People sayin HS is all luck. Not true, skill is key factor

Multiplayer Discussion
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My intention wasn’t to make fun of you, but rather to help you improve your gameplay so you can feel less like a victim but instead be empowered. If you blame your losing on the “game being rigged” you are doing yourself a disservice. Yes, there are times RNG will make it seem impossible to win, but there are also plenty of times where you could have potentially outplayed your opponent if you improved your skill at playing the game. If you really want to improve and are the type to care about winning and rank, then you need to stop blaming outside forces and try to blame yourself more for when you lose. After you are able to blame yourself, then it allows you to improve. If you always blame outside sources than you make it impossible to improve because nothing is your fault.

I get to legend every time I try and have faced LanguageHacker, J_Alexander, Kibler, LifeCoach and many other famous players and have been in the top 1k. You can do it too if you stop blaming things outside your control and blame things in your control for losing and winning. Have a good one.

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HS is very much skillful. There are a plethora of choices every turn, and the number of things to consider is vast. It’s way more than what 75 seconds of thinking can cover.

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Skill is definitely a factor. Having said that, RNG dictates an awful lot of games.

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Yes, every time my opponent discovers a stack of outs in the game, I blame myself for not having won before they could play their cards.

There is skill involved, but the modern game has moved very, very far away from skill.

I’m sick of games where players use more discoverd cards than cards from their starting deck.

I’m sick of discoving random I win conditions like stacks of dragons, twenty mana of random, and anything related to yogg.

It’s too much and it ruins the fun.

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How dare you imply im anything but perfect…
Theres nothing to improve here if im losing a match its 100% because the world is out to get me and theres shaddy mechanics in play.

Now if you will excuse me i have a prior engagement with the other voices in my head and i cant afford to waste my time with imperfect lifeforms.

Good day.

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It’s still a skillful game but of any of the card games I’ve played it’s the one where a lot of games are dictated by RNG. It’s no surprise that high rank players are always high rank and the people seen in tournaments are always the same people but sometimes losses are out of your control and you can’t really blame people when they get frustrated over that.

It’s like when people complain about Master Duel being a one-and-done format. A lot of wins happen because people play go first floodgate decks that would normally lose in a best 2 out of 3 because of siding. Doesn’t mean that MD doesn’t take skill but you could also attribute a lot of losses in that game due to the issue of no siding and I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong either if people want to play the TCG instead of MD.

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Being a player that can reach high ranks with relative ease on a consistent basis over the years I can give some insight from that perspective.

Basically, it’s gotten progressively harder to reach high ranks putting in the same amount of time year over year. That anecdote is consistent with the games RNG deciding more and more of matches over time. This is actually fully expected as power creep… Creeps forward.

If you follow any of my posts on these topics in the past you will already know this from there, but I will repeat myself somewhat here to keep things self contained.

First, in any game that mixes randomness and skill, skill is never truly removed out of the equation. Instead, as randomness increases, you should expect many more trial repeats to obtain the same level of confidence on any statistic you wish to measure. What does that mean? That means as RNG increases in the game, it takes many more games for your skill level to make an impact on your winrate.

Next, Hearthstone will always have a fundamental component of randomness in it related to card draw. This, combined with power creep year over year, means that drawing the cards you need to win in the correct order has a larger and larger impact on winrate as power creep increases steadily. Therefore, the games randomness steadily increases with power creep!

Hence, what we will eventually get as power creep continues unchecked is a game where skill will matter after ten million games, but not a game before that. What does that mean? Well theoretically skill still matters, it just only matters if you can live as long as the solar system.

Translation: there are limits to the amount of power creep and randomness that a card game can carry before effectively being a completely random game for humans, but not for stars (the solar system kind.)

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You sure think far too highly of yourself Yellow, and are wrong on many counts.

The more random the game, the MORE skill is required. The more skillful are those who adapt on the fly.

Sorry you are not as good as you believe yourself to be, but adaptation is by far the most skillful element of this game.

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Honestly, I debated responding here, and I’m not sure I should, but I’ll just leave that quoted there for posterity, and let readers decide how to interpret your post.

I fully expect you are the type of person who says that if you had a game where you drop yogg and got 2 free casts of sunset volley and just win the game on the spot you believe it’s your epic skill to adapt at work.

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Good for you.

You acknowledge that adaptation to randomness is indeed a skill without even realising it.

You think far too highly of yourself. I know youre a good player, but you lack the ability to adapt, which means you will never be a great player. No matter how highly you think of yourself.

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Wow, and you know this how? Have you even spectated a single one of my games? You must be an Oracle. There are players on these forums that play at high levels as well and have played against me or spectated a streamer game with me playing, and I would accept their criticism, but damn, the hubris you have to claim to know me or how I play without ever seeing me play, that’s some next level stuff.

