Hearthpwn

I visited the site this morning, and noticed that another "Blizzard rigs the game - and I have proof" thread had gained traction in the forums - dozens of responses, and the OP received dozens of "Likes" for his contribution to the ongoing drama. Also like every other "Blizzard rigs the game - and I have proof" thread, the OP didn't think it quite important enough to post any of the data he used to support his claims - despite explaining that he had "over fifteen years experience in the statistics trade," and should have known better. A professional statistician should also understand that intention can't be deduced from the data - even if everything the OP had said were true, the existence of bias wouldn't be evidence of "Blizzard rigs the game." A statistician with fifteen years of experience would understand that the OP's trials had done nothing to identify the source of purported bias - a glitch in the match-making process, for example - and the claim of "proving" that Blizzard is cheating everyone seems needlessly declamatory (as well as incorrect.)

In any event, the gentleman claimed to have played nearly two hundred games, spread out in seven "trials" separated by three hours each - his "tech-ed" deck queued into Cubelock about fifteen times less often than his regular deck, which lacked the "tech." Conclusion = Blizzard rigs the game.

Rather than linking to his HSDecktracker page, and providing the community with the data he used in his purported trials, he claimed that it was better for "everyone else" to perform the same, fifteen hour series of trials, and decide for themselves. Apparently, this non-response is acceptable to folks who already "know" that the game is rigged.

HSDecktracker has been available for a couple years, and dozens (probably hundreds, by this point) of people have claimed to have "proved" that Blizzard rigs the game, but no one that I'm aware of has bothered to post a link to their data so that the community can "decide for themselves."

Challenge = do the work, and post the links. Everything is time-stamped, so nefarious attempts to "cheat the system" by deleting recalcitrant results will be easily detected by the community.

After that, the "riggers" will have a case for discussion, provided they find evidence of bias - a discussion of sources of bias would be helpful to the community, and might elicit a response from Blizzard. Endlessly posting "proof without proof" is only helpful to folks who really aren't interested in the issue, but instead enjoy the shot of adrenaline which apparently accompanies anonymously shit-posting about the game.

Yep, utter nonsense from what sound like little teens who haven't experienced the world yet. They won't put forward anything... 2000 games would also not even be close to a solid sample size even when grouped down.. Complete drivel.

Everyone don your tin foil hats.

I honestly wouldn't bash the other thread too badly.  It's honestly the first time someone posted anything remotely looking like actually finding out the truth rather than conspiracy theories and hypercasual observations, or just bashing each side.  What's more the OP didn't demand we go declare 'victory' and start demanding a crusade against Blizzard.  Ignoring the clickbaity title, the entire post is someone presenting an experiment, posting their findings, then recommending others to do the same to see what they get.  That's EXACTLy what we need right now.

Whether it's fake or not is honestly not needed right now.  It doesn't matter if it's real, fake, misinformed ,or just a fluke.  It's a trial with a testable experiment, a result that can be compared, and a hypothesis.  Real or fake we treat it the same way: rerun the test, post the findings.  

If we start seeing a lot of other posts showing something is wrong, THEN we can start getting scientific and start pushing for integrity like data sets replay data, videos, ext.  But that honestly can come later.  Right now we just need warm bodies.

Well, no it carries zero relevance - it wasn't a testable experiment in any way at all, it had zero control, it was entirely undefined and lending this type of fluff credence, is a big problem.

And yet OP you make ANOTHER thread about this instead of just commenting on THAT thread. 

Honestly I agree with ian above that even though he failed to provide screenshots he did everything else.  Why don't YOU try the experiment yourself and add it to the results rather than bash this guy for the work he put into his experiment?

Quote from MrShmoove >>

And yet OP you make ANOTHER thread about this instead of just commenting on THAT thread. 

Honestly I agree with ian above that even though he failed to provide screenshots he did everything else.  Why don't YOU try the experiment yourself and add it to the results rather than bash this guy for the work he put into his experiment?

It's a rigged game since it's a Blizzard game, no need for another proof.

Thanks to the folks that brought up the other test.  I saw of it but that thread was hard to pick off the info from.

So yeah now we have 2 tests, one with video evidence of the situation being standard.  

You know one thing that does bug me though, everyone bringing up info about it being rigged keeps proving that they are at the 'negative' side of it: the game purposely matching opponents against them.  Given this particular hypothesis, this means we have folks who are on the other end, getting great and easy matches against opponents.

*raises hand to stall* yes yes I know there's theories over how that can be. However, wouldn't it be MUCH more conclusive if we had a test to see whether you can be on the positive end?  That is an account who is running a string of easy matches that their deck counters?  Warlocks that never get their weapon killed or their minions silenced?  That sort of thing?

