After rotation, my understanding was power levels should of dropped significantly across the board leading to games that would hopefully go past turn 5-6, so if you don’t draw much you can see some of your deck other than the first 10 cards. Turns out I was wrong.
Outcast DH routinely kills turn 4-5 with their legendary.
Shadow priest lost a bit of steam but not much, and can snowball you turn 4-6.
Paladin, can snowball you (if you are a class without AoE, which is most of them) and kill you by turn 4.
Frost DK can also snowball you and kill you by turn 4.
At least pre rotation most games lasted ~turn 6, seems turn 4-5 is the new standard game length. Thanks Blizzard.
He definitely drew the same correlation as you, perhaps you misread something?
I find it hard to believe that any person goes around actually being this skeptical of everything. When someone says “good morning”, do you interrogate them about whether the morning was actually good? That said, there are game length stats on HSreplay (and maybe VS, idk).
Perhaps you mean the aggro game is faster than before, but the game length most certainly is not on average. With Blood DK and Control Priest dragging games into fatigue, it’s most certainly upped the average turn a game lasts.
Before this, for the last 2 years I might have hit fatigue twice. I’ve hit fatigue games a good 30 times already in the last 2 weeks.
Games are most certainly longer overall. Aggro vs aggro? Games might be faster than before.
I didn’t conclude that correlation is correct. I listed it as a correlation that was proposed without evidence.
Average game length can be affected by power level both in increasing and decreasing it.
Unfortunately I don’t know of anyone who has historically recorded stats on this topic.
Zacho claimed it decreased in Stormwind and increased in Nathria. But he’s not posting it every week on the VS reports. On both times the power level increased as a 5th expansion was added to the game, thereby providing evidence against the correlation, and that it’s the nature of what is powerful that correlates to game speed.
I am hard dragging the average game time down. I faced a Frost DK yesterday who opened Arms Dealer, Coin, Arms Dealer, Horn of Winter, Bone Breaker on turn 1 into my empty board. I played Plague Strike and they immediately dipped. Not a moment’s hesitation. All life must end.
Good point, but then the average would be determined by how many of the respective types you see from aggro or control. In my experience, control other than blood DK is nearly negligible, and blood DK is definitely a minority of the field for me (though not negligible), so you could say my experience is colored by this.
My biggest beef with the short game times is the disproportionate effect that it has on the significance of your initial draw (i.e. the mulligan.) As games get shorter and shorter, Blizzard needs to update the rules around mulligans so they more closely resemble that of other TCGs (for example Magic.) Although I’ve never played MTG competitively, I know that its rules allow for repeated mulligans as long as you accept one fewer card in your opening hand. This would be critical to address the over importance of the initial draw (if game lengths continue to shorten or stay this short.)
My point is, if you significantly change the game length since the initial design of HS like nearly or over a decade ago, expect unwanted effects, like the over significance of the mulligan draw. As the game lengths get absurdly low, such that you will never see most of your deck (we are getting there with turn 4 lethals consistently) the initial mulligan becomes an unwanted source of a “coin flip”, you either get the cards you need to pop off or you don’t.
This is a sore spot for me, because I hate the direction this game is going in this sense. I’ve made posts about this, but effects like the one I describe above really make me feel like draw order (initial or otherwise) has never felt so important in all of hearthstone’s history as it does now.
As you’ve said yourself, where is the data/evidence showing this? I certainly think that “power level” in whatever lose way you want to define it, will definitively contribute to shorter and shorter game times as you increase the power level.
Purely as a thought experiment, if you allow power creep to run for, say 100 years, I’d expect turn 1 drops 10/10 with perhaps charge would be not that uncommon, and knowing blizzard’s stubbornness at increasing life total, that will lead to some quick games.
Of course the thought experiment is just that, a thought experiment, but it should be clear that as power levels increase, people optimize for “faster” decks as “faster” decks that are consistent will always be more favorable than “slower” decks, at least from a utilitarian point of view.
I mean there’s the typical definition, lethal being executed, which would happen on a given turn.
There’s other definitions such as “non-games”, which can actually be tricky to definitely classify, but are pretty clear when you see them.
Lolwut? How would talking about the value of a measurable statistic be the equivalent of making unfounded claims about an unknown matchmaking algorithm? Sounds like a bit of an ad hominem argument here, though one thats pretty senseless.
If every discussion required meticulous data collection, analysis and reporting of findings, with peer revision, nothing would ever get done. Point is, I’m suggesting a trend is forming (i.e. games are shorter than before rotation), it’s up to different stakeholders to evaluate whether its important or not (I think it is) and if so, if its real or not (I think it is yet again.)
If enough people/stakeholders answer in the affirmative, one then can organize to expend the necessary resources to confirm or disprove (if possible) if this trend is real.
But we don’t know that, do we? I particularly feel the game speed is just about the same. Whatever deck you may have used in this time greatly affects this.
You say it’s shorter than before, but really, I in partcular don’t see that.
Across my climb till platinum, about 73 games, the average length of the game has been 9.2 turns, which, if anything, is far slower than pre-rotation. That is with the last version of my homebrew. The previous version had up to 9 turns average, across 30 or so games.
If you want to use that terminology sure, the OP was my declaration of my experiences playing this game.
I never made any claims that I’m presenting data collected by other means, ie, it’s anecdotal. I play maybe tens of games, so take it to mean what you will.
That said, my experiences are a valid sample of the larger set of all games, so can very well be used to observe the existence of trends.