Miracle Rogue.....finds a way

[SparkyElf-2852]

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

It’s actually more like: politely referred to as homebrewers. Your thinking here is backwards, both generally and in contrast to your overall ideology.

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…

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

Rationally all decks would converge upon their most refined versions

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.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

and the chance that such refinement is your original content is infinitesimal

Quite the opposite: few innovate or make adjustments, those netdeckers just copy, as far as I understand.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

Yeah generally I don’t pretend I have a medical degree, instead I go to a doctor.

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.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

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.

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.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

I can pilot better than a bot

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’.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

you can’t build a deck better than ChatGeePeeTee

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:

@SparkyElf-2852

That’s what all those clueless sods with cheating software like so-called ‘deck trackers’ (which in fact do much more than that, I believe, and include actual hacks) and such probably don’t realise — that they’re nothing more than lab rats to supply data to someone else’s project. In fact, some are already paying for it.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

Plus, to the extent that eSports has ever been real, it’s always been about piloting skill.

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…

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

I haven’t ever heard of a professional deck author, even in the before time.

I have heard of those that’d specialise in this and whose recipes so-called ‘pros’ would often borrow.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

This is the polar opposite of the design goal.

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)?

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

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.

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.

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

Fun is the initial reveal period and the first day of the expansion trying to confirm what is good and what isn’t

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

@Scr0tieMcB-1291

thinking that something like Tony Warrior might be viable

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.