So I enjoy playing around with fun deck concepts. Often means I’ll rarely ever have elites, or wicked powerful cards.
Sure it might hinder the queue time, but I’d prefer to be matched with a deck with a roughly equal amount of Elite cards in their deck.
Maybe make another game mode or enable that kind of matchmaking for Casual play? Sure, no-holds-bars for Competitive, but I’d like to stand even somewhat of a chance when I’m playing my other decks.
As far as I see it now, there’s countless cards that’ll never see the light of day in this game, and this scene doesn’t reward creativity.
If I want to see anything from the future of this game, it’d be this.
I believe that the best matchmaking is the one that provides the least polarizing experience. People don’t want to queue into a game where they’re already a 40-60 underdog because of the deck choice. So I absolutely would agree that what cards each player has in their decks should be considered.
That said, you didn’t say “match decks AND skill.” You said “not skill.” And that idea is completely ridiculous. Skill is an absolute necessary component of matchmaking, because if the players have decks that are evenly matched against each other, then it’s just the skill difference between players that determines the polarization of the match. If the decks are even, then the skill of the players should be even. If one deck has an advantage against the other, it can still be a good match IF there is a proportional skill difference between the players, with the more skilled player playing the underdog deck.
Essentially, I would consider the ideal matchmaking algorithm to conduct a MULTI-factor analysis to match opponents as close to 50-50 matchups as possible, using every available metric that has a role in predicting the result of a match. That’s emphatically not matchmaking by deck contents alone.
Arguably, the only skill these is in this game is deck-building… y’know, aside from identifying good choices to make, but that usually is inherited from the deck-building portion… why you’d choose to pair cards.
Other than that, the only thing that could be perceived as ‘skill’ is just pure luck in the draw of your cards. Of course that’s not considering the decks made to shuffle/draw/pull until you collect the fabled “Exodia” pieces.
But yes, ideally it’d match the Deck format and the skill of the players.
If you go to a Hearthstone data website like Vicious Syndicate (free) or HSReplay (pay walled), you can find matchup winrates. If you do, you can see that the matchup winrates for, say, Diamond, are not the same as those for top Legend. So you’ve got players playing the same Pure Paladin netdeck vs the same Rainbow Mage netdeck and there’s a roughly 2% difference in that same matchup going up the ranks. This differences mostly persist between measurement periods, showing that this isn’t caused mostly by sampling error. That’s hard empirical proof that when you keep everything the same and you raise the skill of not one player, but both players equally, winrates change.
As far as raising the skill of one player WITHOUT raising the skill of the other, for the most part matchmaking by skill prevents such matches from occurring. Not saying that it’s perfect, but it mostly works.
Meanwhile, deckbuilding skill is mostly irrelevant. Unless you’re in the top 1% of the top 1% of deckbuilding skill, you aren’t going to be a netdeck author. And if you’re not a netdeck author, I’m sorry but the internet beat you to the correct answer to the puzzle, better luck next expansion.
The only skill in this game for 99.99% of players is piloting skill.
That said, raising the skill of both players from Diamond 4-1 to top 1000 Legend changes winrates, on average, about ±1.75%. It’s measurable, and consistently so, but it’s small. Meanwhile, the effect of polarization averages at about ±7%. So I will give you that luck is about four times as influential as that much skill (that between the average D4-1 and the average T1KL player). A bigger skill gap is worth more, a smaller skill gap isn’t worth as much, but luck definitely is a big factor.
The TL;DR is: piloting skill is real. And what not having it feels like is that you don’t even see the opportunity to play better. If you want to get more piloting skill, slow down (rope) and look harder. If you don’t really want more piloting skill, because slowing down feels tryhard and lame, then don’t I guess. I’m not your boss, have fun.
It’s difficult to have fun when I can’t play the decks and themes I want.
This is why I say this isn’t casual friendly in the slightest. I want to build something fun, entertaining, new, clever, etc. I don’t want to play to be the best.
Which is the point of the original post; to make a gamemode designated to players who want to be a little original. Who want to play the opposite of meta. Have an option that’s entertaining without being a competitive scene.
