Should Blizzard be more Transparent With Arena Rules?
Let's start things off with our first Arena question of the day with a simple answer; Yes. Does that mean they should have the entire formula out there with every little change? That depends on who you ask.
Arena has long had hidden rules which were somewhat known by the community but never with exact rates. When we were told about upcoming changes back in February, there was a general gist of the changes but nothing with numbers outside of two cards (Flamestrike and Abyssal Enforcer). This was somewhat addressed through an additional post by Dean on reddit which provided some numbers, but we were still left in the dark on others.
Recently, Blizzard adjusted the rate of Un'Goro cards in Arena down from 2x to 1.5x. Though this isn't really anything new as it has been happening for many expansions, they unfortunately never communicated this change to the community prior to or as it happened, leaving us without this knowledge during our drafts; Something that some people do spend real money on.
What do you think? Should we as players get to know the entire formula with every little possible change, or is it okay to only know the major stuff? Would knowing the formula change how you personally draft?
Dean "Iksar" Ayala believes that we should be told about all the major changes, but very minor ones such as a 3% less chance of seeing a particular card aren't as relevant and ultimately may be the path to more balance in the Arena. Before you ask, no, Primordial Drake does not have less chance of appearing in Mage decks (as of writing at least..), it was only used as an example.
Quote from Dean AyalaOver the last year and a half, a bunch of exceptions to offering rules have accumulated and it has become really hard to keep track of it, even if you are constantly playing the arena.
Now I do fully agree that these informations should NOT be accessible inside the game client. I am not saying this for the "confusing new players"-meme but because I feel like those details do not belong there.
What I am asking for is a page that collects all the rules that are applied and that you can check for any updates. Right now, I am sure you could find all the rules if you googled them, but they will probably not be listed on an official site of blizzard. If you would like to collect the rules from official sources only, your only cholice would be to read through evry changelog existing.
This is pretty reasonable. We are currently working out a bunch of adjustments for a future patch and going back and forth on what is the most digestible way to view the 'arena rules'. What you have listed I think is very reasonable, some people would like more detail and I think some people would prefer less detail. The rules I think that are most important are the ones that might actually impact any of your gameplay decisions. A card like Flamestrike never showing up in arena is very relevant information, while a decrease in draft appearance rate of 3% on Primordial Drake in Mage is less relevant. One of the ideas on the table for arena balance specifically are thousands of very small changes to the appearance rate of a card in each individual class. I think if we move forward with that it is unlikely to list those thousands of individual changes, but likely to summarize what the goal of that strategy might be. Always happy to hear more feedback on this topic.
Wait... Drake is atm offered less in mage? And how should an Arena with [thousands] of [separate] draft rates for each class work? How would someone know to play around anything?
It is not, was just an example. In terms of playing around anything, the hope is that the differences are small enough they should not impact your gameplay decision making. When Flamestrike shows up 50% less I would expect that to make an impact on your decisions on turn 7 vs a Mage. If it showed up 1% less that decision is essentially no different.
Have Odds on Weapons Changed?
Going more into these silent changes, redditor /u/Tarrot469 recently stated they were confident a bonus to Weapons is active in the Arena which puts them on the same level as spell rates (1.75x). Using data found on HSReplay.net, they've put some pretty damning evidence against the Hearthstone team.
Simply looking at popular arena weapons starting on June 2, after the 8.2.2 Patch, the following cards had an increase in the amount of decks which included at least one copy of the card of around 50%. This also really shows just how popular Paladin is in Arena..
- Jade Claws - 1.41% of decks included this card and it was increased to 2.16% and has remained steady.
- Fiery War Axe - 0.43% of decks increased to 0.61%. (A must pick card!)
- Eaglehorn Bow - 2.14% of decks increased to 3.29%.
- Truesilver Champion - 6.01% of decks increased to 9.14%.
There are no significant changes in the pick-rates of any other card. Overnight, people certainly weren't just more interested in playing with these weapons, they simply were offered them more often and thus were taken.
Perecentage of decks that included Jade Claws over time.
Is this a significant enough change that players should have been informed of? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Personally, this is a major change and I believe it should have been addressed via an official blog post. Blizzard is no stranger to posting short blog so this wouldn't have been out of the ordinary.
