41 Responses to HS: What’s the problem again?

1. Trego says:

   July 28, 2015 at 5:42 pm

   Any HS game played by you, given your guaranteed winrate?
   • SynCaine says:

     July 28, 2015 at 8:22 pm

     50%ish winrate is… a coinflip.
     • Trego says:

       July 28, 2015 at 9:41 pm

       Looks like someone’s trying to have their coin and eat it too.
2. solidd says:

   July 29, 2015 at 3:08 am

   What do you think of The Grand Tournament, what is your opinion of the new mechanic and cards and do you think the pre-purchase is worth it? Would nice for once to read a real HS review from you instead of mindless (and obviously wrong) bashing about “luck” ;)
   • SynCaine says:

     July 29, 2015 at 7:09 am

     Haha yes, obviously wrong. Can’t wait to be ‘wrong’ again when the world final happens. It’s not like G&G wasn’t a massive increase of luck to the game or anything. I think there was a card or two with the world random, right?

     TGT looks decent because at least the new mechanic is controllable (hero power). As for the pre-purchase, given that HS isn’t worth spending money on period, why would a pre-purchase make sense?
     • solidd says:

       July 29, 2015 at 5:36 pm

       Simply having some rng or luck in HS or any other game does not invalidate the importance of skill in that game. I’m sure we can agree on that.

       Ergo, it is the amount of luck in HS that irks you. You think it is too high. I claim it isn’t and that given identical decks a better player (more skillful) will win more games – more than the 50-ish percent dictated by pure luck.

       In fact in HS simply having better cards or a better overall deck is much more important than luck. Doesn’t that prove the point that luck isn’t such an overriding factor as you claim?

       Since you’re the one making the claim I would say the onus is on you to prove it. Since you refuse to grind to legend (therefore proving your claim that anyone can) find some other way to prove it. As proof of my claim there I would present for example Trump’s frequent 7-12 arena win streaks as proof that a superior player makes better choices about which cards to select and how to play them. I’ve certainly never reached 12 wins and I suspect you have never either.

       “given that HS isn’t worth spending money on period, why would a pre-purchase make sense?”

       Worth is ofc up to you to determine. I am just curious about your reasoning, why spend money on other games and not HS? For me I think it is worth it since grinding 5k gold in order to buy the 50 decks would take a very long time while buying them now gets me the most bang for my buck – least amount of dust, more new cards to explore, try out and have fun with right now. That leaves me the gold I earn over the coming months to either save up for the next adventure (I bought both previous adventures with gold only) or buy more packs or arena games.

       I guess it comes down to whether you find HS fun at all to play.
       • SynCaine says:

         July 29, 2015 at 7:42 pm

         Funny you make this post on the day Blizzard (finally, since they keep falling behind, ala Blizzard) opens the rehash of the portal Tavern. Still want to say two identical decks come down to skill?

         My best in arena is 8 games. Getting to 4+ wins happens often-enough with certain champs (I’ll play a champ I’m less familiar with if the daily quests line up, which is why both arena and ranked are a joke; how often are you facing someone who doesn’t care about the win but is just trying to cast 40 spells or summoning cost-2 creatures?). You say Trump is ‘frequently’ at 7-12; what’s his overall win/loss in Arena?

         Like I’ve said, HS is 90% luck under ‘normal’ conditions (tavern right now is 100% luck, arena is likely around 95%), which is why I can’t wait for the world champs, because its going to be as big, if not a bigger joke than it was last time (GvG cards this time around as well).

         As for the spending money on HS; no chance. It’s a highly flawed game that is very limited in terms of entertainment (TV commercial filler). Compared to a quality mobile game like CoC or BB that are worth spending on because they are full, solid games, HS isn’t even in the same league. Plus there is no rush or point to getting cards early; arena is likely going to give out the new deck as a reward, so reward Blizzard for making sub-par game?
       • Trego says:

         July 29, 2015 at 8:20 pm

         What? Of course two identical decks comes down to skill. If you want to make autoracing more fair and more skill-based, you make rules to make the cars more equal. If you want to make bridge more skill-based, you play duplicate bridge instead of rubber bridge–i.e., identical hands. If you want to make basketball teams more fair, you try to make the teams as identical as possible, both in skill and in physical attributes. If you want to make boxing or MMA more fair, you make sure the participants are of identical weight. Are you seriously claiming the opposite?
       • SynCaine says:

