Hi all.
I’m new to hearthstone, but a regular gamer including ranked. I have been playing and really enjoying Hearthstone original / classic. I spammed about 250 games and mostly the games were pretty evenly matched. I then got ranked and climbed to Gold. Now I am on a losing streak of around 40 games straight. Every player has significantly better decks, experience, better players and everything that comes with it.
As someone who is experienced with MMR in alot of other games I know losing streaks happen. I am familiar with other games were you can go on losing streaks of even 10-12 games before MMR corrects. But it’s like my MMR is broken and is permanently matching me against players I have no chance with.
I am telling myself to have patience and hoping my invisible rating will kick in and match me more evenly at some point. But at this many lost games I am starting to wonder if the matching is completely broken. Is this the case or will matching eventually correct and give me even matches? Or am I destined to be dunked on by players?
I know it’s not that I’m just bad. There are plenty of players in this game and I had plenty of easy and evenly matched games getting to gold rank.
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The answer to your question is that you are not being matched by MMR at the moment so your opponents will never get any easier. The way it works is that when you are not in Legend ranks and you don’t have a star bonus the matchmaking will match you based on your current rank only. Meaning you are going to be matched against other gold players regardless of how long your losing streak is.
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Thats a shame. I guess I will go play something else. I had high hopes for regular even matches given the large player base. But looks like Ill just be sitting here getting rekt for eternity.
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As far as I know it’s slightly more complex than this.
The statement that only legend players are matched by MMR was correct before the major rework of the entire ranking system, but is not correct anymore.
My understanding (95% certain this is correct):
- Legend players get matched by MMR, which is “sort of” visible to them by virtue of their legend rank;
- Non legend players that have a star bonus (1) also get matched by MMR, even though the MMR is completely unvisible to them;
- Non legend players that no longer have their star bonus get matched by rank;
- In the matchmaking there are set durations after which the rules for a match are widened to ensure acceptable queue times even when few players at the same matchmaking level are online.
(1) A star bonus is given at the end of each season (month) based on the highest rank achieved, this ensures a faster climb back to that rank in the new season. E.g. if you end the season between Gold 10 and Gold 6, you get a 4* bonus, meaning each win gains you 4 stars on the ladder, after crossing from Bronze 10 to Bronze 5 this is reduced to 3*, then at Silver 10 to 2*, and at Silver 5 you’d be back at 1* (no star bonus anymore).
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i am a returning player from way back… i decided to give the game a try again and am massively disappointed in the experience i am having. All i have is the free deck i choose for fel hunter and jumped into matchmaking to give it a try. i am currently on 13 games in a row losing, and the way i am losing is honestly the most frustrating part. I am not loosing because of poor play or strategy, i am losing only because the players it is matching me vs are MUCH higher ranked than me and have a deck that has all the new and powerful cards. Gives me a near 0% chance of winning (im sure there will eventually be a game where i luck into a win getting the perfect setup and they get horrible luck). This is supposed to be a strategy based card game, with ranks and matchmaking, but, it seems to have drifted further away from that during the time i was away and now for any new or returning player you just lose until you either get super lucky or spend tons of money buying cards and crafting one of the current best decks.
to me, this is not only a horrible design, but a horrible business decision. I am most likely going to quit before i drop any real $$ into the game… where if i was able to have a decent experience i would eventually be spending a decent amount of cash on the game.
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14 games lost played. 0 wins. this is hearthstone now?
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I understand your frustration. But I’m gonna be honest with you, I don’t think there is a way to fix this.
Players you face have, based on your description of their decks, a larger card collection than you have. How can one solve that?
- Match you with players with similar collection. Not sure how to measure “similar”, as going by card count still ignores that not all cards are of equal quality and you also do not want to be matched to someone who dusts their entire collection to craft that one super meta deck they want to use to conquer the ladder. But the bigger problem is that this severely limits the amount of possible opponents. It would mean either longer queue times, or loosening the maximum rank / MMR difference between you and your opponent (which of course results in new, other, but also valid feedback on bad matchmaking).
- Remove cards from all other players. Obviously not a serious option. Just putting it here for completeness sake.
- Give new and returning players lots of cards. Blizzard is already doing this. Specifically for new players, the amount of free stuff they get is enormous, especially when I compare that to the stuff I got when I started playing (which was around the release of The Grand Tournament, so August 2015). Based on what I found it seems that the returning player experience has not been improved quite as much as the new player experience, but returning players, too, get a lot of stuff. And they still have the option to either use their existing collection in Wild, or dust that collection to craft more new cards.
But of course, “a lot” might still not be enough.
As a player, I am all in favour of more, more, more freebies to players. Including more for new and returning players. But if I put myself in the shoes of Blizzard’s executives, then I also have to consider sales. Most sales come from packs.
Tell me. Honestly. If I give you so many cards and/or gold or dust that you can build fully competitive decks, why would you spend money to buy packs?
Being a free game does not mean that the parent company doesn’t want to make money. You can play for free, but then the grind for cards and decks has to be at least long enough that a relevant percentage of players will be motivated to use their wallet to shorten the grind.
This is the dilemma for free to play games. Give away too much and nobody will spend money. Give away too little and you lose players. To make the game commercially viable, the amount of free stuff has to strike the right balance.
Any choice aimed at the balance will always be painful for those who are not in the middle, who are not the common customer. And a returning player is most definitely not the common customer.
I assume that Blizzard would want to solve this conundrum if they can.
But how?
I had a few hundred games were most were evenly matched. It wasn’t until I had the star ratings that my games became ridiculously unbalanced to the point where I had no chance in gold. I’d say an easy fix would be to let MMR do it’s job and not let the star system impact MMR. I don’t see the point in it doing that. At present it appears that I am severely “overanked” and the star system is preventing MMR from correcting that.
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I just <3 reading stuff like : you are not good enough player, thats why you get rekt by rng what bob has to offer you in tavern … its so fun to read this kind of bs