If by adapt you mean constantly craft the current flavor of the month then yes I agree, I hardly if ever do. I am a free to play player and don’t have an infinite dust budget. I nearly always play homebrews or teched variants to the level that I play.

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No skill everything is rigged. If you buy packs you can reach legend.

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Nope, it’s not ‘power creep’ — since the ‘power’ alone ‘creeps’ equally for everyone.

PS And it could creep in a very ‘deterministic’ fashion, by the way, meaning that those impactful cards or effect could be predictable and calculable, you can make a game plan that accounts for them and so on — I’m not saying in HS, but in theory.

What you’re saying suggests that the role of skill diminishes over time — nothing more, nothing less.

If it is well within the stochastic (random) error, it is practically lost.

In plain words: if a slot machine gives you $(50 +/- 30) on average (with a certain confidence level, if you will), and your skill makes a difference of +/- $1, you can consider it a pure gamble.

And why is that? Define ‘randomness’ quantitatively, by the way.

Ugh, guess you guys will never learn. :grinning: A statistic is by definition a function of your data (sample) — you don’t measure it (that’d pertain to your actual data), you calculate it (from the data, as said).

That statement actually looks correct to me.

And why is that, again?

As said, it seems to me that if the impact of skill is ‘drowned’ in stoctastic errors, it might be difficult to prove convergence, if there is any.

PS That was not a rhetoric question, I’d actually like to know.

Lemme tell you how.

It’s one of the same miserable troll accounts on this forum, generating the same kind of repetitive junk posts with no meaningful contents but supposedly provocative and inflammatory personal attacks — again, mostly dull, unimaginative and stock ones (come to think of it, wouldn’t be surprised if somebody were testing a crude chat bot to imitate Medivh’s magic mirror from the Karazhan adventure :grinning: — but it could be just some very strange and sorry person practically living on these forums, who knows), along the lines of what that rude homunculus, or whatever the card is called, would say — at seemingly random forum posters, mostly of the ‘normie’ kind, i.e. those who post something more or less meaningful.

No, I’m not an oracle, it’s these forums that are quite… predictable, repetitive even, that’s how I know it. :grinning:

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More skill is required in highly random outcomes because it separates people who can navigate card order well but that doesn’t necessarily mean that skill is as important in HS as in other games where the most random components are milling, excavate (YGO)/ scrying/ surveil (MTG), and card draw which is common amongst all card games and especially deck builders.

HS has higher chances for random outcomes to be game deterministic and therefore you still see top players continuing to be top players (by whatever metric you determine a top player) but it also means that there are larger samples of robbing/ getting robbed.

The main issue with RNG as it exists in HS is that is allows impossible strategies that cannot occur in normal deck building (and therefore breaks game balance) and also makes it impossible to play around random card generation. Stuff like plagues is fine because you can measure likelihood of how many you’ll draw over the game on average and create a timeline of how quickly you need to try to win but you can’t account for Zarog’s Crown generating Shoplifter Goldbeard and hitting you for lethal on almost any possible board state and life total.

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This is just something people tell themselves, but it’s not really true.

This is what it is. The random variance is noise in the data, hiding the skill deeper in the pile.

For every instance you show your skill, you have two games where you couldn’t do anything. There’s even a good chance that game you thought was your skill, your opponent’s hand/discover bricked and you were just lucky.

Random is not skill, it is not skill expression. Random is the preference of higher ranking players so they don’t have to grind repetitive games. This preference is for style of game and it isn’t related to skill other than coincidence of the more you play the more you want varied games.

I’ll go one step further: making the game more fun for those top players is siphoning off the rest of the player base. For every person that loves miracle rogue in top 1k, there were literally thousands of players who just wanted to play their homebrew and couldn’t.

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Very few people think the game is 100% luck. That is just a bad strawman. It is undeniable that the direction they have taken with the game is far far into making extreme variance decide games.

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Yogg is a calculated risk as many of his spells can backfire n screw your board over. Having a successful roll of the dice/draw of the card/whatever other gambling analogies you wanna use is 100% up to the personal decision of the person that played the card. Which is to say if you use one of his abilities n it pays off, yes, it was a good play on the player’s part, meanwhile if the effect screws over your board or any other negative effect, then it’s also on the player.

You’ve bought your own press lol

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It’s not all luck, but the more you add random discover, the more you reduce the ability for skill to decide games. The more you print outsized power swing cards, the less skill decides games.

Yogg is a slot machine and is unrelated to skill. Pull the level and hope.

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Skill is a factor in the same way finger length, finger width, hand eye coordination, and wind speed, is a factor in flipping coins, yes.

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Neon you don’t get it.

There are actually people who believe that deciding not to play Yogg because it can potentially backfire on your own board is a show of skill and not just common sense.

Calculated risk? That’s funny. Good luck to anyone trying to crunch the numbers on the spells in Yogg’s pool to determine potential outcomes. Even if they did, it wouldn’t demonstrate skill; just knowledge of the card’s effect.

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