         July 29, 2015 at 8:33 pm

         Right, so two decks of all Unstable Portal come down to skill huh?
3. Trego says:

   July 29, 2015 at 9:25 pm

   The current Tavern Brawl isn’t all unstable portal, it’s around 80% portals. ;)

   The amount of skill inherent in playing two identical decks depends on the decks. Very little in life, or games, is as black and white as the palettes you invariably try to paint HS with. I truly don’t understand your flippant descriptions of 90% luck, 95% luck, etc…what does that even mean? If you imagine two equally skilled LoL players, who over time average a 50/50 win/loss ratio when they play each other, then the result of each game comes down entirely to luck, right?–but if they played other people of vastly different skill then the win/loss ratio would more likely be 100/0 in one direction or the other. You’re reducing a complex situation into one variable and it simply doesn’t fit.

   If you really want to talk about luck in HS, you need to talk about all kinds of luck.

   1. Matchup luck. Some matchups are near even, some are completely imbalanced. control warrior vs freeze mage is basically an autowin for control warrior, e.g.
   2. Deck Ordering luck. The ordering of the cards after the ‘shuffle’ of the deck, this is the major intended luck factor in most card games.
   3. Luck from cards with inherent randomness. Since these are the dice rolls we ‘see’ happening during the game, these are often overvalued in significance by newbies. Writing critical blog posts about HS while being in this early stage of understanding is quite Tobold-ish of you, I’m sorry to say.

   If you want to compare HS with other games in terms of luck, then there is a central difference for which I will borrow a term from piloting–control authority. This basically means: how quickly you can make a craft turn. HS is rather like poker, in which the course of matches progresses slowly through multiple games–like a freighter turning with ponderous slowness. Other games, like chess and LoL, have high control authority, and a skilled player will win basically every time versus an average player, which is rather more like someone jetski’ing around whither they will. It is tempting to react to describing a difference in control authority as being equivalent to an increase in luck, and for a given number of games in a short series, it does indeed have that effect. The two main areas of low control authority in gaming are A. games which contain a higher element of ‘hiddenness’ in mechanics, for which poker vs. chess is a great example, and B. games which involve a physical component, and are thusly often described as ‘sports’. (This is usually just hiddenness again, although also sometimes randomness)

   The interaction of randomness and hiddenness is seen in 2. Deck Ordering from above, as the deck ordering is both randomly generated and initially hidden. Interestingly, something like shooting a basketball, often described as random, is not fundamentally a random process, as the random air currents inside a gym are not substantial enough to have a real impact. The physical involvement which we generally understand as random-based luck is often more accurately described as hiddenness-based luck–no one, not even the shooter ahead of time, knows exactly how his/her muscles will fire to make the ball miss or make. However, when it comes to the physics of say, a bowling ball hitting ten pins, randomness joins the fray to combine with hiddenness to generate the full picture of luck in that physical sport. What I mean by that is that this interaction is complex enough that even if we measured two balls to many significant figures of velocity and position, the exact results would still differ unpredictably.

   So, that’s a start on defining luck, which you throw around like an epithet despite, as far as I can tell from your writing, playing only games which rely at least partially on luck and spurning those that do not. I won’t even attempt to define skill.

   But to answer your question: “Right, so two decks of all Unstable Portal come down to skill huh?”

   Yes, and no, depending on how many games you play, and against whom, and what exactly you understand skill and luck to mean. :)

   I will say that my winrate in the current tavern brawl is higher than my winrate playing face hunter :)
   • SynCaine says:

     July 29, 2015 at 11:10 pm

     90% luck, 10% skill. How is that hard to understand?

     But glad the 100% luck tavern is working out for you. True skill on display.
     • Trego says:

       July 30, 2015 at 1:33 am

       “90% luck, 10% skill. How is that hard to understand?”

       It is hard to understand in the sense that they are made up numbers which don’t refer to anything real; and so if I attempt to infer any link between your words and anything that actually exists in the game of hearthstone, it doesn’t work. Why wasn’t that clear to you?

