Sorry, just can’t help it when hearing about ‘high skill requirements’ etc in Hearthstone, especially about decks like this — yes, I was around when it was all the rage. Yeah, tell me about high skill required to spam ‘Everyone!’ or go face.
At best people might be referring to higher requirements for APM (actions per minute), required e.g. to fling 20 spells in the face in one turn before that rope burns out, in such cases, which they confuse with ‘skill’. So yeah, if you have slower controls, you might be at a disadvantage, there’s that.
Patron Warrior had something like a 42% overall winrate because people below ~Diamond had no idea how to count. It definitely required more skill than other decks at the time. Like Miracle Rogue usually does.
You’re putting it as if those very skilled legend players had (or still have) — or as if it would matter anyway.
Yeah, that’s the usual offended ‘Trogg no stupid! Trogg make you stupid!’ talk by those players that’d like to think they are smart, skilful etc (referring mostly to the original version, think Classic and so on, dunno about the latest… last time I checked briefly, it was more or less the same ‘summon a huge clown with stealth on turn 3-4 and so on’ kind of thing). What they don’t like to acknowledge is that even this requires more choices, strategy, brainwork (yeah, yeah) etc.
(Updated, some errrors corrected and minor edits made)
Well, I’d like to parse that word salad, but overall it seems like you’ve got your mind settled. Please at least ponder why it’s the case that Miracle Rogue so often becomes the best deck at top 1k Legend, while floundering everywhere else - and why it takes significantly longer to optimize Rogue decklists than other classes.
Patron Warrior was one of the highest skill cap decks in Hearthstone ever because it had lethal far more often than rookie pilots would often imagine. As in, screenshots of relatively common Patron Warrior boards would make good high level “where’s the lethal” puzzles. Due to the significant animation times for any turn, there were intense calculations to perform and precious few seconds to do it before making the critical, mutually exclusive choice to play for the board — one might refer to this as “spamming ‘Everyone! Get in here!’” — or go face.
Forget completely about nerfing due to popularity. It’s completely against any proper balance philosophy. I don’t care how many times you play against Deck X.
Group all archetypes into the following tiers, per the definitions below:
Tier 1: Has a winrate over 50% in both top 1000 Legend and Diamond 5-1.
Tier 2: Has a winrate over 50% in either top 1000 Legend or Diamond 5-1, but not both. There’s two subtiers here: 2D for the decks that are over 50% in Diamond 5-1 and 2L for the decks that are over 50% in top 1000 Legend.
Note: 2L decks have historically been the victim of overnerfing, which is a mistake. We want high skill cap decks to dominate tournament play. If the Diamond players can’t make Miracle Rogue work then Miracle Rogue isn’t a problem. Period.
Tier 3: has a winrate at or above 45.34% in Diamond 10-6 but is not in an above tier. This percentage is not arbitrary; it’s the winrate necessary to climb while winstreak bonus is in effect, so up to but not including Diamond 5.
Tier 4: not in any of the above tiers but is popular enough to be statistically significant.
Nerf all the decks in Tier 1 while minimizing splash damage to archetypes in lower tiers. Do not overnerf.
Determine which Tier 2 decks benefit indirectly from the nerfs chosen in the previous step. This is done empirically and dispassionately by looking at their matchup winrates against the Tier 1 decks. If an archetype had net losing matchups then the Tier 1s were “predators” to it and it will benefit from their decreased viability; if it had net winning matchups then it was “preying” on the Tier 1s and it will suffer from their decreased viability. Use the matchup winrate data for the rank appropriate to the OTHER subtier, such that 2L decks don’t start dominating Diamond and 2D decks don’t start dominating high Legend. Nerf the Tier 2 decks that stand to benefit from the Tier 1 nerfs, while leaving the others alone.
Buff all of the Tier 4 decks. Don’t waste time with buffs for decks no one is even trying to make work (Tier 4 is the only Tier where popularity is relevant) and don’t accidentally buff anything from the higher tiers. Do not overbuff.
Determine which Tier 3 decks are hurt indirectly from the preceding nerfs and buffs. As with Step 4 this means analysing their matchup winrates against the other decks impacted. Use Diamond 10-6 matchup winrate data. Buff any Tier 3 decks that are hurt indirectly. Otherwise, leave all Tier 3 decks alone, and in absolutely no case nerf them (no matter how much the salt mines complain).
Good, balanced, interactive play style, perhaps? Surely, it takes a lot of skill to build 15-15 clowns with stealth on turn 4 (or what was it) and go face with them.
