Based on Hsreplay data in Diamond 5 through Diamond 1 where the highest density of players are currently; 4 classes control 7 of the top 8 decks in the meta. So the question needs to be asked how does Team5 observe and value balance beyond saying they try to keep decks and players through matchmaking at a 50% winrate?
Is it just accepted that certain classes will have their time in the sun and the others will have to wait until cards rotate or new broken class cards/archetypes are released in another expansion? As someone who acquires every card on day 1 of an expansion I have the ability to play any deck whether it's a net deck or a home brew. Some players can only craft one good deck per expansion so why not craft the top winrate deck? At the same time wouldn't it behoove Team5 and Blizzard from a sales standpoint to balance the game by tuning it regularly instead once every 6-8 weeks so that every class has a viable deck and players will feel more incentivized to play their favorite class instead of whatever the best deck is? Or is it better for them to go look at Hunter Mage Rogue and Shaman if they were your favorite class in warcraft then play them now because we made them better than the other 11 classes?
Is it just accepted that certain classes will have their time in the sun and the others will have to wait until cards rotate or new broken class cards/archetypes are released in another expansion?
Yes pretty much
At the same time wouldn't it behoove Team5 and Blizzard from a sales standpoint to balance the game by tuning it regularly instead once every 6-8 weeks
Back in vanilla/early expansion we had to wait 6-12 months for balance changes, I think it's at a good pace now, my only problem is they have few clear target cards and archetypes that they absolutely want to see play so they'll buff them, but there's tons of mediocre cards that will never be looked at because they are intended to be mediocre or have no impact.
There's an issue here from the start of your post. HSReplay data is data from people who use their plug-in and people they played against. That's not a balanced picture to start with. Especially since you go on with "in Diamond 5 through Diamond 1 where the highest density of players are currently", which may be true for the HSReplay data (which just goes to show who actually uses their services and not an actual fair view of the playerbase as a whole) but is certainly not true for the entire playerbase since we know for a fact most people are actually in Bronze, and that as you go up, the amount of people gets less and less and less.
So to answer a question you probably weren't asking: Blizzard balances with EVERYONE in mind, not just the narrow band of players on the cusp of Legend rank.
You can argue if they do a good job of that or not, but then you need to look at everyone, and not a very small and biased slice of players.
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There's an issue here from the start of your post. HSReplay data is data from people who use their plug-in and people they played against. That's not a balanced picture to start with. Especially since you go on with "in Diamond 5 through Diamond 1 where the highest density of players are currently", which may be true for the HSReplay data (which just goes to show who actually uses their services and not an actual fair view of the playerbase as a whole) but is certainly not true for the entire playerbase since we know for a fact most people are actually in Bronze, and that as you go up, the amount of people gets less and less and less.
So to answer a question you probably weren't asking: Blizzard balances with EVERYONE in mind, not just the narrow band of players on the cusp of Legend rank.
You can argue if they do a good job of that or not, but then you need to look at everyone, and not a very small and biased slice of players.
Then how or where would you recommend to get "accurate" data snapshots from since Blizzard doesn't post that data themselves? On top of that I can positively guarantee you that of players who play at least 3 games a day to finish their daily quests the majority of them are not in Bronze. Again this data I'm using from is HSReplay but those same decks are consistently some of the most played from bronze up into legend so yes I agree that balancing should and does take everyone into account but there's a correlation that as you go up in rank the same 3-4 classes consistently have the higher if not the highest winrates.
It doesn't help when you have someone like me who used to use HSReplay's tracker, and changed to Firestone because I preferred it. But honestly find myself playing the majority of my games on my iPad around the house now when watching my 11 month-old son, so there's no tracking metric on there at all. Just more avenues that feed into HSReplay giving smaller and smaller slices of reality that MAY be accurate. Or not.
They balance for winrate and sometimes nerf to get rid of decks that are particularly frustrating but not necessarily overpowered. The goal is not perfect balance, only that decks are playable without feeling like total garbage and that there aren't just a couple of decks dominating the meta.
Usually decks that are strong at the start of an expansion will continue to be strong, because blizzard doesn't like to nerf decks into unplayability. Doing so would feel really bad if you just invested all your dust for nothing.
Also the balance is always horrendous for the first month or so after an expansion. Not just because decks are unbalanced, but because players are experimenting.
I care more about NPE and freshness than balance. Things that have poor interaction or are infuriating to play against are more bothersome than a high win rate to me. If a chunk of people concede to a deck on turn 1 because they hate playing against it, the NPE is too high and something should probably change, unless it's being played by a tiny, tiny fraction of people.