       “But glad the 100% luck tavern is working out for you. True skill on display.”

       Sarcasm, how original!
       • Caldazar says:

         July 30, 2015 at 5:11 am

         Why are you arguing with Syncaine about HS. His HS posts are his cynical hate persona, just take the posts as a source of amusement, but don’t bother with arguments or anything, as those are not really relevant.
4. solidd says:

   July 30, 2015 at 6:53 am

   Caldazar – I disagree. The whole point of blogging is to put your opinion out to the world. If Syncaine allows comments, obviously he is interested in responses to his opinions.

   If you as a reader don’t respond, you’re missing out on 50% (hurrah for made-up percentages! :)) of what makes blogs interesting, both for the writer and the readers.

   Back to the main issue – Syncaine, if consistently getting to a high number of wins (not a single time due to a god-pick) in Arena is not a marker of skill, than what is it? Because if it is consistent, it can’t be about luck!
   I think for Trump the average is 7 or higher, I don’t have a source at the moment though sorry.

   I would say the same is true of ranked play, getting to a certain rank every season is not just about luck – as you yourself noted in the past, there are decks that are known to be better than others and people can net-deck these and get a better win-rate (assuming they have the cards)! If some decks are better than others, how can the game be purely (or even mostly) luck based??

   So if Arena is not based on luck, and ranked play is not based on luck (but by your own words on playing with known good decks) doesn’t that mean the HS is not based on luck?

   My original response was that you “mindlessly” bash HS for being a luck-based game. I stand by that statement. I think you can make very valid complaints about HS but it being a pure luck-based game is not one of them.

   A few points about your spending money response:

   “It’s a highly flawed game”

   To a certain extent I agree, but then, what game is perfect? If I never spent money on a game I did not think of as perfect I would probably never spend any money on any computer game ever again…

   Also, I would love to hear more details about exactly how HS is flawed, or even “highly” flawed. I think personally “highly” is uncalled for, but perhaps you can defend your position.

   “that is very limited in terms of entertainment (TV commercial filler).”

   TV commercials last a few minutes at most, HS games can easily last 15 to 30 minutes so now you’re just in hyperbole land.

   Even if we agree HS is a limited form of entertainment, so what? Does every game need to hold you for several hours per day? And given that there are people out there who play HS for many hours (not just famous streamers), is it possible the problem is just with us?

   “Compared to a quality mobile game like CoC or BB that are worth spending on because they are full, solid games, HS isn’t even in the same league.”

   I really don’t know what you mean by “full” and “solid”. In what way is HS not a “full” or “solid” game? You sit down, open the GUI, play against people, lose some games, win some, have some fun, make some mistakes, rejoice about your cunning that allowed you to win others. You can spend only a little time and no money, or play 18 hours a day and spend hundreds of dollars and be one of the top dedicated players who invent new decks that everyone else will copy and attends tournaments all over the world. Do you even know how many HS tournaments there are?! You could watch the tournaments listed in http://hearthstonecalendar.com/tournaments all day every day and probably you would still miss a few? What are all these players and viewers doing if HS is not “full” or “solid”?!

   “Plus there is no rush or point to getting cards early”

   Well here at least we are getting into “can’t argue, personal opinion” territory. I disagree, I think if the cards are fun I might as well start enjoying them now and as I wrote before save my gold for when it will make more of a difference (adventure). Bang-for-buck. But that’s just me, YMMV.

   “arena is likely going to give out the new deck as a reward”

   Actually it was announced, starting from TGT the player will decide if the Arena reward pack will be from vanilla, GvG or TGT. So yes, you will be able to get the TGT cards without spending any money. It will just take a looooong time.

   “so reward Blizzard for making sub-par game?”

   This sentence makes no sense. Sub-par means, “poor, deficient, unacceptable, unsatisfactory”. If you’re playing the game, you must find it satisfactory and acceprable – else you wouldn’t be playing it (you’re not a masochist right?). Of course it’s not perfect, but sub-par?
   Also you are not rewarding Blizzard. You reward yourself by spending money in HS in a manner calculated to maximize your ROI. The “I” in this case being of course time (a precious commodity!)
   • SynCaine says:

     July 30, 2015 at 3:50 pm

     I’d love to see something that shows Trump has a 7+ win rate average in the arena, because honestly I don’t think he does, mostly because the system isn’t designed to work that way, and there is just too much randomness (luck) for skill to overcome. If you find some database that tracks that, like LoL data can be tracked, that would be cool to look at.