Don’t know what modes you’re playing, but it’s been years since I’ve seen any difference in decks or skill between rank 25/ Bronze 10 and Legend — used to be you’d meet people with basic decks and such at lower levels, but not anymore (in fact, I’ve seen waves of bots with basic decks up to Legend in Classic, but that’s another story).
The difference between, say, you high-Legend druid and your stuck-at-D5-druid is mostly the following: the former always opens up with something like Innervate-Yeti, followed by a Wild Growth and a perfect curve with good draw, while the latter is having ‘yet another game with nothing but hero power on turn 2 and 3’. Same thing here: the difference is how skilful you are to topdeck a 15-15 Van Clown with Stealth for two turns in a row, as opposed to sit on your hero power shenanigans (a fitting illustration of the subject — without even getting off-topic — overall, by the way, highly recommended!).
PS I’ll even put it here separately:
Yeah, yeah, you’re not the only one who did that Puzzle Lab , so I wouldn’t get too cocky here and instead considered something else. Let me begin with a somewhat abstract example.
You know, in chess, there are endgames such as two bishops or a queen vs a rook which are theoretically won, but it’s not quite trivial, and it takes some skill to do that, as well as theoretical knowledge. You’d think that’s what can make the difference between winning, as a master can do, or not, like an amateur — except that… not in practice. In your long career as a FM, IM or even GM, you may encounter the two-bishop engame, say, once — or not, having played thousands of games, so if you wanna improve your performance, you’d better start with those rook engames, comprising more than half of all engames overall, rather than these undoubtedly skill-intensive ones.
What’s this got to do with your point? Yeah, show me a practical example where missing a few points of damage would allow for a great comeback, fit for one of those Trolden’s videos of yore with appropriate music, and not getting yet another pile of ‘Everyone!’ etc to the face next turn anyway — and how often this’d impact actual outcomes of games. I’ve already hinted at that above:
You mean, show you an example of a combo deck missing lethal and dying next turn as a result?
Are you serious right now? Those are everywhere.
The thing about skill in a card game like Hearthstone is that you either see it or you don’t. To the unskilled player there was no lethal, and then they lost. And there are plenty of games where there REALLY is no lethal before dying. But my point is that the unskilled are oblivious. It’s some real Sherlock Holmes “you see, but you don’t observe” type stuff.
But I’ll be real with you, I’ve never really felt that playing Hearthstone. Maybe I would if I observed more games and had a better friends list, but I don’t. Where I really felt it was with Magic the Gathering. Through a series of coincidences I happened to spend a lot of time at my youth at RIW Hobbies in Livonia Michigan, which I guess could be described as some kinda wannabe Star City Games. But the point is that some pro players were attracted and they put logo’d polo shirts on some of them and sent them to Grand Prixs and Pro Tours and whatnot. In particular I drafted a lot, and did some playtesting with, Michael Jacob, who would eventually be US national champion of the game. And there was a distinct moment watching him play — I barely remember the board state anymore, except it involved Troll Ascetic somehow, but the feels of it — when I realized that there was a whole world of theory to the game that Michael saw and that I simply didn’t. When I realized that I simply was on a lower skill tier than him, that it wasn’t luck, it was thought, and that I couldn’t truly grasp it but just kinda fumble along the edges.
It was like being able to dimly perceive something invisible that had been in the room, in all the rooms, this entire time.
Skill exists in this game, and if you don’t have some level of awe of it then I can only tell you that you haven’t found someone else who can wield it on a higher level than you and spent a LOT of time with them. Maybe that’s because you’re already top 1% and you’ve met a lot of other people in your same tier. I really get that, I’ve been a big fish in a small pond too. But if you think you’re at the upper limit you’re wrong. There’s always someone better
unless you’re like Kasparov or something idk, obviously it’s not an infinite regress, you get what I mean.
Yeah, but for one small thing: in a ‘zero-sum’ game like this (one player wins, another loses — or, in rare cases, it’s a draw) the best deck in the world is gonna have exactly 50% win rate if everyone plays it. By the way, that’s why there’s no such thing as an abstract ‘win rate of a deck’.
Which is arguably the contender for ‘the dumbest way ever to rank anything — or anyone’.
No, but there’s winrate in practice. Abstract winrate is not empirical and an argument without empirical evidence can and should be dismissed without evidence.
It’s a function of the deck’s popularity, that’s the whole point.
Yes, I am. How prevalent are these?
That’s stating the obvious, isn’t it?
That’s the whole point.