I would love that, I play jank all the time… But your premise is flawed. Even if they introduced conditions to matching based on deck power, a meta would still form. You cant rely on a “gentlemans agreement” to play janky homebrews outside of using your friends list. No matter what conditions you apply, there will still be a best combination of cards to use for a given deck, forming a meta.
This is true, a meta will form… short term solution is to form a ban-list of the most popular/used cards, or cards with the highest win-rate (and if single card bans sound ridiculous, perhaps *Popular card Pairings would be something interesting, though would require a more active ‘live service’ for this game.)
There’s a way to do it, but whether they have the time/money is in the air.
This is not true if the matchmaking algorithm matches you against more difficult opponents for running more powerful cards, and matches you against easier opponents for running weaker cards.
That said, such an algorithm would need to have such a pool of opponents to draw from. If you’re already a bad player in terms of skill, it might not be possible to find a player worse than you if you run weak cards. Conversely, if you’re already a top player it can’t find players significantly better than you if you run strong cards. Essentially, a matchmaking algorithm that factors in card choice to counter the meta only works in the middle of the skill bell curve, with the system breaking at the tails.
So, just played my best deck. After losing all night with my other one, I try playing my best one because everyone I was being matched with had pretty average-tier decks.
Mage Deck
Renethal
Jaraxxus
Invincible
And like 6 or so other elite cards, didn’t even get halfway through the deck.
I had the Odyn Warrior deck going, saved up my Gorehowl, got Odyn out, slapped on a Collossal Shield for +15 attack, +5 & draw for +20, and my hero ability for a total of 29 damage. They had 27 HP and 4 armor.
I’m at like, 6 HP.
Last round, after having 3 secrets already, she played another card that applied two more.
Used Forge to draw out a bunch of fodder, wiped out two of her secrets because they were both counters. So both of my abilities, completely nullified. Hero Power for 2 attack.
I attacked. Secret: Enemy is Immune if they take fatal damage.
I lost because this mage stacked as many of the most powerful and favorable cards you could. And you try to claim this game has any semblance of skill.
It’s money, time, and looking up information. there’s no skill.
Yes, it is true. I have, on multiple occasions, fought off top tier decks and hit legend with janky homebrews, and up to 56% win rates in d5-L. There is no possible algorithm that cant be manipulated into a meta forming with any method. Your “weak vs strong” card argument falls flat on its face right there.
People will just game the system. If you create a mode like suggested trying to score the deck power, people will play a netdeck with 1-2 terrible cards in an attempt to smurf the games. Drawing the bad cards might brick a few games for them, but the others they will run away with.
They already made tons of changes to ladder to protect real lower league players from being put against smurfs.
You have that mode. It’s called friend list battles. There’s no such thing as a pvp rando matchmaking creativity mose. Most people prefer having the best tools possible to win.
You lacked the game knowledge, the skill, to consider the most common secret in wild since it’s inception. There’s only so many secrets that could affect the outcome.
The one thing that always gets a bit tricky when it comes to trying to plan a matchmaking system that takes decks into consideration is that it would have a pretty strong bias toward mirror matchups.
Take druid for example, which is often God awful against early decks, but makes up for it by being often oppressive in the mid to late game. If a matchmaking system is trying to avoid polarizing experiences, it pushes the druid away from seeing aggro decks, because that sucks for the druid, but keeps the slow decks away from druid because that sucks for them. What does that leave druids to queue against? Druids.
You run into similar issues with most OTK decks.
You get your 50-50 win rate goal, but you kind of destroy your deck variety experience out of your opponents. You can’t build a counter deck, because doing so basically just guarantees you won’t even see what you were trying to counter once the algorithm learns the deck’s matchup spread.
VS/HSR tiers would basically turn into “play this deck that is still tier 1 because it’s just not polarizing enough to lock out X/Y/Z good matchups.”
It becomes kind of a mess, and I think ignoring deck choice entirely probably gives the better experience overall.
I think this is a flawed approach to game design. It shares principles with auto leveling content that has crept into some games over the last decade, and is essentially the designers overreaching in their efforts to control the user experience. Adapting gameplay mechanics dynamically to provide a consistent user experience means that users only ever get a single experience, and that’s not what they want in the medium to long term. Users who change their approach want such choices to matter.
