Ben Brode Unhappy with Ranked Ladder System
There is a bug (or as Bob Ross would say, a happy accident) right now where you'll get a win streak after 2 wins instead of 3. After a lot of discussion about it Ben Brode came to reddit to announce that it's indeed a bug and explained some of Team 5's thoughts about the current ranked ladder system.
Quote from Ben BrodeSeeing some comments here about how people are enjoying easier laddering due to this bug, and hoping we leave it unfixed. I thought I might chime in and talk about the ladder a bit, and hopefully get some feedback!We have been discussing the ladder system a lot recently - we're not 100% happy with it.
Here are some things we are currently discussing:
Rank 18 players are higher ranked than 50% of HS players. That number doesn't make you feel like you are in the top 50%, and that's a missed opportunity. We try and counter this by telling you all over the place what the mapping is to the rest of the population, but it'd be better if expectations and reality matched here.
We've received feedback that the last-minute jostling for high Legend ranks at the end of a season doesn't feel all that great.
We've received feedback that the ladder can feel like a grind.
We are reanalyzing the number of ranks, the number of stars per rank, the number of bonus stars given out at the start of the season, and other parts of the system.
We are developing simulation systems that let us predict what changes to the ladder would do to the population curve. If we inflate too many stars, the whole population ends up in the Legend bucket and while that might feel great for a single month, the entire system falls apart eventually. People who played waaaay back may remember when "3-star master" was the pinnacle of achievement, and it meant nothing because so many people ended up in that bucket. With better simulation tools, we are planning on trying a lot of crazy things. Iteration is important in design, and getting the tools to iterate quickly is very important.
Something I want to emphasize is that while I think we can improve the ladder, the metric for that improvement isn't necessarily any one player's individual rank increasing. Players want the better rewards (and prestige) associated with high ranks, or the Legend card back, so any change we make that increases the chances of those are likely to be perceived as "good", at least for the short term. But part of what makes the ranked ladder compelling is that exists to rank players. If you want to see how you stack up, ranked is the place to do it. So while some inflation might improve the experience, we need to be careful and make sure we end up with a system that makes people feel rewarded for increases in personal skill or for finding a new deck that breaks the meta.
Have you considered not making the fall in rank so severe in the start of the new season? When I was a new player at rank 21 it didn't feel good to lose against a wicked good deck all the time with my inferior cards.
Yes, that's what I meant by this: We are reanalyzing [...] the number of bonus stars given out at the start of the season.
We think it's a reasonable direction to explore in, but in general it's hard to predict the results on the population distribution among the ranks. Hoping to do some simulation there and make sure there aren't other, better options, too.
Is this really that bad considering legend has its own internal ranking system?
Yes, I think so. Imagine just one bucket and we sort by MMR. There aren't breakpoints with rewards as you increase in skill. There isn't an obvious way to communicate with others about how good you are. It's also difficult to know if you are bad or good. (Is Legend 135003 good? What about Legend 27809?)
The way we communicate our skill or progress is important. Ever heard a friend say "dude! I got to rank 5 this month!"? What is that achievement in a world where everyone is in the same bucket? Watching discreet rank buckets go by (and feeling that progression) and feeling the thrill of reaching a new rank that you've never hit before... those are pretty important, I think.
"Ben brode unhappy about the ranking system"
-sees Ben Brode smiling on the thumbnail.. I am confused..
Where is the unhappy face?
Some say that he is unhappiest when doing laps of the Top Gear test track....
Ben Brode always smiles. If you measure his smile you'll notice it's slightly less wide than usually.
I believe I speak for many here when I say it is a disgusting and unfun experience playing ranked for at least half the month, where all the legend players just stay in the rank 15-10 beating up all the new players and players playing fun decks with aggro shaman, midrange hunter, and all-golden control warrior decks (of course with golden heroes too). Blizzard needs to get these players that choose to stay at a low rank to make the game less fun for others the hell out of their incorrect rank. This could easily be fixed by just making them restart legend players at like rank 5 the next season. Most consider rank 5 to be halfway to legend, so put them there. Also, it would be amazing to see a penalty put in place for playing the same deck, without any changes made to it, played over and over. Playing the same damn unoriginal netdecks just makes ladder a boring slog. At least there is arena...
