Hearthpwn

Edit:  Thanks Kraken296 for correcting my math.

All the players who arrive there have approximately the same ladder win percentage

Looking at ladder win percentage (at legend) is not a good way to estimate skill level.  The ranked matchmaking system for legend players uses a hidden skill rating to try to match players of similar skill against each other.  That means that it is a design goal that the system maximize the number of players with a 50% win rate.

Let's imagine a hypothetical:  Four players, A, B, C, D are all queueing constantly, and the rest of the legend ladder has taken a Hearthstone break today.  A and B are top players who win tournaments with roughly equal skill, C and D botted to legend using a pirate warrior bot and now play exclusively quest paladin decks, with roughly equal skill (but much lower than A and B.)

The matchmaking system will soon figure out that A and B are much higher skill than C and D, and every round, A and B will be matched against each other, while C and D will be matched against each other.  All four players have 50% win rate.  If A or B ever played C or D, they'd beat them 90% of the time, but they don't encounter them at all.

Ladder win rate at legend usually does not and should not tell you anything about skill level because players only encounter opponents with similar skill estimates (often referred to as "matchmaking ratings.")  The exception is at the very high and very low end of the scale, where players rack up excess wins or excess losses because the system cannot find a similarly-skilled match.

Edit:  Blizzard's matchmaking system is similar in concept and design to Microsoft's TrueSkill system, described here if you're interested.

Quote from Gunnolf >>

I'll refrain from commenting on the casters which are quite abysmal and usually just antagonise each other rather than focus on the game.

It costs about US$100 to US$150 per expansion, plus gold from playing regularly, to have a card set that pretty much lets you play any deck you want at any time, with some judicious dusting and crafting.  If your goals are more modest (like to have a few decent meta decks at any given time) you can probably average like $50 per expansion.  That's relatively expensive for a video game, but it's to Blizzard's credit that they haven't gone for a design that rewards something crazy like spending US$1000 per month (unlike many other F2P games.)

How easy is it to reach rank 5?  How good are you at Hearthstone?

I don't mean that to be a challenge, or in fact an assertion that it takes particularly advanced skill at the game to make it to rank 5.  But, when you're starting to play, it's easy to stall out at lower ranks, even if you are playing really solid decks with the best cards.  It takes time to learn all the cards.  It takes time to learn the various decks you'll face and how they work.  There are some skills that aren't really super-obvious at first, like knowing when to hold back good cards instead of always playing the best card you can afford at the moment.

The people saying "it's easy" or "it just takes time" are half right.  With time and practice you'll most likely get there reasonably fast.  But, it's not trivial, people aren't born knowing how to do it, nor do most people shoot straight to Rank 5 on their first try.

I say this mainly so that if you run into difficulty, you won't think it's because there's something particularly wrong.  That's normal, just keep playing and doing your best to learn.

I have an answer not listed above:  Why would I want to use only one deck (or class) to grind to legend?

Quote from zzAMBIENzz >>

Quote from Lysenko >>

"Well, for starters, there really was no nerf to Jade Druid. From what I have encountered, it hasn't changed in any noticeable way. "

Vicious Syndicate win rate for druid (which was 53% for token and 54% for jade) has dropped to 50%, behind Paladin, Shaman, Rogue, and Hunter.  That's a significant drop.

 Everyone keeps wanting to jump on the VS data, or hrsreplay. It is WAY to early to draw any reasonable conclusions. 

"Well, for starters, there really was no nerf to Jade Druid. From what I have encountered, it hasn't changed in any noticeable way. "

Vicious Syndicate win rate for druid (which was 53% for token and 54% for jade) has dropped to 50%, behind Paladin, Shaman, Rogue, and Hunter.  That's a significant drop.

I pointed out earlier in the thread a specific metric that Blizzard can probably measure with their dataset that hsreplay doesn't have enough games to support:  Comparing performance of a popular deck to performance of a nearly identical deck with a single card swapped out.  Do the searches yourself, you'll see they don't have enough data on those variations.  Blizzard may not either, but with 300x more games, they'll come a lot closer.

Quote from Lolliswagger >>

Agreed. If you think a sample size of several hundred thousand isn't enough you have no idea how statistics or probability work. Assuming the sample is representative the statistics from the same analysis would almost certainly be nearly identical. However, if you argue instead that the sample is biased because mostly a specific type of subset of players (i.e. serious) use HS replay, then you might have a valid argument.

The "actually drawn" win rate doesn't tell you how the card compares to other possible alternatives in the same deck, though.  It may be that the next best card on the list (that didn't make it into the original deck) is a lot worse.

Besides there is ambiguity everywhere in their PR statements

Being ambiguous or withholding information is not what you accused them of in your earlier post.  You accused them of making up a nonexistent bug.

That's completely insane.  Blizzard definitely doesn't share everything, but they're not going to knowingly straight-up state something false.  The downside if an insider lets slip that they've done this is too much.

The easiest methodology for evaluating the value of a given card, if you have statistics on 100% of the games played across all servers, is to look at a particular popular deck with that card and compare it to all decks that sub it out for something else.  The difference between the next-best deck and that deck is your card quality measure.

Regarding "just wanting people to buy more decks," setting up a situation where expansion cards are more valuable does help serve that goal, but it also serves the goal of keeping the game changing across expansions, which makes it less boring for long-term players.  Making sure that classic/basic cards aren't too strong serves both those goals, and that's fine, since it's something for them and something for us all at once.

The reason they can't just put "better" cards into expansions rather than nerfing certain classic/basic cards is that they'd have to bring up the power level of the whole expansion to reduce those cards' value, otherwise deck builders will just uses both versions.  Power creep has other downsides, like shortening games and extending even further the gap between new player and long-time player deck quality (which is already a problem.)

As you point out, hsreplay's contributors are self-selected.  Also, Blizzard's much larger data set gives them options for analysis that are a lot more interesting than just "what percentage of games where this card is played," particularly when they're looking at a specific card.  The question I'd start with would be to compare overall win rates in various match-ups between otherwise identical decks with and without the card in them, which hsreplay doesn't answer.

Now, this won't necessarily tell you the difference between the card's actual power and its perceived power, because it's very possible that if the card is perceived to be very strong, not running it will end up a marker of lower skill even if its actual performance diverges from the community expectation.  But, it's a more targeted analysis than that statistic you posted, which just looks at the card in the context of that specific deck.

(One might imagine a quirky card that were not generally useful but set up a particular powerful combo.  That card would have really nice numbers on those per-card win rates on hsreplay, but only in the specific context of the deck that relies on that combo to succeed.)