Power Creep has Created worse Players

Multiplayer Discussion
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I hit rank 224 legend on day 2 this month. I saw objective misplays until I hit legend and have continued seeing them while I meme around in legend completing achievements.

@Altair - You are again objectively wrong. The more randomness introduced into a game the easier it is for a less skilled player to beat someone better than them. This is a fact. I was the #1 player in the world at my character for a fighting game. If someone far less skilled than me challenged me I could beat them 100/100 times. I have quite literally coached people and gone 50+ and 0 doing this. This is because fighting games are almost purely skill based. This is why a random no name could very likely take games off a world class Hearthstone player. It is built into the game that way.

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I’m 195 at the moment

Washed Thijs and Meati destroyed me today - they didn’t make mistakes and they’re still in 200-s, worse rank than me xD

The game is merciless, as you should know

If you see those people misplay like you mentioned from time to time, it’s understandable because they probably play 12+ hours per day and burn out

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Well then I already answered. The game is relatively short of players nowadays. You’re not going to see immense skill outside the top 100 in the first days of a month.

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I have no time or patience to stay in top 500, let alone try for top 100. Streaming for hours anyone will make mistakes, we are all human. My current experience is that I feel like I see more misplays than back in the day. Almost every play session since coming back I find myself asking a at least once per play session, “why did they do that?”

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Could be also an effect of the number of players. The game might be 4X less popular now, so roughly 3/4ths of the skill is out.

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Power Creep has Created worse Players

So true, those worse players are the ones coming to ragepost after losing 1 match since they still use moldy ol decks that they haven’t touched up (or copied a newer netdeck) for a couple expansions or so.

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It’s a mobile game not Chess. They want the curve low intentionally. The average player doesn’t spend that much time playing HS so why make it complicated?

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How can you tell the good players from the bad when there’s so much brain dead discover, draw, stall, and RNG?

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The games pretty simplistic and boring now… Id imagine people are tabbing to other windows coming back and completing their turn without giving it full thought, especially against slow players.

I mean small misplays like that would be expected in this circumstance and I wouldnt say its power creep but just bad card design given that you can play 1 card these days and do everything (clear board, summon a board, heal, draw cards) so theres little need to pay attention.

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It is indeed more complex in the same way flipping multiple coins at a time is more complex than flipping a single coin multiple times

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They’re consistently in better ranks, that’s how

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Be careful you’ll shatter their fragile ego if you imply skill is a big factor.

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I can one hundred percent concur this actual happens to me. This is for several reasons.

  1. Player agency feels so incredibly low that it really feels like if I make a oops here, who cares? Most games are going to be decided by a high roll. Close games are a once in a blue moon type event. It’s usually one player stomping on the other.

  2. I used to play with most of my focus on the game, since I was actually interested in the game. Now I am nearly always multitasking. At the very least I’m walking my dog, but sometimes watching a show or something else.

  3. The UI is horrendous for what the game has evolved into. On mobile I can’t even see my player when I pull up my cards. To play well I should be checking my player health, be hero power and whether there is a weapon to swing every turn. But due to how short turns are compared to how many actions or cards you play now, it’s very common for me to skip that and miss a hero power, swing or even how much health I have. This has resulted in many misplays. Furthermore, other aspects of the UI are horrendous, for example I’ve lost many games due to the interface not informing me when a card will be traded vs played. So I’ve traded the speaker stomper instead of playing it and basically lost due to terrible UI design many times.

  4. Last of all, and this is the biggest issue I have by far, animations and turn length. By God I can’t tell you how many complex turns I’ve just had the rope end my turn on mobile because the animations play at a tenth of their speed on PC. It really makes me not want to think on turns as I get rewarded by timing out on a turn, so I’m conditioned into this play faster with more errors but play so you get all your moves in. And it has nothing to do with skill, but how horribly designed this game is. I see this in very high end streamers games to, such as no hands gamer and other’s. By far this is the most egregious thing this game needs to address.

Note I haven’t played since patch and I only visit this forum occasionally, so take my post as you will. It is based on my experience with the game over the last 5 years or so. Nearly every point I’ve listed above has gotten worse over those 5 years in my opinion.

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34

I thought rank didn’t matter anymore?

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This is the main part of your argument I kinda disagree with.

