One thing you keep hearing from the "skill "crowd is that luck *allegedly* evens out over some amount of games or time. That alone cant be proven but we'll save that for another time. The comment you see a lot is this: "Luck can play a big role in one game but over the long term it doesnt". Hmmm. Lets mull that over. It doesnt make any sense. How so? Because if luck can be the deciding factor in each individual game and thats what we play - individual games, then how does that change over the long haul?
Isnt it possible that some players might get bad draws most of the time? Isnt it possible that some players might just be luckier?
Luck factor affects everyone there is no way around this. However no one can be lucky all the time or never lucky. In span of one game you can win all rng rolls but not in a thousand. Therefore if you play thousand games this factor will become somewhat balanced. That is also the reason you need skill to be consistent player across all your games.
Well, yes, it is actually possible for someone to almost always win just due to top decking the perfect cards. The thing though, is that this is so unlikely to happen that most people pass it off as impossible. It is perfectly possible, just extremely unlikely.
Luck isn't going to be a factor in every match of hearthstone, it only comes into play when its a 50/50 mach-up or situation; example: Did you opponent draw their way of removing your big threat, even though he only had a 5-7% chance to? If so, that was luck. If that have no way in their deck to deal with your threat, that isn't luck. That just a good match-up for you.
In terms of hearthstone the most polarised match-up I see is Freeze Mage vs Control (or C'thun) Warrior. The stats don't lie, its probably a 90% win for the warrior. That's because of the way the decks win condition works. Freeze mage controls the board, gets you down to 15 health then deals 15+ Damage to face in one turn. Control Wariror Out-lasts their opponent with massive armour gain and efficient removals. So Luck isn't involved in every game; its just odds.
Luck comes when the match up or situation on the board/health is balanced 50/50. Drawing the right card or gets the right 'RNG ping' win/loses the match. With all things 50/50 it evens out over time; look at coin flips, flip a coin enough and you'll end up with a 50/50 ratio.
Obviously take all this with a grain of salt, its just the way I look at it! Sometimes you can go on massive losing streaks where opponent Rag hits face rather than hit 1 of the 6 minions on board, then again you can topdeck a win condition with only a 5-7% chance too, just the way it works works sometimes.
If you flip a coin 5 times and get heads all five it is unlikely but chances are if you flip it 95 more times you will get somewhere close to a 50/50 split.
We all have times when it seems we are getting very lucky or unlucky but math states the more games you play the less these outcomes will all fall one way.
One thing you keep hearing from the "skill "crowd is that luck *allegedly* evens out over some amount of games or time. That alone cant be proven but we'll save that for another time. The comment you see a lot is this: "Luck can play a big role in one game but over the long term it doesnt". Hmmm. Lets mull that over. It doesnt make any sense. How so? Because if luck can be the deciding factor in each individual game and thats what we play - individual games, then how does that change over the long haul?
Isnt it possible that some players might get bad draws most of the time? Isnt it possible that some players might just be luckier?
Im curious. It just doesnt make sense.
Luck is not a stat.
This is an important element of understanding what 'luck' really is.
Take a coin clip. Now, let's assume that a coin flip is a 50/50 split (it isn't but it's close enough but I know SOMEONE will fuss about it if i don't mention it :P). That means on average you half of your flips are tails and half are heads. So you flip it 10 times.. and get 9 tails and 1 head. WTF? Are you unlucky? Is it rigged? Are the folks talking about 50/50 just BSing?
No. It's variance. Or rather, it's the fact that averages really don't mean much in small samples. For any one set of coin flips, you CAN get anywhere form 0 heads to 10 heads. That it's a 50/50 flip does NOT mean you CANNOT get 0 or 10 heads. It just means its rare. The problem is that you can't tell how rare from that one sequence. Because, in the short run, ANYTHING is possible.
The 50/50 factor comes into play in the long run. While you CAN get that extremely rare run of 10 heads in a row, chances are, you won't keep getting it. You roll again, you get 6 heasds. Roll again, you get 2. After 10,000 sets of 10-flips all of those rare 10-head flips will be counteracted by a similar amount of 0 head flips, and you'll see a lot of 4-6 flips. Count it up, and you WILL see about 50,000 heads out of 100,000 attempts.
Thus, in the short run, you could get anything, but in the long run, you WILL get 50/50. And the longer the run, the closer it'll get to the proper percentage.
This is a basic factor of statistics. And it's why people who follow it get VERY critical over proper testing with large samples. The goal is to fight against variance and get to the true average.