If it comes to chess, then I know well what you’re speaking of (as an amateur, I’ve had the opportunity to commune with a master or even a grandmaster, just like many others, thanks to modern streaming platforms, to be specific). If it’s a game of roulette or Hearthstone… I just don’t feel that way.
Oh, how fitting that you’ve mentioned him: last time I heard, he was your D5 player — I wrote a little about him. Yes, that’s the guy with the kind of brain, despite that he’s not what he used to be — old age and all, you know, that probably most, if not all, of this forum participants cannot even dream of having. Speaking of how skill matters in this game…
In the sense that overall winrate is the sum of (matchup winrate × popularity) for all opponent deck archetypes, then yes. But that’s not just f(x1, x2,x3…xn) where x is all popularities, it’s f(x1,y1,x2,y2…xn,yn). And it’s more complicated than THAT because popularity itself is a function of rational factors (winrate) AND irrational factors (like fun, which is ACTUALLY the whole point).
And it seems to me that the irrationality of fun truly is the concept you’re evading, although you might see it as casually dismissing. Fun increases popularity and fun is GOOD. Winrates increase popularity and general winrates above 50% are UNFAIR. The theoretical best deck design would almost be one with a 0% winrate that everyone plays because it’s so irrationally cool — I say “almost” because this is impossible, like reaching the limit of an asymptote. So the problem with attacking popularity directly is that the good and the bad are entwined within it.
Man it’s rough at the top now. It’s basically Tony Druid, Rogue(take your pick) and DK. Even Paladin has fallen off dramatically. Sticking to BG’s till we can let some other classes be playable. Should be interesting to see what they do.
Sadly, it seems much mundane than that to me: since the bulk of those players I see, politely referred to as netdeckers, are like sheep, driven by herd instincts, the popularity is probably determined, at least in a ‘first-order approximation’, as a physicist would put it, by the popularity of whatever ‘authority’ (a ‘streamer’ or self-proclaimed ‘meta guru’) they are following, e.g.: deck_popularity = sum_{i} streamer(i)_popularity * deck_play_rate_by_streamer(i) , or something along these lines. These seems in contrast to how a ‘meta’ would evolve if everyone would adhere to a rational strategy — although it could converge if those authorities were rational enough.
Indeed, how is this possible if a win rate of a deck that everyone plays is exactly 50% a priori, as noted also above?
As for the fun factor, I know it first-hand: I had been stuck at rank 5 for many, many seasons, playing what I wanted rather than what was considered ‘tier 1’ (from what I recall, Kasparov told a similar story), since I couldn’t bring myself to play the likes of that dumber-than-a-face-huntard-faceroll-goblen-rogue (I suppose that takes some skill to achieve that — I’ll concede this regarding the subject in general), undertaker hunter, mech mage, oil rogue, patron/pirate warrior and so on (I would sometimes pick some of those decks or their variations up after they had been nerfed and the bulk of those meta monkeys had abandoned them, though… I remember playing Malygos rogue with Thaurissan somewhere after WotOG, post-nerf patron warrior and a version of ‘zoo’ warlock with Sea Giants, as well as some peculiar hunter decks, although these might have been my low moments), so I would keep playing what was more or less fun… until I realised that it was no longer fun at all.
PS That was at Un’goro’s launch, also famous for the introduction of the ‘bright, vibrant, and colorful’ art style fit for dino movies targeted at five-year-old kids… but that’s another story, probably; this was timely enough: apparently, I was fortunate to have missed some much, much worse things that followed… But once again, that’s another story, a personal one and probably not very relevant here.
It’s actually more like: politely referred to as homebrewers. Your thinking here is backwards, both generally and in contrast to your overall ideology. Rationally all decks would converge upon their most refined versions, and the chance that such refinement is your original content is infinitesimal. It’s hard to take you seriously when you spout such hot garbage.
Yeah generally I don’t pretend I have a medical degree, instead I go to a doctor. Not saying that all or even most influencers are elite deckbuilders but they usually at least know who is.
You fit the classic psychographic of the player who doesn’t want to fully believe that piloting skill is real because you want to win in the deckbuilder, before you even queue up to play in the actual game. But in all honesty the age of that being a skill is gone. I could shell out about $5 for HSR Premium and not even copying a deck list, just sort cards in a class by drawn winrate and get 99.99% of the way to an optimal list. I can pilot better than a bot but you can’t build a deck better than ChatGeePeeTee. Just give it up already.
Plus, to the extent that eSports has ever been real, it’s always been about piloting skill. I haven’t ever heard of a professional deck author, even in the before time.
