WTF matchmaking

I probably a bit salty right now, but is the matchmaking bugged?

Finnally crafted down odd paladin, and 2 out of 3 match againts a warlock, who plays Despicable Dreadlord. I have seen that since it was in STANDARD. Obvioualy i didn't draw any weapon to kill and lost the game. Then i say "if so many non-big priesf control deck are here, finally let's play jade druid". Immedietly a murloc, who kills me over 6 turn.

Wtf this matchmaking? I'm the only onw who feels this way?

Not only is the matchmaking not rigged, you just happened to be unlucky, but only three games as a sample size and you think the game is rigged? That amount is beyond low and completely negligible.

No one can say 100% one way or another without seeing the match making algorithms (which we'll never have access to).

I would say it happens too often that match making works against you for it to be completely random. I lost count a long time ago of the times I tech against a popular deck and then never see it but if I remove the tech options from that deck I instantly get the deck I originally was trying to counter.

You'll get people trying to prove to you with their 'facts' but the truth is only Blizzard knows.

No sympathies for odd paladins from me.

Quote From Khaostheory1980

No one can say 100% one way or another without seeing the match making algorithms (which we'll never have access to).

I would say it happens too often that match making works against you for it to be completely random. I lost count a long time ago of the times I tech against a popular deck and then never see it but if I remove the tech options from that deck I instantly get the deck I originally was trying to counter.

You'll get people trying to prove to you with their 'facts' but the truth is only Blizzard knows.

 

What bugs me about these ideas is that it's always ALWAYS against the person posting it.  If a match making algorithm isn't random then whatever system is being used should have the reverse as well: people who, no matter what changes they make, keep getting good matchups.  Once a system is no longer random, it becomes a solvable puzzle that can be manipulated and gamed.  

"only blizzard knows" is a cop out.  The entire field of Statistics is meant to show the pattern behind the random, and humans are notorious for being very bad at hiding non-random elements.  Whatever non-random system people claim, beyond any "it will know you are looking for it and hide itself" theories (which is solve by toning down on your distopian sci-fi stories), you can show evidence to suggest it actually exists.  

That's not to say "It would've been found if it exists."  I can very much believe that those that disagree do so blindly while those that believe ..well, do so blindly, and nearly no one has actually bothered a long-form testing, given how bloody impossible it is to actually see anyone post results either way.

But put down the "no one could know the truth.. so anything can be true" card here.  It's not a good way to quiet or ignore dissent and it's far too good at ignoring whatever information doesn't fit your current bias when it SHOULD be used to question your own beliefs as well.  It also spits on a very major branch of mathematics in this case.

1. Why would blizzard ever do this? If even, they would probably want you to feel good about the deck changes you just did. 

2. For every bad matchup you get, someone else gets a good matchup. So what‘s your point? A miraculous blizzard algorithm chose you to be on the losing side, based on ..... what?

There is simply no reason for Blizzard to tinker with matchmaking. 

Flip a coin 100 times, it may teach you something about statistic

I've long been suspicious about this aspect. Really ever since Team 5 claimed one of the design goals for Hearthstone was to push each player to a 50% win rate. Obv this is not actually possible, because it depends who is matching against you at that point in time, how strong your deck is, how good a player you are, the card draw order (etc), but given a choice of two different opponents, each with diff decks, the algorithm will prioritise one over the other and that's what you get matched against. So really all they have to do is be selective about what you face to try to push your win rate towards (up, or down) 50%. Obv MMR has a big part to play in that, but given two possible opponents of the roughly the same skill level, the deck they are playing can make a massive difference in your ability to win or lose. These are things I think most players never consider.

Lol.

It's seems i triggered more people than i tought. :d

This happens luck is rough sometimes, but sometimes you highroll like hell, you just don't remember that

Quote From Dakarian

Quote From Khaostheory1980

No one can say 100% one way or another without seeing the match making algorithms (which we'll never have access to).

I would say it happens too often that match making works against you for it to be completely random. I lost count a long time ago of the times I tech against a popular deck and then never see it but if I remove the tech options from that deck I instantly get the deck I originally was trying to counter.

You'll get people trying to prove to you with their 'facts' but the truth is only Blizzard knows.

 

What bugs me about these ideas is that it's always ALWAYS against the person posting it.  If a match making algorithm isn't random then whatever system is being used should have the reverse as well: people who, no matter what changes they make, keep getting good matchups.  Once a system is no longer random, it becomes a solvable puzzle that can be manipulated and gamed.  

"only blizzard knows" is a cop out.  The entire field of Statistics is meant to show the pattern behind the random, and humans are notorious for being very bad at hiding non-random elements.  Whatever non-random system people claim, beyond any "it will know you are looking for it and hide itself" theories (which is solve by toning down on your distopian sci-fi stories), you can show evidence to suggest it actually exists.  