     “how can the game be purely (or even mostly) luck based??”

     Careful, I never said HS is purely luck based, just mostly (tavern with portal is super close though, but that’s just a gimmick mode that almost everyone accepts isn’t ‘serious’, ala ARAM in LoL). And what mostly means is that if you play 100 games, your skill vs the skill of the other player effects the outcome of 10 of those games. The other 90 are out of either player’s control; the dice determine the winner. Now lets say your skill level vs the other player is only different-enough to win you one more game out of that 10, and suddenly we are at a 51/49 split.

     So yes, moving up in rank is almost exclusively a grind (how many games can you play with a facerolly deck you got from the internet) vs a reflection of skill. In contrast, a highly skilled LoL player could get an account into the top 5% very quickly, while a top 10% player could play a thousand games and not crack the top 5% without improving skill-wise.

     “Also, I would love to hear more details about exactly how HS is flawed, or even “highly” flawed. ”

     Look up some of my past HS posts, I get into why it’s a rather poor game, both as a mobile title and just overall.

     “HS games can easily last 15 to 30 minutes so now you’re just in hyperbole land.”

     If you are playing 30min HS games I feel really sorry for you, that must be torture. Also should a game go far past a commercial break, I turn HS off. There is almost zero penalty for losing a game (losing ranked games is often a benefit, as the closer you are to 20, the more deck variety you see), and that is balanced out by getting d/c wins (fairly common in ranked).

     “If you’re playing the game, you must find it satisfactory and acceptable”

     It’s acceptable commercial filler after CoC/BB/Dominations/MPQ, but that doesn’t put it even close to being worth spending a cent on.

     “Also you are not rewarding Blizzard.”

     Giving money to Blizzard for HS is rewarding them, and sending the message that you want more products of HS-quality. My wallet vote is worth more than HS-quality entertainment.
     • Trego says:

       July 30, 2015 at 4:54 pm

       http://local.se/trumpstats.pl

       That is trump’s data for arena, uploaded from some attachment he uses. Of course, he could have manipulated that, since it’s not an official tracker. However, the results he has consistently had on that tracker have reflected the overall consensus for the results of top players in Arena–namely, 72-74% pre-GvG, which has been steadily dropping as ‘worse’ arena players have improved their decks by using computerized (and legal, since none of it interacts with the client) deck building aids while choosing their 30 card decks. Based on the speed with which Trump has gone from 73+% down below 72%, I’d estimate he’s been averaging more like 69% in the past few months. It of course obvious that a hypothetically exact 70% winrate, with no variance, would indeed be nothing but 7-3 arena finishes.
     • Trego says:

       July 30, 2015 at 4:56 pm

       Obviously having a higher Arena average isn’t a grindy thing–so I think we can safely conclude at this point that the results of top Arena players vs. Syn’s results prove that skill plays more of a role in HS than he previously thought, ending this incredibly fun thread. T_T
       • Anonymous says:

         July 30, 2015 at 6:33 pm

         So if Trump’s winning rate is ~70%, it means that his “skill” wins him only 20% of games (the remaining 50% of his wins is pure luck). Syn’s 10% estimate is lower but hey, Syn is exaggerating for entertainment purposes :-)
       • SynCaine says:

         July 30, 2015 at 6:40 pm

         If we assume that data is all of his games and not just a selected sub-set, the data shows that one of the best players, playing an absurd amount of games against every other player in the game (not just players close to his skill level, like an ELO system would do), wins 20% by skill, so what is the skill-win ratio of an average player?

         10% might be a very generous estimate given this data.

