So now, can we all get aboard the idea that Blizz's abandoned balance and fun for serious arena players?
Like you said, consistent philosophy. Wild rotations over Standard (thier competitive ruleset). Bucketing philosophy (pick rates by bad players, over win rates). Nothing new here. Nothing suprisingly I couldn't have told you (and did) last month.
What more do they need to say? Every move Team 5 made in 2019 is pushing heavily at the idea that there is and will be no support for serious Arena meta. We can do whatever we want with it of course. But Arena is now explicitly intended to be a pubstomp with heavy RSP and RNG. No one's watching out for OUR meta, just the 2-2 meta. WE will not have as many choices in drafts for strategy as plebs. That's right, the people who agonize over every pick, will get LESS choice than people who don't know the game and don't even care enough to consult a tier list. And this is straight out of the mouths of HS's BALANCE team. Imagine if they did that with constructed. They wouldn't even dream of it. But this is arena, a casual mode some people oddly choose to take seriously.
What I don't get is why they made Chakki do this. Last we heard, he's still responsible for 100% of initial bucketing (at the time, the implication being it would more accurately reflect the power of the cards). Is he now just trying to replicate and predict what pleb players would do? Why don't they just take a poll around the wider Blizz office then or randos on the street? What does Chakki know about random players, what is his expertise adding? Or did he really miss all these cards SO hard.
Who knows. Let's just do more PR and hope no one cares.
Go back now and listen to my rant that kicks off Lightforge Podcast episode 188. Prescient, eh? It's not about what Team 5 can do or may do, it's about what they actually WANT to do and WILL do. Too many top arena players are wilfully blind to the new Arena balance philosophy that will define the year of the Dragon.
Arena is an extended event meta now. We serious players are barely an afterthought for the balance team at Team 5. This game is not made for us, will not cater towards our meta, or our definitions of fun. All devs have to make a choice about who various parts of the game is for. Great devs can make it fun for everyone. For Arena, Team 5's targets are to make 95% of thier playerbase happy, and leave the 5% of us who seriously care about the Arena hanging.
I have no idea if the 95% like this meta. But for the 5% of people who play this mode seriously, the results were always predictable, a necessary consequence of the "balance" direction.
We've been abandoned completely folks. Not even the illusion of progress anymore for us. What annoys me still, more than Blizz's direction with the game, is that serious arena players STILL don't accept this new reality.
The meta for good players will suck going forward. By explicit design. Team 5 just re-confirmed it here.
To be clear, the end result of bucketing is nearly irrelevant to class balance. Balance isn’t handled through micro adjustments which is a different topic. The end result of bucketing by perception of power for expert players is that some picks will seem more obvious to them than they do to the rest of the player base. We didn’t see that as a major concession.
I understand having criticisms of this approach but trying so hard to pit Team 5 vs the player base isn’t necessary. There is no one with some hidden agenda, we’d just like to make the game as fun as it can be. It sounds like this post mostly comes from a misunderstanding of how class balance in arena works from our end, which I can understand because it’s a more complicated process than we’d like.
Thanks for engaging. It's great to have decision makers step in, even when we're having a bit of a tiff.
I don't think anyone is complaining about a hidden agenda, but instead the stated one. Constructed Hearthstone is designed to be as fun as it can be, while also being designed to be competitive and interesting at the highest level. Arena is designed to be as fun as it can be, and no more. The frustrating part is there could be so much more. The Arena format at its fundamentals is a tactically rich and complex way to play a darn solid card game. There's nothing at the core holding it back from being a full, competitive format.
The decision to put the average player's fun as the core of the experience does hold it back, because those decisions strip away some of the rich complexity of decision making without adding much back in return. The lovely thing about bucketing cards of roughly equal value together is that it makes drafting richer, in which each decision is shaped by your knowledge of your growing deck, and shapes the future draft picks you make. The more auto-picks (or auto-avoids) there are, not only do you make that pick more thoughtless, you force decks into more fixed archetypes. The game becomes more samey, and more determined by draft RNG. This also hurts average players (not least because it doesn't help them learn the format).