With freshness, it would go back to the last three or so patches before this expansion where the commentary was always "the meta is in a good spot right now so we don't see the need to make changes". Sure, but it got stale and boring. I'd rather changes were made for the sake of changing things even if they created "imbalance".
I consider balance to be the exact opposite of what anyone on here says it is. If they developed based on what people say here it would be the worst game on the market by a huge margin.
Duels too. Literally any mode right now is highly unbalanced. No surprise given the power level difference between classes and archtypes in Titans! I stopped playing the game again yesterday. After some good duels runs, but it's no fun at all to play against the same 2 classes every time (shaman/hunter in duels, mage/dk in arena)
There appears to be a huge level of misinterpretation regarding the value of data aggregators like HSReplay. It’s true that most players don’t use deck trackers at all, myself included most of the time as I play on mobile, but as you climb ranked ladder you’ll notice a pattern over and over - an abundance of players directly copying a tier 1 list from a netdeck, from Hearthpwn or any other source. This happens not just in diamond but all the way down to bronze - the only difference is that the bronze players are not playing the decks well. There are also obviously a decent amount of fringe homebrew decks, but to insinuate that their winrates are relevant to the meta as a whole disregards one key factor: if they were outstandingly well performing decks, people would notice and begin to copy the list to achieve more wins. That is how a deck goes from one player’s recipe to a contender in the meta. There is no point in balancing cards to put archetypes in line that are basically unknown to a majority of players.
However, I would agree that balancing cards in favor of the high Legend meta, which is unreachable to 99% of players, is flawed. There have been plenty of examples of high-APM difficult to pilot decks that can’t even be played properly on mobile, especially by a bronze or silver player. The ranks that set the trends are platinum, diamond, and legend. That has proven to be true time and time again.
Arena is simply unplayable for many reasons, it´s certainly the worse experience i ever had in any video games in my entire life. Truly embarassing.
Maybe Kripp quit arena years ago for a reason, balance issues aside don't forget it used to have 9 wins cap. So, at some point blizz realized that too many people can maintain infinite runs and just killed the mode
Maybe Kripp quit arena years ago for a reason, balance issues aside don't forget it used to have 9 wins cap. So, at some point blizz realized that too many people can maintain infinite runs and just killed the mode
What? Arena has always had a 12 win cap. Unless you mean pre-release in Beta.
Let's also not get into general balancing of the game when the thread was clearly about constructed balance.
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Based on Hsreplay data in Diamond 5 through Diamond 1 where the highest density of players are currently; 4 classes control 7 of the top 8 decks in the meta. So the question needs to be asked how does Team5 observe and value balance beyond saying they try to keep decks and players through matchmaking at a 50% winrate?
Is it just accepted that certain classes will have their time in the sun and the others will have to wait until cards rotate or new broken class cards/archetypes are released in another expansion? As someone who acquires every card on day 1 of an expansion I have the ability to play any deck whether it's a net deck or a home brew. Some players can only craft one good deck per expansion so why not craft the top winrate deck? At the same time wouldn't it behoove Team5 and Blizzard from a sales standpoint to balance the game by tuning it regularly instead once every 6-8 weeks so that every class has a viable deck and players will feel more incentivized to play their favorite class instead of whatever the best deck is? Or is it better for them to go look at Hunter Mage Rogue and Shaman if they were your favorite class in warcraft then play them now because we made them better than the other 11 classes?
Google search: Is Hearthstone free to play?
Yes pretty much
Back in vanilla/early expansion we had to wait 6-12 months for balance changes, I think it's at a good pace now, my only problem is they have few clear target cards and archetypes that they absolutely want to see play so they'll buff them, but there's tons of mediocre cards that will never be looked at because they are intended to be mediocre or have no impact.
"Based on Hsreplay data"
There's an issue here from the start of your post. HSReplay data is data from people who use their plug-in and people they played against. That's not a balanced picture to start with. Especially since you go on with "in Diamond 5 through Diamond 1 where the highest density of players are currently", which may be true for the HSReplay data (which just goes to show who actually uses their services and not an actual fair view of the playerbase as a whole) but is certainly not true for the entire playerbase since we know for a fact most people are actually in Bronze, and that as you go up, the amount of people gets less and less and less.
So to answer a question you probably weren't asking: Blizzard balances with EVERYONE in mind, not just the narrow band of players on the cusp of Legend rank.
You can argue if they do a good job of that or not, but then you need to look at everyone, and not a very small and biased slice of players.
