Ben Brode On The Meta, Balance, and Shaman
Ben Brode has written down his thoughts about the current meta, the Shaman class and his balance considerations on the official Hearthstone forums today. There is a patch planned for the end of February and an announcement of balance changes will be made a week or so before that.
- The past two weeks, 30% of players were playing Shaman on the Legend ladder
- 17% of players were playing Shaman when all ranks are included
- This includes all types of Shaman decks
- The worst point in history, balance wise, was Undertaker Hunter where Hunter was being played by 35% of players across all ranks
- The 'pirate package' of Small-Time Buccaneer and Patches the Pirate is being played in rougly 50% of decks above rank 5
- The average win-rate for Aggro Shaman is 53%, which is currently the highest win-rate deck in the meta
- There has never been a 'best deck' with a lower win-rate than this
- It only has a 35% win-rate against Control Warrior that is tuned against it.
- For example this Control Warrior from Fibonacci works great!
- There will be a patch near the end of this month
- An announcement about balance changes will be made around a week or so before that
Quote from Ben BrodeHey everyone!I've been reading a lot of feedback on the state of the game, whether pirates are too good, and whether shaman is too good. I'm also seeing a lot of folks wondering what we are planning to do about some of the current issues.
I should start by saying that we truly appreciate all of your feedback. I think Hearthstone is at its best when the development team and the community discuss and share ideas back and forth. These are real issues, and hearing about your experiences has been helpful for us in determining next steps.
So today, I wanted to talk a bit about the meta, potential nerfs, and how we think about balance.
To get us started, I wanted to define some terms. These are common terms, so there may be no revelations here, but it's useful to make sure we're talking about the same things, and how these terms (which are common to all games) are specifically used in relation to Hearthstone.
About the Meta
The Meta is short for the 'metagame'. The game is what happens once you tap 'Play' and see the spinner. The metagame is what happens outside of the game. It's what deck you choose to play. It's what decks your opponents choose to play. Some people define 'metagame' as literally everything game-related, including chatting with friends about it, reading information about it online, or anticipating upcoming content. The Hearthstone community uses it more frequently as "all decks that everyone is using" and often more specifically as the "the top X decks". If there are 7 decks that all see enough play that you see them again and again while you play, you might say those decks are 'the meta'. If you're playing a deck that people don't see often, you are playing 'off meta'. If you build a deck specifically to beat the most popular deck then you are playing to counter the meta. It doesn't matter if a deck is good or bad, what affects the meta most is how frequently any one deck appears. It's important to note that bad decks can be part of 'the meta', and good decks might not be widely spread enough yet to have become part of 'the meta'.
About Balance
Balance can mean different things in different contexts. Sometimes we use it to describe the relative power level between things. Sometimes we use it to describe how often things are being used in relation to each other. And there is a complex relationship between these two metrics.
For example, a class might have a very high win rate, relative to others. That's not balanced. When that happens, more people tend to flock to that class, increasing the play rate. Eventually, that class will become played more than other classes. That's also not balanced, and it's the more worrying imbalance.
We believe, at its core, Hearthstone is more fun when you are having a variety of experiences. We randomize the order of cards in your decks, restrict you to 2 copies of each card, and limit your hand size and the amount 'card draw' we print to help make experiences different each game. We print cards with random effects partially for this reason. But one of the biggest ways to give you different experiences (and problems to solve) each game is to give you different opponents with different decks. We also release new cards, because even all of these things isn't quite enough to keep things variant over time.
There are games with less variety (like Chess), that are still very deep. But we believe that allowing creativity in deckbuilding, and giving players new and different problems to solve is really fun.
The value of Balance, then, is to keep giving players different experiences.
This is not to say that each card's role is to compete for a spot in a competitive deck. Some cards (like Majordomo Executus), are intended to be a lot of fun for players who like big splashy moments. Other cards are meant to be deckbuilding challenges to players who like to experiment with cards that others have deemed weak (Hobgoblin). Some are meant to be hooks for learning or comparison. ("This is like Chillwind Yeti, but better! That must be good!")
Statistics and the State of the Meta
I wanted to go through some stats about the current meta, and talk about how we analyze them.
Over the last two weeks, 30% of players are piloting Shaman at Legend. If you include all ranks, 17% of players are playing Shaman. This includes several decks: Aggro Shaman, Midrange Shaman, Control Shaman and Jade Shaman.
The worst point of imbalance in our history was Undertaker Hunter, where Hunter was played by 35% of players across all ranks.
