Seems to me that their most recent wild report is off. This is the numbers they report for 1k legend wild:
T1 (winrates):
- even shaman ~54%
- pirate rogue ~54%
- secret mage ~54%
- unholy even dk ~53%
- Miracle rogue ~52%
All top 4 decks are very much aggro decks. This seems off to me. I’ve played ghetto rank 10 (bronze or smtg) → legend then legend 3k → top 200, piloting a miracle rogue deck hitting somewhere near an 80% win-rate (95%+ winrate to legend, then lower than 80% win-rate approaching top 200), so a fair good sample of games, and I’ve faced all those decks as well as many others. All top 4 decks feel like a joke to play against compared to some tougher MU with miracle rogue, but that may be because I’m looking at everything from a MR perspective.
None of the top 100 players I’ve faced (maybe counted in the 5-10 right now) are playing any of the decks in T1 except miracle rouge.
I’ve noticed a pattern in the VS reports where aggro decks seem to get very favourable placement in rankings, more so than I believe they deserve. Could VS be biased towards aggro decks? Is their understanding of the meta flawed? Perhaps aggro decks can more readily be identified and tagged correctly in their cataloging/data-aggregation whereas tougher decks to catagorize are ignored?
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There’s no doubt they put in an insane amount of work to get this free information out to the players… It’s greatly appreciated. On a personal note, I’ve noticed that they tend to favour the developers “choice of the month.”
They’ve had developers on the show many times, and instead of asking the tough questions, they pander to what seems to be a pre decided script.
Essentially, never asking questions that the community wants answered.
The biggest offender is clearly Ridiculous Hat. His hat is the last thing he has to worry about. His bias is clearly shown in each episode, and the same can be said for his priest loving friend that co hosts the abomination called Coin, concede…yeah I’ll concede
…so I don’t have to listen to your bedraggled voice.
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The top 1000 players is a pretty small sample size, one key thing to note is that they show 2.2% of the playerbase in top 1000 is playing miracle rogue, so that basically means 22 people are playing it and you are one of them (the maths wouldn’t really be this clean, but lets assume for simplicity). They usually say something between 50-100 users gives a pretty fair sample size I believe, so anything with 5%+ population distribution is pretty representative so that is like 7 decks and the rest would all have some piloting bias involved.
Sometimes I imagine that the top decks in wild are actually not the ones that become meta, the meta would cycle around more if players had more resources, if distributions changed a bit. Another factor is that some miracle rogue cards were in recent nerfs so people would have used it as an opportunity to hop to another deck.
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If you actually look at the matchup winrate tables, VS says that all 4 of those matchups are either even or favorable for Miracle Rogue at T1kL. So when VS is looking at everything from a MR perspective, they’re mostly agreeing with you. Maybe you think an even matchup is actually favorable because you’ve been mildly lucky. But the point is VS isn’t calling any of those hard matchups for MR.
In essence you’re playing Rock and asking why there’s so much hype around Scissors.
No. They know better than you do. It is not even close.
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What are your Top 3 questions for the developers?
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Yes, that’s how interviews generally work. You can deviate from that pattern, but if you crucify one of the devs then no Blizzard staff member is ever going to appear again.
WTF even are the “tough questions” for a gaming podcast?
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Here’s my top question. I have no idea if it’s tough.
Classic has failed to appeal to a large audience. Many people have suggested repurposing it to recreate past expansions. What are the challenges to doing it? What resources would you need? What audience numbers would you need to support it?
“We’re not able to talk about any potential future modes or products at this time” is the answer you’d probably get.
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That’s not the question.
It’s a question about resources and challenges for the creation of game modes.
I would just turn to ask what resources it took to make Classic.
I am trying to understand how hard or easy these things are to implement.
Some people run around the forums claiming it’s super easy. Maybe it is, maybe not.
But there’s going to be a threshold between resources and players that needs to be met.
Maybe they wouldn’t answer that because Zeddy or someone else would use it as a “gotcha!” for videos trashing Blizzard. But being better informed about the players they need to support a game mode would help understand their decision making.
I’m saying that the question would push them into PR mode, and they wouldn’t go along with it from the start because it means saying that Classic has failed. Companies generally don’t admit when their product fails.
100% someone would take anything said and try to turn it into some kinda gotcha. That’s just “journalism” these days.
People said they wanted a Classic mode. For the most part, they didn’t. That’s the state of Classic afaik. I can’t imagine putting resources into repeating the release cycle if the mode isn’t popular. Probable response is “Not enough people are playing Classic so resources put into it would be wasted,” because they never have to establish what would be successful. And even that is corporate speak for “It’s not making enough money.”
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You’re kind of just making assumptions that nobody wants the mode, I would say classic is one of their few moments of success with Hearthstone and you still have to imagine that as per the last stats I saw it is more popular than duels, mercenaries and arena and we should assume it is about on par with wild, there are about as many legend players in both formats. A rotating sets mode could be standalone to any other mode and if it did have to eat up another mode it’d probably have to be wild, a lot of people advocate for a lot of changes in wild that probably would require a lot of development from them either way.
I think the game will get Heroes of the Storm treatment soon, it already kind of has, they have cut off all non profitable sectors of their business, they just print cards so you will buy them and throw the odd balance patch again so you need to buy more cards.
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Not that this is particularly impressive, mind you.
For the amount of outcry for old hearthstone, both Wild and Classic together make up for a small fraction of standard business.
The size of legend in wild basically tells the full history
I still think wild and classic have enough people to play to justify keeping them on the client, battlegrounds is like whatever for me, I guess most people are glad for it to be apart of the hearthstone client, but mercenaries is one big mistake that they probably won’t like to admit, it should be retired from the client, I would go so far to say duels also should probably be retired, people play it once or twice and grasp how unbalanced it is and come to the forums to complain, in my eyes that is just bad publicity.
They are always biased. They like to push their own ideas and the decklists that you see there are almost always suboptimal. Like they follow the top deck for 26 or even 28 cards.
And then you will see 2-4 cards in there as well that the autors personally think are good and they will list it as the meta deck.
They want to try shape the meta,they want to influence players and also blizzard. You can see this in virtually any of their posts (havent looked there for a long time though).
They should just be reporting on the meta but replay net already has that.
What they make is a sort of opiniated article on the meta,and to support their opinion they are willing to misrepresent the facts a little bit at times.
They are good for offering ideas,but they are bad when it comes to data and decklists.
Its not a bad website if that is what you are looking for but for data i wouldnt go there.
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Aggro decks have always been easy to counter when you know what you’re doing. However most people don’t, especially in wild, hence why they perform well.
Lol of course Scrotie likes this. The most miserable person I have ever had the pleasure of not knowing. Expected.
Tough questions are questions that the community wants asked, yet are failed to be mentioned. Stuff regarding OP Brann, complete lack of proper of game testing, why the constant use band aids instead of proper balance changes…I can go on and on. Pretty simple really.
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Read my response above. I could ask a hundred more meaningful and fruitful questions than what I’ve heard asked on podcasts.
Those are loaded gotcha questions.
Anything where the premise of the question presupposes an accusation is not an respectful question.
What you seem to want is for someone to disapprovingly wag a finger at them and disrespect them to their face, so you can come and talk about how they got owned.
Am I wrong here? Do you want information or for the devs to get humiliated?
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Its another platform where blizzard can advertise there product. Like interviews with music artist in music magazines are paid ads by record labels to promote new records and artists.
For sure theres no though questions.
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Information about why the game is in the current state. Reasons real problematic cards aren’t touched but non problematic ones are nerfed or made unplayable.
Not unreasonable questions and any developer worth their salt would answer these and stand by their decisions.
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