They did that once, Frost Lich Jaina. It was just as stupid as this.
That’s debatable. But good point nevertheless.
NONE of those completely took over the ladder like Yogg has. They were all powerful i’ll grant you and needed changes(except Renathal).
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Yeah. Maybe my argument with chia over methodology is making the perfect the enemy of the good. Point is that YoggBreaker is just utterly ridiculous across multiple archetypes.
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This is nothing new to me, but vs has always been bad at any sort of analysis of the top 100 meta, and if your are relying on vs analysis to get to top 100 it might take you a few lifetimes, after all, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I take everything they write about “top ranks” to mean anything about 400 to 1k, and, arguably, in that range their analysis tends to be okay.
That said, unless I’m missing something about ramp druid, it’s far from the best deck in the game at this time. It’s almost undoubtedly some optimized variant (I don’t think the VS is well optimized for instance) of secret rogue, that deck is absolute bonkers. It’s also true that yogg is a very strong card, but I wouldn’t say it’s meta defining. If you are talking meta defining, that title belongs to prisoner breakers imo.
The sources I follow for top 100 play certainly indicate that this is the case. For me it’s a combination of first hand experience and following what my friends are playing at that level, certainly not VS.
Also, they have never given a top 100 analysis.
Which is the bracket they report on…
Top 100 includes just 100 players, always. There is no way you can gather anything accurate for the top 100 players, unless it is a mandatory requirement to have a deck tracker installed to reach said rank. Even then, I would hazard a conservative guess that not enough game would be recorded for it to be, mathematically, reliable.
Just saying.
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It’s the one deck I see mentioned/complained about the most. I don’t think it’s been this bad since Renathal or Quest Rogue from back in the day.
Yogg is neat. The theme of the mini-set is neat. However, it would be fantastic to see the devs put a bit more work into balancing the power and the cost of cards when making stuff like this version of Yogg. OG Yogg was fair. It could win, it could lose, it could do absolutely nothing, it could do something for both players, it could do something mid. There’s the balance.
In this version of Yogg, the devs seem to think “Ummmm 15 mana oughta do it. Yeah.” And I guarantee to you if this card ever recieves a nerf, it’ll just be increase the mana cost. Remember Theo? It went from 4 mana to 6 mana. Did that stop people from playing it? No. The mana wasn’t the “issue”, it’s the text; what it does. Only when the cards it countered were nerfed (Sire) did it see less play.
I’d personally hate to report on the game in this state, so maybe that’s where the slip is happening. -shrug-
That’s an interesting opinion. I am of the opposite opinion that every version of yogg before this version was completely bad for this game and was a massive injection of variance into the game with little upside.
Effectively coin flips that would happen at the end of games. While that may seem balanced, it’s not. It takes agency away from the players and creates an environment where what you roll on random effects is what matters most in this game.
This version of yogg has 2 determinstic effects and one random effect similar to previous yogg iterations, but with one important exception. Playing full RNG yogg in this iteration requires committing very hard to it by keeping an empty hand and spending a lot of mana and minion space on tentacles. Huge difference. And actually far healthier for the game.
Well, we also have to remember OG Yogg was one of many cards in the decks it was used. I think Big Druid made the most efficient use because it had other cards on deck to make big plays afterward. In addition, I forgot to mention I believe the nerfed version is more balanced; the one that stopped all spells if Yogg was killed/sheeped etc.
It’s balanced, it’s just not fun.
New yogg is both not balanced AND it’s not fun to play against.
They’d never have made sylvanas cost 0, be a 7/5, AND have 2 alternate effects that include a board clear and random spells attached to minions…
Who on earth thought designing yogg like this was a good idea?
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I sincerely wish they’d do a “stat squish”
It’d be poetic using the Titans expansion as the peek of power creep where they finally took the game back in power. I’m certainly hoping the big BGs announcement during BlizzCon is something substantial.
They can’t.
This game is not about status but about effects.
The proof is there when you look the cards and get that not that much did change in numbers.
What did change was the amount of mana cheating,abundance of draw and some other minor things.
Downcreep it is mostly about raise the cost of many cards in the last years by 1 and is about the best that can be done.
This is what I mean.
I was too vague with “stat squish”
I’m saying the game needs a year of mid expansions. Nothing super duper. It’s possible to have flashy, neat cards without insane plays. Also, the mana cheating, class identity, card draw etc.
I not wanna the raven year again thanks.
Devs either take courage and do something or they better not do anything at all.
It was literally worse than doing nothing last time.
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I think the best we had was Year of the Dragon
Not because of the raven year.
It’s actually the opposite. They threw it by the Window and returned to do powercreep stuff.
People should stop trying to justify that year seriously.
If they ever dare to pull a design like of the raven year i not staying. This is all i have to say about it.
No, this is a commonly held misconception. It seems most people don’t understand fundamentals of randomness.
A very basic and incorrect understanding of randomness usually goes like this: each side has the same chance of rolling high or low events so over the course of time it balances itself out.
False.
This is false because randomness (more accurately variance) injected into the game has no discernable effect other than making measurement of any statistic or measure of interest harder. The scaling is quadratic in standard deviation, meaning doubling standard deviation requires quadruple number of samples to estimate the same level of confidence in a statistic.
Okay so what does that mean? Well let’s make things concrete, and say the statistic of interest is a players true win rate with a given deck in a given meta. As previously discussed, increasing variance significantly increases the number of games a player has to play to establish the same win rate (ie beating down or fighting the variance.)
A conservative estimate of how much variance old iterations of yogg would inject into the game would be a ten fold increase in standard deviation when compared to metas without them. This would translate to 100 times more games required to establish the same win rate as metas without those yoggs. That would mean tens of thousands of games in a months time instead of hundreds that normally players would participate in a one month reset period.
This means that old yoggs were not balanced. There were people walking away with net wins and people walking away with net losses (sometimes in large amounts) in those metas due to the massive injection of variance, and not enough games to beat down the variance.
For massive randomness to be balanced there has to be enough time/samples to reduce the effects of the randomness for balance to be established. Since Hearthstone has a fixed time period it establishes ranks over, which is one month, a large amount of randomness can easily create unbalanced metas where the net effects from the randomness have not had enough time to balance themselves out.
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Yes, it messes up the win rates for individual players. That’s why it’s not fun.
It’s still balanced because over the entirety of the meta, the RNG nonsense isn’t averaging out to something overpowered, as that sample size does hide the negative impacts you describe.
That’s why the card can look fine on HSR stats, but still be obnoxious to the individual because it warps games.
Agreed, but this is where we get into the nitty gritty. It all comes down to the exactly what statistic you are trying to estimate (and to a lesser extent the confidence with which you want to measure it.)
As you mentioned, if all you care about is how the card preforms over all games played (regardless of players) in a meta, you will have far more samples that will beat down this variance.
If you care about tracking an individual players win rate, for example, that player will generally not play anywhere near enough games to beat down the variance and so their win rate will be very much biased by any highly random effect (such as old yoggs). Some people will walk away with net wins, some with net losses.
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Aye, I pretty much loathe all of the playable “cast X random spells” cards. My luck has always been that my opponents get way more out of them than I do.
Opponent: here’s a board clear, then a board for you with buffs
Me: I see your hand is almost full, let’s draw 15 cards.
I wish blizzard would stop making them, but we can’t seem to go long without one in standard.
I don’t mind some added variance, but I do wish that random effects were far less powerful overall so they had a far lower chance of deciding a game.
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