Interesting how they touch on hidden mmr…
Lots of good stuff here about player psychology and matchmaking when it comes to many different games, not just League.
Is it a real thing in Hearthstone? Highly plausible.
If your mmr remains hidden, the company doesn’t need to explain the details of their internal system.
They can just say matchmaking is geared toward finding fair matches for everyone and leave it at that.
win-rate close to 50% is basically the way you determine that your MMR system is functional, though? The alternative is to have essentially random matchmaking when the ladder resets and there’s a period of utterly miserable stomps for everyone who is on the lower half of the skill curve.
In fact the point at which it stops being fair is… when you are out of star bonuses and don’t get MMR based matchmaking, and instead just play against whoever matches your rank (until legend which is all MMR).
The current method relies on the feel-good of Star Bonuses to buoy people to their “current” rank, and then once the star bonus is gone at, say, platinum, if you’re better than platinum players then you’ll overperform because the no longer fair matches are in your favor.
You don’t understand, like 95% wieners who post it’s all MMR. What makes the case “50% is the worst”. Is when game matches you with better players or decks intentionally, which should be rare occasion with pool of players in that rank.
Example: You are at plat with hidden ~1500MMR and others are 1000, and each time game gives you 1000mmr guy, you dominate him. So game gives you other 1500mmr players or even 2000mmr decks, to make it fair and your win rate stays steady.
To compare it to League, you are given smurfs or other odd mmr players at that rank. Which essentialy lock you into silver/gold/plat/dia with 50%. While in reality, you should be given other random players at that rank and you should rise in elo. While they think it’s not fair, because you dominate so hard and others don’t feel good by getting wrecked by odd( much better) player. Who might even intentonally play good and then play bad( or play different decks/champion which looses). So in the end you just get stuck at any random elo by the game and given 50% win rate. Game intentionally matches you with odd pool of players and not random ones from that elo.
Literally only people that are unhappy with their rank ie not as good as they think they are believe this.
Everyone one on actual planet earth sees through it.
We had one guy on here claim he NEVER makes mistakes, and yet he can’t get out of Platinum. When I pointed out I usually make legend when drunk…yeah, he had no answer to that.
I swear, it’s like people are to the point of believing that a matchmaker itself is “rigging”.
It’s pretty simple, folks.
The matchmaking in HS (and many games) is performance-based. Your MMR is a number that is generated by your performance, including your most recent match (whether you win or lost and your opponent’s MMR) and that number is used to match you against opponents with similar MMRs, or you know- similar performance levels.
When you match people of roughly equal performance levels, the winrates naturally tend to equalize around 50% on their own because when you get above that, you’re playing against folks with better overall performance and you’re likely to get knocked back down to an MMR level that more accurately matches how well you perform.
The idea that the game needs to actively “feed” people losses in order to trend them towards that 50% in disproven both by the fact that the above-outlined system already does that when you reach your general skill cap and the fact that people streak up the ladder or through legend ranks woth 80%+ winrates. If the game really had to feed them a loss, it would have. Those people DO eventually hit their ~50% winrate, just not until they’ve climbed to whatever rank contains opponents that can match/exceed them in performance, which is exactly how Blizz have outlined that it should be.
I don’t care about ranking, i got legend and yet I think the matchmaking is rigged in one way or another.
Not rigged to screw you only, but also to help you.
I can’t prove it and I don’t need to; it is how the game looks to me 
I still play it because i have fun and i don’t care about the unfair matchmaking (i am only mad when you see the same deck too many times in a row…)
Thats a bit different from ‘I’m stuck at x rank because’ or ‘as soon as I hit x rank I get terrible rng’
Well…
People even refuse to actually believe that there is any skill in hearthstone to start with.
So How exactly they can believe that matchmaking hits you against players of equal skill?
That post is half true actually. Most people end peaking their mmr above where they should be at some point and this is why they end matched against better opponents.
Win streaks normally do this.
Here’s an anecdote. Yesterday I was playing Pirate Warrior and was facing a lot of mirrors. I decided to switch to Handlock to deal with these board-based decks and you know what happened? I am matched against a QM. I felt the instinctive suspicion that this was somehow intentional. I quickly realized it wasn’t matchmaking targeting me nor my opponent based on deck composition. However, I totally understand where people are coming from and it’s from an emotional, feeling place.
And equally, most of the time there will be no recognisable pattern, but they don’t stick in the brain.
You’re correct. It’s a position born from emotion, which means any attempts to bring logic into the argument usually fall flat. People keep trying though lol
It’s like, statistical pareidolia.
If you don’t make mistakes, what determines whether you win?
60% determine your deck 30% RND and 10% skill… and how you with this reach 50% winrate?
Simple only with rigged matchmaking Based on your deck!
Pics or it didn’t happen. 
By gaining/losing mmr with wins/losses and thus facing easier/harder opponents as you go up/down, thus making it more likely you win/lose the next game.
If this is beyond your comprehension, your position isn’t credible.
Switching decks to deal with the meta is almost always a bad idea because the decks you have been facing are always going to be “weighted” in some way that isn’t perfectly representative of the overall composition of the meta and thanks to regression to the mean you are statistically more likely than not to start seeing different decks than the ones you were facing before.
I barely know anything about statistics, but they are a fascinating subject to read about and if more people really understood how regression to the mean works there would be a lot less people who think there is some conspiracy to make them lose games. (not saying you’re one of them Kil, I just wanted to piggyback your comment here to add my two cents)
It’s highly unlikely someone who is not already at least D5+ can even have such a big gap between their MMR and their listed rank. And in any case, Blizzard uses the mechanic of the Star Bonuses for this: while you are facing fair opponents and not receiving the stomp matches you “deserve”, you are instead receiving vastly, VASTLY larger movement in rank increases.
Of course the system is not a standard MMR only ladder, because they are adding an additional goal than just having an MMR ladder: they want people to have a sense of progress each time the ladder resets. I think the current system is an OK middle ground when it comes to accomplishing that and then also being a real competitive ladder for people who want to seriously compete at the top end as well as people who want fair matches.
The idea that fair matchmaking is “rigging” the game shows up in pretty much every forum about games with a matchmaking/ranking system, and it’s hilarious.
Said by who?
Also your example already suggests two top legend players playing against each other(to be people who never do mistakes).
And that case isn’t the norm either.
The good part about the older system were that with true reset were you could both see and experience those stomps in person.
But obviously even when they were a thing and everyone was actually playing those one sided matches against players who didn’t were low rank people started to fault their draw and everything else.
The point here being:
It’s a total loss of time to explain someone who is bad why It is bad at the game unless he admits it by itself in First place and is wanting advice.
Name few past some poor casual games as Hearthstone n Leaque.
Everything is rigged when you losse …Didnt you get the memo???
When i win on the other hand its just because im better than everyone else.
Literally Chess.com, lol.