If you see a bad post on the forum use the report function under it, so I or someone else of the moderation team can take care of it!
I care a lot more about archetype representation then class representation.
When you don't die before turn 8 each game maybe?
Then how or where would you recommend to get "accurate" data snapshots from since Blizzard doesn't post that data themselves? On top of that I can positively guarantee you that of players who play at least 3 games a day to finish their daily quests the majority of them are not in Bronze. Again this data I'm using from is HSReplay but those same decks are consistently some of the most played from bronze up into legend so yes I agree that balancing should and does take everyone into account but there's a correlation that as you go up in rank the same 3-4 classes consistently have the higher if not the highest winrates.
Google search: Is Hearthstone free to play?
You can use Tempostorm for a different list of decks based on Pro player's activities.
And believe me, it is always different from Hsreplay.
https://tempostorm.com/hearthstone/meta-snapshot/standard/2023-07-18
It doesn't help when you have someone like me who used to use HSReplay's tracker, and changed to Firestone because I preferred it. But honestly find myself playing the majority of my games on my iPad around the house now when watching my 11 month-old son, so there's no tracking metric on there at all. Just more avenues that feed into HSReplay giving smaller and smaller slices of reality that MAY be accurate. Or not.
They balance for winrate and sometimes nerf to get rid of decks that are particularly frustrating but not necessarily overpowered. The goal is not perfect balance, only that decks are playable without feeling like total garbage and that there aren't just a couple of decks dominating the meta.
Usually decks that are strong at the start of an expansion will continue to be strong, because blizzard doesn't like to nerf decks into unplayability. Doing so would feel really bad if you just invested all your dust for nothing.
Also the balance is always horrendous for the first month or so after an expansion. Not just because decks are unbalanced, but because players are experimenting.
According to the latest patch dealing 60+ face damage on turn 7-8 IS considered balanced, so there's your answer.
I care more about NPE and freshness than balance. Things that have poor interaction or are infuriating to play against are more bothersome than a high win rate to me. If a chunk of people concede to a deck on turn 1 because they hate playing against it, the NPE is too high and something should probably change, unless it's being played by a tiny, tiny fraction of people.
With freshness, it would go back to the last three or so patches before this expansion where the commentary was always "the meta is in a good spot right now so we don't see the need to make changes". Sure, but it got stale and boring. I'd rather changes were made for the sake of changing things even if they created "imbalance".
CCGing since '98.
Arena right now is the perfect example of a completely unbalanced experience, standard is not too far behind from that tbh.
I consider balance to be the exact opposite of what anyone on here says it is. If they developed based on what people say here it would be the worst game on the market by a huge margin.
Duels too. Literally any mode right now is highly unbalanced. No surprise given the power level difference between classes and archtypes in Titans! I stopped playing the game again yesterday. After some good duels runs, but it's no fun at all to play against the same 2 classes every time (shaman/hunter in duels, mage/dk in arena)
There appears to be a huge level of misinterpretation regarding the value of data aggregators like HSReplay. It’s true that most players don’t use deck trackers at all, myself included most of the time as I play on mobile, but as you climb ranked ladder you’ll notice a pattern over and over - an abundance of players directly copying a tier 1 list from a netdeck, from Hearthpwn or any other source. This happens not just in diamond but all the way down to bronze - the only difference is that the bronze players are not playing the decks well. There are also obviously a decent amount of fringe homebrew decks, but to insinuate that their winrates are relevant to the meta as a whole disregards one key factor: if they were outstandingly well performing decks, people would notice and begin to copy the list to achieve more wins. That is how a deck goes from one player’s recipe to a contender in the meta. There is no point in balancing cards to put archetypes in line that are basically unknown to a majority of players.
However, I would agree that balancing cards in favor of the high Legend meta, which is unreachable to 99% of players, is flawed. There have been plenty of examples of high-APM difficult to pilot decks that can’t even be played properly on mobile, especially by a bronze or silver player. The ranks that set the trends are platinum, diamond, and legend. That has proven to be true time and time again.
Arena is simply unplayable for many reasons, it´s certainly the worse experience i ever had in any video games in my entire life. Truly embarassing.
Maybe Kripp quit arena years ago for a reason, balance issues aside don't forget it used to have 9 wins cap. So, at some point blizz realized that too many people can maintain infinite runs and just killed the mode
What? Arena has always had a 12 win cap. Unless you mean pre-release in Beta.
Let's also not get into general balancing of the game when the thread was clearly about constructed balance.
If you see a bad post on the forum use the report function under it, so I or someone else of the moderation team can take care of it!