Ben Brode On The Meta, Balance, and Shaman
Ben Brode has written down his thoughts about the current meta, the Shaman class and his balance considerations on the official Hearthstone forums today. There is a patch planned for the end of February and an announcement of balance changes will be made a week or so before that.
- The past two weeks, 30% of players were playing Shaman on the Legend ladder
- 17% of players were playing Shaman when all ranks are included
- This includes all types of Shaman decks
- The worst point in history, balance wise, was Undertaker Hunter where Hunter was being played by 35% of players across all ranks
- The 'pirate package' of Small-Time Buccaneer and Patches the Pirate is being played in rougly 50% of decks above rank 5
- The average win-rate for Aggro Shaman is 53%, which is currently the highest win-rate deck in the meta
- There has never been a 'best deck' with a lower win-rate than this
- It only has a 35% win-rate against Control Warrior that is tuned against it.
- For example this Control Warrior from Fibonacci works great!
- There will be a patch near the end of this month
- An announcement about balance changes will be made around a week or so before that
Quote from Ben BrodeHey everyone!I've been reading a lot of feedback on the state of the game, whether pirates are too good, and whether shaman is too good. I'm also seeing a lot of folks wondering what we are planning to do about some of the current issues.
I should start by saying that we truly appreciate all of your feedback. I think Hearthstone is at its best when the development team and the community discuss and share ideas back and forth. These are real issues, and hearing about your experiences has been helpful for us in determining next steps.
So today, I wanted to talk a bit about the meta, potential nerfs, and how we think about balance.
To get us started, I wanted to define some terms. These are common terms, so there may be no revelations here, but it's useful to make sure we're talking about the same things, and how these terms (which are common to all games) are specifically used in relation to Hearthstone.
About the Meta
The Meta is short for the 'metagame'. The game is what happens once you tap 'Play' and see the spinner. The metagame is what happens outside of the game. It's what deck you choose to play. It's what decks your opponents choose to play. Some people define 'metagame' as literally everything game-related, including chatting with friends about it, reading information about it online, or anticipating upcoming content. The Hearthstone community uses it more frequently as "all decks that everyone is using" and often more specifically as the "the top X decks". If there are 7 decks that all see enough play that you see them again and again while you play, you might say those decks are 'the meta'. If you're playing a deck that people don't see often, you are playing 'off meta'. If you build a deck specifically to beat the most popular deck then you are playing to counter the meta. It doesn't matter if a deck is good or bad, what affects the meta most is how frequently any one deck appears. It's important to note that bad decks can be part of 'the meta', and good decks might not be widely spread enough yet to have become part of 'the meta'.
About Balance
Balance can mean different things in different contexts. Sometimes we use it to describe the relative power level between things. Sometimes we use it to describe how often things are being used in relation to each other. And there is a complex relationship between these two metrics.
For example, a class might have a very high win rate, relative to others. That's not balanced. When that happens, more people tend to flock to that class, increasing the play rate. Eventually, that class will become played more than other classes. That's also not balanced, and it's the more worrying imbalance.
We believe, at its core, Hearthstone is more fun when you are having a variety of experiences. We randomize the order of cards in your decks, restrict you to 2 copies of each card, and limit your hand size and the amount 'card draw' we print to help make experiences different each game. We print cards with random effects partially for this reason. But one of the biggest ways to give you different experiences (and problems to solve) each game is to give you different opponents with different decks. We also release new cards, because even all of these things isn't quite enough to keep things variant over time.
There are games with less variety (like Chess), that are still very deep. But we believe that allowing creativity in deckbuilding, and giving players new and different problems to solve is really fun.
The value of Balance, then, is to keep giving players different experiences.
This is not to say that each card's role is to compete for a spot in a competitive deck. Some cards (like Majordomo Executus), are intended to be a lot of fun for players who like big splashy moments. Other cards are meant to be deckbuilding challenges to players who like to experiment with cards that others have deemed weak (Hobgoblin). Some are meant to be hooks for learning or comparison. ("This is like Chillwind Yeti, but better! That must be good!")
