Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

"[Giggling Inventor is 3rd Tier]" - Blizzard's Arena Guy

Background: Blizzard groups Arena cards in buckets when they offer them to you, based on some combination of how good they perform, and how often they get picked.... or so we're told.

Latest Patch: Because Blizzard doesn't tell us how they rebucket cards, we, as part of the Arena community, updated the Arena buckets using ArenaDrafts data after the latest patch adjusted nearly 100 cards and where they were bucketed, including some deeeeep cuts from the Legendary pool by half buckets. You can find the updated buckets on our Lightforge Tier List along with our tier scores, which have not changed.

Surprise: Giggling Inventor, one of the universally recognized top cards, and statistically according to HSReplay, one of the most frequently picked AND highest win rate cards in the arena.... a commonly recognized misbucketed card.... a card we rated a 179 at launch, the top neutral non-legendary in the game..... Is STILL in the 3rd bucket , below cards like Plated Beetle and Tar Creeper. There are other instances of obvious misbuckets, but after waiting TWO MONTHS to rebucket the cards, is this oversight of the #1 (or #2) meta-dominating card is pretty ridiculous.

The very system put into place to control OP cards in the Arena, is being SPECIFICALLY overridden by hand by Blizzard, to preserve the illusion that Giggling is not a top card (of course, with the effect that it gets picked even more, and is even more gamewinning). Remember when MCT got moved up half a bucket above where it statistically should have been, and what a huge deal Blizzard made about it on their blog how they deviated from their sacred objective ranking system? We get nothing here for Giggles. Not a peep. Because it's flat out unjustifiable, and mystifying for Blizzard to do.

Conclusions:

1) Blizzard lied about bucketing cards purely based on some objective measure, or they switched philosophies in the last week. Any objective system would certainly have moved Giggling Inventor, by pick rate, or win rate.

2) Whatever subjective system Blizzard is working WITH (or in place of) their old objective system is deeeeeeeeply flawed in ways even a somewhat casual Arena player would easily spot. This is obvious uncontroversial stuff. And yes, Mossy Horror hasn't moved either, still in the 3rd bucket with Giggles, despite being the most picked epic neutral, and one of the highest win rates.

3) Blizzard cares so little about communicating and responding to the Arena community at this point, that this whole thing was allowed to happen even after 2 months of delay (Witchwood was first updated within a week, twice in the first month), and the whole re-bucketing thing wasn't even important enough to make it into the patch notes... even though it moved more than 10% of the cardpool around.

More ranting and more details on specific rebucketing movements in our Arena-only podcast here if you're interested in the deep cuts.

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So, just wanted to put things into perspective for those of complaining about lack of new game modes or wanting a Giggling nerf in constructed. In Arena, despite top notch performance in data on pick rates and win rates, Blizzard doesn't even consider Giggling one of the best neutral cards. They actually went AGAINST their prior objective system of bucketing, to hold Giggling down in their internal rating.

As usual, even when others have it bad. Arena gets it in odd and previously inconceivably worse ways.

Why, Blizzard. Why.

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