Hearthpwn

Meanwhile every arena run is still 80% games against auto-generated names, people who bought gold accounts to get the perfect deck (they just throw away any other draft).
67k sounds like a fun number, but it has done nothing whatsoever for the arena problem.

I only watch Thijs sometimes, and very occasionally kibler. Both aren't in the poll.... Bit weird to leave the biggest HS streamer out.
Why people would vote on Kripp is beyong me but each to their own i guess :D Forsen ain't my streamer either but i can still see the potential there for people liking the chaos.

TQuote from Zizka >>

I was under the same impression (the game dying), so again, research. While there was a drop in 2020 it’s back up  in 2023. 

Also: 

• The Hearthstone player base is 10 times bigger than it was in 2014.

Source: https://webtribunal.net/blog/hearthstone-player-count/

Although:

• Hearthstone’s revenue has been decreasing since the end of 2019.

(same source)

I just wish I had financial data to confirm this. I did find this which seems reliable:

Hearthstone revenue for 2018:

$165 million

---

Hearthstone revenue for 2016:

$394.6 million

Source: https://videogamesstats.com/hearthstone-facts-statistics/

It seems revenue is going down (as of 2018 anyway) but the player base isn’t declining at an alarming rate. I did find this which was interesting:

While 2018 closed with $165 million in revenue for HS on mobile alone, SensorTower predicts total revenue of just $33 million for the first half of 2022.

Source: https://us.millenium.gg/news/28415.html

So, in a way, it is dying but it seems to be from lack of player who actually spend money on the game as opposed to lacking players. Hopefully this will mean the end and lead to Hearthstone 2.0 which reworks the game from the ground up.

 

What a nonsense article.
We DO have player amount data, albeit it being for the part of the playerbase that uses a decktracker, which should not matter because it generally is the same % of people that use one over time.

In it's peak HS had around 25-30 million games per week (of people using HDT), since 2018 that has steadily declined to peaking around 15 million per week after new expansion release. This (newest) expansion is the first expansion ever where peak HDT players didn't go over 10 million; it peaked around 9 million in the week after release and has been declining since, currently on 8.2 million (300k unique players).

SO, in essence, we are now at a level where there's 30% of weekly games versus prime HS days, of the people that use HDT (which i guess is the important part of the playerbase, as those people, i assume, are more likely to spend money on the game). The only thing we do not know is how much % of the playerbase uses HDT. I think it's quite large as only 1 person in each game needs to run it for this data to feed.

If you look at other, less reliable, data, like twitch viewership or youtube views on hs videos, it's completely down the drain too. This just means player interest for watching HS is down, a lot, too as opposed to the prime days.

Is the game dying? I don't think it is, but it surely is making a heck of a lot less money than it used to.

There is also this video from HS mathematics, backed by sensortower data, which claims 2022 was, by a long shot, the worst year for HS ever in revenue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kob4zKCyHMc

Quote from b1ak1ce >>

why do people even bot in this game, I get it in WoW because you can sell gold on online markets, but why HS? The reward economy is self-contained.

Most of 'm are blizzard bots i reckon.
Just look at hsreplay stats, every other expansion the weekly played games went up to 15-16 million after launch. This expansion it went up to 8.9 million and has been dropping since, already down to 8.2 as we speak, with only 305k unique people using deck tracker in a week.
There's been a mass exodus from hs it seems, people finally being fed up, and blizzard is trying to salvage things with bots...

Quote from Faustivious >>

 LOL !!!

Diablo sucks !!! I've never played as him (nor will I), but I beat him 90%+ of the time.
What sucks is when he fights all players, and even though I hit face, Diablo is Immune every 4 turns.

Ehm, what MMR are you at?
Diablo is the best hero in bgs right now, by a large margin....

Played for a few hours. I think it's a hot mess with a terribly designed UI and a mind-numbingly boring gameplay. 
The whole game mode is basically math puzzle simulator, and it doesn't change ever, it's like a way worse version of the adventures they released in the past. I kept playing for a little bit to give it a fair chance, but the dreadful design (hovering over thing with 90% empty ui space, the terrible way of upgrading stuff b clicking each hero separately, etc, etc.) made me quit.