Statistics and the State of the Meta
I wanted to go through some stats about the current meta, and talk about how we analyze them.
Over the last two weeks, 30% of players are piloting Shaman at Legend. If you include all ranks, 17% of players are playing Shaman. This includes several decks: Aggro Shaman, Midrange Shaman, Control Shaman and Jade Shaman.
The worst point of imbalance in our history was Undertaker Hunter, where Hunter was played by 35% of players across all ranks.
The Pirate 'package' of Small-Time Buccaneer and Patches the Pirate is played in about 50% of all decks at rank 5 and above.
The average win rate of the best deck in the meta is 53%. Historically, there has never been a 'best deck' with a lower win-rate. Put another way, this is the worst 'best deck' in Hearthstone's history. The win rate is consistent across all ranks, though individual players have wildly variant individual experiences. We don't include mirror matches in our calculations.
The highest win rate of all time was Undertaker Hunter around 60%.
When evaluating balance, we look at the win rate of decks and classes, compare them to the impossible ideal (50%), and to the worst case (60%). Knowing that 50% is impossible, we just want it to be "close". This isn't a science, but for us, that has traditionally been between 53% and 56%. This isn't the most important metric, though. If a deck has a 70% win rate, but only a handful of players are playing it, that's great. It doesn't cause the issues of non-variant gameplay... yet. Traditionally when a deck has a very high win rate, people begin to copy it, and it becomes a larger and larger part of the meta. Another important consideration for us at that point is 'Counters'.
When a deck loses to specific cards or other decks, players can be rewarded for playing those counters as that deck rises in popularity. If a deck ever became 60% of the meta, but there was a deck that handily beat it, then you could have a 60% win rate by playing that deck, and it would become the new best deck in the meta. This phenomenon causes metas to change over time. We've seen that so far since the release of Gadgetzan – Pirate Warrior hit peaks of 30%, but shrank to as low as 10% over time. There were also a few days in which Reno Warlock was the dominant deck and which Rogue was the dominant deck at very high skill levels. When the meta is still changing, we don't like to make changes to cards.
Right now, Aggro Shaman is one of our highest win-rate deck, but has a 35% win rate vs Control Warrior decks that are tuned to beat them. Reno Mage is also a bad match up for them. Does this mean that it has become 'correct' to play Control Warrior? It depends on the other decks in the meta, and whether Aggro Shaman continues to become more popular. Fibonacci recently took advantage of the predictable meta and built a Control Warrior deck that did very well against Aggro Shaman.
We believe that it's important to let good players recognize shifts in the meta, and capitalize on their knowledge before the meta shifts and the 'solution' changes. This is one of biggest reasons why we don't nerf cards very frequently. When metas stagnate for too long; When there are no good counters; When the best decks aren't fun to play or lose to; these are all reasons we have made balance adjustments in the past. If a deck is popular for a few weeks, that isn't a reason to make a nerf on its own. We'd have to be concerned about the fun, not be seeing any emerging counter-strategies, or be far enough away from a new content release to be worried about stagnation for a long time.
So that brings us to today. Another consideration for making a balance adjustment is planning around a client patch for each of our platforms. We are working on the ability to stream balance adjustments (and other content) directly to players' devices, but until we have that ability, we need to release a client patch to make a change to a card. Our next patch is planned for around the end of this month. You can expect an announcement from us regarding balance changes either way in the week or so leading up to that date.
Fibonacci's Anti-Shaman Control Warrior
Want to check out that Warrior deck Ben was talking about? We have it right here!
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I think you must have read a different article. The article acknowledged and discussed problems with the meta, then went on to say there was a balance patch being released at the end of the month.
Whether the patch works or not, who knows, but I'm completely bemused as to where you have derived your synopsis from?!
That is very disturbing, basically saying the meta essentially is pirate decks (rogue, shaman, warrior) vs turn 6 Reno Jackson (warlock, priest, mage.) A lot of cool decks, and entire classes are shut out of the meta right now. I would actually prefer a "best deck" with a higher winrate, but more variety.
