Matchmaking System

Multiplayer Discussion
1

I want to bring up that the matchmaking system should not be based off skill. That kind of does not really make much sense in hearthstone. Blizzard has to change the matchmaking system, being based on deck ability/potential. So that matches can be somewhat equal and you’re not facing off with people that have really good cards while you’re stuck with most beginning cards, not winning, or having any fun.

If it’s based off of deck potential, then no matter your deck, or how you make it, you can use anything and still have at least a fun equal experience as you climb ladder. Making this change would increase the strategy in card playing and the game will feel like it’s based off strategy, rather than just having powerful cards to win.

2

Ok, now how would you measure deck potential?

Each person pilots them at different levels. There are tons of tiny variations that impact various matchups. Some weak decks hard counter specific popular ones. You can’t use dust value because of how wildly unrelated dust cost can be to power levels.

And how would the game instantly analyze all of the factors you think should be used for matchmaking instead of skill, and quickly get you into games only against those with a similar “deck potential?”

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3

What he means is he doesn’t want to be put against other people with lots of legendary cards. He uses what synergies he can, but most archtypes have a handful of capstone legendary cards that pull the decks together. If you go really far back, most expansions had low synergy and legendary cards were even more powerful because they were standalone power house cards that provided clear advantages in tempo/value/future potential.

I think the game match making is already partially weighted to consider “deck value”. As a player with the cards I don’t think I have in a long time been put against a player with deck with very low rarity. Year(s?) ago you would occasionally come across players with basic cards that played well with aggressive decks.

The other possibility I consider is that if players don’t have enough cards they just quit now, and there aren’t these rare occurrences anywhere anymore.

4

It’s very unlikely the game can scan your deck when doing matchmaking, conspiracy theories alleging that notwithstanding.

If it could, a dust cap-based bracketing system would be interesting.

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5

or a rarity cap, 2 legendaries/4 epics max for each deck

6

Legendaries don’t always equate to deck power.

It isn’t that uncommon for some of the strongest decks to be surprisingly low on total dust cost.

Making a matchmaking system look at your dust value just shifts the ladder meta in other pretty terrible ways.

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7

It’s not based on skill nor decks

It’s based on your winrate

8

Doesn’t your win/loss ratio help (in most circumstances) reflect your level of skill? I add the caveat because there are players that are skillful, but don’t play to win and use strange offmeta decks.

9

That’s the idea, but not always the case for reasons you mentioned

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10

Hard no.

The point of matchmaking is to reduce polarization. It doesn’t feel fun to play a game when from the very beginning your chance to win is low and your opponent’s chance to win is high. A big part of that is matching people with high piloting skill against other people with high piloting skill, and same for low.

Of course, skill can’t be measured directly. So what is done instead is that the system tracks player winrate, which is not a great indicator after only one game but becomes a better and better indicator the more games have been played.

Well, I would say they “have to,” but they should.

As I said earlier, point of matchmaking is to reduce polarization. And there’s no reason why a big computer system couldn’t approximate card power in exactly the same way it approximates player skill. Players go against other players, system tracks win/loss records. Cards go against other cards, system tracks win/loss records. It’s the exact same system really, except instead of tracking one pilot per team (a team of one) it’d be applying rankings to a team of one pilot and thirty cards.

None of this dust cost nonsense. That’s a strawman. Just give each card it’s own MMR that dynamically updates based on real performance.

And that WOULD lead to better matchmaking. If a good pilot who has been netdecking suddenly decides to try his own creation, and it’s bad, that’s a significantly weaker opponent than before he changed decks. You’d get a closer, funner matchup temporarily lowering his “team rank” (overall matchmaking rank) while keeping his piloting skill rank unchanged. This would mean factoring in the new cards.

So yeah, I support this idea. Just not to the point of throwing out piloting skill for matchmaking purposes entirely. Merely de-emphasizing it a bit to make some room for card power considerations.

And by the way, this is also how you’d solve Arena bucketing. I mean, matchmaking wise Arena should always be matchmaking by run record, not by skill or deck power, but having a system for tracking card power is how to make pick decisions interesting and balance classes against each other.

11

It wouldn’t really help. It just gives the players more tools to fool around with to manipulate the system.

