Magic: The Combattening - Hearthstone

[dusematic]

Top players at HS have an average win rate of 60 percent in ranked play

If randomness wasn't an issue it should be higher

That doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they're playing other top rated players of the same rank as them I'm sure.

[Morat20]

Arena with a mage. Like EVERY Arena run I win the first two, then get face rolled for two or three. Their matchmaking is really atrocious.

In Arena, every time you win, you then face people who have the same wins.  So at two wins, you're facing other people with two wins.  That's why you always lose then.  Because you're a baddie.

I'd bet it balances every two games, actually. Because it really has been two easy wins, two "Why am I even here" games, then an iffy game. Over and over.

[schild]

The implication that 40% of the players are top tier at any given time is hilarious. Ive gone on ridiculous win streaks in large (6+ round) big prize magic tournaments an absurd number of times and can count on two hands the number of times I've played the actual cream. No one is playing the top 1% of players 40% of the time. In the formats provided by Hearthstone (the shittiest sealed format ever and constructed) if randomness was minimized in card design, we'd see winrates of 80-85%. Not that theres even a pairing system that makes sense in Hearthstone that would yield worthwhile win results.

[Rendakor]

Arena with a mage. Like EVERY Arena run I win the first two, then get face rolled for two or three. Their matchmaking is really atrocious.

In Arena, every time you win, you then face people who have the same wins.  So at two wins, you're facing other people with two wins.  That's why you always lose then.  Because you're a baddie.

I'd bet it balances every two games, actually. Because it really has been two easy wins, two "Why am I even here" games, then an iffy game. Over and over.

I haven't played enough to be sure, but I believe you're always facing someone with the exact same record as you in arena. So your iffy game is another person who is 2-2.

[schild]

Iffy matches or not, without standard card distribution in their arena, skill is tossed out the window. I dont even know why this game has bad rares. Youll never play them in constructed, and in the arena they only serve to fuck potential since you choose 30 cards without building an actual deck and press go.

[Morat20]

Iffy matches or not, without standard card distribution in their arena, skill is tossed out the window. I dont even know why this game has bad rares. Youll never play them in constructed, and in the arena they only serve to fuck potential since you choose 30 cards without building an actual deck and press go.

I would play a lot more arena if they offered me 90 cards and had me pick 30. Even if it was the exact same 90, crap rares and all. Just do all the random number generating and give me my choices.

[Paelos]

I gave up on arena a long time ago. It's nowhere near fair or fun to me.

[jakonovski]

I gave up on arena a long time ago. It's nowhere near fair or fun to me.

Agreed on the fairness, and more and more on the fun too. But how do you get cards without arena, if you don't mind me asking?

[Tannhauser]

Complete quests with your constructed decks. Once you earn 100 gold, go to the shop and spend that 100 gold on a pack.

[schild]

Iffy matches or not, without standard card distribution in their arena, skill is tossed out the window. I dont even know why this game has bad rares. Youll never play them in constructed, and in the arena they only serve to fuck potential since you choose 30 cards without building an actual deck and press go.

I would play a lot more arena if they offered me 90 cards and had me pick 30. Even if it was the exact same 90, crap rares and all. Just do all the random number generating and give me my choices.

A large number of my complaints would go away if:

1. You kept the cards you drafted.
2. All arena runs were 2 legendary/mythic, 4 rare, 8 uncommon, 16 common.
3. If the majority of rares and mythics weren't total dank no one would want in a game WITH trading.

Fuck, they just really couldn't have made it worse without actively trying to do so.

[jakonovski]

Complete quests with your constructed decks. Once you earn 100 gold, go to the shop and spend that 100 gold on a pack.

Well derp, I obviously meant the slow pace of card acquisition. With arena you at least get to play with all the cards (to varying degrees), but straight f2p constructed is an exercise in outing the same underpowered pile of commons over and over. Grinding, in other words.

[lac]

They wanted MtG for dummies and make a buck out of it and that's what they did. This game is racking up players everywhere and those players seem to be spending. I've got candy crush colleagues who've spend a hundred bucks on this game just to be "in it". Blizz is doing this right, they took the heroin that is MtG, cooked it down to casual size and are serving it to a demographic that's still discovering casual gaming and take in-game purchases for granted.
It's obvious it's strongly luck based but as a business model that's a strength, up to a point, because it encourages casual players to buy more cards in order to become stronger players even if that sounds a bit counter-intuitive. If it was purely skill based there wouldn't be any point in buying more cards, buying needs to give you an advantage. It's their bottom line and, as they've done before, they've executed this one quite well.

As to card acquisition you can actually get quite far with a well constructed noob deck. When I first checked this game out I made the decks suggested in the icy veins guide and it took me to rank 14-15 without much trouble. If you play casually it's nice to add those 5 cards you get every 2 days through quests to your repertoire and work from there. It's a simple game that's fun during lunchbreak. They did well.

[Paelos]

Complete quests with your constructed decks. Once you earn 100 gold, go to the shop and spend that 100 gold on a pack.

