In this case Carnivore is correct, your argument is a strawman. Per the title of the thread the context clearly involves rank floors, and you were talking about Legend where there aren’t rank floors. By ignoring that key context you were mischaracterizing his argument.
I think this might be a case of the broken clock being right twice a day, but you kinda walked right into it here. Maybe don’t make strawman arguments against someone who you say always calls everything a strawman.
“Maybe” the “broken clock”, called nonsense being nonsense, and “maybe” someone talking nonsense consistently does it again (maybe the mistake is not just ignoring after the first ~2 times he talks nonsense).
[PS but seriously: strawman and ad hominem are the most common fallacies in gaming fora; they are sometimes ~80% of all posts (!); I’m not even surprised at this point and I don’t find it weird mainly because there are lot of children around gaming that have no clue what an argument even is.]
I think you should take a look at his argument again. It clearly involved 3 steps - I’ve focused on his final step and by refuting the final step, the conclusion of his argument, I’ve essentially refuted the whole thread.
Lokcing people at bottoms of ranks is NOT bad because people reach the rank they don’t deserve with luck and then get stuck and think they’re better than they are for the simple reason that people DON’T GET STUCK in those ranks at all. They get stuck in any rank. If they then go on to lose a couple of games to drop till the locked rank, then it happened because they went on tilt, started improvizing or straight up gave up. It doesn’t mean they don’t belong there and in fact, it probably means they will do it again next month.
It’s pointless, though. Everything in this thread is pointless. No matter who’s right or wrong. No matter who gives better arguments. The only thing happening here is OP trying to bring people down to their level and beat them with experience.
Look, everyone has what I would call an “equilibrium rank” at any one point in time. This is the rank where, based off of the decks at that rank and their personal skill level, they’re going to long term average a 50% winrate. But short term they can have win streaks or loss streaks.
So let’s consider the following:
50% chance of win streak of 1 for Platinum 1 with 3 stars
25% chance of win streak of 2 for one less star
12.5% chance of win streak of 3 for one less star.
etc etc
Even if those players start at their equilibrium rank, they don’t get stuck at Platinum 1, they get stuck at Diamond 10, because they can’t sink back down.
So it’s not like every rank is equally likely for people to get stuck in. Ranks that are just below a rank floor have less people stuck in them and rank floors have more people stuck in them, and for someone who’s stuck in a rank that’s below their “equilibrium rank” this can temporarily put them in a situation where they have a less than 50% chance to win games.
Now this does become complicated by two important factors.
There is a mirroring effect caused by better players and losing streaks. For example, consider:
50% chance of lose streak of 1 for Diamond 10 with 0 stars
25% chance of lose streak of 2 for one more star
12.5% chance of lose streak of 3 for one more star.
etc
As any month drags on, the number of players who are overqualified (their equilibrium rank is Legend, for example) climb through ranks like Platinum and Diamond. This means that lower ranks are significantly more challenging early in a month and significantly easier later in a month. This means that, over the course of a month, everyone’s equilibrium rank slowly increases. So after a while that person who’s equilibrium rank is Platinum 2 but his actual rank is Diamond 10, well his equilibrium rank then increases to Platinum 1 then to Diamond 10 then to Diamond 9 and eventually he gets unstuck and starts climbing again. So when we say “stuck” it should be understood as a temporary condition and not a permanent one.
I am very sorry if I’ve given you the impression that I need further clarification.
I don’t.
We’ve misunderstood each other. You actually think I want to get in the depth analysis of what every half-witted ladder player knows from experience. I never had that intention.
My intention was to use socratic method to make OP realize how delusional and unnecessary his obsession with locked ranks is.
It won’t happen again. I’m sick of getting stuck in pointless arguments with a child hysteric and a human bot.
It had a noticeable effect on player retention after they created ranked floors. That was the primary purpose. It kept players coming back with the star bonus so they could keep trying each month to improve and allowed players to keep trying to get to that next floor instead of dropping weeks worth of wins in an hour.
i.e. me the first month I was playing, stuck at diamond 5 for 2 weeks: I had the delusion I deserved to easily go higher: I kept facing some massive Highlander decks filled with leggos (it was the meme of that month too) and I clearly had no chance (especially when exca rogue became the meme lol…).
not sure why people resist the concept; also ‘lol’ on that guy trying to portray me as selfish here; I’m reflecting myself too being stuck at ranks not “deserving” to be there (especially if the deck too doesn’t ‘deserve’ it).
That proves nothing, because video gamers often stay for a while just because something is novel; Blizzard routinely uses the trick; e.g. they obviously create “OP” and “nerfed” classes to shake things up (I was noticing that trend in WoW for years(and it appears HS has it too)).
I think it’s bad for their games long term and they’re stupid doing it but some Executive for years at the top Blizzard appears to believe in it…
I mean, it’s a proven method of psychological manipulation. Rank floors make players who are losing feel better, so they are less likely to quit and buy more packs. You can say “but it’s just an illusion, they’re not actually better players even if they feel like they are” but it’s an illusion that exists in the sense that illusions exist, and it does the job it’s designed to do.
On a long enough timeline maybe. Problem is, that timeline is beyond what Blizzard cares about. And in all honesty I doubt that I’d do differently if I was in their shoes. I like money.
Most importantly, people who are psychologically manipulated successfully are very unlikely to discern the true nature of said manipulation afterwards. You’ve probably noticed that there are many conspiracy theorists who believe fervently that the game is rigged against them to make them feel bad. This is of course silly because frustration doesn’t make people buy packs. The actual manipulation came before that, making them feel like better players than they were, because that DOES make people buy packs. But they still believe the manipulation (that they’re better players than their results) even as their fantasy collides with reality. They might be frustrated now but they’re mostly looking in the wrong place, creating a huge amount of misinformation and distraction. So in essence Blizzard doesn’t get caught.
If they believe the game won’t last long they’re probably wrong; we’re not in the year 2000 when games looked BAD a couple of years after their release (the transistor being hard to shrink nowadays is the main cause); if they only care for short term gains because they’ll retire it’s an unsolvable problem without replacing those people.
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Feeling good does not mean profits automatically; people are hardwired to want hardship; if they give you the cheat-codes of a single-player game: you probably have noticed very blatantly that you get BORED soon after.
They probably have an algorithm searching for ways to have maximization of profit; that goes probably together with increasing the number of players; but it’s probably only the type of players who happen to be the PAYING-ones.