This will produce 2 main advantages:
1 . People will not be lazy thinking “oh I’m locked into Legend and now I can be trashy or oh I’m back to Diamond 5 and now I can lose again”; this will raise the quality of games; winning will be more meaningful.
2 . There will not be congestion at specific ranks; e.g. right now about half of the game is in diamond 1 to 5 and then quit; people keep seeing bots on anything below diamond 10 and high Legend is 3 people.
I like the checkpoints because of one simple reason - they’re useful to experiment with various decks and finding the right one to grind with when you reach a rank you’re stuck on.
I couldn’t care less for diamond 5 checkpoint for the simple reason I can’t really lose games before Diamond 1 or 2 anymore, but for people who never hit legend before, it’s the same checkpoint as reaching Legend is for me, so I guess it should stay.
Also there are more pragmatic reasons why the checkpoints exist, I think - ranked rewards at the end of the season. But I might be mistaken. Maybe there are more reasons why they’re implemented, we just aren’t aware of them.
We need to be able to relax and breathe a bit, even if it means sacrificing the quality of a few games in order to improve the quality of our next few hundred games.
People should relax in Casual. If you don’t like Casual’s XP/rewards and design: petition for that to change instead of making Standard worse at its mechanics (I personally find it stupid that they give low XP in Casual when it could just be EXACTLY that: a “relaxation room” for Standard [and probably they should have a Standard-Casual (currently it’s effectively “Wild-Casual”)).
PS What OP deck can’t lose before diamond 1?
I didn’t mean “relax” in that literal sense xD I meant to say while we’re grinding we’re on edge trying not to screw up, and once we reach a certain check point, we can tune out the stress part and try not to screw up while being more relaxed.
Personally I don’t understand why anyone would play worse intentionally just because they reached a checkpoint and can’t lose a rank at that point. If anything, when I reach a checkpoint I get a boost of dopamine to keep me going, I’m on a momentum.
But yeah, swapping decks tends to cause a few lower quality matches. These things happen in all ranks, though, top 100 legend players swap decks all the time trying to get an edge over the others.
It’s not about the deck, it’s about the player. Let’s take a look at an example of one specific deck: treant druid.
Diamond + winrate = 56,7% (includes legend)
Legend winrate = 44,4%
Shame I can’t filter only diamond win rate to prove the point even better, but I think it’s kinda obvious that diamond matches are considerably easier than legend ones.
Also take into account that I hit my legend January 4th when the grind is real. if I had waited until the end of month to reach legend, my win rate would be north of 80%. Majority of Hearthstone players are just bad at the game.
This is so wrong on multiple levels that I don’t want to expand at the moment (no time).
I’ll just say this: you copy-pasted your deck from someone early (and I know you copy-pasted your deck because you have no understanding about the game at all when you say such a blatantly wrong thing about the game),
and because you copy-pasted your deck early: it was harder to counter it because not everyone and their mom was expecting it.
No, it’s not. The grind is immensely harder at the beginning of the month because only high legend players are in diamond. 25 days more, every gold noob and their grandma is in diamond, trying to hit legend. It’s a completely different game.
??? I’ve been beaten by Treant druids for weeks before I took it up. Everyone I played against knew the deck well. It doesn’t help much when the deck has 56+% winrate, though
First of all that has a technical fallacy in it: the top Legend players have a star bonus for Diamond5 you don’t have: i.e. they just get out of Diamond without trying much.
As for the rest: the explanation that makes me right is very simple: if a good deck becomes popular then its win rate by definition drops to 50% given identical skill.
You imply your skill is god-like; that would be a strong argument if skill was the only factor; it’s a mathematical fact that “2 god-like skills”: 50% wr on the same deck.
That OP is technically correct.
People say they want the game to not be a joke and then proceed to be pro every damm system possible that desintivize competitive play.
Have an actual competitive standard start far before whinning about any card you think it’s OP.
Go together with that :
Separated rank rewards.
Slighty better(not necessarily more in terms of value ) rewards at the end of the month.
And there are some others but as you can already see most people here only pretend to look competitive.
Actually be competitive is another history.
But I do have the same bonus stars as am I one of those players xD
But the best decks still have 55%+ winrate from diamond+ xD
Diamond 4 - 1 for excavate pally is 59,6%. So it’s pretty far from 50% so there must be a skill differential involved, no?
Nothing god-like,it’s just how math works in this game xD If my win rate is 10% better than yours, due to how ranking works, it takes me on average 2 times less games to hit legend than it takes you.
If your winrate is 55% and it takes you 150 games to hit legend on average (you win 2 stars every 20 games) and my win rate is 65% (win 4 stars every 20 games) that means I hit legend twice as fast as you do (75 games on average).
FYI, it took me 120 games to hit legend, because I decided to grind it out early. FYI, I’m not even top 1000 at the moment. I don’t have the time for mindless grind this month. Hopefully I’ll have for the next one to hit some tournament invitation points.
My win rate fell significantly in legend (from 56% to 44%), even though those should be the same players I played against to hit legend. So what changed? Decks changed. People play aggro decks to hit legend, but once they do, they switch to slower ones. Also, meta was shifting this season, so it impacted the win rate of decks
No, no, the change in decks played is not the factor - it is only skill according to our uber driving statistical expert.
You should know better than to disagree with him.
He’s the expert on everything.
Then you are off topic in the entire context. Why do you even mention that diamond is not hard for your account.
If your account has a bonus on all of diamond then you have to TRY to not go Legend.
Because it’s easy especially if you wait a few weeks into the season before attempting the grind.
At least it’s easy compared to what awaits you once you do hit it xD
What are you even talking about. A star bonus gives effectively near 80% win rate with a skill that would be 40%.
It’s completely out of context of a discussion about skill (also they should delete those bonuses).
No comment xD Your math is broken beyond repair
It’s literally like that if a win gives you 2 stars.
No, it is not like that at all. Stars do not impact your win rate, only the speed of your climb with a given win rate.
If your winrate is 55% and you get 2x stars, it takes you 75 games to hit legend on average. 150 games if you get 1 star
If your winrate is 60% and you get 2x stars, it takes you 37 games to hit it, 75 without stars.
If your winrate is 50% or lower, you just don’t climb no matter how many stars you get xD
So your win rate determines how fast you climb, not the bonus stars. Bonus stars award good players, they do not punish bad players.
This is not a big in the design but a deliberate feature. Ranks below Diamond don’t exist to challenge players, they exist to give the illusion of challenge and thus the illusion of accomplishment. It’s all part of the sales psyop of making players feel like they’re better players than they actually are.
Rank floors will never go away for this reason alone.
STOP USING HSREPLAY
Their numbers are tracker side only and therefore garbage. Use Vicious Syndicate instead.
First off, will you quit it about making fun of my work already. I hadn’t even posted in this thread yet; your hatred is creepy obsessive.
Second and on topic, I said that the change in decks played is not the main factor, that is, that the change in skill between Diamond 4-1 players and top 1000 Legend players has a bigger impact on winrate than the change in decks popularity between D4-1 and T1KL. I didn’t say that it’s not a factor, it’s actually about 40-60. Yours is a mind seemingly incapable of any nuance so when I tell you that you’re wrong, it’s not 100% arbitrary meta shifts, you assume that I mean it’s 100% some other thing.
I’m not, I’m using Metastats data, dunno how they calculate it, though.
Never heard of em before now, so I don’t either.
Feels kinda high though, based on prepatch Pal numbers