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Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Megamogwai/Swim create meta on ladder

I love so much this game and play it since beta, diamond every time since then and hope someday master if I could have more time to play, but the topic I want to talk about is about how mogwai mostly and swimstrim create meta on ladder, every time mogwai, specially, upload a new video that deck appear on ranked, and thats great because our boys are receiving so much support from the community, but today !oh man! (morty voice) I encouter of 11 matches I play, 6 of them were that ASHE/SEJUANI deck that he upload recently and lost every time that face it, stop playing for today because I got frustrated of lose against it and dont wanna play a specific deck just to counter it, its not a post about hate or anything because I enjoy both of them content, just a random thought I have and want to share it with you and read some of your comments about it.

  • Dovagedys
    Posted 5 years, 5 months ago (Source)

    Thanks for the post.

    This is frustrating and the effect is something we talk about frequently.

    It's awesome that streamers are playing the game and showing off new decks. It's awesome that their fans can easily copy those decks and try them out.

    The frustrating part is when the meta can seem small or when you feel you're facing the same decks repeatedly. We hear that frustration. But the streamers are not to blame. They are awesome!

    The problem is about asymmetrical information and sometimes misinformation. I'll share some examples.

    1. Mobalytics "meta" - The mobalytics data is biased, because it only shows information from peoplel with the app installed and the majority of those people have similar player motivations. When we look at our internal data, which shows all games of all players, we see a very different meta than what mobalytics represents. This is not mobalytics fault. We think mobalytics is awesome and doing a great job. However, many you rely on the information of mobalytics, which can sometimes lead to the belief that the meta is more narrow than reality. It also reduces the number of decks you all think are viable. When that happens then the perception slowly becomes the reality as more and more players feel they are required to play a mobalytics deck if they want to win. We are working on a way to be able to share more data with everyone more broadly. We don't have an estimated date yet, but we think it is extremely important to show you all the possible competitive decks that are available. The number is much larger than data aggregation sites currently represent.
    2. Cognitive bias - If a person sees a deck on stream, mobalytics, reddit, or wherever, then when they see that deck in game they recognize it faster and are more likely to have a response (positive or negative) toward it. As an example, if I see Mogwai playing Swain/TF and then I play 10 games, then I’m more likely to remember each game my opponent’s play those same champions and less likely to remember other decks my opponent’s play.
    3. Small population echo chamber - This subreddit is incredible. It is so positive and it's clear most of you love the game. And we love you back. But it is critical to understand that reddit, streams, other forums represent a small number of the community. Legends of Runeterra is played by millions of people all over the world, but our subreddit is English only and usually has around 1.5-3k people online. That is an extremely small percentage of the player base. Each individual community (Reddit, stream chat, etc) are generally made up of like minded people. As an example, I love watching BBG stream LOR, but BBG's audience is different from Swim or Mogwai or Grapplr or whomever. Different people like different streamers. And that's awesome! I watch a ton of different LOR streamers and I like almost all of them for different reasons. Unfortunately, there is an echo chamber effect that can develop over time within communities, which can then lead to people feeling like everyone agrees with them or that their viewpoint is shared by a larger percentage of the total population.

    One of my favorite things about Legends of Runeterra is that most cards are playable and that leads to a very large deck diversity. One of our core goals has always been to have a very high number of decks in our meta game. Originally, the goal was to have 10+ decks. Over the past few months we have seen double or triple that number. It’s very exciting for us to see with internal data.

    Unfortunately, the number of meta decks looks much smaller to the community because of the reasons I listed above. We know that is frustrating and we are frustrated by it as well, because we want you all to have as much information and as many choices as possible.

    We want to help give more information. We don’t want you all to feel like you must play the same 6 or 7 decks to have success. We want everyone to have the option to play 30 decks and have success.

    All of that said, we know the meta fluctuates from time to time. We take live balance very seriously, because we know it’s important to you all. We aren’t perfect and we will make mistakes, but we will always focus on addressing those mistakes as quickly as we can.

    I hope sharing this helps and I hope we can share more data on the meta with you very soon.

  • Dovagedys
    Posted 5 years, 5 months ago (Source)

    Hey Uthgar from Mobalytics here. This is something we think about a lot. First I would like to thank you for the kind words in that fair assessment. We definitely recognize those problems, and I'd like to apologize for unintentionally making some players' experiences worse.

    Right now there are 19 decks in the tier list (that's a lot of viable decks!), and the majority of them are in the A tier. To me this constitutes a diverse meta, and our intention is to honestly create a power ranking that players can discuss and contribute to.

    I love LOR and think its the best damn card game ever, even if I don't get as much time as I'd like to play. What is hard to anticipate is how much of a focal point the list becomes and how it would potentially reverberate with the community.

    When we created the stats pages and the tier list, we wanted to provide people with tools that they were heavily requesting (whether that was through Reddit or direct message or email). A lot of this was probably influenced by what exists in Hearthstone, us included, and to be fair a lot of the same complaints exist there in the Hearthstone subreddit.

    We know our sample size isn't even close to representative of the total population (we have no way to track mobile games!), but our goal was to provide players who want information with something that they can use. In an ideal world this doesn't disrupt other people's perception of the game. However, our world is far from ideal, and the result is what we have now.

    That being said, we have tried real hard to promote community decks through our deck library. We played around with discoverability tool, highlighting hot and trending decks, but it hasn't seemed to catch on as much as we'd like. The reality is that most people who visit the site are primarily concerned with what top players are playing.

    This doesn't mean that we have given up on the rest; far from it. We have a new release on the roadmap that will allow players to find decks much more easily and even share their own decks and thoughts in a better way. We remain very committed to the game and community and want to figure out how to make it a better place for ALL types of players, not just the hyper competitive ones.

    If you have any ideas, we are all ears. Please feel free to post here, email me, DM me, whatever you are comfortable with. While we work to implement new thingsthat can help solve this problem into the platform , there are a couple of things that will help us get there:

    1. Visit the deck library frequently and up-vote decks you like. The more cool decks people see, the more cool decks get tried. I try and do this every day, I vote 3 decks I haven't seen. I know it probably doesn't do much as of yet, but a few random people have probably seen that 1 upvote on the deck they made and I hope it feels good.
    2. Submit your feedback on how we can make the platform better for your needs. The competitive players and net-deckers are the loudest so we get the most feature requests from them, so please share with us your thoughts!

    In online games, there will always be a problem of perception and reality of what is strong. Something will appear to tell players what to do and help players win (whether that's streamers, stats, or a site), but that doesn't mean that "thing" can't be done well. We are committed to making a great companion that everyone can enjoy, and deeply want to figure out this problem, so please help us!

    Excellent post, Uthgar! You and your team are amazing and doing awesome work. We are lucky to have you and your team working so hard for our community!

    Interesting fact for the LOR community, Uthgar and I met playing WoW in 2005. We were long time guild mates and raiding buddies. Fast forward more than 10 years later and we have randomly met in our careers with me working on LOR and him working on Mobalytics. He is one of the smartest and kindest humans I know.

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