For most of the history of Hearthstone — but not recently — I’ve been an Arena player. I’ve pretty much always went infinite or nearly infinite on my Arena runs. For thousands of games, I would win 2 games for every 1 I lost.

So while I admittedly didn’t play a lot of Ranked under the old ranking system, my opinion of the average Hearthstone player under the old rating system is that they have two digit IQs and that it’s a miracle that they can tie their shoes in the morning. I don’t mean ALL of them were stupid, you get near the end of an Arena run and instead of pairing you against a seal they pair you against another seal-clubber, but the overwhelming majority, dumb as rocks.

In the past few years I’ve played more Ranked and less Arena, especially because bots, but my core opinion hasn’t changed. I have trouble understanding how anyone who is stuck in Diamond can consider themselves intelligent life.

And the excuses they make! Any mental gymnastics to avoid personal responsibility. Again, these are not new, they’re very old. Conspiracy theories are a ten year old forum tradition.

And yes, I’ve watched your conversation with Carnivore with mild amusement. But I don’t agree with you when you say it proves your hypothesis, because your hypothesis has two parts, and one of those parts is that players in the past were good.

Here’s the truth: back under the old ranking system, you were a scrub fighting scrubs. Now you’ve successfully got gud. Welcome, and congratulations!

Edit: this post was a little mean. I am joking about Hearthstone politing skill being a reliable form of IQ test. You can be, and probably are, good at real life despite poor Hearthstone politing skills. But, um, y’all (as a group) are bad at Hearthstone. Like, really bad. Just being real

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The old Arena system was such a great teaching tool to learn the basics of HS. Many of the best HS players came from the arena system. Unfortunately it’s just not like that anymore. It’s sad because it’s the one place you could really learn to get good at the game if you didn’t already know the fundamentals of a CCG.

I wish i could get excited about standard like i used to but it just holds little appeal for me beyond the monthly climb playing with something off meta. BG’s is the only real place i have fun and can be creative with now.

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Btw, good point. Reminds me of WoW arena when the better you become with time the more fun you make seeing meta slaves with low skill doing absolutely wrong moves with the most broken classes or team compositions. :wink:

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I think you both are talking past each other.

Regarding what Altair was saying, I can speak fighting game a little — I’m not going to pretend that I’m skilled at it, but I’m a long time fighting game spectator, so I understand some theory and lingo. Fighting game characters have different options, in the form of buttons and specials. These options tend to be static, while in CCGs like Hearthstone your options are not static, they are determined by what is in your hand. What Altair is trying to say is that the availability of options in a CCG determines the amount of time you have to practice with and consider those options; therefore, the more randomness in the availability of options, the more different options there are. And I think that you can agree that, the more situationally good options a fighting game character has, the more difficult that character is to learn — as opposed to some character with fewer options but those options are cheap so they just follow the flowchart.

Consider Hayao’s mastery of Hugo’s standing HK. Extremely niche option, and the basis of, IMHO, best EVO moment of all time (sorry Daigo). That’s roughly equivalent to knowing that your only out for a tournament game of Hearthstone is some obscure Discover option, going for it and getting it to pull off an otherwise unwinnable game. Discover might have an RNG element, but it’s also where Hearthstone hides those obscure options, and mastery of obscure options is legitimate skill. Unflowchartable.

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Never played WoW arena, but I’m trusting that you know what you’re talking about. With my no skill (in that game) I can’t tell the difference between mid skill and high skill.

I wish more people would realize when they have this kind of blindness. Be honest.

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The complexity of arena have became the reason it never was an actual E-sport. For someone who’s not deep into the process it just looks dumb and repetitive while for game fans the same moments would be the greatest replays of the tournament (most stuff is happening within top right buffs/debuffs corner and mind games with ideal predictions and advance counter moves).

Easy example - Shadow Word: Death will do small portion of damage to an enemy and will return part of this damage back to priest but only Hydra was the first to realize it could be used as anti-CC (let’s say mage will cast sheep and before the cast ends priest uses SW:D so sheep lands and soon after damage returns and priest is out of CC). That’s easy for any good player nowadays but the best ones predict even immediate CCs like rogue’s blind via shadowstep and keep close to 100% results with their predictions because they actually read the whole game plan of the enemy.

So yeah once again very good point. :slight_smile:

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