Not ever touching this gamemode again. 

Quote from MyDude33 >>

Quote from savarunl >>

Quote from FortyDust >>

Love how the tinfoil hat-wearers selectively refute the arguments they think they have answers to, but they consistently fail to address the ironclad ones, such as:

• Computing power and programming time required to do this would be so expensive that Blizzard would never recoup the investment.
• Blizzard has tried and true psychological gimmicks at their disposal that can do the same task far more efficiently.
• Blizzard has far more to lose than to gain if they cheat like this and get caught (and they WOULD get caught).

All the conspiracy theorists really have is anecdotal evidence that amounts to "I have trouble ranking up because I'm bad at the game and don't know it."

Lol, computing power and programming to do this would be almost nonexistent.
It's literally comparing a hash of your deck against hashes of a win rate list and picking the one that favors or does not favor your win rate. 

This would be 200 lines of code at worst, and that's really stretching it already.
For draw optimization you can run sims, hearthstone deck tracker literally does the same, it runs thousands of sims for your entire board state and the opponent's, on people's potato pc's, in less than a second...

Lol at the programming bro talk. I actually do it for a living instead of telling people about it on the internet. 

Your making a huge mistake by assuming everything is known and in a vacuum with no outside forces acting on it. Deck lists change all the time with subtle meta shifts. Not everyone has every card for every optimal deck. Not all metas are the same for every rank. Not all people can pilot a deck the same. Human behavior and ingenuity is a huge variable. To account for all of these things is near impossible without someone noticing at some point given how popular the game is. 

As for the deck tracker I assume you are talking about the Battlegrounds one. Keep in mind there is far less going on there. You don't choose what minions are offered. They are all always offered. You don't choose how many exist. They all have a set amount. You don't choose who attacks who. It is governed by a strict set of rules. Far easier computationally.

Of course if you want to write that 200 lines of code that proves me wrong. Be my guest and make that app. I hope you get rich off it. I'm just going to err on the safe side and bet against you on that one.

I've mentioned it before, but at some point I'd like an answer as to why 3 people on Hearthpwn seem to have this all figured out but no one actually tracking and writing code for these things has. It's mind boggling.

The first error you are making is assuming you're the only one doing this sort of thing for a living ;)
From your previous reply about this sort of thing (a simple deck hash comparison) needing 'massive computer power', i can already tell you that you either do not or are not very good at it though.

The hs deck tracker battlegrounds simulation actually does a LOT more than a simple boardstate check for calculating it's outcome positions, it actually simulates every possible outcome, and averages those out to give you  a result.

Nuff said

Quote from ScrotieMcB >>

Quote from savarunl >>

Quote from FortyDust >>

Love how the tinfoil hat-wearers selectively refute the arguments they think they have answers to, but they consistently fail to address the ironclad ones, such as:

• Computing power and programming time required to do this would be so expensive that Blizzard would never recoup the investment.
• Blizzard has tried and true psychological gimmicks at their disposal that can do the same task far more efficiently.
• Blizzard has far more to lose than to gain if they cheat like this and get caught (and they WOULD get caught).

All the conspiracy theorists really have is anecdotal evidence that amounts to "I have trouble ranking up because I'm bad at the game and don't know it."

Lol, computing power and programming to do this would be almost nonexistent.
It's literally comparing a hash of your deck against hashes of a win rate list and picking the one that favors or does not favor your win rate. 

This would be 200 lines of code at worst, and that's really stretching it already.
For draw optimization you can run sims, hearthstone deck tracker literally does the same, it runs thousands of sims for your entire board state and the opponent's, on people's potato pc's, in less than a second...

 Did you know how many different combinations of cards you can put into the deck editor? How many different hashes are possible? A seven with 86 zeroes after it. If you're talking about a winrate table, you'd have to square that number.

Or, I imagine you could take only the most popular hashes. Except if you were one card off for whatever reason — like you were missing a chase legendary? — totally different hash.

You might need some extra lines of code after all.

