Dragon priest vs freeze mage is one of the most interesting match-ups I've played in a long time. Super interesting, it plays differently than any other matchup. Just a ton of fun.

I jumped on and jumped right back off. Facing literally 5 control decks in a row immediately after creating the deck will do that. I run worse than tuff fish

Wolfram I think you're wrong about the Data Reaper. Using low resolution tools to try and figure out the information that the Data Reaper just tells you with high resolution is a huge chunk of what's fun about Hearthstone. I don't blame people for using or anything, but I think Blizzard should try to kill it if they can.

Are they going to kill Twitch and streaming to as well as netdecking? If you can't kill all the way things are shared already, seems silly to kill something that is only used by a few. It really only helps with laddering which can get you a shot to win money but as we know the tourney scene is much different from the ladder scene.

I didn't actually think i was into grinding ladder this month but I casually climbed to rank 5 alternating between 3-4 rogue builds. But the 5-1 meta is so hostile to rogues I rarely see a favorable matchup the past few days.

I think what is fun and what is not is subjective. I enjoy getting a refined deck into my hands and then trying to pilot it as well as I can. I simply can't be bothered with rolling my own builds cause I know there's close to zero chance I will come up with something that beats the meta.

Exactly. Pre-internet you could beat a lot of games, e.g. poker, by just knowing a few heuristics that weren't immediately apparent to a beginner player.

But that world is gone now. Everything gets shared immediately and there's no way to prevent that. So you might as well embrace it and figure out what other avenues there are for you to grow as a player.

There's a massive difference between watching Savjz hit top legend with a new deck, and having thousands of games parsed into matchup by matchup analysis and statistics.

Low resolution vs high resolution

If there was some AI Godbot that revealed the exact metagame equilibrium as soon as the spoiler is released, it would not be good for the game.

I'm in the "theres nothing we can do so embrace it" camp, but I think it's bad for the game.

Part of being a good player is learning what the meta is doing, what decks counter which, etc. i know i'm playing well if i discover a top deck through my own research/watching streams/tourneys/listening to podcasts/my own innovation well before the VS report comes out.

But then as soon as it comes out, i'm like ****, now my information is worthless and within hours the entire meta is x deck with y counters. Start process over.

I do like to use the data it gives, particularly matchup strengths, to guide my decision as to what deck's good. I dont know. I think it tends to drive the meta more quickly into a solved, circular state, which I dont think lends to a fun experience.

They talk a lot about this on value town which is one of my favorite podcasts.

I've always been a little confused about people that scorn netdecking. Pros do it, everyone does it - if the deck isnt already around, chances are its not very good. One of my friends just told me he could hit legend if he netdecked, but he's never gone beyond rank 17 so it's just a delusion i think bad players have about themselves.

Blizzard probably auto assumes that aggregators are driving players to play their game and see no reason to mess with that, though I don't know if that can be quantified.

I just got **** on super hard by c'thun priest @ ~200 legend PogChamp

Watching the global games at the moment. Who the **** are these clowns casting?

I honestly don't see what peoples problem with netdecking is. If casuals didn't have good decks to play they wouldn't play.

Blizzard caused the problem by making cards best in slot.

Yeah I couldn't watch it because they kept missing really obvious lethals the other day

I mean Elitist Jerks was totally devoted to WoW min maxing back in the day, Blizzard didn't have a problem with that so I can't see them having a problem with the likes of data reaper and TS

Blizzard talked about people "consuming" Hearthstone content too fast and them having to adjust. People don't really enjoy solved(ish) Hearthstone metas. Reddit rioted and revenues collapsed after a year of everyone knowing you should just play Dragon Warrior or Shaman if you want to win. I don't think World of Warcraft faces the same sort of existential threat from everyone knowing that Shaman is the best class if you want to win.

Remember Dragon Warrior? That went from fringe deck that VS said secretly was maybe the best deck to the most played deck on ladder at all levels in like a week. How long would that have taken in 2015?

That's what I meant when I say it's bad for the game.

Weve had two solid weeks of a really fun meta, then VS posts their first report and it's gonna be all downhill from here.

one good suggestion is they should make changes to high impact, high usage cards more often. Or even introduce a few new cards between sets when they see the way the meta shakes out. Small things like that can cause huge meta shifts - just think if they had changed totem golem to a 3/3 or a 2/4 or something. We would've been playing an entirely different game from last july til this month - but no, they were fine letting it be because it was "rotating out anyway." Yea, and you made the game nearly unplayable for that time period.

