Everything they've changed about arena has been the result of the community telling them month after month that X card is a problem or should flat out not be in the arena.
And the result of that is them doing dumb shit like nerfing Abyssal Enforcer and destroying Warlock for no reason. Popular outcry is not a good way to balance a game.
I think it's unlikely we'll make changes like this going forward now that we have reasonable tools power to make slight adjustments to a wide variety of cards. The goal of reducing the rate at which some cards appear by large numbers is less to make arena balanced and more to make a small subgroup of people happier than they were before at close to zero cost to the the audience that is unaware of the changes. Ideally we would like to get to zero cards that have large adjustments or are completely removed and rely entirely on micro adjustments. Anything that has an impact on gameplay decision making or drafting we want to be transparent about going forward. Also, a couple people pointed out that faceless summoner wasn't on the list and that the classic/basic neutral 50% decrease was also unlisted. Was an oversight on my part, thanks for pointing it out. The rest should be correct, and I'll talk with community on where the best place would be to get a permanent location of these rules up that we can update.
Anything that has an impact on gameplay decision making or drafting we want to be transparent about going forward.
This is a good rule. I appreciate the transparency.
The goal of reducing the rate at which some cards appear by large numbers is less to make arena balanced and more to make a small subgroup of people happier than they were before at close to zero cost to the the audience that is unaware of the changes.
TBH I'm a little confused by this. Since no individual player is going to notice the changes (either in any one run, or in the aggregate over 100 runs), who is the subgroup that is being made happier? The game developers? :)
In any event, micro changes make sense to me, whatever the reasons.
I was referring to the large rate changes of Flamestrike, Abyssal, and Flappy. People notice when the notes go up, but I agree even large changes like that to individual cards are very noticeable. I do agree with some people when they say the impact is rather small, but I think it does make some amount of positive impact for very little trade off.
Thanks for commenting on this comment chain, great that you're addressing and correcting critisism. On a related note with that list of 'banned' cards. Have you considered re-introducing them now that you're working on tweaking individual cards rates.
I accept it would be a whole lot more work to balance it while throwing effectively new cards in, but there a lot of situationally good cards from classic in that list (cards from expansions I absolutely understand not bothering with, because they won't be around for long), and I think it's a shame to never see them at all. Windspeaker, Soul of the Forest, Inner Fire etc. There's definitely a time and a place for them in arena. Sure if the classes are struggling make them rarer. But I'd like to think this opens up the possibility
Totally reasonable and something we considered. We want to see what the impact is of the micro adjustments we made before adding more variables to the mix. My expectation is that these changes will not completely solve arena balance, but when we are at a place we're comfortable with I think it would be a good idea to reintroduce cool cards like Snipe that have interesting gameplay.
Can you check if weapons/spells are really +175%? HA seems to have it at +75%, the numbers doesn't seem right.
Also, could you say how exactly the arena leaderboard averages are calculated? And how are players sorted when tied? I've tracked my own runs and they come out nothing like the official averages, and I know popular streamers also find a discrepancy.
They show up 175% more than most neutral commons. The example Heartharena uses notes the difference between a class minion and a class spell being 75%, which is correct.
As for the second question, we look at all the players who played 30 or more runs then take their best 30 consecutive runs as their 'average'. Previously, we had some issues with the time we pulled down the data in various regions (12am pst all regions) but those issues should be resolved now and we should now get the data at 12am for your respective region.
According to Shadybunny, an Arena streamer, this is incorrect. His first 30 runs averaged out to 7.97 on EU, and then he played a few more runs to bring it up to 8.00 on his best 30, but his EU average is only showing 7.97. Additionally, it seems that the average winrate on the leaderboard has uniformally dropped (for example, in April/May the winrate at 100 in NA was about 7, but in June it was 6.8, a massive dropoff for no reason). Is there any chance that there was a mistake with collecting the data and that it was only collected for the first 30 runs?
I see. I'll double check with the people collecting and distributing the data. I still wonder if those 'few more runs' happened on the last day in the final 6-9 hours, which could be the result of the time zone issue I mentioned. In any case, thanks for the extra info.
Iksar
I think it's unlikely we'll make changes like this going forward now that we have reasonable tools power to make slight adjustments to a wide variety of cards. The goal of reducing the rate at which some cards appear by large numbers is less to make arena balanced and more to make a small subgroup of people happier than they were before at close to zero cost to the the audience that is unaware of the changes. Ideally we would like to get to zero cards that have large adjustments or are completely removed and rely entirely on micro adjustments. Anything that has an impact on gameplay decision making or drafting we want to be transparent about going forward. Also, a couple people pointed out that faceless summoner wasn't on the list and that the classic/basic neutral 50% decrease was also unlisted. Was an oversight on my part, thanks for pointing it out. The rest should be correct, and I'll talk with community on where the best place would be to get a permanent location of these rules up that we can update.
Iksar
I was referring to the large rate changes of Flamestrike, Abyssal, and Flappy. People notice when the notes go up, but I agree even large changes like that to individual cards are very noticeable. I do agree with some people when they say the impact is rather small, but I think it does make some amount of positive impact for very little trade off.
Iksar
Totally reasonable and something we considered. We want to see what the impact is of the micro adjustments we made before adding more variables to the mix. My expectation is that these changes will not completely solve arena balance, but when we are at a place we're comfortable with I think it would be a good idea to reintroduce cool cards like Snipe that have interesting gameplay.
Iksar
They show up 175% more than most neutral commons. The example Heartharena uses notes the difference between a class minion and a class spell being 75%, which is correct.
As for the second question, we look at all the players who played 30 or more runs then take their best 30 consecutive runs as their 'average'. Previously, we had some issues with the time we pulled down the data in various regions (12am pst all regions) but those issues should be resolved now and we should now get the data at 12am for your respective region.
Iksar
I see. I'll double check with the people collecting and distributing the data. I still wonder if those 'few more runs' happened on the last day in the final 6-9 hours, which could be the result of the time zone issue I mentioned. In any case, thanks for the extra info.