I am not one that is going to spend hours on a college essay of a post- I prefer just saying it simply and if there is a better way of saying it, maybe someone else can.
Please do not acknowledge any of the replies to this post. In the year 2025 everyone is a contrarian where when they see an alternative idea that isn’t status quo their minds are already forming what they consider snappy and final responses before they even finish reading it. Sad times.
Over the years I have pushed for an idea that I do not believe would be very hard to implement: PUNISH THE PLAYERS THAT FLOCK TO OUTLIER HIGH WINRATE DECKS BY HAVING TO FACE EACH OTHER MORE.
Every time I post this, people jump down a hyperbole thinking I am stating, “If I play deathrattle DH in standard or Libram Pally in wild it means I will see only my own deck”. No. Learn to read better?
What I propose is an algorithm that takes into account HOW outlier in winning it is that determines how much it should face itself. If the deck is winning 100% of the time (not counting against itself of course) I would say, yes, let it queue up to only itself. More realistically we see unhealthy winrates around 57% for example. Perhaps it would be better if that 7% excess should result in it facing that same deck (or any other outliers).
The truth is that there are many HS players who adore this game but cannot play what we like. A new expansion arrives and because of some overtuned interaction we cannot enjoy the competition of playing what we like with the clones who just check HSReplay and copypaste whatever is winning the most.
You have a wonderful product, so good that many of us endure through this that has always gone on.
Why not instead just code the matchmaking to take into account decks that are being abused so that we don’t need to as much go through this slow process of whack-a-mole where you nerf something, somethinng else takes its place, everybody’s upset, and repeat.
Punish netdeckers by making them queue into each other even just a little bit more.
My friend HS is not a wonderful product , HS had issues from day1 back at 2014 but had more positive things than negative ones . Is not about algorithms etc .
The main problem is the mentality devs have ,HS need a hard reset from the begging to play with simple minions and only few powerful ones . The problems in core of HS are so many i need pages to mention them
I’ve seen less offensive threads (“ignore the other people Bliz”) doing the following mistake so I’d rather respond to that instead of talking about the rudeness,
OK let’s assume you are an amazing homebrewer and you make a new deck: people will copy you and play it: now you “punished” yourself thx to your idea.
It’s even worse than that: since the combinations of cards are finite: the same netdecks are created by different people independently.
I think it would be nice if you could choose between two different decks after seeing what two decks your opponent has. That way you could have a specific counter deck loaded up and also reduce mirror matches.
It’s not a horrible idea, but it’s still netdecking with extra steps. I mean the “netdeck” will be the pair of decks you now have (so people would be sharing “pairs of decks” in that case as a “combination of win rate” (the way they share one netdeck now)).
Sure it might lower the brutality of the randomness of the matchmaking, but it would make everything more complex which would be kinda offensive to beginners and people who don’t tryhard the ranking.
You literally just described MMR. Congrats you’ve just discovered it.
Complaining about netdecking in a game and genre that has always had netdecking is hilarious and pretty sad. You shouldn’t expect to have a 50% WR with some meme deck that has no cohesion. The reason these netdecks exist is because they’re good decks with cohesion and thought put into them.
You literally just waisted your time by proclaiming the that devs “need to listen” to you… about something that’s not an issue and never has been.
I get the thread. It is frustrating when everyone is playing the same decks over and over. It makes this game boring and repetitive, especially when said deck is broken. You just have the usual forum idiots who jump to pile on anyone who is clearly not happy and posting what they think. This forum is a horrible place to vent or express frustration. It is full of scabs who like to talk down to people and express their greasy hearthstone superiority complexes.
They do end up doing so, indeed, even without forcing. In fact, matchmaking is a highly complex system and you can’t “make it” do anything it wouldn’t normally do, and expect it to stay that way.
It’s not gonna stay that way, it’s gonna correct itself.
You may force those players to face each other more until that more is actually maximum possible, and from then on, it’s just gonna rebound and start going back towards the equillibrium state (people get incentivized to take risks and experiment with decks in order to find a counter).
That’s the only thing which sucks about your idea - it’s not even theoretically possible.
So, instead of playing just Rock, paper OR scissors, now we’re playing Rock AND paper OR Rock AND Scissors OR Scissors AND paper.
Now, since rock and paper beat scissors and rock, and since scissors and rock beat scissors and paper, it follows that you’re simply back to the usual “rock, paper, scissors”, just with 2, instead of 1 dimension (deck).
Go figure! Nothing we can do! It’s a self-organizing, self-correcting complex system!
It’s not slow at all. The best deck builders in the game identify the best combinations of cards very early and those combinations are very finite (especially in Standard) so before the patch is even live the same decks (or at least extremely similar (max 4 cards difference)) will see play by different people from day 1.
It becomes even more profound lately because Blizzard releases entire collections of cards that go together (e.g. all StarCraft decks with no exception had half of the deck already predetermined and the other half was often not too open to interpretation either).
I don’t think MMR is an answer there. If in pure theory you had an extremely good deck and everyone else had a very bad deck that couldn’t win against it (again: in pure theory), then the MMR would not help at all because anyone would still win against the best player online.