So in hearthstone, you play Yogg and it pyroblasts your face. You play it again and it does it again. You then see people say that Yogg is beneficial about 60% of the time, and you think they are trolling. But they aren't. What the means is that, over the long run, those two lost games you had will be overshadowed by the winning Yogg plays. Play a Yogg deck for 6 months and, eventually, you'll get more good Yogg rolls than bad ones. You'll get your 60%. But for that ONE game, anything can happen.
So when it comes to luck vs skill, the idea is that luck is NOT a stat. There aren't 'unlucky people' and 'lucky people'. That's an illusion. In the short run, anything can happen in that one game. You get nothing but 5-6 drops in your opening hand on an aggro deck. Your juggles always go wrong. Yogg pyros your face. That WILL happen. but there WILL be games where yoru opponent gets 5-6 drops, bad juggles, and Yogg pyros. THAT will happen too eventually.
Thus if you keep fighting opponents, the matches where rng went against you will be off-set by the matches where rng went for you.The RNG will balance out over the long run.
So what's left? Skill. The games where you mulliganed away that Emperor on your OTK warrior when you should've kept it. The games where you took a chance on Yogg (which pyroed your face) when you SHOULD'VE passed the turn, took the damage, then cleaned the board with normal board clears. The time you brawled at turn 5 against 2 minions when you should've held for more greed...or the time you DIDN'T brawl when you should've because you were too greedy.
Luck balances out over time, but misplays, poor choices, lack of understanding of what you should know and should be doing, or simply playing the wrong deck for the meta (BUT I WANT TO PLAY RENOLOCK!!!!!). Those remain. Your 6 games where yogg did well will be offset by a skilled player's 6 games where their yogg did well.. so all that's left are the 4 games you just lost while the skilled player won 2.
So that's how it works.
TL:DR
Luck is not a stat. There are no 'permanent (un)lucky people." You get lucky one day and unlucky the other, same as everyone.
In the short term, any variance can happen. But over the long term, rng always sticks to a standard average. This is the basis behind statistics.
Due to that, bad draws and bad card RNG will balance out over time with good draws/RNG. Same for your opponent.
What WON'T balnace out are games won/lost due to knowing the right move for the situation and having the correct deck for the matchup.
Thus, over the long haul, luck is no longer a factor, but skill shines through.
It's a card game, so luck is inherent in every single game. If you want all skill, go play chess or golf.
That being said, there's a reason that certain people climb to legend in just 1 day. They know precisely how to mitigate the luck factors in their favor, and know how to play every single match-up you will commonly see on the ladder.
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I know that what I'm about to say will prompt triggers from a lot of people to tell me to tie my tinfoil hat on tighter (and maybe this would be better reserved for the salt thread, as it is the one thing I see that consistently bugs me) but here goes all the same.
Let's say your opponent has a lot of minions on the board. You're playing a mage and coming up on 7 mana? Sure would be nice to have that Flamestrike.....Oh, look, you top-decked it. I've done that several times. I'm sure my opponent has too. It just feels like sometimes you get the card you need on curve, sometimes your opponent does. We could factor the probability of drawing any one card down to the tiny percentages, but I feel like it's a more simplistic luck factor: either your opponent gets the best card on curve or you do.
Still, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that skill has nothing to do with it, I'm just saying that sometimes skill alone isn't going to cut it.
One thing you keep hearing from the "skill "crowd is that luck *allegedly* evens out over some amount of games or time. That alone cant be proven but we'll save that for another time. The comment you see a lot is this: "Luck can play a big role in one game but over the long term it doesnt". Hmmm. Lets mull that over. It doesnt make any sense. How so? Because if luck can be the deciding factor in each individual game and thats what we play - individual games, then how does that change over the long haul?
Isnt it possible that some players might get bad draws most of the time? Isnt it possible that some players might just be luckier?
Im curious. It just doesnt make sense.
Let's say you flipped 100 coins.
96.38% of the time, you would get 40-60 heads and 40-60 tails. Assuming heads is good and tails is bad, less than 1 in 50 people would be unlucky enough to get less than 40 heads.
If your claim was that you got less than 12 heads in 100 flips, I wouldn't believe you for a second - not because it's impossible, but because it's improbable. If every one of this planet's 7.5 billion people did one set of 100 coins each, the chance that ANY of them had this happen to them is less than 0.0001%. To believe such a claim, I'd first have to believe you're the unluckiest person in the world, then on top of that that out of one million possible universes that we're in the unluckiest one. Or in other words, the statement "no one in the entire world is that unlucky" would be true 999,999 times out of a million.