That's not to say "It would've been found if it exists."  I can very much believe that those that disagree do so blindly while those that believe ..well, do so blindly, and nearly no one has actually bothered a long-form testing, given how bloody impossible it is to actually see anyone post results either way.

 

But put down the "no one could know the truth.. so anything can be true" card here.  It's not a good way to quiet or ignore dissent and it's far too good at ignoring whatever information doesn't fit your current bias when it SHOULD be used to question your own beliefs as well.  It also spits on a very major branch of mathematics in this case.

Thank you for writing this so I didn't have to do it. *claps*

Quote From Gerix55

Lol.

It's seems i triggered more people than i tought. :d

It's a discussion forum and we still don't have a lot of discussion topics as the number of people are still low.  

It's also a VERY old and loaded topic from hearthpwn that keeps showing up.  We've been debating this topic for the past 5 YEARS in the old forums.  To the point where they flat out banned the topic if it didn't come with data.

So it's a trigger yes.  Feel free to bring up other ones like offering nerf suggestions for the coin or blaming blizzard for northshire cleric showing up 5 times out of 10 against you.

What I feel a lot of people forget is that each random choice is a new instance. With 100 rolls you don't have 50% chance to roll 50 or higher half the time. You have 100 times 50% chance to roll 50 or higher each time.

this belong in a salty thread 

Quote From Gerix55

Lol.

It's seems i triggered more people than i tought. :d

Good ol' "Lol triggerd."

The only thing left for a person to say after they've been shown to be absolutely wrong.

Quote From dib

No sympathies for odd paladins from me.

Yesss...Also thought the same thing. Boohoo crafting a top teir deck and getting trashed by a homebrew

What would T5 get out of rigging match-making? If you frustrate your playerbase too much they are more likely to just quit the game, not throw more money at your product. Rigged match-making would be a risky lose-lose across the board in most scenarios.

Quote From sinti

Quote From Gerix55

Lol.

It's seems i triggered more people than i tought. :d

"Matchmaking rigged" is one of the common triggers for HS community in general, since it has been asked and (not) answered thousand times over. No one can really tell, since we dont see the code. One would need thousand games played, probably more, to establish a reasonable sample size, but other factors will also play role, so even if you could get those games down in certain conditions, it is just not possible to get any reliable data. So it ends up being a feeling and it always starts from someone getting crushed and then goes to forums complaining about matchmaking and the cycle repeats :) There is just no good answer, simple as that :)

It would take thousands of games to utterly prove it, but we're not really at that point.   What we need is just enough games that go over the random expected to show it's something to at least do a bigger test on.  It's similar to that bug last year when they made the change to packs that caused most people to get a legendary in the first 10 packs.  Right afterwards a few people wondered why they were suddenly getting legendaries early even though they had already opened packs.  We brushed it off like..well. like this.  Then a few people posted data: they opened 10 packs from each of the 4 sets and stated that they received legendaries in all four.  

The first few times it was still doubted but no longer mocked.  It also caused a few others to test themselves and post their findings.  After a few pages of that, the tide shifted.

Note that no one posted a video so we could've easily said "oh they are just lying."  I didn't see anyone claim that, even among the doubters.  Meanwhile more and more people kept running the test.  Even when a few people posted that they DIDN'T get a legendary, enough did to show that SOMETHING was odd.  Reddit eventually ran a survey and found that 75% of the respondents were getting legendaries early.

Blizzard never acknowledged it, and there wasn't some massive 10,000 player study done, but it's generally accepted as a thing that happened.  

I saw a similar thing happen in the reverse as well.  People declaring that they broke the pity timer. Note that this is a flat out trigger: we've spent years seeing people swear that it didn't exist or they broke the timer only to find out they never really knew how many packs they opened.  So we flat out shut down the first few folks who said they broke the timer.  

Then came a few that posted data.  Again, no video or big study. Just a simple "I use a pity timer and normally things are fine, but it's been 45 packs and nothing."   A few of those and while most ignored it not everyone did.  Others posted the same, not a vague "I did something and I KNOW I SOOULD GET IT NOW!" or any "OMG GREEDY BLIZZARARADDD!" Just calm statements showing they actually TRIED to keep track.  42 packs.  41 packs.  Here I have a spreadsheet of what I opened.  After a few pages of that, people stopped mocking it and started thinking it was a bug.  

Blizzard never officially declared the pity timer, but they DID post a week later that "some people didn't get the legendary they should get, so here's dust to compensate."  By then it was already long accepted as a real thing.  That's, again, without video, or viewing the code or anything people keep swearing they have to do to prove anything.

