Hello there, I was wondering if the stats we can see on site such as hs replay are taken from the whole player base or only the ones that has a a tracker. Thanks if you can answer.
It varies by site. Multiple sites have access to the raw tracker data, but they have different levels of effort/quality in terms of analyzing that data.
HSReplay and HSGuru are tracker side only; it doesn’t consider the opponent of the player with the tracker. Vicious Syndicate is non-tracker side only; it doesn’t consider the player with the tracker, only their opponent. This makes Vicious Syndicate better, because their analysis has less selection bias; it takes more effort, because they have to determine opponent archetype from the limited number of cards seen rather than a full deck list, so they have to spend more time on their archetype determination algorithms.
Obviously, the trackers collect the data. If neither of the two players have the tracker installed, the game is not recorded, so it’s not in the data at all.
I strongly discourage everyone from trusting HSReplay about anything. HSGuru isn’t much better, but at least they don’t ask for paid subscriptions to get data above Gold rank. VS is the industry standard, but they don’t have (good) live data, just the best weekly-ish reports, which is the only reason HSGuru has a niche.
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Okay thanks for this precise answer mate. So there so such site that would gather all info’s from different trackers such as Firestone and hsreplay ? Also I am sorry but I didn’t get the argument about why vicious syndicate is better. I mean, I don’t see why tracking only opponents deck is better.
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The two word answer is selection bias. That was in the previous post.
What is selection bias? It’s when instead of having a random sample, your sample selects itself (or is selected nonrandomly by the researchers). For example, if I conducted a Hearthstone customer satisfaction poll on this forum, it would be biased towards the negative, because players who enjoy the game more tend to spend more time playing the game and less time talking about the game on Internet forums. If I wanted better data, I’d make the invitation to the survey part of the actual game application, to reduce (but not completely eliminate) the selection bias.
In the same way, players who download the deck tracker is a self selected sample. In this case, deck tracker players are usually more “tryhard” than the average Hearthstone player. Because they’re more serious, their overall winrate averages higher; HSR and HSG will display winrates that are 1-10% higher than they actually are, depending on rank (tracker advantage is lower at top ranks). Importantly, there is no tracker for mobile phones, so they’re eliminated from the tracker-side sample completely; tracker side is 100% PC. The opponents of players with the tracker installed is a much more random sample.
Edit: oh, and my understanding is that while the Hearthstone Deck Tracker (HDT) and Firestone data sets are collected and sold separately to aggregator websites, HSGuru and VS purchase both and combine them. I think HSR is only HDT but I’m not sure.
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