Standard is boring after Diamond5 for an intellectual reason

Multiplayer Discussion
1

I mean while skill plays a role obviously and that’s important for feeling a sense of accomplishment in a fair competition environment: I feel like the RNG of the mulligan and other randomness related to the mechanics of the game: makes you often feel “yeah I mean skill plays a role here but RNG plays such a huge role at the same time that I don’t feel like I should spend hours on this thing because I don’t know if I will even prove skill or …RNG after a point”.

All I’m trying to say is reduce RNG; skill plays a role already but if the game is spammed with things like “Discover” on top of the Mulligan and the general nature of drawing cards from a shuffled deck anyway: it starts feeling like does the rank even matter more than “~50%” of what you have achieved unless you play 24h/7d and eventually go the highest possible but then you wouldn’t know if it’s RNG or skill or time?

2

If you can’t separate things then you have the answer already.

It’s all 3.

Skill to be able to compete atleast as an equal to your opponent.

Time to prove it.

And some luck to not be screwed nonstop by RNG.

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3

Time and luck are intricately linked.

If you have bad luck, the only way to potentially improve upon a string of bad luck is to play many more games.

More formally, skill is masked by RNG in any game that has it, and it’s a quadratic relationship, meaning RNG has the upper hand even with small increasing in randomness.

The only way to get a better measure of true skill of a player in a game with randomness is to have them play many games and average out the randomness.

4

This is bias.

Basically the coinflip one. Flip the coin one time will not change the probability of the next coin toss.

Like…
It’s true to the average player but there gonna always be THAT GUY where the luck never really reaches that point.

It’s just that for our own benefit we should try to not think too much about it.

5

To me it seems like RNG is a much larger component of what decides wins and losses compared to way back in the early stages of hearthstone.

I think the only time where it was greater was the old ‘yogg’ days.

6

but the best decks we have dont rely on rng like yogg deck did

i dont understand thge comparison between those decks and the current ones like the new ramp druid

7

Well It really depends.

In general when you play decks with tons of RNG you end avoiding polarization creating some sort of safe zone.

It’s why it’s one of the favorites at high ranks with they being heavilly played there when they’re viable.

The other favorite is combo decks with high skill ceiling because they can push all agency of the match to themselves and negate the other player.

8

Your thinking of the gamblers falacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

That’s not what I was referring to. I am specifically saying, if you have suffered a string of loses that were truly cause by RNG and not misplays, then the only way to have a CHANCE to recover is to play at least twice as many games (typically, assuming a WR around 50%.)

I didn’t say anywhere that because you suffered an unlucky set of events your future is looking more likely to have fortunate events. I simply said you have a chance to average out the losses in your future games.

LUCK by definition is only important in short-time processes. That is, if you plan to play 12 games and win 12, LUCK plays a massive role, because sample size is 12. So whatever you roll in that small number of samples will have an outsized effect on the outcome. These short-timed processes are well known and documented (for example read the effects on skill vs luck in Major League Baseball https://sabr.org/journal/article/calculating-skill-and-luck-in-major-league-baseball/) to be extremely high in variance (see standard error description below.)

What I’m referring to in my post is actually a very simple property:

The standard error, which is defined to be an error on your estimate of a statistic (such as win-rate or skill of a player), decreases with the number of samples you take, but grows quadratically with standard deviation (RNG). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_error

If you want a good understanding of games that have both LUCK and SKILL, I highly recommend reading topics on baseball. It is a really well studied game and really breaks this down.

For example, because final series in MLB have a small number of games (I think 7?) between two teams for the world title, even if one team is twice as likely to beat the other team due to being higher skill, because of the small number of games, the percent chance they will win the title is only ~60%, which is shocking. That’s how powerful RNG can be if you don’t give enough samples to average out the variance.

So when you watch competitive sports or e-sports keep this in mind. Because the sample size is typically very small, LUCK plays an outsized role in short events like tournaments.

9

Than why play it? If you find it boring for your 200 iq?

10

If by shocking you mean shockingly wrong then yes. If the probability of team A winning against team B in a single game is 2/3, and every game has the same probability, then the probability that team A wins a best of 7 is 82.67%.

Specifically:

  • 19.75% A wins 4-0
  • 26.34% A wins 4-1
  • 21.95% A wins 4-2
  • 14.63% A wins 4-3
  • 7.32% B wins 4-3
  • 5.49% B wins 4-2
  • 3.29% B wins 4-1
  • 1.23% B wins 4-0

I don’t know what it was that you were trying to say here, but whatever it was you slipped up somehow.

11

I’d say it’s boring because the higher you go the more likely players are to only be playing the same few boring skillless meta decks. Unfortunately players are addicted to the concept of a “meta”. Even in games where there shouldn’t be a “meta”.

12

Time is contaminated here as a “proof” in a major way, because there is a DOWNWARDS CEILING so given enough time you will hit Legend almost guaranteed.

Remove all downwards ceilings in all brackets (i.e. make “time” able to get you to copper-level and don’t have any bonuses) and we’ll see about time…

Don’t forget another contaminant of “time as a proof of accomplishment”, there is a downwards ceiling on ranks. Remove that (and all the star bonuses) and then we’ll see if a lot of time actually helps or doesn’t make it worse for seeing who’s better in a competition (before they hit Legend at least).

I mean yes, and there’s often a blatant technical reason, e.g. the mechanic of Discover is CONSTANTLY SPAMMED by certain decks (to not say all decks (or at least all classes have decks that constantly spam discover and other discover-like mechanics).

It’s not about my iq being 999 or not. Whatever iq I have: it’s unclear if I lost(or won) because of rng or not at least half the time.

Or even when you’re “low-iq”(iq is a limited metric but anyway(another topic)): you constantly wonder “was it rng?”.

That is a factor too. Also if their decks are extremely optimal: at least half of them run Discover or Discover-like mechanics in their decks[on top of the fundamental randomness of the shuffling of the decks].

So you often feel “ok those 2 people had good skill and they both discovered tons of stuff: who is even the better player here other than rng?”[and the point is often to figure out the best player in the game].

13

I’d say a lot of players want to perform well, thus they use a meta deck

Are you insinuating HS shouldn’t have a meta?

14

The problem is that there isn’t usually enough time. Ranks are reset at the end of the month and most people can only play a single digit number of hours per day.

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15

The problem you mentioned is my only point. Time is a contaminant for the question “who is better?”, if there is a FLOOR which is not that far from the top you want to reach [i.e. the few players with more time is questionable if they were better or …with more time].