The Pirate 'package' of Small-Time Buccaneer and Patches the Pirate is played in about 50% of all decks at rank 5 and above.
The average win rate of the best deck in the meta is 53%. Historically, there has never been a 'best deck' with a lower win-rate. Put another way, this is the worst 'best deck' in Hearthstone's history. The win rate is consistent across all ranks, though individual players have wildly variant individual experiences. We don't include mirror matches in our calculations.
The highest win rate of all time was Undertaker Hunter around 60%.
When evaluating balance, we look at the win rate of decks and classes, compare them to the impossible ideal (50%), and to the worst case (60%). Knowing that 50% is impossible, we just want it to be "close". This isn't a science, but for us, that has traditionally been between 53% and 56%. This isn't the most important metric, though. If a deck has a 70% win rate, but only a handful of players are playing it, that's great. It doesn't cause the issues of non-variant gameplay... yet. Traditionally when a deck has a very high win rate, people begin to copy it, and it becomes a larger and larger part of the meta. Another important consideration for us at that point is 'Counters'.
When a deck loses to specific cards or other decks, players can be rewarded for playing those counters as that deck rises in popularity. If a deck ever became 60% of the meta, but there was a deck that handily beat it, then you could have a 60% win rate by playing that deck, and it would become the new best deck in the meta. This phenomenon causes metas to change over time. We've seen that so far since the release of Gadgetzan – Pirate Warrior hit peaks of 30%, but shrank to as low as 10% over time. There were also a few days in which Reno Warlock was the dominant deck and which Rogue was the dominant deck at very high skill levels. When the meta is still changing, we don't like to make changes to cards.
Right now, Aggro Shaman is one of our highest win-rate deck, but has a 35% win rate vs Control Warrior decks that are tuned to beat them. Reno Mage is also a bad match up for them. Does this mean that it has become 'correct' to play Control Warrior? It depends on the other decks in the meta, and whether Aggro Shaman continues to become more popular. Fibonacci recently took advantage of the predictable meta and built a Control Warrior deck that did very well against Aggro Shaman.
We believe that it's important to let good players recognize shifts in the meta, and capitalize on their knowledge before the meta shifts and the 'solution' changes. This is one of biggest reasons why we don't nerf cards very frequently. When metas stagnate for too long; When there are no good counters; When the best decks aren't fun to play or lose to; these are all reasons we have made balance adjustments in the past. If a deck is popular for a few weeks, that isn't a reason to make a nerf on its own. We'd have to be concerned about the fun, not be seeing any emerging counter-strategies, or be far enough away from a new content release to be worried about stagnation for a long time.
So that brings us to today. Another consideration for making a balance adjustment is planning around a client patch for each of our platforms. We are working on the ability to stream balance adjustments (and other content) directly to players' devices, but until we have that ability, we need to release a client patch to make a change to a card. Our next patch is planned for around the end of this month. You can expect an announcement from us regarding balance changes either way in the week or so leading up to that date.
Fibonacci's Anti-Shaman Control Warrior
Want to check out that Warrior deck Ben was talking about? We have it right here!
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First time I stopped playing...it is so frustrating to play the games against pirates...this game needs a change or I will never come back to it and find sth else to play...i dont play at all 14 consecutive days...
Give us some fucking changes already.
I have played this game since launch and now is the first time i've completely stopped playing because of the meta. I can't even bring myself to complete my daily quests or the tavern brawl. Like they said, fucking 50% of my opponents are playing 'the pirate package', which means every game is over at turn 4. Another 30% is playing Jade decks, which means playing any other control deck is not an option either.
And yet they keep saying everything is fine because the best deck is at 52% winrate. Which means nothing when EVERYBODY is playing that best deck.
What i said makes sense because 50% of players are playing 'the pirate package'. So of course the winrate of pirate decks isn't going to be spectacularly high when 90% of it's games are vs other pirate decks (which obviously adds up to 1 win and 1 loss) and decks that are specifically build to counter it...
Does that make it a fun or competitive or rewarding game? No.
