I can always predict who the algo wants to win

You mean that if you win a lot, your MMR goes up and then …<GASP!> it’s very possible to lose? Inconceivable.

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What’s incredible to me is sometimes I go on this website called Reddit and they have some Hearthstone discussion too, and it’s incredible to see people come to the same conclusion about algorithm/matchmaking even if they don’t quite understand it or why or how exactly it is going on. I sorta feel bad for them because they are so naive and innocent thinking their “skill” affects the outcome and they become confused because the game decides for them to lose in highly suspect ways, I just find it really interesting that more and more people are becoming red algorithm pilled

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Look, if there is an algorithm, I don’t think it intervenes in all games, there are games in which you have 3 or more outs to choose from but only 1 makes you lose because of the last card your oponent draw, the algorithm cannot foreseen your play, leaving the control to the skill of each player, so you cant deny skill is involved in game, and i am one of the bests.

I’m not saying skill isn’t involved, I’m saying it does not matter when the outcome of the game is already decided whether via matchup RNG to mulligan RNG to draw RNG to the actual card RNG, yes skill matters in the same way a butterfly’s flapping of its wings matters in the formation of a hurricane.

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TBH idk who is the naive with the pink glasses on?

the one who thinks no one sucks, and we are just get bullied by the algo

or the one who believes that his defeats its because of his failures…
but believe in this company, both seem very stupid to me in their own style

You are very skilled at misunderstanding and creating words to feed from people’s mouths. If you ever want to have a constructive discussion on the matter, I will await you. Until then, continue on being a butterfly flapping its wings believing it is responsible for creating the hurricane :butterfly::cyclone:

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  • IF
  • skill matters 1 out of every 20 games, and the rest is luck
    AND
  • the luck is fair
    THEN
  • on average, the leaderboards at the end of the month are going to look the same as if 100% of games were decided by skill, but each game took 20 times as long.

I think the “butterfly forming a hurricane” analogy is a bit of an exaggeration, but I don’t think that it’s fundamentally incorrect. I believe that the impact of skill on each game is a quite low. I personally think the percentage averages somewhere between 1% and 4%, depending on whether it’s earlier or later in the month and how skilled you are.

(A lot of this is because the game is actively trying to match players by skill, so the difference between players in terms of skill is minimized, systemically. But the why isn’t as important as the what, and the what is that randomness has a much larger impact on individual games than skill.)

However, over the course of MANY games, randomness equalizes. There is no rigging, just a bunch of chaos — and as Heath’s Joker said, the thing about chaos is that it’s fair. At the end of the day, skill decides rank.

Generally true with the caveat “given enough games” because if the randomness is very high then players who don’t play too much are faced with inconsistency (some of them will win a lot independent of skill and some of them will lose a lot independent of skill) so the randomness must have a low enough limit to not feel bad.

The only true exception is: assuming they don’t favor certain players. It’s unclear if it happens because nobody has data on the relation of each player with the company but if I were to guess is that they don’t rig it at that level most likely (because it would probably cause tensions even within the company if revealed).

At this point some people are inclined to say “but we have stats that prove everything”, which is not true because you can have the averages look good but certain individuals to be unfairly treated in favor of others.

But again it would be a brutal blow to the company for social/ethical reasons so I doubt it happens.

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Data aggregator websites absolutely have enough games recorded where, if they actually looked for it, they would know within 0.1%. This could allow a very small number of individuals to potentially fly under the radar, but for almost all purposes rigging would be disproven.

The only thing is that this data, in its raw form, is valuable, so it’s traded for money. Sites like HSReplay and Vicious Syndicate buy it, then they publish their analyses and make money off of subscriptions and ads. It’s not that no one has the data, it’s that it’s behind a paywall.

Still, I think it should be considered that those businesses COULD, at any time, perform the analysis required to tell us if the game is rigged, with proof if it is. I think that such an exposé would be extremely well received by the Hearthstone public, don’t you? Ad revenue would skyrocket. In contrast, an article explaining how the game isn’t rigged would be very upsetting to many players, and the websites would have to admit it’s only 99.9% proof and there still could be unicorn accounts undetected.

So the way I see it, in order to believe that the game is rigged, you’d have to believe that the data aggregator websites are all in on it. You’d have to believe that they know, but they’re part of some Big Blizzard conspiracy, paid off with hush money. I don’t consider this possible, much less probable. It’s not realistic for a group of more than a dozen people to keep any secret for years.

I guess it is possible for a secret to be leaked and nevertheless disbelieved. There was this guy with a private island who self-deleted in prison under totally normal circumstances; people knew about this guy for years, but it was “just a conspiracy theory” until it wasn’t. But unless I’m just not aware, there isn’t a single person, regardless of reputation, going public and saying that they were a Blizzard employee and that Hearthstone was rigged. There’s no name to tie to the claims. If there was a name, then I’d say maybe. But there isn’t, so I don’t.

Not everyone plays with an addon so not all games are recorded by third party sites.

Without bla-bla, the games are simply not rigged, but there are “sometimes” (or often, I don’t know) bots (cheating or not, like gold hoarders) in the game that developers ban them when they find them, and which are recreated.

Not sure that follows Statistics logic (and I had explained it in the past without getting a convincing rebuttal).

Fact 1: a lot of individual players have lopsided results (i.e. a lot of high win rates or a lot of low win rates); hence individually their rates are meaningless without the aggregate results of the individuals; at the same time high randomness in the game in general would make them possibly being the majority on top (i.e. given enough-high randomness in the game in general MOST players will have excessively-outside-the-average high win rates and low win rates(high standard deviation/variance)).

Fact 2: No third party has data on the relation of their users to the game itself so they can not split their users into players with relation A to the company vs relation B to the company (I don’t write it very explicitly to not be misunderstood as trying to create a stir) and even if they knew personally some of those players’ relation to the company it would be a very small minority to be important (mainly their family and friends).

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Fact 3: feelings matter more than facts when it comes to perception.

Fact 4: arguing from facts, against a statement born from feelings, is literally pointless unless the person arguing from feelings, is willing to GENUINELY admit the possibility they may be wrong.

Fact 5: conspiracy theories - as in, the fact that they actually exist and are “bought into” by more than literal morons - prove that you will NEVER find someone willing to admit they might be wrong.

Conclusion: Hearthstone is rigged, and the earth is flat

Literally everyone is wrong. Myself especially. Some people are just a little less wrong than others.

For literally every human being, on literally every subject which requires empirical evidence, there is a nonzero probability that they are wrong. Only stuff like 2+2=4 is immune (due to nonreliance on empirical evidence).

Therefore, Hearthstone isn’t rigged and the earth is an oblique spheroid.

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Don’t joke about it, it seems there are millions of people around the world who believe the Earth is flat.
:open_mouth:

They may not understand the joke and take your sarcastic sentence seriously…

:earth_africa: :earth_americas: :earth_asia:

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Globeheads together! :muscle:

icwutudidthar

And also, fair point. Sarcasm doesn’t always translate well via anonymous printed media.

It’s called Poe’s Law.

Nothing… nothing … nothing …

You know how you can predict 100% what will happen? If you decide to lose, and if you get depressed against a deck of an opponent then it will go near 100% usually.

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I’m literally looking at flat Earth right now…

:earth_americas::earth_africa::earth_asia:

I swear some people really need to learn what the second dimension is before trying to live in the third

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