Hello everyone, for those of you who don’t know me, I am Nuba, and I have been getting to the legendary rank since the beginning of Hearthstone, before the game release during its beta phases and I have not missed a season ever since I started playing this game. I write a lot in some websites and you can find a ton of content posted by myself around the internet and today I am going to talk about my feelings regarding the actual ladder system, its flaws and how I think it can be improved.
The Ladder System: How it Works
We are very familiar with Hearthstone’s current ladder system, a group of ranks that you have to go thru in order to progress in the game’s ladder, until you reach the final ranking: Legend, where you’ll then start your competitive Hearthstone.
The Ladder System: The Flaws
Now this is the point I wanted to talk about, I probably spoiled a little on the last section where I explained the system: The grind.
What is the most fun aspect about Hearthstone? Many people have different answers for it, for me its the competitive possibilities there are, the meta shifting and everything, I just love that. Making different decks, innovating and testing stuff is my favorite thing about this game. so why am I writing this article?
Every month, the same thing repeats: The grind. You have to, starting from rank 16(in my case), play countless matches until you reach the Legend rank, and while that is easy, the time it consumes is just huge.
Keep in mind, that as I said before the game only starts once you reach legend rank, before that is just an if you want to play, you’ll have to play before you play” (yo dawg)
The repetitive grind is starting to get boring, and although I could simply not play it, I have to in order to be able to play only against the players in my level.
Another thing that I completely dislike is the rank system itself, which is the biggest flaw here: Blizzard has had a ton of experience with ranking systems, Starcraft Ladder, WoW Ladder, they know what they do in all their games, but for some strange reason they seemed to lack that in Hearthstone.
First, the ranking system is only good once you play it and get Legend for the first time, then it becomes repetitive and boring. Then the legendary system which includes all types of players, from random Hunter players to known professional players. It just feels wrong to put the guy at rank 2000 and the guy at rank 1 with the same title: Legend.
I belive this game should move towards a ladder system that looks like Starcraft’s (with Leagues and everything else). And altho Brian Kibler said he thinks another system should be implemented that is not ELO Based, we both agree that this current system is just too weak.
Then we move to the other wrong part about this game’s ladder system: The lack of rewards. Yes, it feels like there is literally no reason to play this game rather than just the fact you are playing it. No achievements, no rewards, nothing! The first thing I saw this game needed the day I started playing it was an Armory, just like Wowarmory where you can click someone and see their accomplishments, what they did, how many lifetime/seasonal wins/losses they have, and while Blizzard does not do that arguing that some players would feel bad for knowing they lose too much, they could just add an option to allow or not for their stats to be displayed online!
Back to the rewards, I think changing the Ladder system would allow for more of that to happen. Different league card backs, etc. Another fact, is that both rank 1 and 20 non-legend players are getting rewarded the same prize at the end of a season regardless of how much time both players invested in the game.
Now, to defend the slowness of Blizzard’s work on improving their own game, we can argue that Hearthstone was a game created aiming to be a casual game for a player base not larger than 500k players, but now we just passed the 20 million players mark, and the game has become more competitive than any other game Blizzard has ever had (it’s even more played than Starcraft!), and to adapt to that the company has to invest in improving their game’s quality for the players. Free to Play Gaming is not only about playing and giving a company money whenever you feel the game is good enough, it’s also about getting an improvement from that company as a response for the money we throw at them.
The Ladder System: Listing what could be Improved
Alright, so after last section, we can now organize a list of what could be improved in the game’s ladder system:
The ranking system is, once you get to legend for the first time, boring and repetitive, that should change immediately.
The seasons are too short, a possible new ranking system should be improved so it can handle a season that takes longer than it currently does, I think 6 months is a fine number.
The game needs more rewards desperately. There should be incentive to keep playing and to keep getting better: cosmetics, hero voices, animations, card backs, I don’t even know!
I did not mention this before because this article is not about it, but I’ll just reinforce it: Spectator mode!! Blizzard please!!