 No, that extra data is not on codelevel. I can pretty much guarantee you that blizzard already has a dataset with every deck ever played and it's statistics against other decks, it's a pretty simple thing to have the client do an api call with a hash or base64 string of your deck and the result against the opponent's hash/string, and save that data somewhere. They even talked openly about this in the past; they are using said data for balancing purposes.

This is even a pretty simple use case as far as big data goes, really.

Quote from FortyDust >>

Love how the tinfoil hat-wearers selectively refute the arguments they think they have answers to, but they consistently fail to address the ironclad ones, such as:

• Computing power and programming time required to do this would be so expensive that Blizzard would never recoup the investment.
• Blizzard has tried and true psychological gimmicks at their disposal that can do the same task far more efficiently.
• Blizzard has far more to lose than to gain if they cheat like this and get caught (and they WOULD get caught).

All the conspiracy theorists really have is anecdotal evidence that amounts to "I have trouble ranking up because I'm bad at the game and don't know it."

Lol, computing power and programming to do this would be almost nonexistent.
It's literally comparing a hash of your deck against hashes of a win rate list and picking the one that favors or does not favor your win rate. 

This would be 200 lines of code at worst, and that's really stretching it already.
For draw optimization you can run sims, hearthstone deck tracker literally does the same, it runs thousands of sims for your entire board state and the opponent's, on people's potato pc's, in less than a second...

While there's no hard evidence, everyone who has played HS for more than a few years knows matchmaking is rigged.
Playing decks where if your winrate goes too high you start facing the perfect counterdeck almost exclusively, then you switch deck and you suddenly face the perfect counter of that deck, etc.
This doesn't happen one or two times, but hundreds of times over the years, for many players. Hearthstone has always been rock-paper-scissors metas so this sort of stuff would be braindead easy to implement from a developer p.o.v.

Anyone who thinks the matchmaking in this game is not rigged, simply hasn't played enough hs to know better, sorry to say.

Jezus this game has entered the milking state hasn't it? They are pushing out more paid skins and other nonsense than actual updates lately.
Leads me to believe they are entering emergency state on the player numbers, because this is exactly what happened with wow too when it's sub numbers dwindled: they loaded the game with an obscene amount of paid cosmetics to offset the money flow, cause whales will apparently buy anything.

Quote from Blueez >>

Priest class is 7th on hsreplay site right now. Do you think It will be 10th after Blizzard killed Illucia? And Aggro Shadow Priest is about 57%-60% winrate... It could fall to 50%-55% after Illucia died?! But why blizzard changed Illucia when priest is 7th class on hrseplay.... 

 Please stop looking at meaningless data to make points.
1. Class percentage data says exactly nothing at all, a class could have a 90% winrate deck and 3 10% winrate ones and it's average would be 30%....
2. You're mentioning the dumpster rank percentages, where stuff like secret paladin reigns. Filter it to legend and it shows a completely different picture.

Shadow priest has been oppressive from diamond up for a long time now, and illucia literally makes entire archetypes unplayable. That should never be in the power of a single card.

Quote from FortyDust >>

Quote from savarunl >>

Quote from FortyDust >>

Quote from savarunl >>

 There are no control decks in the top end of the Stormwind meta, Blizzard professionally killed off that archetype.
If you think a deck is control because it has 1 removal card in it, i don't know what you've been doing in all those mtg years you claim to have had....

The single deck that has a control style play is Quest priest and that one is currently low tier 4.
Please look at https://hsreplay.net/meta/ and tell me any control deck that is in tier 1 or 2. Hint: there isn't, it's all aggro, midrange or combo decks.

 Quest Shaman is a control deck through and through.

When you say "or combo decks" at the end, it shows that you don't even understand the terminology. There's no "or." A combo deck can be aggro, midrange or control, depending on how it behaves until it achieves the combo.

 Quest shaman is not a control deck, at all, it's a classic aggro/burn type deck. I think you are the one not understanding terms here.
Combo just aims to get to their win combo in the fastest way possible, in HS this usually resorts in exorbitant amounts of carddraw, now with the quests added into it. Control decks, in the terminology that has been established since the early days of MTG, are purely decks that aim to outlast/outvalue everything the opponent does until they can start putting their pressure up or wining through fatigue.

