Hearthstone: Gamers are slowly losing motivation because of the current matchmaking system

If you’ve ever played an online game, you’ve probably complained about the matchmaking system. You’ve crushed low ranked players, and you’ve been beaten to death by high ranked players. Because of some error in the algorithm, sometimes those matches still happen. But for the best players in Hearthstone, this has happened to them a lot lately.

Over the past few weeks, many professional Hearthstone players (and a bunch of Redditors), Legend-ranked players have often been placed in matches at a lower rank than they are, including those who haven’t reached Legend rank yet. For players at the Legend rank, this makes climbing and improving their rank almost impossible.

The top 25 ranks in Hearthstone use the Star system, but when you reach Legend rank, your rank becomes a number. The smaller the number, the higher your rank, that’s why we have a race to Legend 1. To improve Legend rank, you not only have to win the game, but also have to beat stronger opponents – those who rank taller than you. The level of rank increase, depends on the rank of the opponent you defeat.

If I have rank 500 and defeat a rank 300 player, I can jump to rank 400 or something like that. But if I beat a 400 rank player, my rank would probably only climb to around 450. This is an oversimplified example, but it does explain it somewhat. Of course, the opposite is also true. If you lose to a player with a much lower rank than you, you will lose more rank than if you lose to someone of your same rank. In a perfect world this would be a self-correcting score system, but this is not what Hearthstone gamers are witnessing.

Because Legend players often have to face lower ranked opponents, winning means nothing, while a loss can cost them many consecutive games. That’s what Redditor wils172 is having. This is a dilemma not only because it makes us lose motivation: everything we’ve worked on for hours disappears in a flash – this is what players need if they want to participate in the Hearthstone Championship Tour.

This is also bad news for casual players who don’t care about Legend rank or HCT, that’s because the best players in the world are facing off against people trying to get into Legend for the first time in a while. his life. Or simply want to challenge yourself a bit. Imagine jumping into a Rainbow Six Siege or Overwatch match and meeting the pros?

What surprised us the most was that this unbalanced matchmaking system came about naturally. It was so widespread that it led us to believe that matchmaking in Hearthstone has changed, but Blizzard hasn’t announced any changes. With that said, Blizzard does sometimes experiment with the Hearthstone system – which is why many players have long called for Blizzard to be transparent about how these numbers are calculated – so it’s possible something has changed.

Blizzard has of course tweaked it to make sure the game’s MMR system minimizes wait times, but it’s basically still following the formula Hearthstone game designer Max McCall has drawn up. “After each game, the company consciously looks at whether you won or lost and your rating, your opponent’s rating, and your rating history to come up with a new rating,” explains McCall. “We call this rating MMR. In Legend, we match players with similar MMR. Under Normal Rank, we match players with equal number of stars instead of MMR.

“When you press the ‘play’ button to start searching for the game. The system will look at your MMR and compare it with the MMR of everyone looking for the game. If the system finds someone similar to your MMR, it will match the two; it will also find someone whose MMR is close to yours. If no match is found, the system will wait a few seconds and start searching again. The range of MMR to ensure a good match will be extended if you search the game for a long time; This ensures you don’t have to wait too long to play. Usually, matches are created so quickly that the expansion doesn’t really matter.”

This early year, Game designer August “Iksar” Ayala said the matchmaking system is always evolving, and he said a high win rate does not mean a high Legend rank. As mentioned above, the matches this month are so strange, that people suspect something has happened. Let’s wait for a response from Blizzard Hearthstone for more details.

By PC Gamer