Alright, so, 4 little topics that would make the game much better, and although implementing them is really hard, I belive is a must for this game to improve in order to maintain a bright future.
A Decklist!
Alright, this is the decklist I used to get to Legend. Actually, one of the decklists, but the one I played the last 2 ranks. The reason I used this is because I was playing Control decks and I wanted to get to Legend asap so I could start playing real hearthstone matches and playing this deck was literally the fastest way, because one Control match, time wise, is around 3 to 4 matches with this deck.
Now, you’ll notice some things are lacking from this not-so-usual Zoo list: Defender of Argus and Argent Squire. These cards were cut off because most decks are now aiming for a very consistent play, as I said before in a post-nerf Theorycrafting article series I made, and because of that, getting consistent-but-slow cards such as these 2 guys are not insta-pick anymore because most likely you’ll end up always getting out-consisted (what????)
Well, basically you can choose to go for more aggressive/explosive choices in order to obtain a win before you lose control of the board to the opponent.
In the end, its Zoo, and its extremely easy to play. So I will not go into details on how to play this specific deck, but if you want to know my win-loss ratio with the deck itself, here are the last few games I played on my way to legend with this thing.
Conclusion
And this is it for tonight, I hope you all enjoyed reading and understand some, if not all, of my points. Hearthstone is a very young game, but still the expectations for it are already huge, and while there is still a lot of days until the end of times, I think Blizzard should consider improving their game a little quicker than they currently are, I am sure they are getting more money here than they do in games like Diablo, yet their Diablo team seems to be doing a much better job at trying to satisfy their player base.
Interesting post. I enjoyed reading about your ideas. I agree we need achievements ASAP. And some sort of stats. It's just crazy that you can't see how your performance compares to other people's. As far as season length, I think 6 months may be a little long for 1 season. I think 3 months would be a nice timeframe.
A few things I would like to see are a "free-for-all" mode where you could play anything you wanted to (not limited to your collection). I mean, what if I just want to play 30 Gelbin Mechatorques just to see what happens? What if I want to see who would die first with 7 Demolishers on each side of the board? Experimenting like this is fun!
There should also be a "simulator" mode where I could practice against a particular deck list that I input. It could also be a place to test out card combinations to see what happens. Can I play Power Overwhelming on an Argent Squire and have it survive at the end of my turn because it has divine shield? If I play Abusive Sergeant on Echooing Ooze will the +2 stick around after my turn is over? Things like that. Many times I see a situation where I don't know what will happen exactly if I play certain cards together. If I'm playing in Arena, for example, I don't want to try it just to see what happens because if it doesn't work the way I think it will then it might cost me the game. It would also help in determining which cards to craft. You could try one out and see how it would work in your deck or against another deck of your choice.
Also, how about including a way to stream to Twitch that's built into the game?
Highest priority for me, though, is let me have more than 9 decks. >_< It's a limitation that actually makes the game less fun. If I want to pop into Heroic Naxx, I have to delete some decks so that I can build decks for those bosses. It's annoying and time consuming.
Well, that's my list of dreams for now. :)
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Check out my motorcycle blog at ShiftHer.com ...or not.
Can I play Power Overwhelming on an Argent Squire and have it survive at the end of my turn because it has divine shield? If I play Abusive Sergeant on Echooing Ooze will the +2 stick around after my turn is over? Things like that. Many times I see a situation where I don't know what will happen exactly if I play certain cards together.
Nope, these are turn based moves and the card effects would not over ride the end of turn mechanism :) Although I do see what you are saying (not to nit pick). Perhaps you can just try your card combinations against the AI or in casual mode?
nuba you are 100% right about the lack of rewards at legend. i ranked quite fast and before legend i fighted against some of the best eu players (savjz, zealot, kolento), so once i arrived at legend i did not saw any aditional reward at Winning, what diffrence beeing top 16 or 2000?? so i put myself an objectif : beeing the last eu player ( so at least my reward would be to know how many legends would be at the end of the season) and played troll decks, and if i was wining i concede. it looks absurd but you are right at legend now with no blizzcon qualifiers why even to try to win after arriving at legend?