Hearing Ben Brode talking about legend is honestly the worst. That is basically the only thing you can truly achieve in this game. If they decide to just give this to everyone to make them feel special i really hope they make the current card back legacy and unattainable. Anyone that has earned this knows the feeling.
Then again i am in the minority. People like you will want that free legend.
Well I would like to reach legend just once. I don't card if I never make it there again. I just want to make it to the dream. However, because of the broken ladder system and the shit load of Shamans I really don't see the point.
says the one who never hit legend xD
Everything rank 20 to rank 10 is usually the most fun. You face a variety of different decks and don't really 100% know what you will face next. Ranks 10 - Legend are... not fun to say the least. Once I hit rank 10 I know I'll be facing nothing but the same couple of decks over and over again. This makes the games a LOT less fun and as a result I don't really bother playing anymore after I reach rank 10. Usually I'll go over the casual and mess around with different decks until the ranks reset themselves or go play something else.
I've been playing the game since launch and I've only been motivated to get legend once due to the laddering from Rank 5 to Legend. It was a gigantic pain. I would like to see it where you don't lose ranks from 5 to L. Instead, maybe the system can change where you have to bank a certain number of wins to get into Legend Rank, say 50. Based on your record once you hit the 50th win, you get placed. So if I go 50w - 60L, I would be at the very bottom of legend. Or if I go 50w 10L that would be close to high legend. You still keep a competitive aspect of the game and you don't punish players for running into extreme cold streaks/bad RNG/top tier decks. It would also let people use different decks if they wanted, knowing they could mess around/experiment but not lose their progress towards legend.
For ranks 25-6 I would still keep it so people can lose ranks, but reward players for insane hot streaks. I think for every win you get after three in a row, you should get an extra star. So 4 wins in a row you get 3 stars, 5 wins a row you get 4 stars, 6 wins etc.
To keep people interested in ranked, I think blizzard should be specific regarding what awards you can win for the month. The only thing we know for sure is a card back for reaching 20. But if they listed what you could win for being a certain rank by season's end, that would be great also. E.g. reaching rank 5 you could get 50 dust, 300 gold, two card packs, and a golden murloc warleader or something.
There are set rewards for every rank at the end of the season. They just had the brilliant idea of not listing them in-game. You have to look them up online based on stuff they released to media outlets, a really enjoyable and interactive way to deal with players...not.
I don't see any problem with the ladder today. I'm playing Shaman, and I'm having FUN
Sorcerer's League: 25% lowest rated hearthstone players + New ranked players.
Adventurer's League: 25% of the hearthstone population ranked just higher than sorcerers league
Pirate's League: the next 25% of hearthstone players
Giant's League: the next 20% of hearthstone players
Grandmaster's League: the 4.5% highest ranked Hearthstone players
Legend: aboven Giant's league (approx. 0.5% of hearthstone population)
These are the 5 leagues. To advance from 1 league to the next you should be in the top 25% of your respected league at the end of the month ('season'). All the leagues have a Legend-like rating system with the lowest rank also visible so you can know where you are in your league.
For the first 3 leagues (Sorcerers, Adventurers, Pirates) how you advance is quite simple: You end in top 25% of your league, you advance to the next league. You finnish in the middle 50%: you stay in the same league. You end in the lowest 25% of your league: you go a league down (these 25% will be almost entirely filled up with inactive players I imagine, so not many people will have to experience going back a league if they played that season). In the higher leagues the chance gets bigger you drop down a league when you don't play that well a season. Also it gets more difficult to end on a promotion spot. In legend rank I would let lowest 50% drop out of legend, 50% maintain legend state (and manage the numbers promoting from grandmaster's league accordingly). For people that just put a lot of cash into HS/ gained a lot of skills there are 1 or 2 mid-season promotions for the highest few % of each league so if you're a legend-quality player you can reach Legend in maximum 1 or 2 months.