As many before me have said, other card games, including big mama MTG, treat their limited modes as serious, competitive, deep, tactically rich formats as worthy as their constructed formats. Hearthstone could do that too, but that's very obviously not part of the agenda.
I think the biggest difference in the line of thinking between us is that I think having some picks where you can use your mastery of arena actually enhances the experience rather than detracts from it. I agree that if all choices were thoughtless, that would be negative. I believe we're very far from that. Recently we've been discussing the idea of having fewer, wider buckets. From the discussion that is currently happening, it sounds like that might be met with a bit of ire. The idea is that most picks are still pretty close together in terms of power level, but there are more choices that have clear answers depending on your understanding of actual card power level. This is mostly just a discussion we've been having rather than a plan in place, though.
As far as this particular discussion goes, I think most of it comes from cards that are just bucketed a little off by both power level and eventual perception. These will be fixed as soon as we have a bit more pick rate data.
I find adwcta's reply to your comment above to be more or less useless in explaining his substantive grievances, so I'll make an honest attempt to restate them for your understanding. First of all, this has nothing to do with class balance, or almost nothing.
Balance as a term can mean a lot of different things, and Adwcta's gripe with your bucketing philosophy is related to what he sees as a turn by you away from rewarding high skill players and towards rewarding casual players and coin flip outcomes.
You suggested that buckets based on pick rate - and this is even more true for initial buckets when we don't know what pick rates are - actually increase rewards to being an expert, because experts can pick all the high-powered cards in the bad buckets. Personally, I think that's possibly legit. Anyway, adwcta doesn't. He feels that having powerful cards in low buckets increases draft RNG, defeating the evening out that buckets are supposed to do. I.E. the player who gets offered multiple Eccentric Scribes in Bucket 5 effectively got 100% extra "1st bucket" picks, counting by power level instead of the actual buckets. The point of buckets was not just, many people felt, to make draft choices all "equally interesting", but to reduce the variance in the power level of arena decks (thus rewarding skill). Which many people welcomed.
This builds on a bunch of other gripes he has. For example, he thinks moving to random Arena sets instead of Standard sets is bad for good players because old arena sets are swingy and random and new arena sets are not (Year of Raven, at least). He also is pissed about RoS itself because of its high RNG content, again not rewarding to veterans, etc.
Sometimes, when people say "hey, now you need to use skill to keep track of the meta and adjust quickly and everything is still skill", he replies along the lines of "that's a crappy, stupid, not fun kind of skill".
A lot of the leaderboard arena community isn't completely buying all of this argument, but on the other hand, a lot of us do find it off-putting to see obviously excellent cards in bad buckets. I would also add that in the big picture, while "rewards to skill" is a hard thing to objectively measure, most of us do feel like it has varied during the life of Arena, and when rewards to skill starts to fall too low, it makes the game experience suck more. I confess I think it's possible that Rise of Shadows is heavy on randomness to an extent that could make Arena less fun, I haven't decided yet either way. We'd all be more comfortable if Team 5 made an effort to demonstrate to us that it thought about this, tried to measure it, tried to adjust in response to it, etc. Balance does have more dimensions than class balance (imbalanced classes are just one form of higher rewards to luck, less to skill)
I see, thanks for the insight.
For what it's worth, of course 'balance' has much more to do with moving win rates to X%. Most players do refer to balance as win rate values, so sometimes I get caught referring to it as that when maybe I shouldn't. At it's core, balance is really about creating a balance of experiences that various player types will enjoy. Power level is relevant to this in that if you choose to engage with the game in a particular way that is fun to you, you shouldn't feel like you have to do it at a power level wildly worse than the power level than other things that you might not enjoy. For buckets based on perception, nearly all players at all level see interesting choices. Newer or less experienced players have interesting choices but can choose mostly any card and end up with a deck that works. Experienced players have mostly interesting choices but can utilize a mastery of card power level to choose cards that they deem are in buckets amongst other, less powerful cards. In theory, both audiences are pretty happy in this environment, but it's not like this is a decision so core to the arena experience it can't change. I believe most of the disagreement here has to do with cards that will be rebucketed by data in the next few days. I mostly wanted to address that I hope conversations can start in a way that is less hostile and we can just have a reasonable conversation.