A Combo deck is not midrange, aggro or control. a combo deck is a combo deck and it's solely build on a draw engine to enable firing off the combo as quick as it can.

 No, a control deck controls the game until it can achieve its win condition. That's literally where the name comes from. It cannot outlast anything unless it takes control. In Hearthstone, that usually means controlling the board. Quest Shaman does this through removal spells and some minions. An aggro burn deck would not bother with minions on board because it hopes to burn the opponent's face off before the opposing minions can win.

And also, no, if you think combo is an entirely separate category unto itself, you have NO idea what you are talking about. All "combo" means is that the deck exploits a massively strong synergy of some type as its win condition. This affects its play style but does not solely define it.

If there's no such thing as aggro-combo or control-combo, you need to ask yourself why there are so many articles written about these different types of combo decks.

 You have absolutely no idea what you are on about do you? Quest shaman doesn't play removal spells, it's main win condition is putting said spells at the opponent's face. The literal only small removal it has is perpetual flame. A lightning bolt that does 3 damage is not a control spell, it's a burn spell. It does not play any big removal, handles big threats very poorly and generally tries to kill the opponent before the opponent kills it. It's the absolute pinnacle of aggro.

Please go read some articles on what combo means too, you have no idea what it entails.

Quote from FortyDust >>

Quote from savarunl >>

 There are no control decks in the top end of the Stormwind meta, Blizzard professionally killed off that archetype.
If you think a deck is control because it has 1 removal card in it, i don't know what you've been doing in all those mtg years you claim to have had....

The single deck that has a control style play is Quest priest and that one is currently low tier 4.
Please look at https://hsreplay.net/meta/ and tell me any control deck that is in tier 1 or 2. Hint: there isn't, it's all aggro, midrange or combo decks.

 Quest Shaman is a control deck through and through.

When you say "or combo decks" at the end, it shows that you don't even understand the terminology. There's no "or." A combo deck can be aggro, midrange or control, depending on how it behaves until it achieves the combo.

 Quest shaman is not a control deck, at all, it's a classic aggro/burn type deck. I think you are the one not understanding terms here.
Combo just aims to get to their win combo in the fastest way possible, in HS this usually resorts in exorbitant amounts of carddraw, now with the quests added into it. Control decks, in the terminology that has been established since the early days of MTG, are purely decks that aim to outlast/outvalue everything the opponent does until they can start putting their pressure up or wining through fatigue.

A Combo deck is not midrange, aggro or control. a combo deck is a combo deck and it's solely build on a draw engine to enable firing off the combo as quick as it can.

Quote from FortyDust >>

Quote from Shango >>

But here comes the problem, while a control deck is built around the premise of being unstopable in the late game, current combo decks are built around the premise of being inevitable way earlier, which means inevitability is not an indicator for a deck belonging to the control archetype.

One way to look at control is that it is one end of a speed spectrum, with aggro at the other end. In that context, control is always present but can look very different from one meta to another. In the Stormwind meta, control is simply getting things done sooner than it used to. Obviously (as the two of us have shown), it's arguable whether that turns it into combo -- but that just semantics, anyway.

The important takeaway is that if inevitability is achieved too early in the game, a significant portion of the player base is going to feel dissatisfied. So where is the cutoff? When is it acceptable for inevitability to occur? My personal feeling is that Turn 10 is a natural point to place that marker because that is when any deck is able to play its most expensive card, but letting it happen at Turn 9 isn't the end of the world. Turn 6, of course, is ridiculous.

 There are no control decks in the top end of the Stormwind meta, Blizzard professionally killed off that archetype.
If you think a deck is control because it has 1 removal card in it, i don't know what you've been doing in all those mtg years you claim to have had....

The single deck that has a control style play is Quest priest and that one is currently low tier 4.
Please look at https://hsreplay.net/meta/ and tell me any control deck that is in tier 1 or 2. Hint: there isn't, it's all aggro, midrange or combo decks.