So while there's no technical guarantee that luck evens out, it is really, really safe bet that it will.
It is called the Law of Large Numbers. Let's say you flip a coin, and get a price if you get heads. There is of course a 50% change of getting heads. If you do it 10 times, then there is about a 1 in 1000 change that you get heads 10 times and win 10 prizes, making you very lucky. So if 1000 people do this, then one of them may get heads 10 times, so one out of 1000 is very lucky.
Now if you play not 10 times but 100 times, then the change of winning 100 times in a row is 1 in 1267650600228229401496703205376. Even the chance of winning more than 80 out of 100 times is marginal. Basically, the more often you try, the closer you will get to the average. That is what meant by 'luck averages out'.
In HS, one player is always the lucky (the one with the better matchup, draws, going first and other RNG). So if skill was not a factor, then the game is basically a coin flip of who is more lucky and everybody would go 50/50. Let's assume 1000 players start playing. Sure, in the first 10 games, 1 of those 1000 players could get lucky and win 10 times. But after 100 games, the luckiest one will probably have won only about 75-80 games. After 1000 games one player would win maybe 600 games and most others would be between 475 and 525.
So it is possible to get very lucky and win 600 games (100 more than the average player), but not all 1000 games.
Let's say your opponent has a lot of minions on the board. You're playing a mage and coming up on 7 mana? Sure would be nice to have that Flamestrike.....Oh, look, you top-decked it. I've done that several times. I'm sure my opponent has too. It just feels like sometimes you get the card you need on curve, sometimes your opponent does. We could factor the probability of drawing any one card down to the tiny percentages, but I feel like it's a more simplistic luck factor: either your opponent gets the best card on curve or you do.
It's called 'confirmation bias'. You remember all the times Flamestrike was topdecked at turn 7, but your brain ignores all the (equally frequent) times you got it on turn 5, 6 or 8, or even in your opening hand.
besides the fact that people that open those threads are just plain horrible at maths, there is one factor that tends to be overlooked by a lot of players: The sheer number of "coin-flips" that even a single hearthstone game contains, from mulligan to every single cards draw to ragnaros-flips ... so, in the end, the number of games necessary to even out the "luck factor" usually isn't even that high... For example I am pretty sure that pretty much every random legend guy on this forum would beat the author of this thread in a best of nine pretty much always ...
Well there is no such thing as luck so thread done I guess.
Do you have 100% win rate after a lot of matches? Cause if you play chess you can have 500/500 wins , if you play 500 matches in hearthstone and you win 500/500 games you will prove your point...Until then , luck exists and will always be....In hearthstone : Skill=the way you are playing the cards you have in hand , Luck= the cards you have in hand ....In Chess : Skill= the way you are playing , Luck = There is no luck.
Wait, you're saying you can deduce the lack of luck (or simple RNG) involved in chess by claiming it's possible to have a 100% winrate over a representative amount of games? Well, no one ever has had a 100% win rate in chess, even Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue. So followng your logic, chess is also a luck based game.
There's so many factors you've omitted I don't even know where to start.
While no one can deny the giant involvment of RNG in the card draw process, the oversimplification you had produced is just mind-boggling.
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One thing you keep hearing from the "skill "crowd is that luck *allegedly* evens out over some amount of games or time. That alone cant be proven but we'll save that for another time. The comment you see a lot is this: "Luck can play a big role in one game but over the long term it doesnt". Hmmm. Lets mull that over. It doesnt make any sense. How so? Because if luck can be the deciding factor in each individual game and thats what we play - individual games, then how does that change over the long haul?
Isnt it possible that some players might get bad draws most of the time? Isnt it possible that some players might just be luckier?
Im curious. It just doesnt make sense.
I win due to skill and lose due to bad RNG. :D
Luck factor affects everyone there is no way around this. However no one can be lucky all the time or never lucky. In span of one game you can win all rng rolls but not in a thousand. Therefore if you play thousand games this factor will become somewhat balanced. That is also the reason you need skill to be consistent player across all your games.
"Luck is probability taken personally" - Chip Denman
Well, yes, it is actually possible for someone to almost always win just due to top decking the perfect cards. The thing though, is that this is so unlikely to happen that most people pass it off as impossible. It is perfectly possible, just extremely unlikely.
each game of hearthstone is 90% luck and 10% skill, but
summary of you all games in the season is 90% skill and 10% luck
Heroes never die.
