Or you’re ignoring that blizzard has literally no reason to do.
They not get more money by doing it, they not need to do that to get a 50/50 field for players and the risk of doing that is basically ruin the Company.
As a player the only thing i can really recommend for someone who gets frustrated with matchmaking is to stop trying to force favorable matchups.
Because that type of frustration is Very characteristic of a player that think that he is being “clever” by playing a deck only made to target other.
Indeed, from a pure Skinner-box, behavioral psychology standpoint, the game is more addictive the more random it is.
From a purely Machiavellian, profit-seeking perspective, the ideal situation would be:
presenting the illusion of minimized polarization, meaning that matchups seem to be as close to 50-50 as they can achieve, AND
having a reality of maximum randomness, with the maximum polarization they can get away with.
The best way to achieve this would be to say there’s an MMR system behind matchmaking, and show your opponent as having a similar rank, and instead to match players completely randomly, with no regard for MMR or rank at all. That would be malfeasance in the opposite direction, not rigging to be less random but to make things more random.
But that’s not happening either, it’s obvious that MMR and rank are being used for matchmaking. Well, the MMR is only obvious when you’re near top rank in a Hearthstone mode (Arena, in my case) but I play other people at the top of the Arena leaderboard consistently.
Actually if that was how they planned to sell packs they would not even have done the ladder reformulation they did some years back and 70% of the server would be stuck in silver and below.
A.K.A. sub rank 15 in the old 25 ranks system.
Actually with how easy people give up nowadays blizzard is more likely to put bots in lower ranks to intentionally help people climb.
But there’s a big difference between giving you generally harder opponents as you climb the ladder and giving you an explicit counter deck to force a loss to keep you from your rightfully-deserved ranking.
They do the former, and the former means there is no need to do the latter.
The rigging whiners insist the latter happens, when the reality is they are trying to validate the disconnect between how good they think they are and their actual performance results.
They have no reason to hide it. Their competitors don’t: MTG Arena explicitly uses rigged matching in play mode, trying to make matches based on the rarity distribution of the decks. They use a “hand smoothing” algorithm in best of one that rerolls the opening draw to favor a land distribution in the opening hand that matches the land distribution of the deck. They don’t use that hand smoothing algorithm in best of three.
So, again, tell me the business interest in lying about cheating their players out of wins?
The statistics on websites shows that 60-70% of ladder are aggro decks. but once you play a control deck it somehow turns into 30% aggro and 70% otk/fatigue/kazakus decks?
Same when you play aggro it somehow turns into 70% control and 30% aggro
All true, but when you say “there is no need” the need you’re referring to is keeping winrates near 50%. When the tinfoil hatters talk about what matchmaking is trying to and does achieve (~50% winrate) they’re not wrong, or at worst exaggerating; it’s only when they get into the how of it that they get outright delusional.
The actual number is somewhere around 40%. Depends on how one defines “aggro” — a bit under 35% with a strict definition and a bit over 45% if you include some midrange-ish decks and combo-y in there. Where are you getting your numbers from?
If you don’t have a subscription, HSR only shows Bronze-Gold, from the perspective of the player with the deck tracker (and data collector) installed. This can be a bit flawed regarding winrates.
However, if you go to the Meta section and look at the Popularity column, even filtering for Bronze-Gold, I’m not seeing how you’re getting 60-70%.
