I have seen a bit of an uptick in threads or replies where people complain that matchmaking is rigged. Which begs the question, how do they decide who it is rigged in favor for?
I am a complete F2P player since beta. Never spent a dime on the game. I also only play very casually. But, despite those facts I make it to legend every month and even get into top 500 sometimes. Wouldn’t it make sense for the game to frustrate me into buying packs so I can build any tier 1 deck I want?
I have also made it into high legend with a variety of decks. Agro, control, combo, and midrange(using the term loosely). I even made it to legend 224 with a deck that was less than 5000 dust.
To me it seems like I would be the perfect candidate to try and force to spend some money on the game. So, I am truly asking. If the matchmaking is rigged, how does the system decide who to rig it for and against?
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As I have stated in another thread and before:
The logic behind that is likely lost on the people that need it most. Balance Changes and Nerfs are pretty much all the proof you need to prove the game isn’t rigged for someone to win because if it were, they wouldn’t ever need to do a single balance change or nerf ever, they would just need to adjust the non-existent algorithm instead. BSM is busted? Don’t nerf it! Adjust the deck’s pre-determined win rate and make people who play that deck lose more often! All problems solved!
Now, watch as those very people I’m talking about reply to this with some cop out explanation in some desperate need to cling on to the idea that the game is rigged.
Watch for bangers like:
“Blizzard shill!”
“Blizzard Defense Brigade!”
“The Patent!”
…and other hits!
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Have you ever heard the term “the house always wins”? That is who it is rigged for. BLIZZARD. TO MAKE MONEY. How do they do that? By rigging the game to ensure 50% win/loss (or close as possible). How can they do this? One way is by the matchmaking algorithm. It will scan the deck you use, and depending on if you’re north of 50% win/loss, or south of it, will then match you with the appropriate rock/paper/scissors to ideally push you towards that goal. Of course “skill” and deck composition along with luck can temporarily defeat the 50/50 rigging, which ultimately becomes the game. How many games in a row can you play before the game forces you to lose no matter what? It is the definition of rigged. This is why I often say it isn’t a question of whether the game is rigged or not, we already know that it is. The question is to what extent is it rigged. Is it just the overall algorithm at work? Or does it even go so far as mid-match Discover-fixing and etc? These are the questions to ask. Not if it’s rigged or not. As it is already proven.
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If it is rigged for me to always win 50% of the time why would I ever need to buy packs? The algorithm would just adjust my win rate up to make up for my subpar decks that has nothing but the free core cards. The House of Blizzard doesn’t win under that kind of rigging.
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No.
We don’t do that here.
You take your common sense and you get out of here.
They don’t need to scan the deck you use to do this. They just have to apply a standard, nonrigged matchmaking by skill algorithm. The better your performance, the better the performance of your opponents, which means that the more you win the harder your matchups become and the more you lose the easier your matchups become. It’s not forcing 50% winrate so much as encouraging it, but ensuring 50% winrate is something literally every PvP game with a rating system does. It’s not rigging, it’s not sinister, it’s ordinary and unremarkable.
It makes no sense for Blizzard to go to extra effort to do something that’s just standard matchmaking with extra steps. Deck scan is too complicated for Blizzard to handle properly, if it was implemented then you’d see winrates not trend to 50%. Plus, it’s more work and they’re lazy. The simpler system does the job better and more reliably.
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It’s unlikely they rig the total win rate of people who play a lot of games per day (like you do); it’s not impossible of course because the game is a black box; but it’s unlikely because it would be easily detected by third parties because they can easily compare win rates between different clients of theirs who opted-in to their telemetry.
What they MAY do in my opinion is to waste the time played by players who haven’t reached their max potential MMR yet; for example it’s easy to do that if they accelerate the MMR after small streaks of winning or losing; if they make you lose easily after 2 wins and vice versa then the win rate stays close to 50% much earlier.
That is NOT detectable by third parties at all; that’s because third parties have zero information on the MMR of the opponents and almost no good guessing about even their own clients’ MMR; and I would find that kind of MMR adjusting disingenuous and I would prefer a more gradually adjusting MMR.
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This is complete nonsense. Anyone who plays a significant number of games per month basically has MMR = rank. People who have only a few games could be filtered out
Also even if they WANTED to do card-by-card rigging they would probably fail, because it sounds like a clusterbeep of complexity to even begin coding for it and I doubt it’s even THEORETICALLY possible to do it because the randomness of the game may even break down the predictions and assumptions you’re doing for such a system.
They can indeed just go by calculations of win rate alone; even if they do accelerations of MMR adjustment after small win or loss streaks it doesn’t need more than that; basically MMR is almost certainly a glorified winrate sum whatever they do with that sum (adding to it or substracting to it in different ways).
Sure. But it’s implied what I was describing is EXCLUSIVELY related to people who play relatively few games. People who play a lot of games ALREADY go on their own towards a 50-50 situation with opponents without any of that unless they are better than the current Legend 1 player.
I can think of systems that would work in the long term. The thing is that they’d require a lot of data storage and calculation. It’d probably increase processing for matchmaking by an order of magnitude, which would mean more servers. That, and they’d be atrocious on day 1 of any new expansion, because there’d be no pre-existing performance data on new cards — and day 1 of a new expansion is when customer experience matters most.
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Maybe, but those people currently have a lead dev who posts on twitter “I decided to make 3 cards 7 mana 7/7 because it sounds so cool for the Lore”, so I doubt they have either the ability or the desire for such a system.
Yeah the core of it is that Hearthstone doesn’t get anywhere near that level of effort. One of the main issues with rigging believers is that they imagine Blizzard implementing these intricate, complex and difficult systems to maintain customer addiction and psychological manipulation, when there are simple, easy to implement and legal systems that Blizzard has already admitted to using that accomplish the same objectives. Above all, rigging believers underestimate the addictive and psychologically manipulative powers of basic randomness.
They also underestimate how they usually think “rigged!” only when they lose and not when they win.
I barely play BTW. I play maybe 5-10 games the days I do play and today is the 1st day in a week that I did play. I normally do my run to legend in 2 sessions that last just a few hours. Reset-D5 with random meme decks and then D5-L with serious deck/s. Normally do it in 1-2 days with 2 separate play sessions. I normally get get into legend with around a 70% WR.
I am also curious why you just randomly assumed I play many games a day. Nothing I have posted would suggest I do.
You said you occasionally go top 500, but I guess you didn’t mean end-of-month rank but you meant you only had the rank temporarily when you played for many hours for the first days of the month, and then dropped rank fast when you stopped playing that much until the end of the month.
Of course it’s rigged 
it’s was even confirmed multiple times by devs who left blizzard…
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Name one source of that (with a URL if possible (but even a name will do)).
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Once I hit legend I play very casually and decay starts eating away at rank or I just play meme decks. While I 100% believe I could stay in top 500 all month if I had the time, I just simply don’t. I have been a world class player at a card game before. The amount of time, practice, and study it takes to stay on top is astronomical.
For clarification, world class would be someone who wins/top16s multiple large events.
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You’re not supposed to think about it, that’s what they count on. You’re supposed to get a string of auto-losses and think that card or strategy was OP, I need to use it now! And then you buy packs. If you think about it though, you’re right. Any astute and non-gullible player won’t buy packs.