% of the playerbase makes Legend by the end of the month. I don’t disagree with your core point, I think Diamond 4-1 should be the balance focus, but you’re not actually looking at the facts of how many people make Legend, you’re just substituting in your own made up numbers.