Hearthpwn

My point is that they're both OTK decks. Blizzard nerfed worgens giving us the explanation that they hate OTK decks and it's not fun for the opponent to play against. Razakus pretty much fits the exact criteria that resulted in worgens getting a nerf. They're both OTK and they're both not fun to play against in similar ways; in blizzard's words, not mine

"People do it for a lot of reasons..."

Or to practice with an unfamiliar deck...

Are you thinking they're trying to devise an "anti-tilt" system to keep people playing?

yambs_tim:

I mentioned my overall win rate in the data set that post you quoted was describing.  It was 72%.  But, and this is important, I do not necessarily believe that matchmaking changes what it's doing based on my own, actual, real-time win rate (though I should be careful to say I don't actually know this.)  I believe it makes predictions based on population-wide variances.  This is supported by the battle.net server engineer's comments that I quoted on the previous page about feeding business intelligence data (which would be population-wide statistics about the game) into Hearthstone's matchmaking.

The point of my post was that I was being matched against a mix of opponents that ought to hit about a 50% win rate based on population-wide statistics about common matchups.

Quote from iandakar >>

So the question is whether that's true or whether Activision has more control over the situation over at Destiny 2. If they do then it would stand to reason that they also have more say over at Blizzard and, thus, aren't as trustworthy as they used to be.

LardLad:

I posted a pretty long discussion of the history of Blizzard's comments on matchmaking here.

I totally agree with your skepticism about the idea that they'd speak falsely.  There's no good reason for them to do so.  However, it has been a year since they came out with a few public statements that only ranking is used in sub-legend ranked matchmaking, and there have been more recent statements that both implied a desire to explore new directions and suggest that they've possibly been doing so without talking about it publicly.

Of course, if you are aware of comments they've made much more recently than the beginning of 2017 that reinforce that that's still the case, that would be great to know about in this discussion.  I haven't found them, myself.

Tonight I decided to switch to a Razakus Priest deck, since based on the outcome of my earlier experiments, it's reasonable to guess that a strategy of picking a more skill-intensive deck might be the best recipe for ladder success if I can do well enough to exceed the average.

I played 18 games (which is of course a small number from which to draw any statistical inferences, so take this with a grain of salt.)  Interestingly, of these games, 8 of them (44%) were against other priests.  All but one of them were Dragon or Big Priest, which according to Vicious Syndicate's Data Reaper Report, are favored against Razakus Priest.  (Dragon Priest, according to them, has about a 55% win rate vs. Razakus, and Big Priest has about a 51% win rate, on average.)

My overall win rate for the 18 games was about 72%.  (I went 13-5.)  Fortunately for me, against those priest archetypes that were favored by the population numbers, I went 6-2.  It's certainly possible to have a good record through just dumb luck, so I won't infer too much about the deck being successful for me just yet.

The important carry-away, though, is that 44% of my opponents were priests, almost all of them archetypes that were supposed to be favored against me, almost twice the representation of priests in the overall rank 5-1 population,  By comparison, my second largest group of opponents, warlock, were 22%, not too far off from their 17% representation in the population.  The remaining classes were only 1 or 2 games each.

The single best thing you can do to accelerate your climb to legend is start playing very carefully.  Work on improving the little mistakes you make.

Beyond that, play a relatively fast deck so you can play a lot of games quickly.

Finally, if the idea going around is correct that matchmaking takes either your class or deck into account to match you against opponents who are predicted to average a 50% win rate against you (and this is far from proven), you might find it helpful to pick a deck with an unusually high skill cap and master it, since such a matchmaking system would best reward people who far exceed average performance with their decks.

Quick follow-up:  I got home and looked at stats on another 45 games of Spiteful Summoner priest, played on my home computer.

Over my total of 65 games played both at lunchtime and at home, these were the numbers for the three top-represented classes:

18 games (27%) were paladin

18 games (27%) were priest

10 games (15%) were rogue.  

Priest is exactly where it ought to be based on representation in the population.  Paladin, at 27%, is a bit over double its expected representation, and was overrepresented in both sets of games.  Rogue, at 15%, is also overrepresented by about 50%, but the number of games is low enough that that could just be random variation.

Nevertheless, if one wanted to overrepresent classes to cancel out a wide range of other good match-ups, rogue and paladin would be the ones to match me against.  I feel this picture is very consistent with the hypothesis that this is how matchmaking now works.

Warlocks and priests make up a total of just over a third of everyone playing, which isn’t too bad.

