I’m told that if you retire decks early often enough your account is marked and you get put in a separate pool to queue against other players who do this. Say I retire a lot but am tired of going against 3x colossal mages after 2 wins and have recognized the error of my ways, and stop retiring all my bad drafts. Will I be put back in to the normal pool? Can i be? Please?
No such thing as normal/ubnormal pool. Only thing arena takes into consideration is amount of wins, not even the losses. No mmr, no standard rank, nothing else.
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I heard it worked that way that from a streamer (DoseofCoffee, great arena content) and when I looked it up I found a post from an article on Hearthstone Top Decks saying they implemented this change in patch 29.2. Dose mentioned the queue times at higher win totals can be really long if your in this pool which I’ve definitely noticed
Gunna need proof of this otherwise, its nothing but heresay.
https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/Matchmaking
Everything you need is here. Links, references etc to back it up.
As for personal experience, I have met a good friend of mine when I was 7-1 and he was 8-2. We were talking through the whole game.
You can verify easily if you ask any regular arena player, that the better the winstreak the longer the waiting times are. At 9-10 wins I have waited in queue over 30 mins during weekend peak times.
Why is it so hard to get over 5-6 wins regurarly (which is the average performance of a good draft), you might ask. Well that can be easily justified if you link the information above. If you have won great amount in your run, you are getting matched with people that have drafted as good as you did and have the same number wins as you. That leads to harder games of course.
I dont know the guy the OP mentioned or where he base his conspiracy theory, but actual good arena players will retire the deck right after the draft. They can realise what is working and whats not. Rng is more important in this format during the draft stage rather than the actual playing.
Anyways, gonna put the patch itself to examine it yourself. No changes are anounced concerning arena matchaking. That it includes 29.4.2 and 29.4.3 where they focused on bugfixing. This guy seems to base his words on speculations and fanfiction as it seems.
https://hearthstone.wiki.gg/wiki/Patch_29.4.0.198933
P.S. As for the credibility of the wikis which are powered by fandom you can search it up yourself what fandom actually is, their roots and their work. Imo if you deny them its like deny the wikipedia information about anything and you have the right to do so if you make your own personal investigation to contradict anything.
(2) P.S. I am a regular arena player, have many reasons to complain such as current card pool or the existence of bots. Matchmaking is not one.
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The official matchmaking rules are mostly correct, but I wouldn’t trust Blizzard to have revealed all the rules because they are known to often do marketing with half of the truth but at the same time I do not believe they rig the game in the micromanaged way most “it’s rigged!” people imagine. They probably doctor the MMR and the matchmaking in general in a way to maximize time players spend to reach their goal rank.
For example I have identified that unless you play at least a few dozen games in a month then you will almost never get very easy opponents unless you lose a lot. Basically after a few dozen games of a lot of “50-50” win/loss ratio I start seeing a tendency of the matchmaker to give extremely easy games as if it waited for you to fill a “quota of the month” and I doubt it’s a coincidence since I see it every month.
Well concerning standard I can somewhat agree with your thoughts since its the most popular gamemode. It’s a bit over the top if you consider the developers’ works and capabilities but there’s logic behind it.
In arena though, an unpopular mode with many queue time problems, I find it hard to believe they would behave the same way as it is already unsettling for the players to jump into it and invest huge amount of time. They get nothing back implementing a tactic like this when they will only have drawbacks.
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I made a typo its patch 29.2. I can’t attach links here but if you just google “hearthstone arena matchmaking retire” you can easily find the article I’m talking about on Hearthstone Top Decks. It’s not on the official blizzard site so it’s not 100 percent but not sure why it would be faked.
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I did not see this in patch notes but there was a forum post about the change.
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I am sorry guys, seems I’ve missed the update aswell due to me having a break, definitely I am on the wrong here. As I said I have experienced the bot problem but never saw their solution.
So we basically have to retire early consistenly so we avoid the barcode accounts? We have to keep purchasing entrances so wet get matches with actual human players?
Yeah, thats a cheap solution.
Dean Ayala explaining Arena matchmaking back in 2021:
https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/dean-ayala-explains-how-matchmaking-works-in-arena/
As far as the “barcode jail” that was created to segregate barcodes from normal players, there are easy workarounds to avoid being put into that pool of players. Barcode decks are still common in Arena.
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But that’s before the update anyways.
True, but other than an attempt to separate barcoders, who early retire multiple runs, into a separate matchmaking pool, dubbed the “barcode jail,” the matchmaking system remains the same for Arena.
For barcoders, who do the workarounds to avoid Barcode Jail, they even start off with a matchmaking advantage of one loss for matchmaking purposes before they actually incur any loses.
For almost ten years, I remained mute about barcoders even though I knew they existed in year one. Some Hearthstone topics are very esoteric.
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So am i understanding this right?
If i retire early often because i am seeing too strong of opponents too often. I will be locked in a pool with only those people who cheat strong decks?
Yes (20 characters):
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I guess im never playing that mode ever again then. Free tickets to the wind lol
I don’t understand… but where do you live? First: it is Blizzard itself in one of the last patches that stated that there are arena “pools”, for example one is where those who use bots to farm end up. but then how can you not see that 90% of the opponents have these names:
red elf
white goblin
uiwefwiejbf
skjbfseibg
chinese name
filipino name
russian name
here too stated by Blizzard who admits to being aware of it, they are all barcode accounts/decks. How can you not perceive what a huge scam you are in?
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At the end of the day, it hurts the average player either pools exist or not. From my own experience, there are still tons of bots and I shouldnt be obliged to reset like a maniac, waste gold, just to get what should be obvious… damn.
To be honest though win/loss rule still applies as mentioned. It is noticable in long winstreaks, i.e. after 7 wins that queue time changes drastically. Game is looking for an opponent with similar ratio to match you, either its a bot or a person.
Right now, Arena is more interesting to me than Standard is, so I am back to playing mostly Arena, since a new season just started.
I expect Mage and Shaman to be the top two Arena classes again for this season. Paladin, Rogue, Hunter and Priest will probably vie for the next best classes. Warlock may be in a better spot than it was last season.
yeah knowing this i dont think ill do arena either unless i forget about it in the future. Its insane that if you leave because you got terrible options when picking cards or only face barcode decks, you get put with even more barcode decks