I would really like to see a system like this, what do you think?
The issue I see with this system is it falls into the same issue we have right now where players that can get to higher ranks will choose not to since it will be even easier to game the system, so that you stay in a certain rank. 25% of the game population is huge.
There is a huge deck quality and skill different at the bottom ranks. Your idea seems like a decent concept, but the sections would have to be a lot smaller to deal with the issue of players being annoying to new players. Make the Adventurer's league the next 5%, the pirates league the next 5%, etc. It would make it much harder to be an asshole that way and stick around in the low ranks with your aggro shaman deck farming gold off the new players by auto-conceeding when you risk being pushed into the higher ranks since just a few wins would push you into the higher tier. Players do not like to lose, so forcing them to lose more and more in order to stick around being pricks would disincentive it.
Additionally, as I mentioned above, I think there should be a major penalty put in place wherein if you play the exact same deck, without any changes made to it many times in a row, you stop gaining rank and do it past this point, you risk losing your end of season rewards. This would help force people to stop playing the same three or four netdecks and foster more creative decks (if only it meant players constantly just playing one or two different decks it would still be better than...the current shit.)
Thanks for the feedback. Smaller leagues are a good suggestion indeed. I had even some more ideas about the concept but I didn't want my post to take up your whole screen :p
You know all this Shaman is unbeatable BS but in last man standing no pro is even getting close to 9-0 with Shaman. If your guys theory was right then they would play a mirror match and be then go 9-0 or something high. Fact is in recent matchup the longest win streak was rouge at 5-0. Its a good deck but you can beat it. If you can target it its quite beatable but in fact on ladder I play against 10% mid range shaman and 90% other stuff. Its a good deck maybe the best in the meta but its not insanly over the other top 2-3 decks.
Something Elder Scrolls Legends does is they have probation ranks when you lose ranking. This keeps you from losing ranks but forces you to win a few times in order to continue gaining ranks.
I would enjoy this change to Probation Ranking in Hearthstone because my play style is often experimental and testing decks in casual is pure nonsense -- it's an alpha flight at best. You have to play against the real meta on ladder in order to tune a concept Johnny deck to have a chance at seeing these kinds of decks' potential.
A regular season sees me rising and falling from 12 back to 19 multiple times per season depending on the success/winrate of these tests. Being on probation would at least not punish me for trying something new. Creating an environment where players are able to test an uncommon, non-meta concept on ladder while still being able to grind for Legend seems like a win-win to me.
Removing the risk of falling ranks will encourage more tuning and creativity. Even netdecking sites would benefit because of the increased chance that players discover a previously unsolved strategy that shifts the meta.
Personally I feel the current system diminishes the impact of theorycrafting on the meta. Ladder is where the true tests happen.
Probation Ranks feels like a good solution. This change could even allow for the removal of bonus wins at lower ranks. Ranks would feel more earned but I could still test interesting decks. I love it. Do it Blizzard. Thank you.
The idea of not losing ranks is pretty sweet.
If you're playing top (or even mid) tier deck you practically don't lose ranks at all. So you wouldn't see much difference.
But it would be possible to reach high ranks with some trash-tier/fun decks. It would be HARD, but still.
This is Blizzard we are talking about here. You have to understand, they can only do so much. Gutting priest and leaving it to die while releasing OP aggro cards that make laddering a disgusting experience takes a lot of work. Pulling their heads out of their asses and listening to what players have been telling them for a years takes an extreme amount of effort. Astounding discoveries like this take time and planning. Just like how it took time and a lot of effort for players to not be confused by having more than 9 deck slots. These are big, complex things here that players do not fully understand and big daddy Blizzard does not want to hurt their small brains.
Or Blizzard could just be retarded and out of touch with their playerbase, but nooo that could never be the case.