         The top 0.01% of LoL players, if they played 4k games against a random selection of ALL players (including bots), would sit at around 99% or so, if not some number that would be rounded up to 100% if we only use two decimal spots.
       • Trego says:

         July 30, 2015 at 6:41 pm

         @anonymous: Sorry, no, that’s not how math works. I would point out exactly how you’re wrong, but I already wrote a huge essay on how to avoid the mistake you just made just up the screen :)
       • Trego says:

         July 30, 2015 at 6:50 pm

         Hey look, Syn made the same mistake. ~_~ The least skilled HS player would win like 10% of his games. So, Trump is 60% more skilled than that player, which means that HS is 60% skill and 40% luck, but only 20% more skilled than the average player, which means that HS is 20% skill and 80% luck, except I’m just kidding, all those numbers don’t actually measure skill or luck in any reasonable way, all they measure is what they actually measure, which is winrate compared to a various population.

         Perhaps your math works for other things besides hearthstone though. let’s try it out: If I competed in a dunk contest against Lebron James, then he would win 100% of the time, so dunking is 50% skill and 50% luck, but if I faced him in a game of horse he would only win 85% of the time, so shooting baskets is 35% skill and 65% luck, whereas if I played him at Frisbee Golf I would win 90% of the time, so Frisbee Golf is only 40% skill and 60% luck. I don’t know, it still feels like I’m just making up random numbers and then turning those random numbers into different numbers according to an incorrect formula and pretending they mean something called skill and luck. I’ll keep at it and let you know how it turns out.
       • SynCaine says:

         July 30, 2015 at 6:58 pm

         Not being able to follow numbers, and showing that said numbers are wrong, are two different things.

         But the useful thing here is you gave data that backed up the point of the post, so thank you for that.
5. Trego says:

   July 30, 2015 at 7:46 pm

   “Not being able to follow numbers, and showing that said numbers are wrong, are two different things.”

   That’s the beauty of just making up numbers and formulas as you have done, they’re not wrong per se, they’re just made up. You have arbitrarily claimed that skill = winrate – 0.5. I am clearly able to follow this math, as I have read your examples and magically divined the formula. I just don’t agree with it; and since you’ve presented no argument in support of it, I can’t even look for errors in your argument. I can make fun of it with Lebron James examples, or I can get a bit more scholarly and look for historical problems with this claim.

   One would be to look at the effect over time. We can start with Hearthstone: as the game has progressed, and those slower to learn have begun to catch up in skill to those who were quicker to learn, the standard deviation in winrate has decreased. Using your formula of skill = top winrate – 0.5, this means we have reached the conclusion that as the average level of player skill/knowledge has increased in HS, the total level of skill which HS enables a player to display has decreased. More skill in the population implies less skill in the game itself. This definition is oxymoronic and counterintuitive, but it’s not ‘wrong’ per se, as it doesn’t exist in a framework of right and wrong.

   Of course this same effect is seen in most fields of competition. Track and field, swimming, baseball, etc. As time has gone on, and the level of knowledge in each of this fields has increased, the standard deviation has decreased. Those of these fields which include not only comparative, but objective measurements, such as track and field and swimming, conclusively show that as the standard deviation among times has gone down, the elapsed total time has also gone down, showing that rising objective individual performance is correlated with lowered std dev. As the standard deviation goes down, the top performance – mean performance is also expected to decrease, on average, which implies that the problem in the previous paragraph is endemic to your system in all these other fields– by analogy with times and winrate in the timed fields; the comparison between winrate and batting average is more direct. It’s not necessarily true that reduction in standard deviation of times changes the standard deviation of winrates in head to head matches in an event like the 100m freestyle swim, but I’ve included those examples to better illustrate the overall trend in average skill vs standard deviation of performance across various fields of human endeavor.

   sources:

   An essay expanding upon Stephen Jay Gould’s famous essay on the decrease in standard deviation in batting averages over time due to improved average skills in baseball players: http://danagonistes.blogspot.com/2004/08/where-have-400-hitters-gone.html

   here are some figures from a journal article on improvements in Olympic events where you can just eyeball the decreasing std devs. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008800 they were more concerned with running curve fits than talking about reductions in variance over time, but it’s pretty clear and I’m not going to take the time to run those numbers myself.
   • Trego says:

     July 30, 2015 at 7:53 pm

     (of course I would normally not criticize a proposed system until the creator had made some reasonable affirmative defense of it, so as to not reward argument from ignorance, but it seems like the mistake of assuming that subtracting 0.5 magically gives you a useful figure was so attractive that multiple people fell prey to it, so I bent my rules a bit)
     • SynCaine says:

       July 30, 2015 at 7:57 pm

       So I summary, you still don’t understand what the numbers 90%/10% are used to show when talking about HS. We can move on, as others are able to follow the conversation and we don’t need a 100% rate here.
     • Trego says:

       July 30, 2015 at 9:36 pm

       In summary, you are making up numbers out of thin air and now you are making up a summary out of thin air. At least you are consistent.

