For the first time since September 2014, we've got the ranked play ladder distribution for Hearthstone!
Hearthstone's Dean Ayala tweeted out the updated distribution, a bit more hidden then posting it on the main blog as they originally did, which comes from November 2019. Here are some observations, followed by the current distribution chart and the original. Keep in mind there have been changes to how ranked works since September 2014, which has definitely had an impact.
- Climbing the ladder is now easier and likely feels more rewarding.
- More players have hit rank 5 or higher, though a smaller amount of those are in Legend.
- Being above rank 15 now means you're in the top 37% of players, which was previously 25% in 2014.
- The number of players between 15 and 11 is similar, though 10 to 6 is slightly over doubled and 5 and up has tripled.
Current Distribution vs Original
Quote From Dean Ayala Rank distribution for the end of November 2019. Data displays a players highest attained rank during the season. Must have played a game to be counted. A little different than data we posted in 2014, I imagine rank floors made the biggest difference.
Hi, thanks for these numbers. Can we have the number of active players also ?
I can't disclose player or revenue stuff. I can say that millions of people have returned to Hearthstone during this expansion, on top of the millions that were actively playing already :).
Can you put this image into the new post? I think it's still using the 2014 image
that was linking the 2014 post to compare, there is no new post, this is just an image I photoshopped with new data from that old post
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Comments
I finally hit Legend for the first time in September. Fun to do once, but I never feel the need to go above Rank 5.
When you look at it closely, that is some untidy photoshop-ing.
Iksar said himself that it was just a quick photoshop pic he did, nothing fancy. So you should take it as such ;-)
Does anyone know if this data is available for Wild
Not likely, at least not publicly. This should be both Standard and Wild together.
I miss that stat in the client that told you what top % of players you were. When you hovered your cursor over your rank. It was always motivating to see.
Wish they would show the average number of games and the number of hours spent by each player on each rank spread. I am of the opinion that many players from 15 up have decent decks that can easily get them to legend, but none has the sheer patience and time to make that push
Interesting there are less percentage of people who reach legend even though it is actually easier now.
Though November... Battlegrounds was the reason I didn't reach legend back then...
If you check the stats at HS Replay, you can see that a huge amount of games is played at rank 5 (on all servers). Does not mean that the most players are there, but I think the 6% are really many people stuck at 4-5.
For many of us the goal is to stay above 5 at the end of the season. I am pretty sure that from rank 3 you are already in the 1-2 % of all players.
It's a shame November 2019 was a sad month for HS Standard ladder, because of both Battlegrounds and Evolve madness.
I'd really like to see the same distribution post in months like May 2019 or September 2019, in which the meta was much more friendly and more people actually played ladder.
However, it gives some useful insights nonetheless (Legend rank still extremely hard to achieve, Rank 10-1 population more than doubled,...).
I believe there is a misperception about the feat of reaching Legend. It is undeniably hard, the question is why. All players reaching regularly rank 5 (which some call soft legend) are skilled players. With the winning streak bonus one could think it's easy to reach rank 5, the data proves otherwise (only 6%). Now take out the winning streak bonus and you have that long road from rank 5 to legend. In fact, reaching legend does not reward your skills it rewards your resilience. Any skilled player with a good deck can reach legend if he puts in the hours. A pro player will put in less hours than the others but the time they take to reach legend is long enough that it can be qualified as grinding. I don't consider grinding as being a feat..it's just one of these game design tricks forcing you to spend a certain amount of time in game to give you that sense of achievement, a decent challenge for your money's worth. Grinding is acceptable if it's well implemented. In the case of HS the grinding is ok ...what I don't agree with is the way the legend status is being sold to us as an achievement based on skill/talent.
December would have been the most interesting with the expansion launch, though it probably would have just heavily diluted the results, adding tons of junk data to the rank 25-16 area. November is likely a more accurate representation of the majority of the year since it wasn't a crazy hype area of the year. It would be interesting to see if December buffed up the low end back up to 75% of the player base, or even higher.
Interesting data. Looks like ranked floors helped quite a bit with populating the R15 and above range. Tho if we take into an account that it has been 5 years between the two distributions, looks like not much has changed in the grand scheme of things. I suppose, the number of players included in the graphic would be a relevant parametr for the comparison as well, if Blizzard were to reveal the number, but they wont :(