I can't wave a non-hostility magic wand, but while you're here and taking feedback, a relevant point:
I believe most of the disagreement here has to do with cards that will be rebucketed by data in the next few days.
Hopefully, but it depends. A misbucketing on the order of Eccentric Scribe in Bottom 5 - Eccentric Scribe being basically a neutral highmane, i.e. a Bucket 1 or 2 card - would have taken something like a year to get bucketed correctly at the Year of the Raven levels of speed and conservativism (you tend to move things one half bucket per rebucketing, no more). I don't think you're committing to rebucketing four or five times in the next month, so I would consider moving things in larger increments.
There is some amount of guidance we get through data, but if Scribe has some insane pick rate we'll move it up more than a half bucket. We get data back, but it's only a guide to help us make decisions, not a ruleset we have to abide by in all circumstances. We've moved things more than a bucket in the past and we will in the future.
Iksar
To be clear, the end result of bucketing is nearly irrelevant to class balance. Balance isn’t handled through micro adjustments which is a different topic. The end result of bucketing by perception of power for expert players is that some picks will seem more obvious to them than they do to the rest of the player base. We didn’t see that as a major concession.
I understand having criticisms of this approach but trying so hard to pit Team 5 vs the player base isn’t necessary. There is no one with some hidden agenda, we’d just like to make the game as fun as it can be. It sounds like this post mostly comes from a misunderstanding of how class balance in arena works from our end, which I can understand because it’s a more complicated process than we’d like.
Iksar
I think the biggest difference in the line of thinking between us is that I think having some picks where you can use your mastery of arena actually enhances the experience rather than detracts from it. I agree that if all choices were thoughtless, that would be negative. I believe we're very far from that. Recently we've been discussing the idea of having fewer, wider buckets. From the discussion that is currently happening, it sounds like that might be met with a bit of ire. The idea is that most picks are still pretty close together in terms of power level, but there are more choices that have clear answers depending on your understanding of actual card power level. This is mostly just a discussion we've been having rather than a plan in place, though.
As far as this particular discussion goes, I think most of it comes from cards that are just bucketed a little off by both power level and eventual perception. These will be fixed as soon as we have a bit more pick rate data.
Iksar
I see, thanks for the insight.
For what it's worth, of course 'balance' has much more to do with moving win rates to X%. Most players do refer to balance as win rate values, so sometimes I get caught referring to it as that when maybe I shouldn't. At it's core, balance is really about creating a balance of experiences that various player types will enjoy. Power level is relevant to this in that if you choose to engage with the game in a particular way that is fun to you, you shouldn't feel like you have to do it at a power level wildly worse than the power level than other things that you might not enjoy. For buckets based on perception, nearly all players at all level see interesting choices. Newer or less experienced players have interesting choices but can choose mostly any card and end up with a deck that works. Experienced players have mostly interesting choices but can utilize a mastery of card power level to choose cards that they deem are in buckets amongst other, less powerful cards. In theory, both audiences are pretty happy in this environment, but it's not like this is a decision so core to the arena experience it can't change. I believe most of the disagreement here has to do with cards that will be rebucketed by data in the next few days. I mostly wanted to address that I hope conversations can start in a way that is less hostile and we can just have a reasonable conversation.
Iksar
There is some amount of guidance we get through data, but if Scribe has some insane pick rate we'll move it up more than a half bucket. We get data back, but it's only a guide to help us make decisions, not a ruleset we have to abide by in all circumstances. We've moved things more than a bucket in the past and we will in the future.