The problem isn't VS. People would still figure out with decktracker what the most broken decks are and play them. Streamers would stream it and their crowds would play those decks. It happened before VS.

I'm not sure how it would be possible with expansions, but dumping cards on us over extended periods of time instead of all at once would help the shelf life of expansions freshness. Like the adventures.

If you're on the pally hate train just queue up 2x devolve/hex/volcano and take a huge dump on them. You get stomped by quest rogue and taunt warrior but paladin is literally a free win.

i might do it. dropped from rank ~700 to rank 2900 last night. lol

control mage isn't that bad though if i'm playing well. it's impossible to play if you're tilty.

and paul, VS does all of what deck tracker/observing streamers does, and puts it on roids, with quantifiable data rather than opinion. it's not close to the same.

it's good and bad - it has improved me as a player by a LOT. without it I doubt I ever get past rank 5 (although, I did do that this expansion) and just seeing the current trends/matchup statistics helps me a lot to decide what to queue. so I do like it and look forward to it every week, but totally realize it results in a stale meta a lot faster because of its very existence.

Lifecoach really wasn't offering an opinion when he tracked and shared his data on stream. Even if he misplayed 10% of the time the general trends of match ups showed up.

The only difference is now the information is collected in one place and free for everyone. It doesn't teach people how to play freeze mage. I saw some of the real good streamers doing really questionable plays when the PsyGunther meme was fresh. Like really basic stuff of not knowing when and where to point fireballs at different things.

Ok, here's my take and experience on this situation:

I played WoW during Vanilla. I played fairly obsessively (what a surprise) and vacillated between hardcore PvP or hardcore carebearing. When I raided, we literally would read online how the very top guilds did stuff, watched videos they made, and digested their content and tried to repeat it. Mind you, we were very "successful" (as far as downing bosses not that long after the firsts were recorded and stuff) but even we just followed someone else's blueprint, with nearly no variations.

At the time I didn't really think too deeply about it, the issue of copying vs actually discovering **** that works on your own.

I quit WoW, years went by, and eventually I found a new MMO, called Rift. (I suppose I played during vanilla rift, as I think the game still exists, but I quit that game after a similar amount of play as I gave wow) In THAT game, I was apart of a guild/group (it rotated a fair number of times) that were literally solving the content as it came out. We didn't copy other guides, we were the ones in the forefront. It also obv is that when I played wow, millions played wow; at rifts height, I doubt it had a player pool of more than a few hundred thousand. (Mainly because from the very start, they consolidated servers frequently)

In any event, figuring **** out on your own was like 10,000 more rewarding and fun. We actually had to test things out, play things out, and yeah it was more "frustrating", but it wasn't just copying mechanics and taking loot.

~~

As this applies to hearthstone, I think about it like my WoW vs Rift experiences. IF there was no resource to solve the meta, it would be more like the latter; at the moment, obviously, it's completely the former.

The game would be 10,000 better if there were no resources or stat tracking and people just had to figure out decks on their own. Building decks is a HUGE portion of CCGs, and obv people netdecking EVERYTHING completely robs the game of a huge portion of their allure.

Some people like just copying mechanics. I get that. Some people like just playing strong stuff and trying to play the specific game. But the overall enjoyment of the game for MOST would go up if you were forced to be more creative on your own.

(The only time this actually occurred in hearthstone was WHEN they had hard adventures, the past 2 or 3??? I did them the first day, and tried solving them on my own. By FAR the most fun I've had with this game)

my suggestion for the past 2 years or whatever was they should make frequent balance changes, like in MOBAs. Every 2 or 3 weeks things shift in HOTS, and its wonderful. Heroes rotate in and out of strength; sometimes heroes completely not touched by buffs or nerfs become strong or weak because of their interactions with OTHER heroes who got touched or whatever.

If this happened in hearthstone, you wouldn't need the bull**** that is card rotations.

Need a little math help here.

The wiki says the odds of one hero power being in a finley selection is .375.

The way they calculate it is via: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone...probabilities/

But, i think this is wrong? The sample space for choosing 3 hero powers out of 9 is 9 choose 3. The event in where your hero power is in a subset of 3 is 8 choose 2. 8 choose 2/9 choose 3 is 33.3%.

Where am I off here?

Actually, it is wrong. They list the odds of having 1 out of 6 hero powers of your choosing as 100%. But you can get the subset of 3 powers that is not in your desired 6. Lol math is hard.