       You are right about one thing: we can move on, as you making up numbers and summaries out of thin air was never stopping anyone from moving on, or accomplishing anything whatsoever.
   • Anonymous says:

     July 30, 2015 at 9:20 pm

     Trego, numbers aside, is it possible for a relatively new player (low skill level) to win a game against an experienced (high skill level) player with identical decks? If yes, than luck plays a very significant role in HS. You cannot say the same about your sport analogies, can you?
     • Trego says:

       July 30, 2015 at 9:33 pm

       I can truthfully say that luck plays a very significant role in certain sports.
       • SynCaine says:

         July 30, 2015 at 9:49 pm

         But not in certain other sports, right?
       • Trego says:

         July 30, 2015 at 10:06 pm

         Sports have a higher luck floor than games, generally, due to the possibility of injury or illness, but obviously some have much less luck than others, yes.
       • SynCaine says:

         July 30, 2015 at 10:39 pm

         Progress, finally.

         Now that you admit some games have more luck than others, it’s down to how much luck you believe exists in HS. I tend to believe a fair amount, you don’t. I’d point you towards an expansion that features a significant amount of cards with the word “random” in them as a starting point, or to your own data set that showed one of the best players in the world only winning 70% of his games vs the average player. I’d recommend you stay away from your other data point; winning more games in the current tavern vs ranked play.
       • Anonymous says:

         July 30, 2015 at 10:49 pm

         Are you saying that you have a non-zero chance to beat any NBA player 1 on 1, or hit a baseball further than any MLB player, or run 100 dash faster than any of the top 1,000 sprinters, or win a boxing match against any professional boxer, etc?
       • Trego says:

         July 30, 2015 at 11:05 pm

         “Now that you admit some games have more luck than others, it’s down to how much luck you believe exists in HS. I tend to believe a fair amount, you don’t”

         Sorry, I don’t believe that. I wrote a long essay about many different types of luck, all of which exist in HS. My main objection has been to you describing all of these different kinds of luck with one variable, i.e., by one sensible way of talking about it, I believe that HS has more luck in it than you do. It’s no wonder that you haven’t been able to follow this discussion properly, if you are proceeding from such a basic misconception as this.
     • Trego says:

       July 30, 2015 at 10:22 pm

       I’ve already addressed your first question above, but just to reiterate: the kind of luck you are talking about averages out over hundreds of games. When someone says a game is 90% luck, when certain kinds of luck are the kind that have to do with how many games are being measured, and other kinds of luck are of other varieties, it’s describing a complex situation with a single variable, as I’ve already mentioned. But yes, if you are talking about only that specific one of the meanings of luck which I described, over only one game, then yes, luck plays a very significant role. That is not a claim I have been arguing against.
       • Anonymous says:

         July 30, 2015 at 10:43 pm

         Let’s assume that luck determines 90% of HS games and 10% is decided by skill. Sure, over a long run a more skillful player will have a better win rate than a less skillful player (a 10% difference, 55% vs 45%). And with your advanced math skills you can show that the difference between the win rate of the skilled player (55%), and the less skilled player (45%) is statistically significant. I would still call this game luck driven. Why would my assumption be wrong?
       • Trego says:

         July 30, 2015 at 11:01 pm

         “Let’s assume that luck determines 90% of HS games and 10% is decided by skill”

         I don’t know what this means.

