Is it surprising that the win rates are similar? In a ranked system, don't we expect that the win rates of all classes and decks would tend towards 50%?

What am I not understanding?

Is there a reason you don't make this data available to fans? I'd be very curious to see the frequency and winrate of priest in legend right now.

Your stats seem to contradict everything we seem to have access to, either official http://i.imgur.com/kMfunDS.jpg (from https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/4mgleu/china_class_representation_and_winrates_from_23/) or unofficial ones ( http://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-report-12/ ).

You can try to affirm that the second one (and ones like it) are selected to bias for people more inclined to take the game seriously, but I find it difficult to do for the china stats. And even if they did, it would just indicate even MORE that there ARE differences between classes that are BIG, just that in your data they are hidden by a giant amount of random data on top of that. But even then you should be able to select for that... I don't understand.

Nice to see Blizz pop in for their yearly post showing how much they care about their players. Just so we're clear, this neither counts as community engagement, nor does your condescending and vague post prove anything.

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Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but dropping minions on curve isn't the same as working hard towards a goal. I prefer to lose to a combo deck in which people have to make important decisions about when to play a certain removal, when to use a combo piece in a not-so-ideal context in order to be able to remove an opponent's key minion, how to use cycle mechanisms without overdrawing and burning important cards... I think there's a lot more merit in that than playing C'Thun buff cards and overstated minions until you draw C'Thun himself. That's how I see things.

Alas, Hearthstone is losing the strategic component that made it engaging in order to cater to a part of the playerbase which arguably has the attention span of a well-fed mosquito and just wants instant gratification and a board full of minions ready to go face. This instant gratification thing is what made WoW lose its appeal to a large part of its fans. The idea that you don't need some effort to be good, and making a game that everyone can successfully play with minimal effort isn't appealing for a long term fanbase. It's ok for a while, but going down this path will probably bring bad (or worse) things.

And I think that it's condescending for you to tell us what is best for us.

That is a cop out answer. The only people who will sift through statistics are people who are already neurotic about that sort of thing, they will just find inaccurate statistics from things like 3rd party stat recording sites. If the classes are as balanced as you say and you felt the need to come to a r/hearthstone thread and correct people citing grossly inaccurate personally collected statistics then it would only benefit your own cause to release the real numbers.

edit: also if you need evidence that what you said isn't true. Dota2 lets sites openly track through the API all of the statistics you are hiding out of fear of... something. http://www.dotabuff.com/heroes/winning here is the aggregate hero winrates. You know what people are not asking for? Omniknight, Wraithking, and Necrophos nerfs they understand why their winrates are high and don't believe it is because they are too strong. People are not as dumb as you think.

yea but what about murlocs? if you could be any murloc which one would you be?

My theory is that you guys balance as much on fun as competitiveness so I understand why Priest got the nerf stick. Even if a class is the worst it can still be nerfed even more if it is too unfun to play against.

In their.... defense (?): from what I've picked up from both HotS and HS discussions of statistics Blizzard really sucks in the statistical analysis department. (I say this as a scientist that does large scale data analysis as part of his job.)

I honestly don't think Blizz knows how to leverage the data they have to a clean effect. And, to be fair, the skills that let you do that are still pretty hard to get at the moment.

Though that's a relatively small sample size. My stats for instance, since Whispers release, are completely different: I've actually faced Mages the most (15.3%), only 12.5% Warrior and 6.8% Priest in 2200 ranked games (I only hit legend once, though).

I think the biggest issue here is that blizzard is looking at the overall data including rank 25 players that play 5 games of priest each month and nothing else - they stated the classes are incredibly well balanced if you look at EVERY game (if I remember correctly classes varied between 52% and 47% overall winrate) - the issue with that is though, that doesn't mean the game is balanced at a higher or even professional level.

For some reson they don't acknowledge this :/