Your logic is false because it contradicts itself from the starting point of it. There is no true randomness is you stick next to it “due to misplays”. It’s just lower skill.
It’s much more complicated.
Imagine there’s a sport event and you have a girl who won 10 wrestling matches against other amateur girls. Now you match her against a guy who also won 10 wrestling matches but against professional guys.
Your matchmaking believes both are equally strong because both won 10 matches and all you do is counting w/l rates. But the matchup would be far from 50% chance of winning for both participants.
You have to take other information into account, as I said, such as whom those wins were against and how much the wins weigh based on that, the decks being played and so on.
If you’ve just lost 5 games in a row, and I, as the MMR system, am supposed to match you with someone you can beat, I can’t pair you against a counter deck that completely annihilates yours by design. But in the absence of deck information and winning probabilities, I can’t accurately match you with a specific goal in mind, such as keeping things balanced.
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They don’t HAVE to take your reasoning into account; I get your reasoning fully btw; my first instinct is too related to weighting the skill of opponents for the MMR of the player.
They don’t have to because without it: it accelerates your matching into harder opponents if you win and vice versa so it will eventually stabilize to “fair opponent” (usually).
By the way the context has a “chicken or the egg” problem because “what’s the skill of any player when the game starts recording MMRs?” but maybe it can self-correct.
But it can’t do that without taking other factors into account, if only W/L are counted.
One person can have 120 wins and 120 losses in gold while the other person can have the same stats in Legend. W/L in isolation are meaningless, their value is relative to the strength of people you played against.
I can’t even give you “harder” opponents if I have no metrics to define what exactly makes an opponent harder. If I look at W/L in isolation, I might assume that someone with 150 wins must be stronger than you with 100 wins. But if that person made 150 wins against noobs while you made 100 wins agains top players, I’m actually giving you a weaker opponent.
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I see what you mean. The devs recently reported they don’t really match only by MMR, because they still try to avoid matching you outside Legend if you’re not at Legend or something else related to that.
I think skill went out the window since you can copy/paste decks into your game.
Maybe 10 years ago skill was involved. Now you just copy/paste meta decks and get Legend in like a week.
Its kinda a joke today.
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Two faults with that reasoning. One: given enough games then randomness is a zero sum game; that’s because the randomness factor is shared between two opponents in a single game while the skill factor is different hence given a lot of played games the randomness cancels out as a shared sum while your skill will show; it is a problem only if you play very few games and it is misleading to think about this only “per game” (because a single game has a lot of randomness that lopsides you to a win or a loss compared to the sum of all games you played (the sum doesn’t lopside you to a win or a loss but to a zero sum)).
Two: if everyone netdecks then why would you have an advantage when they would also be playing optimized decks against you?
As if netdecks haven’t always been a thing
The goalpost keeps moving on just how matching works, it seems.
I believe the matching is impartial, but I also think there is more to the formula than they admit to.
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It’s generally more vague than one may think at first, because you can easily stretch the phrase “fair opponent” to mean a lot of things; e.g. it might be “fair opponent” “only if you play a lot of games in the month”; until you play a lot of games your MMR might be yo-yoing too much into …unfair opponents and …underpowered opponents in order to keep you artificially closer to 50% win rate especially because they seem to still exclude Legend players from matching with you if you’re not Legend yet so they might want to compensate for that higher win rate it may cause.
It’s generally a culture of a company that is not very succinct in whatever they report so no one should take their phrases such as “fair opponent” to mean very simple clear things necessarily.
By your ridiculous definition of skill every CCG is skilless. Net decking has been around since MTG started it all. You’re not some genius for home brewing you’re a doofus handicapping yourself.
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I’m sorry but you keep saying this and it doesn’t make much sense.
Randomness is not a game. Depending on what you mean by randomness, if you mean to refer to randomness as a random variable as defined in probability theory in mathematics.
Abuse of notation is a common thing in math, if you want to convey a meaning quickly you might use a technicality incorrect term to describe something just because it’s more concise or relates to your audience better. This is not the case here, the thing you are referring to is very different.
A zero sum game can be thought of as a linear program, in fact it’s an equivalent definition. In the sense that if you have a zero sum game you can map it to an equivalent linear program and vice versa. Furthermore, the linear program that a general zero sum game maps to is general enough to represent all linear programs, therefore the two are interchangeable.
Linear programs are much simpler to consider and think about so this is a really important equivalence.
In any case, linear programs or zero sum games have nothing to do with probability or randomness.
I believe what you are trying to say is that randomness in Hearthstone is zero mean, meaning it’s unbiased and shouldn’t favor one opponent or another, barring a bugs or a poor implementation.
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Zero sum game is a very well known figure of speech popularized by game theory that is not about literal gaming; it refers to cancelling out; I was saying it’s a zero sum game i.e. its importance cancels out given enough games.
I don’t know what other analogies to bring to make it understood. Maybe think of it like 2 racecar drivers that often have good or bad luck in the same race but in 10,000 races in 10 years the best will show the highest rank.