I mean, we aren't seriously making the claim that everyone in hearthpwn is being systemantically targetted to never have good matches.. are we?

If the other's thread OP was actually a statistician with 15 years of experience, he should know that changing only one of the variables doesn't really confirms causality.

As someone who also tried to create an experiment to "prove" that matchmaking was not random, I can tell you the reason why I never bothered to put the time and effort into posting the results is because no matter what you do, it will never be enough. The counter argument will always be "sample size" .... if you test 300 games (which is what I did), it needed to be 3000 ... if I somehow managed to test 3000 games, it would need to be 30,000.

So why go through the time and trouble of putting it all together when no matter what you do, or what you find, your results will always be shot down by the "conformation bias" crowd. 

Quote from zzAMBIENzz >>

As someone who also tried to create an experiment to "prove" that matchmaking was not random, I can tell you the reason why I never bothered to put the time and effort into posting the results is because no matter what you do, it will never be enough. The counter argument will always be "sample size" .... if you test 300 games (which is what I did), it needed to be 3000 ... if I somehow managed to test 3000 games, it would need to be 30,000.

So why go through the time and trouble of putting it all together when no matter what you do, or what you find, your results will always be shot down by the "conformation bias" crowd. 

Why do the "folks who think the game is rigged" or those who disagree with them need any specific burden of proof?  Make the argument, present evidence and let the forum users draw their conclusions.  Weak evidence will be rejected and strong evidence can't be ignored.   No reason for either side in the debate to make arbitrary preconditions for debate to occur, as this thread attempts to do.

Quote from Xynot >>

Why do the "folks who think the game is rigged" or those who disagree with them need any specific burden of proof?  Make the argument, present evidence and let the forum users draw their conclusions.  Weak evidence will be rejected and strong evidence can't be ignored.   No reason for either side in the debate to make arbitrary preconditions for debate to occur, as this thread attempts to do.

One thing for sure, I remember facing at least 7 priests in a row during the Highlander Priest debacle.  That is one thing that you can be sure of, is that if a deck is broken, people will play it any chance they get.  I can only imagine the numbers put up during Trogg Shaman and Mysterious Paladin days.  

These kids want to get to Legend, that's all they care about.  So if a deck is OP, you're going to see a lot of it for 1-2 days, then it will go mute because everyone is playing the counter deck/cards.  Then 1-2 days it will be back again.  Your tests cannot take that into consideration, so there are flaws you're not considering.  

Why....why would it be rigged, what would Blizzard gain from that.

Quote from Laysson >>

It's a rigged game since it's a Blizzard game, no need for another proof.

Quote from Livtraser >>

Why....why would it be rigged, what would Blizzard gain from that.

Quote from iandakar >>

You know one thing that does bug me though, everyone bringing up info about it being rigged keeps proving that they are at the 'negative' side of it: the game purposely matching opponents against them.  Given this particular hypothesis, this means we have folks who are on the other end, getting great and easy matches against opponents.

• Ideally, ranked ladder should measure your skill at playing the game to a greater degree than your skill at picking a deck archetype.
• Matchmaking that tries to even out differences by class/archetype also makes the experience better for people without access to or awareness of community data like Vicious Syndicate or HSReplay.net.

I collected some of my own data back in December.  Unfortunately, my sample size was way too small.  It's really hard to grind enough games fast enough, because one needs to compare opponent distribution to a known, measured distribution across the whole community like Vicious Syndicate's, and those can change pretty fast.  So, I got tired before I had a large enough sample size (although I felt my results were interesting enough to warrant a closer look.)

Aside from that, I also posted about the comments of an engineer working on Hearthstone matchmaking from Blizzcon 2017 that seemed to indicate that they were using business intelligence data to tweak matchmaking.  Note that archetype classification and performance are well within what a game company's business intelligence group would be routinely collecting and feeding back into development.  Unfortunately, since the engineer just casually threw the term "meta" around as the subject of their data input, it's not entirely clear what precisely he meant by that.

Finally, some thoughts on reasons that such an approach would be good for meeting game design goals and improving player engagement.

I keep posting links back to some of this stuff because there's so much noise in these threads that the people who want a serious conversation and/or serious data collection and analysis end up talking past each other.

Since this whole thread seems to be about bashing other people, how come you seem to be trying to use fancy English? For example when you use the word "recalcitrant" instead of "unwanted".  It's not that I can't understand what you are saying, as I do understand.

My point is, it takes you a lot longer to communicate what your point is than just using regular English, and less people in general will be able to understand it. It's very much a lose-lose, and in the end doesn't really make you any smarter.

Quote from Xynot >>

 Currently, game makers deny implementing these patents, but their existence has fueled this debate.