         Most HS games are determined by a combination of luck and skill. Separating them out is a nontrivial task. I wrote a long essay about it, which no one has responded to in a meaningful manner. The assumption you want to make is not well-determined enough to be sensible. Do you mean that you want to assume that 90% of games determined by luck to a level where you can assume that the winning side is played as poorly as possible, and the losing side as well as possible, and the winning side still wins? Or do you mean to assume that if both sides play to an average level? Or both sides play perfectly? Or one player is playing how he plays, and the other side is average? Or….etc, I could come up with another 20 variations on this theme. Like I’ve said many times, you guys are attempting to describe a complex situation with a single variable, and it just doesn’t work.
       • SynCaine says:

         July 30, 2015 at 11:16 pm

         “Do you mean that you want to assume that 90% of games determined by luck to a level where you can assume that the winning side is played as poorly as possible, and the losing side as well as possible, and the winning side still wins? Or do you mean to assume that if both sides play to an average level? Or both sides play perfectly? Or one player is playing how he plays, and the other side is average? Or…”

         Gun to your head, which one do you think we are talking about?
       • Trego says:

         July 30, 2015 at 11:24 pm

         “Gun to your head, which one do you think we are talking about?”

         None of them.

         I would guess that you guys are *trying* to say that if two random players play at their respective skill levels, then the variation in results will stay between 55 and 45% win rate.

         My objections to this, which I’ve already enumerated, are:

         1. This isn’t true, people in various HS situations achieve much higher than a 55% winrate over thousands of games.
         2. If this is what you are trying to say, then I don’t agree that the words you guys are using match what you are trying to say, for reasons given above at great length.
         3. This is describing a dynamic system with a static vocabulary. The skill levels of the population change over time, the winrate changes over time, so your description must necessarily change over time as well, or be dynamic in nature.
       • Anonymous says:

         July 30, 2015 at 11:28 pm

         I think that in your essay defining different types of luck in HS you are splitting hairs and making it more complex than it really is. If below average player can occasionally beat one of the best players in HS it tells me that the component of luck is too hight for my taste. It might be just right for you.
       • SynCaine says:

         July 31, 2015 at 7:30 am

         “None of them.”

         And you’re dead.
6. solidd says:

   August 1, 2015 at 9:49 am

   Syncaine – 30 minute games are rare, but don’t feel sorry, I enjoy them also, win or lose. In any case typical game length is much longer than a TV commercial break. The exception being the occasional match against a face hunter or paladin – those I either win quickly or lose quickly.

   If you personally decide to play only short games, only against bad player (level 20) and don’t enjoy any of the finer points of HS game play than what can I say, I’m the one who feels sorry for you – I think you’re missing out on the more fun parts of the game.

   it’s a shame that instead of interesting and thought provoking critics we get what amounts to personal and un-substantiated (not backed up by any facts) claims that winning in HS is mostly about luck.

   “And what mostly means is that if you play 100 games, your skill vs the skill of the other player effects the outcome of 10 of those games. The other 90 are out of either player’s control”

   There’s no way to prove or disprove these numbers. How do you expect meaningful discussion with made-up numbers that cannot be proven? Do you have a way to back these numbers up? If not, how do you know the real situation is not closer to 90 games skill 10 games luck? Gut feeling?

   “So yes, moving up in rank is almost exclusively a grind (how many games can you play with a facerolly deck you got from the internet) vs a reflection of skill.”

   We both agreed ranking up is not for us. Anyone who wants to mindlessly play face hunter just to reach legend, well… has no life tbh :)
   That doesn’t make games at our level less interesting or fun. As for luck? Any luck in drawing or not drawing a certain card at a specific stage of the game averages out over many games and that the reason I continue to rank up every season (hit 11 last season) is due to my increased mastery of the decks I built and better cards I put in as I get more cards over time.

   Oh and that’s another point, the whole “just netdeck” point doesn’t hold water for us casuals. I can’t build the vast number of decks listed on hearthpwn because I just don’t have the cards. Sure you can spend hundreds of dollars to get either the cards directly or the dust to craft them, but what kind of casual does that?

   That’s not to say that luck isn’t a factor in HS – of course it is. But it’s part of what makes HS games fun, e.g. when you aren’t sure what will happen when your Mad Bomber hits and he wins you the game. Sure, you could look at that and say “see, luck! you had a 1 in 5 chance to hit the enemy hero”. Ah, but my response would be, it was skill that brought the enemy hero down to 1 health and made it possible for my Mad Bomber to win the game.

   “Look up some of my past HS posts, I get into why it’s a rather poor game, both as a mobile title and just overall.”

   I can’t, you don’t have a “Hearthstone” category in your “categories” pull-down menu.

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