Once you start including what is in your deck as part of the matchmaking formula, you start giving people the ability to choose their opponents to climb. Don’t like playing against the tier 1 deck? Just build a deck with a bunch of lower power cards and now you never see it!

It would just validate all of the matchmaking system is rigged BS, because it would be at that point. The meta would stop trying to counter the best deck, and instead search for builds that dodged it in the matchmaking system entirely.

1 Like
12

False. Unlike OP I’m not talking about throwing pilot skill out the window. High skill pilot + bad deck could easily be matched against low skill pilot + good deck. It wouldn’t be possible to game the system without knowing your opponent’s piloting skill in advance, which you won’t.

13

Yeah, you just end up with 2 side by side ladders.

A high power deck ladder and a low power deck ladder.

Once your MMR rises high enough, if you are playing a low power deck well enough, you won’t see people playing the high power deck unless they are playing it badly in that situation. You’ve still effectively removed it from the pool.

It also runs into snags where there are decks that have high skill requirements to perform well, but are top tier when piloted properly, as now the average power of your cards are artificially lowered, so you steamroll people more easily once you figure out the deck than you would have if the game weren’t trying to set a power level on your cards.

Nothing would be improved by this kind of matchmaking. It would just create a whole lot of extra attempts to game the system.

14

Neat idea, I wonder how computationally intensive it would get.

Based on aggregate data across the whole meta, or individual deck history data? If the former, how do you account for card context (e.g. mr Smite in quest warrior vs pirate rogue)?

If it has to know what the deck is to weight the card’s “value” appropriately, what happens to decks when it can’t determine what deck the player is running (e.g. homebrew).

It seems doable, and seems like it would make for some interesting dynamics.

15

This is exactly how you defeat the rigged match making, though!

I made a deck that has the cards that cause counters and the counter to the counters so I cannot be matched with any deck and I am gifted default wins in every contest because I broked the rigged matchers. I am #1 legend in all regions, but just posting on my alt. I will send deck code for monies. Bitcoins only.

2 Likes
16

No, because players from one would be matched with players from the other.

You’re being close minded and ridiculous. This is ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENT from team matchmaking. Let’s say I was playing a game with 3v3 team battles. I could, if I wanted to, drop my two teammates that are at my skill level and replace them with two complete noobs. This would lower the team’s overall rating, and cause matchmaking against lower ranked teams, but it’s not going to cause a “separate ladder” or “game the system.” Changing out inanimate cards is no different from changing out living breathing team members as far as rank systems go.

Again, ridiculous.

Maybe your core delusion here is that you think bad cards can be good in a way a rank system wouldn’t catch on to. Nope. Bad cards are always bad, just like adding noobs to your team is always bad. The dominant strategy, the one that wins, would always be good pilot + good cards. A weaker team deserves a lower rank, it’s not gaming the system, it’s ungaming it.

And what would be the result of this steamrolling? The rank of the cards would go up. You’re referencing a “problem” that would literally fix itself. These’s no way to get this past a rank system unless the overall performance of the cards in question is low — in which case, the cards are legitimately bad.

17

For each class, for each card. Simple. So if Mr Smite is in your Warrior deck, the win/loss count of “Mr Smite in Warrior” would go up or down off the result.

18

I’m satisfied with the current matchmaking system. My two cents.

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19

Actually, that’s really easy.

Not every card has equal power in every deck. A card can be very strong in one deck, and middling in others.

Cards can be strong with certain pilots, and weak by the average.

Once you start counting deck power into the mix, even with a skill component, you inherently allow for people to start choosing their opponents.

Even in your example of 3v3 teams swapping in noobs, that does drop the rating to the point where you start seeing a different group of opponents, thus changing your match up spread in a way you control.

So when you start talking about a bunch of players with relatively equal skill, say the top 1k players, now they just get mirror matches because of the system matching by deck power as well?

There are a ton of little things that have to be considered and measured and weighted before any system could come close to weeding out all of that kind of behavior.

Or, you can just base it on win rate, which does just as good of a job of it in the first place.

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20

…

Your MMR is your winrate. Therefore a card’s MMR would be the card’s winrate.