Hearthpwn

So I fed all Mar 15 Vicious Syndicate Standard data into an Excel spreadsheet that models future meta shifts — for each simulation cycle, decks with winrates below 50% lose players at a rate proportional to how much below 50% the winrate is, while decks with winrates above 50% gain those players proportional to how much above 50% their winrate is.

Given that, here are my predictions:

1. Warlock, Hunter and Mage numbers will continue to decline, while Priest numbers grow. Eventually Priest would grow to 40% of the meta.

2. Spiteful Priest is in decline and would eventually be forced out of the meta completely. Priest players will abandon it for other Priest archetypes.

3. Overall Paladin numbers will remain constant but in 2-3 weeks virtually all Murlock Paladins will become Dude Paladins, continuing the trend of the last few weeks.

4. Big Spell Mage will hold onto its niche, not really growing in popularlity but holding steady at ~3% total meta population. Meanwhile, Secret Mage will continue to decline as its prey deck, Control Warlock, loses meta dominance.

5. Spell Hunter isn't even viable. People will realize this.

This "law" is kind of like saying "the deck that reduces the enemy hero to 0 health fastest wins." It's technically accurate, but devoid of meaning. The fundamental nature of how Hearthstone works is: players play threats and the threats that aren't immediately dealt with get to get extra value and/or deal damage; thus, for all decks, plays that your opponent fails to interact with are your win condition. Obviously, if your opponent fully interacts with your plays, your board is cleared and you're far from winning. That's just how Hearthstone (and pretty much every CCG) work.

Different decks have not only different threats but also different answers, which means decks are better at interacting with some threats than others; if this wasn't the case, good matchups and bad matchups wouldn't exist, because the deck that better interacts with enemy plays is the favorite to win. So to banepost slightly, if you just lost a game, clearly the opponent's plays were uninteractive FOR YOU. If you saw how you could have interacted, you would have and not lost.

Ultimately I think OP is wrong to say that a certain deck is uninteractive simply because a certain line of play wasn't interacted with. The phrasing of the law shifts all blame for the loss off of the loser, completely destroying any hope of growth.

Voted Playable. I think this card is very comprable to nerfed Raza — same effect, decent body for the mana, also requires a deckbuilding restriction — but slightly better because it is from start of game and is Neutral so it only needs to fit in one deck to see play. I predict a Tier 3 archetype based on this card.

The 1-cost hero power is FAR better than the Justicar hero power. Any combination of even-cost cards to fill the turn + 1 Mana to hero power uses all Mana effectively on an odd-mana turn, it presumably works with Death Knight hero powers (for classes with access to even-cost heroes) and the body isn't bad for the cost. Meanwhile, with the Justicar power you need to play an even number of odd-mana cards to use all Mana on an even turn (except on turn 2), a Death Knight hero power overrides it, and not only is the body understated but it costs 9 so you can't hero power the same turn.

Voted Dust it.

The 1-cost hero power is FAR better than the Justicar hero power. Any combination of even-cost cards to fill the turn + 1 Mana to hero power uses all Mana effectively on an odd-mana turn, it presumably works with Death Knight hero powers (for classes with access to even-cost heroes) and the body isn't bad for the cost. Meanwhile, with the Justicar power you need to play an even number of odd-mana cards to use all Mana on an even turn (except on turn 2), a Death Knight hero power overrides it, and not only is the body understated but it costs 9 so you can't hero power the same turn.

The 1-cost hero power is FAR better than the Justicar hero power. Any combination of even-cost cards to fill the turn + 1 Mana to hero power uses all Mana effectively on an odd-mana turn, it presumably works with Death Knight hero powers (for classes with access to even-cost heroes) and the body isn't bad for the cost. Meanwhile, with the Justicar power you need to play an even number of odd-mana cards to use all Mana on an even turn (except on turn 2), a Death Knight hero power overrides it, and not only is the body understated but it costs 9 so you can't hero power the same turn.

So let's say you've got some asymmetric version of paper-rock-scissors; paper beats rock 55% of the time, rock beats scissors 60% of the time, and scissors beats paper 65% of the time. That metagame will equalize (that is, all three having a 50% overall winrate) when the field is 1/2 rock, 1/3 paper, and 1/6 scissors. All three will be viable, but assuming that meta began as 1/3 of each, scissors players will feel metagame pressure to switch to rock until scissors is no longer overpopulated and rock is no longer underpopulated. (You can calculate this quickly by visualizing each archeype as an angle at a vertex and each matchup's winrate minus loserate as a side; each angle is proportional to the side it doesn't touch.)