Brode pretty much said the same thing.
Which didn't stop them for demolishing Patron Warrior and OTK Worgen Warrior. I've hear it was the same with Oil Rogue, but I didn't play at the time, so I'm not gonna dwell on that part.
Thats true. It would be a good point to put to him.
I wonder if the people who stopped playing the game are counted towards the "x % of players play shaman" statistics. This would mean that 30% of players are playing shaman and meanwhile 40% of people stopped playing the game. 29% are just the roleplayers playing renodecks and 1% are the real MVPs with exclusively incredible new decks
This balance patch is probably the fastest response from blizzard, only 3 months, not even waited the new expansion and rotation.
GJ BLIZZARD
To me, it feels like this post was purely condescending, it's as if Blizzard it trying to speak to us as if we were children, explaining terms of what a meta is, or what balance looks like. Not only that but these analytics don't mean anything without a timeframe for reference. It's not just that Shaman is strong, but for how long he's been in the meta as a top tier deck. If 17% of players were playing him this month, that's nice, but imagine when Karazhan released what those numbers might look like. There are threads going as far back as May of last year complaining about Shaman. This is too little too late. I've stopped playing Hearthstone after they announced they might be changing Evergreen, but came back to read this post hoping the team might have done something good for once. I leave again baffled by their incompetence. Thanks B-Team
Ladies and gentlemen set your faces to palm
Some key points I wanted to touch on
"The Pirate 'package' of Small-Time Buccaneer and Patches the Pirate is played in about 50% of all decks at rank 5 and above."
the fact that half of your competitive players are abusing the pirate package, and the other half are building their decks with patches in their sights should be a clear indicator the game has completely warped around these cards. That Team 5 doesn't come out and and plainly admit that this is a huge problem is disturbing. Saying aggro shaman isn't as broken as the most busted deck in the game's history doesn't tell us a damn thing. The problem isn't aggro shaman's winrate. Its player's perception of ladder efficiency for grinding to legend (which aggro shaman is great for), which leads to shaman's over representation. All that stems from a much deeper problem within the ladder system rewarding faster decks, which is a topic for a different conversation.
"When a deck loses to specific cards or other decks, players can be rewarded for playing those counters as that deck rises in popularity........ .....When metas stagnate for too long; When there are no good counters; When the best decks aren't fun to play or lose to; these are all reasons we have made balance adjustments in the past. If a deck is popular for a few weeks, that isn't a reason to make a nerf on its own. We'd have to be concerned about the fun, not be seeing any emerging counter-strategies, or be far enough away from a new content release to be worried about stagnation for a long time."
Its been 2 months dude... aggro shaman, and pirate warrior have been running rampant after the first week of release. The meta has been settled for the last month or more. I'd hardly call the fact that one of the best control warrior players in the world was able to pilot his deck to a positive winrate 'counterplay'. CW also typically struggles against dragon priest, reno decks, and completely loses to druid. Sure you get your free wins against shaman, but lose to almost everything else. Because every set is so riddled with bullshit unplayable cards, the few playable ones leave almost no room for creative deckbuilding or counterplay.
I understand not listening to a vocal minority, and rely on a more statistical approach when evaluating nerfs. However, 30% of legend players as shaman? FFS there are supposed to be 9 classes in the game (7 for standard).
TL;DR:
Thanks Ben Brode!
"balancing Patch" = Cards which we never play again
Gadgetzan auctioneer, Sylvanas Windrunner and Leeroy Jenkins say hi.
Did you even read the article? Try Small-time Buccaneer, flame tongue totem, flamewreathed faceless, Kor'kron Elite.
I think he meant cards that had previously been nerfed that still see lots of play
I guess now is the time for my golden shaman portrait.
They don't include it in the win-rate calculations as the mirror-matches would necessarily skew the rate towards 50%.
That moment when we're expecting a balanc patch, but they're actually adding another Patches to the game.
"There will be patches later this month"
"Yeah we know, thanks. We have patches now too"