I agree completely, I started on Naxx, and got legend last week and I'm already thinking what now? After I got legend my achievement was completed, so now It doesn't look attractive as it was before. There are a lot of ideas for Hearthstone but I think the main one should be something related to the objective of the game. Like some new achievements, etc.
I personally was thinking these days what combos, and decks would be possible if you could use all class cards. Like a new format, where you actually can use some other classes cards (and maybe limit to another class only, or limit the number of each one, or limiting the number of different classes) what brings that this game has a incredible potential but really appears that Blizzard is not really focused here (maybe on Heroes of Storm?), like the infestation of bots on ladder on rank 3/4/5 (LOT of seagiants shamans). With the nerf and the announcement of new cards coming I know that they aren't overlooking that hard. But I heard that was the tourneys wanting to ban hunter that "forced" the hand of Blizzard nerf, so I don't know =/
Given that (according to Blizzard) Legend rank is home to less than the top .5% of Hearthstone players
Then 99.5% of players are not really going to care about this?
I think that a lot of unused accounts (given on WoW pack for example) enters on this math though. But I know what you mean... I don't know if it is because of the people I watch and I'm friend with, but the legend seems so more common than this rate of 0,5
Given that (according to Blizzard) Legend rank is home to less than the top .5% of Hearthstone players
Then 99.5% of players are not really going to care about this?
I think that a lot of unused accounts (given on WoW pack for example) enters on this math though. But I know what you mean... I don't know if it is because of the people I watch and I'm friend with, but the legend seems so more common than this rate of 0,5
legend is aproximately 3000 people in each region ( but most of them arives in last week. in 14 it was 550 in 21 1k now 2775), so it is 9 000, not a lot for a 20 000 000 players but beeing 75% under rank 20 the real base is less like 5 000 000, but this 10 000 most of them are the ones buying packs, so having them happy is quite important to blizzard. (for example a lot of wow achievements are avaiable to less than 10 000, like firsts of the realm or others.)
the only thing you get for being a legend player is bragging rights
and as for reward system, yea it would be nice to have one say top 16 gets 10k gold end of season, top 1000 gets 1k gold etc. lol
or maybe just some random golden cards lol
I'd be wary of throwing gold - especially significant amounts of gold - at top players. I fear that would just reinforce a "rich get richer, poor get screwed" mindset.
But I definitely feel that there is a huge empty wilderness between rank 19 and rank 1 that could do with some sort of cosmetic rewards. If we assume that the rank 20 card back is basically guaranteed if you play in a given month, and that the legend card back is out of reach of 99.5% of players.. then yeah, it doesn't seem great design to make them the only two breakpoints for cosmetic rewards.
You could even do something like a "cosmetics shop" where players earn a special currency based on their ladder position each season, that can be spent on cosmetic items. So lower ranked players could grind over multiple seasons to get something that a high ranked player could get in one month.
the only thing you get for being a legend player is bragging rights
and as for reward system, yea it would be nice to have one say top 16 gets 10k gold end of season, top 1000 gets 1k gold etc. lol
or maybe just some random golden cards lol
I'd be wary of throwing gold - especially significant amounts of gold - at top players. I fear that would just reinforce a "rich get richer, poor get screwed" mindset.
But I definitely feel that there is a huge empty wilderness between rank 19 and rank 1 that could do with some sort of cosmetic rewards. If we assume that the rank 20 card back is basically guaranteed if you play in a given month, and that the legend card back is out of reach of 99.5% of players.. then yeah, it doesn't seem great design to make them the only two breakpoints for cosmetic rewards.