A stabilized meta in a game like Hearthstone is merely a more complicated version of paper-rock-scissors (PRS); for instance, "paper" might consist of three different archeypes, each of which have a PRS relationship among themselves. Although it's possible that this can be applied symmetrically, this is often not the case (and it's arguably not even desired). However, if we imagine a five-archetype meta where there is only one "rock" and only one "scissors" but three different "papers," we would naturally want "paper" to consist of a larger portion of the meta. Thus, in this example we would want "rock" to have a very high winrate-minus-loserate against "scissors" (increasing the angle at the vertex opposite) while "paper" had a relatively low (but positive) winrate-minus-loserate against "rock" and "scissors" a low (but positive) winrate-minus-loserate against "paper."

I've looked at matchup data from Vicious Syndicate and it seems that our current metagame MIGHT (I'm not sure) roughly fit this five-archetype model. It's a lot more complicated than that, but Control and Cube Warlocks tend to have winrates above 50% against pretty much everything that isn't Priest or Secret Mage. Those decks, in turn, have their own very diverse array counters, most of which tend to lose to Warlocks. So Warlock is Scissors, Priest is Rock, and there are many Papers. However, what seems problematic here is that the Priest matchup against Warlock, while favorable, is not overwhelmingly so, and the Warlock winrates against some of the "papers" seem too high; as explained above, this reduces the meta-stabilized population of "papers."

So if we're going to nerf Warlock, we'd want a change that makes Priest even stronger against them while reducing Warlock's winrate against "Paper" without making it negative. Therefore, if Blizzard is going to nerf Warlock, my suggestion would be

REDUCE THE ATTACK OF VOIDLORD TO 2

This would make the Demon more vulnerable to Potion of Madness and Cabal Shadow Priest, making Priest even more of a counter; it also would probably slightly reduce winrates against minion-based aggression, but I doubt it would be severe enough to make Paladin favored against Warlock.

Again, I'm not sure that Warlock even needs nerfing; I'm just talking about how to nerf.

Quote from Slain >>.

1. Close account creation doesnt mean close card collection. Some new players maybe just wanna play some games and test hearthstone and others for example a Trump that want to play free to play run legends or people that invest money.

In both cases the new player that just wanna play hearthstone casualy still gets slaughtered with your matchmaking so that sollution doesnt realy solve things for those players.

Quote from Deadvim >>

 Been binge watching JP lately.

Q. Why didn't the undocumented immigrant attack the Mage?

A. He was afraid of the ICE barrier.

Q. What does N'Zoth serve as card-drawing appetizers?

A. Loot Hors D'oeuvres

Quote from MrShmoove >>

It DOES get tiresome facing Paladin after Paladin.  I played 6 straight games against pallies the other day and got bored and logged off. 

Quote from Slain >>

New players atm have the real problem that they cant even finsih most quests since they cant win any games due to everybody in all modes is netdecking with full collection.

Thus we need a save room for new players. Maybe that suggestion is not the most creative but it would not take much afford to programm it and it makes the game better for new players.

Quote from Dunscot >>

Quote from SMcB >>

 

But Johnnies aren't cool. Johnnies are angry. [...] All these things are great distractions, but more than anything else Johnny needs expansions and resets because given enough time the illusion will break and Johnny will be inevitably miserable [...] None of this is to say Johnnies don't matter. Indeed, as I said earlier they're 99% of the posters on social media. From a Dev perspective, keeping them happy is absolutely critical. [...] As explained above, there's nothing to be done, except string Johnny along with new content.

 

You seem to like that Rosewater terminology a lot. But I would strongly disadvise to make any further assumptions, or practice pseudo-psychology, based on that. And if you truly believe that anybody who states an opinion does so purely for the sake of self-expression and emphasizing individuality, you are a madman.

Anyone who likes to operate with models must be aware of their limits. If you take that very simple and debatable formula to identify player types, and want to use it to rationalize away the entire topic, which it certainly is not suited for, you probably have no actual interest in discourse.

I strongly disagree with your conclusion that "there's nothing to be done", but I'm sure I will not be able to convice you otherwise.

I voted "yes" but I'm not at all motivated by the recent Wild events. Right now, the meta is such that Paladin and Hunter are much stronger in Standard than in Wild, while Mage, Druid and Shaman are much stronger in Wild than in Standard. (Priest and Warlock are Tier 1 in both, Rogue is Tier 3 in both, and Warrior is simply garbage.) As such, i find a lot of incentive to complete Druid and/or Shaman quests in Wild, and sometimes Mage too if I can't pull it in Arena. So I wouldn't say I play Wild a lot but I'm there sometimes for quest completions, where before recently I never touched the format.

Given that Blizzard isn't likely to balance Standard such that all none classes are viable within the format, I'd like to see a more deliberate effort to make the good Standard classes distinct from the good Wild classes.