Off-topic: While we're at it, let's get some better patch notes too that detail actual changes rather than "bugfixes" :)
Is not it better to make the odds more "equal"? Lemme explain. If someone actually has flamestrike, is not it much more unfair when the odds are for example 3%? If it were, I dont know, 10%, it would not be that unfair because people would actually have a big chance of getting it...
Warrior to tier 1 with Fiery WIN Axe :D
It makes me wonder what kind of weighted randomness goes into ranked play opening hands as well. Would love to know if any of the stat gurus have looked into something like that?
Do they weight the appearance of lower cost cards? Do they weight the appearance of certain cards in your opening hand based on deck archetype matchup?
With so many other aspects of the game weighted such as the discover mechanic and arena as stated above, why is it not possible that the opening hand is as well? In other words if weighting something furthers the goal of balancing the game, it's conceivable to think Blizzard would be willing to make such changes.
You seems to be confusing two issues. Computers cannot be truly random in the sense that "random" numbers are obtained from a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). PRNGs are a sequence of numbers that are as close to random as possible but if you start from the same part of the sequence then you obtain the same numbers. Numbers from a PRNG are generated from an algorithm, but these numbers would be used for ALL random choices, including card order, discover effects, etc. As such the fact that there are no such thing as truly random numbers generated by a computer cannot in itself bias just the opening hand. Problems with PRNGs are typically an issue for cryptography or in some games where you can somehow bias the seed or look for patterns that tell you when you have a certain seed.
On the other hand, the way that these random numbers are used can be weighted, such as to generate certain arena cards more often or indeed to bias card order. Again, this has nothing to do with the fact that computers cannot generate truly random numbers but would be a specific choice by Blizzard.
Finally, you should be careful about selection and confirmation bias. Our brains are wired to look for patterns even when there are no patterns. The default assumption should be that there is no weight on opening hands unless you have very strong evidence. Also, given the sheer number of Hearthstone players there are going to be some people that do get "biased" opening hands and/or higher rates of returned mulligan cards even given a uniform probability (or as close as possible with a PRNG). If you are serious about testing this, then record your opening hand with every game and then do a statistical test after you have 100 samples or so.
Please, PLEASE read darker_raven's post, because your comment is just dramatically inaccurate. You need a much better understanding of pseudo-randomness before you start talking about "algorithms" controlling everything in Hearthstone.
Yes they defnetly should communicate any and all changes since it drasticaly changes the draft at high level.
Yeah we know "casual and new players blablalba.....". Don't care about that. And neither the casuals that is the point! Casuals will just skip all these stats since they don't know what to do with it or just don't care, But those who DO should have access to them all the time.
And while we're at it, the patch notes could use some of this as well to list all the actual changes not just the ones THEY think are relevant. Because all others are not important to "casuals". I'm getting sick of hearing this word.
I am still mad at Blizzard for announcing possible double pack rewards and not saying anything about the higher drop rate of Card rewards.
Though they may not make sense or be usable to the majority of Arena players, these changes should be 100% transparent.
Many decisions are made based on odds of drawing or generating an out, so it's important for those people in those instances to know these things.
If Arena is ever to be elevated above a full-on RNG clown fiesta, this is where it can start.
How about you move Arena back to Wild? The sickening state of the current arena (Mage Rogue Paladin or fail) is hugely impacted by your blunder when you ruined Arena by making it Standard.
Please don't upvote this. Team 5 makes all it's design decisions based on the moaning of the community (ref. Reddit and abyssal enforcer). Moving arena to standard was clearly a great move.
They just failed to make any effort to balance the class cards in the expansion for arena. They should have done that but are now going to instead tweak offering rates then not tell us what they are. Clearly a Bad solution.
Standard Arena is fine, I hated having no idea what to play around cause the opponent having options from 8+ expansions to choose from.5-7 is ok,you have a general idea of what a class can and cannot do (although MSG discover cards kinda ruin that).I am not against a seperate Wild Arena of course but if we have to have only one i prefer it to be standard.What ruined imo is the spell bonus.Mage and rogue have better spells than the other classes overall and combined with having the best hero powers sets them far above the rest.Paladin can only compete cause it got broken cards at a reasonable rarity(Steed,vinecleaver).The weapon bonus is a good step to balancing that and ofcourse it should be transparent.
"I hated having no idea what to play around"
Yeah, because you can definitely play around Primordial Glyph now!