Blizzard’s genre-defining online CCG always seemed to struggle to gain clout similar to that of other esports, and it seems like the reasons against taking it seriously keep piling up as time goes on. Right now, the ghosts of the recent ladder rebalance seem to haunt the top-level competitors. Some peculiar issues with the game’s matchmaking system that seemed to be solved previously have returned just as the monthly season is nearing its conclusion.

A stacked deck

Hearthstone always seemed to have a contentious relationship with its own competitive scene. Famously, the game’s initial concept didn’t account for such an element or for the title’s astonishing runaway success to follow. In a very unique way, in the Twitch era, its esports scene had a heavy grassroots proponent initially, introducing a brand new audience to the idea that card games can be played professionally despite their inherent variance, mostly through invitational events featuring the most popular streamers of that early period. As time went on, Blizzard’s Team 5 started to play an ever-larger role in forming the scene. It’s reached a point where now most of the events revolve around their own Hearthstone Championship Tour – a competition which has already crowned four world champions for a game that lacks a dedicated tournament mode to this day, and whose participants regularly have unreasonable challenges to face, ranging from a regularly changed tour system and an in-game ladder system that doesn’t reasonably separate the top contenders from each other. While the actual competitive LAN events of the Hearthstone Championship tour also have their fair share of issues that are worth discussing—we’re going to take a look at those in a separate article—it’s currently a controversy regarding the game’s built-in ladder system that has got a fair share of the community up in arms. The players on the top are now often pitted against disproportionately low-level opponents. The game’s main matchmaking mode features twenty-five separate “ranks” that you progress through by earning a star for each win and losing one for every game you lose – aided by a bonus star for win-streaks until you hit rank 5, beyond which you’re left to your own devices. If you manage to get past the last five ranks (requiring you to go +25 in however many games), you become a Legend, a separate grouping which features individual MMR and assigns you a numerical position accordingly. This is the only information you are given as you fight for that coveted “Legend 1” spot. This, of course, means that your win-rate itself only starts to matter once you make it past those initial 25 ranks, something only a fraction of the players do. Generally, a 60% win ratio gets you close to two digits and somewhere between 65 and 70 percent is needed to climb the mountain. Of course, the challenge is made tougher as the quality of opponents also increase on the way up as a system like this only makes sense if you are pitted against players with a similar MMR and therefore a numerical ranking close to yours. This last part of the system is the one that has ceased to work properly recently as many top-Legend players have reported being placed against players who are still only on the regular portion of the ladder, making it incredibly difficult to actually climb or even maintain your position. Many anecdotal examples are flying around on social media, but perhaps the most illustrative one is the case of Casie_HS, who’s 38-38 record starting from Legend rank 39—meaning he was the 39th highest-rated player on the server at the time he started—dropped him all the way to 4057. A similar phenomenon occurred in March when the differences were sometimes so huge that even winning your match led to losing rating points for the favored player. Back then, the same issues mostly coincided with the long-awaited wider ladder change, and the developers’ eventual reaction on the very final day of the season didn’t exactly shed a light on the situation.

[...] When we implemented the 30-game requirement to earn Competitive Points for March 2018, we also increased how much your rank rating shifted after each match in order to make matches played feel more meaningful. Together, these changes accomplished what they set out to do—Legend players who were previously being completely inactive to preserve their rank were actively competing on the ladder again and their ranks were adjusting accordingly. We reverted the increase to how much your rank rating shifted (back to the normal rate) a few days ago to ensure that competition for end-of-season rankings wasn’t as volatile, which would have created a frustrating experience for players who were aiming for certain ranks [...]

This time around, the developers’ response to the issue’s return amounts to complete radio silence so far. Of course, the final day of the month is still a little further away at the time of writing. It’s not just fun and games for those involved: the aspiring participants of the Hearthstone Championship Tour greatly rely on the points given out to those who finish in the high Legend spots at the end of the month—after which the ranks reset and they have to climb back up again from rank 4—and being on the receiving end of such a rating slump may be completely unrecoverable with only a week to go, especially if the issues aren’t fixed quickly. In a way, these issues only serve to highlight the system’s many baked-in flaws which impede the competitive experience, many of which were crying out for a fix for a very long time by now.

Light a match

For a portion of the ladder that is supposed to represent the elite of the elite, a combination of the game’s recent rank changes and the fact that you theoretically only need a 50%+1 win-rate over a large enough sample size meant that the three servers now regularly get over ten thousand “Legends” per month. Of those, only the top two hundred get meaningful benefits for the game’s competitive scene. We can only speculate about the inner workings of Hearthstone’s Legend MMR system, which is an easily solvable issue with it in and of itself. If you only know your numerical position on the list without having an idea about how much exactly separates you from the players in front of you, it is impossible to make educated decisions about whether or not it’s worth going for yet another game at the end of the season. It also robs them from interesting pieces of information like the all-time highest rating or your personal best. Of course, the client has always lacked the set of stats that are usually made available for the players of online multiplayer games, a gap which can only be partially filled by third-party programs. There are other concerns beyond the actual rating system as well. As effective as a monthly reset is to keep the casual playerbase active, it makes it essentially impossible to reasonably differentiate between Hearthstone’s elite players, especially in a format that relies on best-of-one games, relatively high variance and no ability to sideboard. The nature of the current setup, as alluded to in the previously quoted developer reaction, also means that only the last few days of results really count when it comes to your final position, meaning players are only encouraged to make a real push at the very end of the short season and then “camp” on their high rank and then watch it slowly decay as the final hours of the season dwindle down. Though there are also issues with the regular ladder experience—the star-based system’s lack of emphasis on win-rate means that players are encouraged to crank out as many games as quickly as possible—most of these issues would not require a system-wide fix as long as the elite players were cut off and placed in a separate environment, similarly to Gwent’s ill-fated initial Pro League system. For now, the complete radio silence seems to highlight the fact that the developers’ ambivalence about Hearthstone’s professional scene remains essentially the same as it was around the game’s release. Actions speak louder than words, after all, especially when the latter is nowhere to be found.

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