What about Standard-meta overtaking Wild-meta? I mean..., ok..., you'll swap sth. or ship's cannon or crackle... but wtf... (even if I like to see secret-pala burn, it feels "wrong" ^_________^)
I just played a game against jade shaman with jade druid. I had 3 crystal lead and more cards and board was reset. My hand was full of jades. No matter how hard i tried it was just impossible to gain any ground against the shaman. The cards are just way too efficient. 3 crystals ahead and he's just doing more every turn. Silence and removal gets nerfed but hex stays 3 mana which btw is better than a silence and removal combined. For a 2 man shaman gets devolve which is pretty much a silence++. Let's not forget the cheap wipes. Or the 2 mana 6 health worth of taunt. Or the 0 mana 5/5. Or the 1 mana 3/3 wapon. Or the 3 tougness 1 mana guy that gets stronger as you play other efficient cards. Remember when fel reaver was rlly strong at 8/8 for 5 mana even with that MASSIVE drawback. Well there's a 7/7 4 mana no drawbacks. Oh i almost forgot the 2 mana 3 toughness creature that provides i definite number of 2 atack bonus. Srsly shamans are doing 20 crystal worth of stuff for just 10 crystals. They just create this fucking huge ball of value and just snowballs the shit out of it. Completely fucking ridiculous
Needless to say i lost the game and here i am grumbling about it. I had near perfect draw and yet it was just not possible to do any shit against this joke of a class. You know how retarded it is to put down aya knowing its gonna eat that 3 mana hex and then still have the mana to put down more threats and yet you have to play aya coz wtf are you going to do with it other than play it so that fuckin brainless opponent can claim his 3 mana advantage.
I am at rank 8 which is pretty decent considering it's day 6 of the season so it's not like i don't know how to play around shit. It's just that there is no playing around these shaman bullshit. Go strong on board, here eat some board wipes. Go weak on board, thanks i'll just massively develop the board that you can never win back from. It's not about the win rate %s or the popularity. It's about how mechanically absurd shaman is right now. I hope they do a good job fixing this.
You realize that you fucked up when you have to bring up undertaker hunter to compare the deck to.. right?? You know that RIGHT???
Before you care so much about the new player experience, you have to care about the actual game experience once they get into the game!!!!
Why the hell is taking them so long??? Its not like they are creating new content, new maps, new in-game models, new animations for these patches! They just fuking changing some wording on the digital cards and it takes them 7 months to do so!!
Well, and ofcourse the wording needs to be coded, dicussed for optimization and implemented in a patch.
But you're right, it should have been done the day before yesterday preferably.
WOW. So Ben actually wants this game's meta to be Rock-Paper-Scissor with counter decks that beats one deck archetype but loses to everything else???
Having such vast difference in winrate depending on who you match up against IS the WORST gaming experience in Hearthstone! It's even fuking worse than undertaker which you lose on turn 1 but in this case, YOU LOSE ON TURN 0! YOU ARE ROLLING A FUCKING DICE EVEN WHEN YOU PRESS A PLAY BUTTON.
Playing freeze mage and running into control warrior is the worst feeling in the game and they want all fucking decks to be like this
My favorite meta in the past was when I was playing a control warrior which was top of tier 2 but I had fair chance of beating any deck in the meta if I made a right choices over long game. That was the most enjoyable time for me when I can rely on my skill more than fucking RNG that happened EVEN BEFORE I TOUCHED MY CARDS.
Ben, you philosophy of the game is either seriously flawed, or you are just making excuses to not admit the mistake your team has made. You have to fucking swallow you pride and MAKE SOME CHANGES TO THE GAME.
Dont think you got his pt. Decks, when pitted against each other should have winrates of abt 60 to 40. Current meta, pirate aggro beats generic stuff 90 to 10. Control warrior beats pirate aggro 70 30 and generic stuff beats control warrior 90 to 10. Basically, you go into game and u're either pretty much going to win or lose depending on matchup. It's no longer about having close matches where each decision is crucial. Pirate Aggro beats jade druid no matter how sloppy the aggro player, no matter how skilled the druid player. Thos wasn't the case at all near the start of hearthstone. Deck matchups were more even.
The alternative is to build a game that is more skill based than RNG based or based on ridiculously overpowered cards. Making certain decisions should be able to be punished. Aggro USED to have to think about board clears once upon a time in Hearthstone. If you played too aggressively, you could get cleared and most likely end up losing the game. So the control player could choose to save his AOE spell, see if the opponent overplays, and punish the misplay of throwing everything on the board.
This kind of interaction doesn't exist anymore. Nowadays even if you clear the board, it can IMMEDIATELY be filled up again entirely with even bigger minions, or you could just be dead to face spells. There is no such thing as a Jade Shaman overplaying, it's reward only and that's the problem.
They ignore some issues: Of course Aggro Shaman is "only" at 53%. But the deck is followed by Mid-Jade Shaman and Mid range shaman, two other shaman deck with above 50% winrate. Also shaman was and is dominant for around a year now!
When he talks about legend, he should define Standard or wild.