Well derp, I obviously meant the slow pace of card acquisition. With arena you at least get to play with all the cards (to varying degrees), but straight f2p constructed is an exercise in outing the same underpowered pile of commons over and over. Grinding, in other words.

I don't play that often. I just play for dailies and however long my winning streak lasts on ranked after dailies.

[Ingmar]

To put it another way that's right about where very good Blood Bowl players tend to land when you leave out the joke teams and such. I love Blood Bowl but I'm pretty sure it doesn't hit the randomness sweet spot for competitive games.

[lamaros]

To put it another way that's right about where very good Blood Bowl players tend to land when you leave out the joke teams and such. I love Blood Bowl but I'm pretty sure it doesn't hit the randomness sweet spot for competitive games.

Surely BB is higher than 60% for the better players. Surely!

Also I still don't get the whole 'dailies' thing (I get it, it's for addicts). What a bizzare gaming feature that is.

[Rendakor]

Dailies feel more like a facebook game hook here: log in everyday or YOU'LL MISS OUT ON STUFF! I hated them in WoW, I hate them in HS and I hate them in HotS.

[jakonovski]

Got the 300 gold reward for 100 wins, did 3 arenas and went 1-9. It was really astonishing, I could see my losses like a million miles away and think of the cards that could've helped, but were never offered in the draft. Funnily, I got my Warrior's weapon destroyed 5 times in 4 matches, but when I drew Harrison Ford in a later draft, I faced not a single deck that used weapons.

I liken this game to buying lottery tickets now, my Mtg experience lets me play pretty much flawlessly and then I just see what I topdeck.

edit: found this. http://hearthstonetracker.com/

[schild]

Someone should make that for Hex because mining stats from a slot machine seems worthless.

[naum]

I finally jumped in, got to play quite a bit over the weekend, as I was doing laundry and waiting for folks to come look at/repair my roof (and who never showed up ;().

Put together a clone of that basic Warlock "zoo" deck -- rose up to 5 ranks or so, and have only lost twice, also with half-dozen or more wins in casual/unranked play.

Tried the arena, and I must really suck cause I went 1-3, though 2 of those losses were really close, and one was a paladin that I must have killed 3X but he kept pulling Heal+6, it seemed half-dozen times, plus all the other heals from minion plays that have heal battlecry effect. I didn't say any rares or legendary cards in the random card trios presented to me, and only one of my opponents seemed to have more than a few killer cards like that.

Completed quests, bought a few packs, though maybe I should have saved gold for arena play as I still don't plan on spending real coin on this. I want to like Arena, but that pick one from three seems like a horrible mechanism for a balanced competition. At least playing MtG sealed decks or drafting or league play (back when it existed), you could craft  a deck from the limited cards, and go with the best of what you got dealt. But here, in this mode, you're at multiple mercies -- the RNG can screw you 2 ways: early on, you lock in to certain cards, but you don't get enough combo cards to make them work; you just don't get enough powerful cards comparatively. Perhaps I'm overthinking it.

Some other observations:

* MtG it not by a long stretch :(, but it not as drab as my initial reflections from reading game descriptions here.

* Grindy to get all the heroes to level 10 (there's a few classes I haven't done this with yet).

* The mana mechanism is a curious choice -- the +1 progression that totally correlates to criticisms here that makes for games to be over by 3-4 turns -- not all games, but I'd estimate most are settled by that point. Later game, it's all about who has more cards in hand, and if you fall behind, you're not rectifying it. And once you dip below 10 HP, it's over for just any of the hero classes, except for paladin.

* OTOH, the extra card, mana +1 coin does balance out advantage of going 1st.

* Not that much of a card library is there? How many cards are there? A couple hundred?

[Paelos]

I'm not starting to figure out if I'll lose on the draw 9 time out of 10. I'm almost to the point where I'll just forfeit early but I haven't gotten that jaded just yet.

[Jeff Kelly]

That doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they're playing other top rated players of the same rank as them I'm sure.

Let me put it another way. In almost all other competitive type card games you wouldn't be considered a "Top Player" with such a win/loss ratio. If you consider that the number is an average over hundreds or thousands of games then in some types of games you would also be broke (Poker for example) because you don't win often enough to counter the losing streaks you encounter due to the innate randomness of the game.

If you consider that each of the top players starts of at Rank 25 every month and will encounter lots and lots of weaker opponents in arena and ranked until they hit maybe rank 5 that ratio should be higher. In other types of games it's a lot higher.

It's indicative of randomness playing a significant part in how your games go, more than in other type of games. It's also indicative that even 'good' players have problems dealing with the effect randomness has on the game. It points to randomness having to much of an effect on the outcome. An effect good players can still deal with most of the time but nevertheless significant. In most poker variants the better player will win significantly more often against the weaker player regardless of the randomness, in Magic the better player will win significantly more often than the weaker player regardless of randomness and so on. In HS even great players seem to barely beat the EV of a coin toss.