What deck are you playing vs. them?

Fair enough.  I would say some of how reasonable it is depends on specifics of how it works.  It's possible they're just doing a coarse class vs. class adjustment, in which case clever deckbuilding details can still get one an edge.  It's also possible they're trying to identify archetypes by looking for specific cards or card groupings.  They might even be using some type of automated means to identify groupings of decks or archetypes, something like Vicious Syndicate's "class radar" feature.

All that said, I do personally like the idea that ranking should be a test of execution and not "what do I put in my deck."  As a player, that would mean to me that the optimal strategy might be finding a difficult-to-play deck and getting really good with it, rather than just going for easy and overall powerful.  (Arguably, like Spiteful Summoner Dragon Priest.)

Edit:  BTW, statistics above are from my lunchtime games at work.  I'll check statistics at home later today to see if they agree.

Please, if you have a moment, take a look at my follow-up post.  Sounds like you disagree but I wonder if you'd like to offer any thoughts about why my arguments don't hold water for you.

Edit:  My TL;DR about why it is possibly a reasonable thing to do is that deck archetypes will always have varying strength and NOT to do something like that rewards people who slavishly follow widely-available data (from sites like Vicious Syndicate or HSReplay.net) in choosing what to play, as opposed to people who master whatever deck they choose and play with care and forethought (which are usually what people think of when they talk about "skill" at Hearthstone.)

Edit 2:  From a practical standpoint, as a player, it would seem to me that one benefit is that it makes it more viable to play a wider variety of decks.  Something that's not as viable against all decks in the meta averaged together can still be worth mastering and playing well, and that means more different decks that can perform well on ladder.

Here are a couple thoughts on what the implications of such a choice would be on Hearthstone from a business standpoint, and for us as players, which might shed some light on why it might make sense to choose to do something like this:

Players like winning more than they like losing, and losing too much is probably highly correlated with disengaging from the game.  This is why they've stated that they've biased matchmaking for new players toward other new players, for example.  So, from a business standpoint, attempting to account for choice of class/deck somehow in trying to get each individual player as close as possible to a 50% win rate makes sense.  The most players will stay engaged if the winning is spread around as evenly as possible.

Another possible argument for it is that it helps to factor out the coarse decision of what class/deck to play from measurement of skill.  By adjusting rates of matching against other decks to reduce overall dominance of one deck/class choice, the remaining variation is more likely to be driven by quality of play, which is what the ranking system (particularly at ranks 5+) is meant to measure.

One potential downside to such an approach is that if (as implied by the Blizzcon quote above) matchmaking is driven by business intelligence data, it means that changes that might drive the last business intelligence data drop out of sync with the current game (such as releasing an expansion, buffs/nerfs, or major new unexpected deck-building insights by players) could allow exploitable class/deck choice advantages for a window of time until the data is again updated.

I should note that I don't consider using such matchmaking strategies "rigging," to the extent that that term connotes unfairness.  There are valid fairness reasons to want to minimize the impact of deck choice on measuring player skill, such as that the availability of aggregate data to players like I've posted here makes choosing a strong deck archetype pretty trivial.

In this thread from a couple weeks ago, I posted a quote from Blizzcon that seemed to suggest that some type of meta-based matching (either by class or by deck contents) had been adopted.  Here's a little data that suggests there might be more to see:

I've been playing a dragon priest deck a fair amount recently, taking me from rank 5 to 3 (and in the losing streak represented in this data set, back again.)  Here's the distribution of classes I've faced:

Here's the latest Vicious Syndicate meta report win rate chart for the three major Priest archetypes.  (The four darkest red boxes on the Dragon Priest row, representing low win rates, are aggro paladin, murloc paladin, Kingsbane rogue, and pirate warrior) :

Finally, here's the overall class distribution in ranks 5-1 from the most recent VS meta report:

Note that dragon priest is relatively strong against everything except aggro paladin, murloc paladin, Kingsbane rogue, and pirate warrior.  Meanwhile, my number of matches against paladin on a dragon priest deck (eight out of 20) far exceeds the two or three game expectation value for a 20 game series.

This suggests that matches are selected in such a way as to push the result toward 50%.  It's not absolute proof, of course.  A completely random series of matches could look the same.  However, it certainly seems to warrant a closer look.

yeah I totally deserved it, no doubt.

Edit:  Somehow didn't put together (though like I say I once knew) the connection between this and the Eye for an Eye/Ice Block interaction in Mage vs. Paladin.