Hearthstone Battlegrounds is getting a rating reset next week! Here is what you need to keep in mind:
- All players will have their rating set to 0.
- You can't lose rating below 2000 - protections are in place!
- There are ranked floors starting at 2000 rating and going up to 6000 rating.
- The floors are every 500 rating and won't let you fall below that floor once reached.
- Your internal rating, MMR, will not be reset so you will still fight opponents at the same level.
We're expecting this update to arrive on December 15, the same one that brings changes to the rewards track, and it looks like Blizzard has also prepared a battlegrounds content update for us.
Quote From Hearthstone Heads up, a new Battlegrounds season is just around the corner! We'll be resetting all players' Battlegrounds ratings to 0 early next week to level the playing field for a new content update
![All The Great Dark Beyond Card Reveals for October 23 - Day 13 [Finished]](the-great-dark-beyond-day-13.webp)
Comments
I have this question concerning constructed ranked as well: what is the point of having a rank if you always face the same level of opponents?
How would you climb if the MMR tries to always pair you with opponents of your own level (which would lead to a 50% average winrate)?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something fundamental, but currently I'm just not getting it.
It's not clear to me what the point is for Battlegrounds, but I think the case for it in the constructed formats is pretty straightforward: your external ranking determines your ranked season rewards, while your internal MMR determines how to best match you up for fun/challenging games. It doesn't seem like they're announcing any particular season rewards for Battlegrounds, so the distinction may not offer any value today. But perhaps they'll add those soon, and this is just a step in that direction.
MMR is based on the long view of your historical win rates. Again thinking about constructed formats here, but even if matching were always perfect, you'd still have win streaks and deck choices playing a major role in your shorter term success despite being paired with opponents who have similar long term success. For example, if I'm playing on ladder, at a ranked floor, and struggling to make progress against a sea of Aggro Demon Hunters, I could make a control deck to specifically target them and try to "artificially" improve my win chances despite the 50% average winrate that my MMR match is trying to give me.
Battlegrounds has certain parallels. If I see that both Beasts and Murlocs are available, I'm more likely to want to pick Jandice Barov, for example, because I have better odds of getting early tokens that I can turn into golden units with a Brann + Khadgar combo. Knowing the interplay between available tribes and available heroes may give you an edge despite having similar MMRs. Then, of course, there's a component of good luck with your rolls. That will average out over time, but in the short term could help you jump between ranked floors
Of course, this all assuming perfect matching, which is itself impossible (even if there's a perfect match out there, they might not be online at the same time you are), so some amount of noise in the matching can also account for moving between ranked floors.
I disagree that the point of external mmr is to determine end of season rewards, those are just an arbitrary way to encourage people to play the mode.
The point of external mmr is that people like numbers.
External mmr gives the impression that all of your skill and knowledge (in comparison to the average skill and knowledge of every single other person who plays that mode) can be reduced to a single number, and if you do good the number will go up and if you do bad the number will go down. Without an external mmr you just have casual mode (which as far as I know still has internal mmr).
I'm not sure that we're really saying different things here.
Underlying my argument is the idea that if the only purpose of ranking was to tell a player how good they are, there'd be no need for a distinction between internal and external rankings. The externally-facing ladder rankings, however, are a way to reward you for taking part in the game. That is, not only for being good at the game (which drives up both rankings), but also for putting time into the format. I could have outstanding MMR, but if I decide to play zero ranked games in a season I'll still end up at Bronze 10 at the end of the month. (But, notably, my internal MMR will decay much more slowly.)
What I've described as "ranked season rewards" is exactly the "arbitrary way [Blizzard chooses] ]to encourage people to play the mode" that you're describing, so I think these are largely the same.
I can tell you this isn't working right now, unless I misunderstand something. I've crashed through those floors at least twice so far.
If I read the article correctly, the changes will be implemented next week, so they shouldn't be live yet
You're misunderstanding. They're saying that's part of the upcoming update.
But they already mentioned it for Patch 18.4. At one point it also seemed to work for me too. Until it didn't.
I believe ranked floors were temporarily disabled due to a severe bug in the most recent big patch? I wanna say I read that somewhere.
What is the point of external vs internal MMR? If the system works, wouldn't people be allocated and sorted quickly regardless?
There is no such thing as external mmr because the external rating isn't used for matchmaking. The number you see is just ment to give you some sort of progression.
"We want our rating system to both provide a sense of progression through gameplay and create fair matchmaking. It’s very hard to achieve these two things simultaneously by using only one rating. Therefore, we designed a “dual-rating” system to address our intention. In the updated rating system, there are two ratings—external rating and internal rating:"
Q
But why not just the internal MMR, then?
They are not resetting the Internal mmr(this would cause a huge chaos). I guess they reset your rating so you have something to work towards, because most players probably reached their own goal by now.