You could even do something like a "cosmetics shop" where players earn a special currency based on their ladder position each season, that can be spent on cosmetic items. So lower ranked players could grind over multiple seasons to get something that a high ranked player could get in one month.
Truth is, there is a ton of good ideas but for some reason Blizzard is either being slow in implementing them, or not thinking about implementing them at all.
I lack the will to try grinding to the Legend Rank although i would love to try at least once. Even though i love the game i started to make it to Rank 5 every season just because it was a fun way to play ladder but for the last two seasons i've totally dropped from the ladder since it doesn't bring me anything special.
The Ladder under the Legendary Ranking is full of " i want the highest win rate whatever i play decks", so it brings a very dull and boring game environment. I just try to grind the golden Portrait of heroes and keep pushing during the last week of each season. If i make it to Rank 10 or a bit above i simply don't care, as you said it "you get rank 20 or 1 it's the same reward".
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Introduction
Hello everyone, for those of you who don’t know me, I am Nuba, and I have been getting to the legendary rank since the beginning of Hearthstone, before the game release during its beta phases and I have not missed a season ever since I started playing this game. I write a lot in some websites and you can find a ton of content posted by myself around the internet and today I am going to talk about my feelings regarding the actual ladder system, its flaws and how I think it can be improved.
The Ladder System: How it Works
We are very familiar with Hearthstone’s current ladder system, a group of ranks that you have to go thru in order to progress in the game’s ladder, until you reach the final ranking: Legend, where you’ll then start your competitive Hearthstone.
The Ladder System: The Flaws
Now this is the point I wanted to talk about, I probably spoiled a little on the last section where I explained the system: The grind.
What is the most fun aspect about Hearthstone? Many people have different answers for it, for me its the competitive possibilities there are, the meta shifting and everything, I just love that. Making different decks, innovating and testing stuff is my favorite thing about this game. so why am I writing this article?
Every month, the same thing repeats: The grind. You have to, starting from rank 16(in my case), play countless matches until you reach the Legend rank, and while that is easy, the time it consumes is just huge.
Keep in mind, that as I said before the game only starts once you reach legend rank, before that is just an if you want to play, you’ll have to play before you play” (yo dawg)
The repetitive grind is starting to get boring, and although I could simply not play it, I have to in order to be able to play only against the players in my level.
Another thing that I completely dislike is the rank system itself, which is the biggest flaw here: Blizzard has had a ton of experience with ranking systems, Starcraft Ladder, WoW Ladder, they know what they do in all their games, but for some strange reason they seemed to lack that in Hearthstone.
First, the ranking system is only good once you play it and get Legend for the first time, then it becomes repetitive and boring. Then the legendary system which includes all types of players, from random Hunter players to known professional players. It just feels wrong to put the guy at rank 2000 and the guy at rank 1 with the same title: Legend.
I belive this game should move towards a ladder system that looks like Starcraft’s (with Leagues and everything else). And altho Brian Kibler said he thinks another system should be implemented that is not ELO Based, we both agree that this current system is just too weak.
Then we move to the other wrong part about this game’s ladder system: The lack of rewards. Yes, it feels like there is literally no reason to play this game rather than just the fact you are playing it. No achievements, no rewards, nothing! The first thing I saw this game needed the day I started playing it was an Armory, just like Wowarmory where you can click someone and see their accomplishments, what they did, how many lifetime/seasonal wins/losses they have, and while Blizzard does not do that arguing that some players would feel bad for knowing they lose too much, they could just add an option to allow or not for their stats to be displayed online!
Back to the rewards, I think changing the Ladder system would allow for more of that to happen. Different league card backs, etc. Another fact, is that both rank 1 and 20 non-legend players are getting rewarded the same prize at the end of a season regardless of how much time both players invested in the game.