This is the polar opposite of the design goal. I thought this went without saying, but to make it obvious: the goal of the player is to solve the puzzle, the goal of the designer is to delay the solving of the puzzle.
For example, if you design any number of asymmetrical options, it’s inevitable because of that asymmetry that there is one superior strategy that could be found given infinite time. But that’s not fun. Fun is the initial reveal period and the first day of the expansion trying to confirm what is good and what isn’t, not really knowing what’s best, thinking that something like Tony Warrior might be viable.
Balance is good. But balance is an illusion, which I mean literally: it’s what stops you from seeing the truth of the stale meta. Good design creates balance and a fun piloting experience makes it harder to see through because the positive emotions get in the way and make you want to believe that bad cards are good. It can’t last forever though. As a good player who’s trying to play well and make rational, optimized decisions, you’re trying to see through the balance as quickly and efficiently as possible, but as a player you want to keep believing that I was wrong earlier in this post and that you can create your own original deck archetype and prove what a skilled builder you are. The player pushes through, the designer makes the resistance that is being pushed through.
Nope, instead, I see a bit of a bandwagon fallacy.
Sheep must be thinking that they are much smarter than a shepherd, for there are many of them, but he is alone, and theirs is the right direction to move in — that’d be the ‘netdecker’ fallacy, if you will, with a ‘homebrewer’ being a shepherd. The real question, then, is: which of the latter brews a ‘better’ recipe. More on that below…
Except that it’s not what happens, in my experience. What’s more, ‘most refined’ is not absolute — in fact, if you fine-tailor your list against what ‘everyone’ is playing, yours can perform better (limited by the constraints of class design and so on, of course) — and those ‘statistics’, especially for most-played decks, might not even reflect it.
Quite the opposite: few innovate or make adjustments, those netdeckers just copy, as far as I understand.
But would you go to your hillbilly neighbour who hasn’t got any degree either, but ‘everyone’ seems to go to him? That’s more or less the bandwagon fallacy mentioned above.
Ugh… ‘I swam in your pools and lay under your palm trees’, seen that ‘piloting skill’ in action — you could, perhaps, farm the netdecker’s ‘meta’ or such, but otherwise, it’s not much more than the ‘skill’ that ‘pilots’ the molecules to the outlying ‘tails’ of Maxwell distribution.
That’s questionable, by the way. This forum is rife with examples of rather dumb bots (clearly, not AlphaZero or something like it) playing to high legend ranks — and there are not many players who can ‘beat’ that ‘achievement’.
I don’t think that one bot does it, although I haven’t looked.
An AI that would, among others things, collect data about a large amount of games being played, if not all of them, would be unbeatable, though. That’s why I’ve written this:
That’s regarding the notion of ‘eSports’ relating to HS in particular. Invited clowns performes putting on a show — perhaps, but if you’ve seen the level of play there and what decides the outcome of single matches… Even putting human mistakes aside (that’s fine and understandable, I don’t even wanna nitpick), it’s hard to consider such tournaments as little more than ‘roulette championships’, HS being the game that it is…
I have heard of those that’d specialise in this and whose recipes so-called ‘pros’ would often borrow.
Is it? Starcraft, for instance, has been praised for its balance, primarily skill determining the outcome of games. Why couldn’t Hearthstone be like it, but in a different format (turn-based card game, as opposed to a RTS)?
Nope: just because they are asymmetric, doesn’t mean that one is superior — that’s the whole point of ‘balance’. Even the rather dull example of ‘rock-paper-scissors’ illustrates this.
Dunno… I’ve never liked that much, as haven’t I playing at lower ranks during the beginning of a season, since it’s unpredictable and you never know what surprise that undoubtedly creative person is gonna present you with: for instance, in case of lower ranks, a ‘troll’ deck that is generally horrible, so you wouldn’t even generally meet it in ranked play since it doesn’t climb, but might pull off that one-in-a-thousand-times combo-wombo just for you. Regarding a release of a new set — dunno, if you do some deck-building yourself (some people see fun in this — imagine that…), rather than just copy like a hamster, then it might be quite a toil in such an unstable environment. Hey, at least those netdeckuhs are predictable…
PS
I dunno about that one, but I think your favourite ‘Old Guardian’ had a video (from early theorycrafting or something like it) calling it ‘bait’ — haven’t watched it, though, Standard being generally not my cup of tea nowadays, but you might if you wish.
And who said that good deckbuilders must cast their pearls before swine, so that the likes of you would just copy them? How about keeping those recipes more or less private — or selling, if that’s the line of business?
(yeah, yeah) etc.