Many consider randomness to be a 'necessary evil' of game design. Designing games without the element of randomness is hard and even well designed games like Chess tend to often end in a draw type situation when the skill of all players is close to each other. A game of "Diplomacy!" for example can go on forever. Such games also often have their own problems with 'rote' or 'tried and true' strategies that you pretty much have to follow.

Randomness shouldn't be the dominant game mechanic though. It's a great way to randomize encounters, to make sure that you can't perfectly execute your strategy every time and that you need to react to changes and swings of the game you hadn't predicted before. If it's dominant though your game is only slightly better than most casino games or roling dice.

[jakonovski]

My favorite card so far has to be Bane of Doom. 2 damage to target creature, if it dies then summon random demon. Which can be anything from 0/1 to 6/6. Skillz!

[dusematic]

That doesn't have anything to do with the fact that they're playing other top rated players of the same rank as them I'm sure.

Let me put it another way. In almost all other competitive type card games you wouldn't be considered a "Top Player" with such a win/loss ratio. If you consider that the number is an average over hundreds or thousands of games then in some types of games you would also be broke (Poker for example) because you don't win often enough to counter the losing streaks you encounter due to the innate randomness of the game.

If you consider that each of the top players starts of at Rank 25 every month and will encounter lots and lots of weaker opponents in arena and ranked until they hit maybe rank 5 that ratio should be higher. In other types of games it's a lot higher.

It's indicative of randomness playing a significant part in how your games go, more than in other type of games. It's also indicative that even 'good' players have problems dealing with the effect randomness has on the game. It points to randomness having to much of an effect on the outcome. An effect good players can still deal with most of the time but nevertheless significant. In most poker variants the better player will win significantly more often against the weaker player regardless of the randomness, in Magic the better player will win significantly more often than the weaker player regardless of randomness and so on. In HS even great players seem to barely beat the EV of a coin toss.

Many consider randomness to be a 'necessary evil' of game design. Designing games without the element of randomness is hard and even well designed games like Chess tend to often end in a draw type situation when the skill of all players is close to each other. A game of "Diplomacy!" for example can go on forever. Such games also often have their own problems with 'rote' or 'tried and true' strategies that you pretty much have to follow.

Randomness shouldn't be the dominant game mechanic though. It's a great way to randomize encounters, to make sure that you can't perfectly execute your strategy every time and that you need to react to changes and swings of the game you hadn't predicted before. If it's dominant though your game is only slightly better than most casino games or roling dice.

I guess I doubt your initial premise.  It's a fact that top players in Arena have around 70-75%% win rates.  I haven't seen any numbers for top players in constructed ranked play, but I would presume it's higher than that.  I guess it depends on when you measure.  If you measure from rank 25 to Legendary, it's probably a higher win rate as you feast on scrubs on your way down.  But I mean at some point a top player is going to hit Legendary rank and then be facing all Legendary ranked players, so I don't know how high the win rate is supposed to be if you're a top player facing other top players.  Presumably two top players of equal skill would have 50% win rates.  

[Simond]

This season's card back is amazing:

[ezrast]

Shit, that makes me want to reinstall.

Almost.

[naum]

Pony up reddit, who's spent the most real world money on Hearthstone?

http://www.twitch.tv/lifecoach1981/c/4314111

Dude opens up 400 packs in 10 different languages in a ~2.5 hour video.

[jakonovski]

That sweet sweet gambling addict money.

*shudder*

[schild]

I haven't changed the first deck I made since I played the game in beta after that wipe. I'll play every season just to get the card backs on the offchance I ever sell my Blizzard account. Incremental value, whoooo. Anyway.



Have fun. Game sucks.

[jakonovski]

Man I ain't got like any of those cards in there. Was the game significantly more giving in the beta (creating yet another class of privileged players), or did you actually spend money?

[schild]

I spent $50 when the Hex alpha got delayed so I could see what Hearthstone was all about. Obviously haven't spent a dime since, but I'm generally willing to give Blizzard that sort of automagic $50 shelf value on anything they make to see what's up.

[Tannhauser]

The Black Temple card backs look great.  Not very hard to get the backs either.  Also, the last two legendaries I got were both Cenarius  .  But one melted down to 400pts which lets you craft an epic so not a total loss.

Lastly, if every game you play is 'decided by turn 3 or 4' you or your opponent is a scrub.

[Lakov_Sanite]

http://hearthstats.net/apr

TL;DR  "This game is a coin toss" 

[Paelos]

Those are stats I would think Blizzard would work their ass off to hide.

[Hoax]

Why? They will say it proves they have fucking amazing class balance. Look at that, their class vs class winrates prove how amazing their balance is! All hail Blizz! Best devs!

[schild]

Those are stats I would think Blizzard would work their ass off to hide.

Why? Your average reader probably looks at it and says "seems fair."

There's a saying, "A person is smart, people are dumb." No, a person is dumb too.

Also I just quoted Men in Black. Sooooooooooooooooooooo. I think they know their target audience. Wallets with mouths - of course, you can't chat in game, so your champion or whatever doesn't have a mouth, but he is certainly indicative of you being a wallet.

Edit: Hoax basically just said what I said sans MiB stuff, so I'm leaving this up.