Luck isn't going to be a factor in every match of hearthstone, it only comes into play when its a 50/50 mach-up or situation; example: Did you opponent draw their way of removing your big threat, even though he only had a 5-7% chance to? If so, that was luck. If that have no way in their deck to deal with your threat, that isn't luck. That just a good match-up for you.
In terms of hearthstone the most polarised match-up I see is Freeze Mage vs Control (or C'thun) Warrior. The stats don't lie, its probably a 90% win for the warrior. That's because of the way the decks win condition works. Freeze mage controls the board, gets you down to 15 health then deals 15+ Damage to face in one turn. Control Wariror Out-lasts their opponent with massive armour gain and efficient removals. So Luck isn't involved in every game; its just odds.
Luck comes when the match up or situation on the board/health is balanced 50/50. Drawing the right card or gets the right 'RNG ping' win/loses the match. With all things 50/50 it evens out over time; look at coin flips, flip a coin enough and you'll end up with a 50/50 ratio.
Obviously take all this with a grain of salt, its just the way I look at it! Sometimes you can go on massive losing streaks where opponent Rag hits face rather than hit 1 of the 6 minions on board, then again you can topdeck a win condition with only a 5-7% chance too, just the way it works works sometimes.
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Luck is the whole game. From draws to Flame Juggler hitting the 3/1 to Yogg Saron pyroblasting you in the face.
it evens out eventually, 'cuz of one word
mathematics
shocker, i know :)
There is no such thing as luck just probability.
If you flip a coin 5 times and get heads all five it is unlikely but chances are if you flip it 95 more times you will get somewhere close to a 50/50 split.
We all have times when it seems we are getting very lucky or unlucky but math states the more games you play the less these outcomes will all fall one way.
There is one way to find out: play Yogg-Saron in every deck and see the results ... bwahahha
The answer to all your doubts will always be
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
It's a card game, so luck is inherent in every single game. If you want all skill, go play chess or golf.
That being said, there's a reason that certain people climb to legend in just 1 day. They know precisely how to mitigate the luck factors in their favor, and know how to play every single match-up you will commonly see on the ladder.
Building Quirky Decks Every Week, Loving Life at Rank 15!
I know that what I'm about to say will prompt triggers from a lot of people to tell me to tie my tinfoil hat on tighter (and maybe this would be better reserved for the salt thread, as it is the one thing I see that consistently bugs me) but here goes all the same.
Let's say your opponent has a lot of minions on the board. You're playing a mage and coming up on 7 mana? Sure would be nice to have that Flamestrike.....Oh, look, you top-decked it. I've done that several times. I'm sure my opponent has too. It just feels like sometimes you get the card you need on curve, sometimes your opponent does. We could factor the probability of drawing any one card down to the tiny percentages, but I feel like it's a more simplistic luck factor: either your opponent gets the best card on curve or you do.
Still, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that skill has nothing to do with it, I'm just saying that sometimes skill alone isn't going to cut it.
It is called the Law of Large Numbers. Let's say you flip a coin, and get a price if you get heads. There is of course a 50% change of getting heads. If you do it 10 times, then there is about a 1 in 1000 change that you get heads 10 times and win 10 prizes, making you very lucky. So if 1000 people do this, then one of them may get heads 10 times, so one out of 1000 is very lucky.
Now if you play not 10 times but 100 times, then the change of winning 100 times in a row is 1 in 1267650600228229401496703205376. Even the chance of winning more than 80 out of 100 times is marginal. Basically, the more often you try, the closer you will get to the average. That is what meant by 'luck averages out'.
In HS, one player is always the lucky (the one with the better matchup, draws, going first and other RNG). So if skill was not a factor, then the game is basically a coin flip of who is more lucky and everybody would go 50/50. Let's assume 1000 players start playing. Sure, in the first 10 games, 1 of those 1000 players could get lucky and win 10 times. But after 100 games, the luckiest one will probably have won only about 75-80 games. After 1000 games one player would win maybe 600 games and most others would be between 475 and 525.
So it is possible to get very lucky and win 600 games (100 more than the average player), but not all 1000 games.
These essay responses pogchamp...
But seriously go find a local community college and enroll yourself in stats class... its called the empirical rule
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besides the fact that people that open those threads are just plain horrible at maths, there is one factor that tends to be overlooked by a lot of players: The sheer number of "coin-flips" that even a single hearthstone game contains, from mulligan to every single cards draw to ragnaros-flips ... so, in the end, the number of games necessary to even out the "luck factor" usually isn't even that high... For example I am pretty sure that pretty much every random legend guy on this forum would beat the author of this thread in a best of nine pretty much always ...
Well there is no such thing as luck so thread done I guess.
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