We aren't dense.  We aren't blind idiots.  We DO listen to data and, as a group, CAN change our beliefs.  We don't need a double blind study done by scientists.  We don't need Blizzard showing us the code.  We don't need video marked by 5 witnesses and a crew of FBI that can prove it wasn't photoshopped.  

We just need something, ANYTHING that shows you aren't just some conspiracy theorist or someone who swears that because you got countered in TWO of your games that the entire world is rigged against you as if anything OTHER than a steamroll win is a sign of the Matrix.  

I spent years posting in these threads, attempting to reason, to meet these ideas half way, to ask for a follow up.  "Do it again, but track it."  "just track for a few days and show what you got."  "Just do something other than miles of theory of how making a hypercomplicated system of code in order to have high cost legendaries decks be countered by Rares in a homebrew deck can somehow mean massive profits and an exploited population.  Just do something other than calling those who don't blindly believe you "fanboys" or "sheep".  Just do something other than swearing that you know the truth while bashing us with 'well, no one really knows.' when we reply with anything other than agreement."  

I got ONE actual test.  **ONE!**  And funny enough, it DID suggest something was off.  But it was stuck in page 7 of a thread full of fanboy/tinfoilhat mud slinging and wild accusations towards anyone for anyone to notice, and the one who posted it never followed up or posted it anywhere else.  

Not long after that, hearthpwn banned the topic, at least when data isn't being presented.  Of course, data was NEVER presented in any other thread.

So, from a person old enough to have owned a colecovision when it was new and who spent over 5 years debating over this topic and hearing nearly everything about it.. I'll be blunt.

Take that egotistical Neo-wannabe "I know the truth no one else does" mindset, and these "who can ever know" mealy mouthed mess, and shove them into 4-chan. Take the "no one will believe on matter what" cop-out excuse there too.

If you want to actually DISCUSS about this topic, then actually DO some actually testing.  Take a statistics course in Khan academy (just checked, they DO have it).  Or just run a #($)#)( deck tracker.  Do some actual testing.  100 games.  30 games.  Just something more than (#)$) FIVE!  Then post it.  No, you don't get worshiped for it, but MAYBE we can get a few others to join in if you have something interesting.  And if THEY do what you do and SEE what you see, we'll have something real to work off of.  

If you don't or can't do this and want to believe anyway, from someone who has a whole host of beliefs I can't prove, you are free to do so and aren't an idiot for doing so.  But PLEASE don't be surprised, angry, or ..well, anything when you get no converts.  You are free to believe as you like, but WE are free to not believe you.  We're fine with it if you are fine with it.  Posting about how we SHOULD believe it is NOT acting 'fine' about it.  Neither is throwing words like 'triggered lol' like a schoolyard idiot.

This may or may not be the overall feeling of the community. But it IS mine, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. And you didn't post in the salt thread so you get a whole heaping helping of my 2 cents about it and a hope you get to see the actual humans behind the folks who posts in forums like this one.  

TL:DR

Post some #($)#)( data or just let topics like this die, please.

@Dakarian:  posts like yours make me sad that I'm not playing HS anymore. I would've definitely tested it 1-2 years ago if I cared enough about the matchmaking or simply played a lot (because I do remember that what OP said was happening to me too).

I really wish HS will change such that I might return to it one day and actually enjoy it instead of fucking up my good mood each and every time.

Quote From Crusader2010

@Dakarian:  posts like yours make me sad that I'm not playing HS anymore. I would've definitely tested it 1-2 years ago if I cared enough about the matchmaking or simply played a lot (because I do remember that what OP said was happening to me too).

I really wish HS will change such that I might return to it one day and actually enjoy it instead of fucking up my good mood each and every time.

No worries.  I've had theories and ideas on other games that I'll never get to figure out since I can't really find a desire to play it or can't find the time.  

There's too many games to play, things to do, and things to see to really be worried about a single game.  Even if this game becomes enjoyable to you, you really aren't 'missing out' by not returning to it so long as what you ARE doing is fun and interesting.  I've personally missed entire generations of games PC and console and I've come to terms for it, and that's without actually disliking them.

I sound angry and bothered but really I don't get a lot of places to really get emotional about something, so I'm actually enjoying the debate. If I wasn't I would've stopped reading them rather than reading and responding for 5 years running.  Same with hearthstone. I'm here because I enjoy the way I play it.  If I can't, I stop.  I'm not going to wait for fire emblem heros to not require gallons of my time to 'keep up' or for clash royal to remove its paywall or for me to figure out why I can't find a reason to play magic arena even though I found the game interesting.  

Millions of people enjoy those games.  And probably most of them are better than when I played it.  They can keep enjoying it.  I'm enjoying the games I play.  And that's that.