I’ve never argued that skill is the only explanation for winrate differences, only that it’s the primary explanation. To be specific, my calculations indicate that winrates at top Legend are 60-70% due to skill differences relative to Diamond 4-1, and 30-40% due to deck popularity shifts relative to D4-1.
If you were intellectually honest about your position on burden of proof, you’d recant everything you’ve ever said about “arbitrary” meta changes being the primary cause of legend winrates being what they are. You’d say that you don’t have the data to know any of that. But what’s actually going on here is that you’re anti-data because the data directly undermines your actual position.
Tell that to guys like McBanterface who finish top on ladder each monthly season playing Mage. It’s a powerful deck in the hands of skilled players in a pocket meta. There’s no data for things like that. You either know or you don’t.
Well, I can understand where you and Scrotie are coming from. Moreover, the meta is a lot different at those hella high ranks. As he said, this deck has a “high skill advantage”. Love that expression.
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I’m not saying it’s the best deck in the meta. The top 50 or so legend players play in their own little meta. Those are not the kind of decks that players outside of that meta can generally play at the level they and/or getting getting the same matches each time.
He’s not wrong about the skill advantage though. Those players play in a meta that is unforgiving for even one small mistake. Playing correctly and seeing the lines of the match is something most players will never achieve or even understand.
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Skill feels like a strange word to use in a class that’s pretty much just a pile of discovery and random card generation. We didn’t say Frost DK players were skillful when they were winning games off of discovering 2 extra Frostwyrm’s Fury, so I dunno why we’re gonna say mage players are skillful for basically the same thing.
I mean, when you’re making like 20 discoveries in a game, maybe we can say picking the correct cards off the random choices makes or breaks your rank. I would rather say such things are just RNG, and the numbers USUALLY are in the mage’s favor since it’s unlikely you don’t find something that does a good enough job for what you’re looking for.
Note, that’s 20 wise decisions to make. It isn’t entirely and exactly random. For this, I have to agree with the others: Rainbow Mage indeed has a “high skill advantage”.
Mastery is knowing the correct move in EVERY possibility. Randomness creates more possibilities. Doesn’t necessarily mean that these possibilities are difficult to know, but nevertheless each one increases the skill cap at least a smidgen.
Randomness is not the opposite of skill. Indeed, they tend to go up together. No absolute rule about it though.