Now, to defend the slowness of Blizzard’s work on improving their own game, we can argue that Hearthstone was a game created aiming to be a casual game for a player base not larger than 500k players, but now we just passed the 20 million players mark, and the game has become more competitive than any other game Blizzard has ever had (it’s even more played than Starcraft!), and to adapt to that the company has to invest in improving their game’s quality for the players. Free to Play Gaming is not only about playing and giving a company money whenever you feel the game is good enough, it’s also about getting an improvement from that company as a response for the money we throw at them.
The Ladder System: Listing what could be Improved
Alright, so after last section, we can now organize a list of what could be improved in the game’s ladder system:
Alright, so, 4 little topics that would make the game much better, and although implementing them is really hard, I belive is a must for this game to improve in order to maintain a bright future.
A Decklist!
Alright, this is the decklist I used to get to Legend. Actually, one of the decklists, but the one I played the last 2 ranks. The reason I used this is because I was playing Control decks and I wanted to get to Legend asap so I could start playing real hearthstone matches and playing this deck was literally the fastest way, because one Control match, time wise, is around 3 to 4 matches with this deck.
The list:
Well, basically you can choose to go for more aggressive/explosive choices in order to obtain a win before you lose control of the board to the opponent.
In the end, its Zoo, and its extremely easy to play. So I will not go into details on how to play this specific deck, but if you want to know my win-loss ratio with the deck itself, here are the last few games I played on my way to legend with this thing.
Conclusion
And this is it for tonight, I hope you all enjoyed reading and understand some, if not all, of my points. Hearthstone is a very young game, but still the expectations for it are already huge, and while there is still a lot of days until the end of times, I think Blizzard should consider improving their game a little quicker than they currently are, I am sure they are getting more money here than they do in games like Diablo, yet their Diablo team seems to be doing a much better job at trying to satisfy their player base.
Bye byes, see y’all in my next article!
Retired Hearthstone Columnist
Interesting post. I enjoyed reading about your ideas. I agree we need achievements ASAP. And some sort of stats. It's just crazy that you can't see how your performance compares to other people's. As far as season length, I think 6 months may be a little long for 1 season. I think 3 months would be a nice timeframe.
A few things I would like to see are a "free-for-all" mode where you could play anything you wanted to (not limited to your collection). I mean, what if I just want to play 30 Gelbin Mechatorques just to see what happens? What if I want to see who would die first with 7 Demolishers on each side of the board? Experimenting like this is fun!
There should also be a "simulator" mode where I could practice against a particular deck list that I input. It could also be a place to test out card combinations to see what happens. Can I play Power Overwhelming on an Argent Squire and have it survive at the end of my turn because it has divine shield? If I play Abusive Sergeant on Echooing Ooze will the +2 stick around after my turn is over? Things like that. Many times I see a situation where I don't know what will happen exactly if I play certain cards together. If I'm playing in Arena, for example, I don't want to try it just to see what happens because if it doesn't work the way I think it will then it might cost me the game. It would also help in determining which cards to craft. You could try one out and see how it would work in your deck or against another deck of your choice.
Also, how about including a way to stream to Twitch that's built into the game?
Highest priority for me, though, is let me have more than 9 decks. >_< It's a limitation that actually makes the game less fun. If I want to pop into Heroic Naxx, I have to delete some decks so that I can build decks for those bosses. It's annoying and time consuming.
Well, that's my list of dreams for now. :)
Check out my motorcycle blog at ShiftHer.com ...or not.
I agree with everything especially the motivational aspect. I just don't feel very motivated to play.
the only thing you get for being a legend player is bragging rights
and as for reward system, yea it would be nice to have one say top 16 gets 10k gold end of season, top 1000 gets 1k gold etc. lol
or maybe just some random golden cards lol
anyway this is very nice thread, thanks!
Nope, these are turn based moves and the card effects would not over ride the end of turn mechanism :) Although I do see what you are saying (not to nit pick). Perhaps you can just try your card combinations against the AI or in casual mode?
nuba you are 100% right about the lack of rewards at legend. i ranked quite fast and before legend i fighted against some of the best eu players (savjz, zealot, kolento), so once i arrived at legend i did not saw any aditional reward at Winning, what diffrence beeing top 16 or 2000?? so i put myself an objectif : beeing the last eu player ( so at least my reward would be to know how many legends would be at the end of the season) and played troll decks, and if i was wining i concede. it looks absurd but you are right at legend now with no blizzcon qualifiers why even to try to win after arriving at legend?
I agree completely, I started on Naxx, and got legend last week and I'm already thinking what now? After I got legend my achievement was completed, so now It doesn't look attractive as it was before. There are a lot of ideas for Hearthstone but I think the main one should be something related to the objective of the game. Like some new achievements, etc.
I personally was thinking these days what combos, and decks would be possible if you could use all class cards. Like a new format, where you actually can use some other classes cards (and maybe limit to another class only, or limit the number of each one, or limiting the number of different classes) what brings that this game has a incredible potential but really appears that Blizzard is not really focused here (maybe on Heroes of Storm?), like the infestation of bots on ladder on rank 3/4/5 (LOT of seagiants shamans). With the nerf and the announcement of new cards coming I know that they aren't overlooking that hard. But I heard that was the tourneys wanting to ban hunter that "forced" the hand of Blizzard nerf, so I don't know =/
Given that (according to Blizzard) Legend rank is home to less than the top .5% of Hearthstone players
Then 99.5% of players are not really going to care about this?
I think that a lot of unused accounts (given on WoW pack for example) enters on this math though.
But I know what you mean...
I don't know if it is because of the people I watch and I'm friend with, but the legend seems so more common than this rate of 0,5
Very nice article mate!i aggree with a lot of your thoughts but 6 months season is too much i think
Famous last words, Mind if i roll Weed? Weed Hoarder, Azeroth
My decks: please, take a look if you want- a lot of dust-free decks-feedback more than welcome
http://www.hearthpwn.com/members/akasumi/decks?sort=-viewcount
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legend is aproximately 3000 people in each region ( but most of them arives in last week. in 14 it was 550 in 21 1k now 2775), so it is 9 000, not a lot for a 20 000 000 players but beeing 75% under rank 20 the real base is less like 5 000 000, but this 10 000 most of them are the ones buying packs, so having them happy is quite important to blizzard. (for example a lot of wow achievements are avaiable to less than 10 000, like firsts of the realm or others.)
Sometimes, if you have nothing to add to a discussion, its better to add nothing at all than make these kind of comments.
Retired Hearthstone Columnist
I'd be wary of throwing gold - especially significant amounts of gold - at top players. I fear that would just reinforce a "rich get richer, poor get screwed" mindset.
But I definitely feel that there is a huge empty wilderness between rank 19 and rank 1 that could do with some sort of cosmetic rewards. If we assume that the rank 20 card back is basically guaranteed if you play in a given month, and that the legend card back is out of reach of 99.5% of players.. then yeah, it doesn't seem great design to make them the only two breakpoints for cosmetic rewards.
You could even do something like a "cosmetics shop" where players earn a special currency based on their ladder position each season, that can be spent on cosmetic items. So lower ranked players could grind over multiple seasons to get something that a high ranked player could get in one month.
Truth is, there is a ton of good ideas but for some reason Blizzard is either being slow in implementing them, or not thinking about implementing them at all.
Btw, your idea is nice!
Retired Hearthstone Columnist
Very true!
I lack the will to try grinding to the Legend Rank although i would love to try at least once. Even though i love the game i started to make it to Rank 5 every season just because it was a fun way to play ladder but for the last two seasons i've totally dropped from the ladder since it doesn't bring me anything special.
The Ladder under the Legendary Ranking is full of " i want the highest win rate whatever i play decks", so it brings a very dull and boring game environment. I just try to grind the golden Portrait of heroes and keep pushing during the last week of each season. If i make it to Rank 10 or a bit above i simply don't care, as you said it "you get rank 20 or 1 it's the same reward".