Hearthstone My husband turned me into a Hearthstone card!

My husband turned me into a Hearthstone card!
Deal
ah yes, the Reno Jackson
The Factors Determining Win Rate
anyone been getting this error?
Is anyone else experiencing this Error?
Scholar Jaina still hasn’t gotten updated voice lines
Expansion name possibly leaked? (Credit to ZelKnow via Twitter)
Pirate warrior left 3 wankers and 2 apprentices on the board to set me to 1. Can it get any more satisfying?
Perfectly balanced turn 3 board, as all things should be
Infinite value!
Poker Legend Daniel Negreanu on Dealing with his Hearthstone Addiction
That's helpful
Jade Idol turned into Mark of Loa w/ Deck of Lunacy. Keeps the Jade choices but cannot select them
Bob: I think you can win this thing. Also bob:
What a turn .. Never thought i would take the win after i saw the stats of those elementals ..
[QOL] It would be nice for the ability to access quests/the collection buttons at all times
I DID IT
I did it guys! As a dad of two and playing since 2015, I finally made legend! Celebrate with me!
"6 random pirates"
Weird fatigue interaction with Twilight Runner. Disclaimer: Opponent was BMing me all game. The previous turn he thought he had won, and said Happy New Year! Which is why I responded in kind. Didn't expect it to go on for minutes before crashing. I played Hysteria to start the interaction.
Leroy Jenkins
Thought I'd open 5 packs of DoD, just to see if I could hit the pity timer.

My husband turned me into a Hearthstone card!

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 12:49 PM PST

submitted by /u/kjuubot
[link] [comments]

Deal

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 02:45 AM PST

submitted by /u/Wackthatass
[link] [comments]

ah yes, the Reno Jackson

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 10:12 AM PST

submitted by /u/AMEdsg
[link] [comments]

The Factors Determining Win Rate

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 12:20 PM PST

Hey everyone, J_Alexander_HS back today to talk about how we should think about win rate data.

How often have you heard some variant of the following ideas being expressed?

"This deck hit rank 1 legend, so it must be good"
"This good player swears that this deck is good and they've been winning with it, so it must be good"
"The data/meta report is wrong because it doesn't reflect the performance of player X with this deck"

What all these share in common is the idea that some deck is powerful because of a high win rate that a player was experiencing at some given time with it. In other words, the performance, the win rate, of a deck in this context is due primarily to the deck's power (rather than some other factors) and is likely to be successful in general because of that.

While it may be tempting to run off and start playing the deck yourself, anticipating your success, before we can say that a win rate is due to a deck's power we want to know what other factors influenced that win rate and rule those out as being the reasons for success. After all, you don't want to go getting baited into playing underperforming decks because you think they'll perform better than they will. And you certainly don't want to get stuck making crafting decisions on the basis of that information either if you're working with a budget collection.

What I want to review today are some of the factors that go into determining a player's win rate with a deck. While some may seem obvious, they help put win rates into better perspective and can hopefully clear up discussions about data, meta reports, anecdotes, and player opinion. Mere awareness of these factors isn't necessarily going to make it easy to accurately attribute some portion of a win rate to them, but awareness is still the starting point.

The three major components that explain a win rate: (1) Player Factors, (2) Random Factors, and (3) Deck Factors. Each of these contains some sub-factors and occasionally overlap.

Player Factors

These refer to how good a player the pilot of a deck happens to be. It takes into account how well a player understands the fundamentals of the game, the general plan of their deck, and their ability to win in particular matchups.

Overall game skill: How well does the pilot understand important concepts like resource utilization and management, tempo, when to trade or go face, and similar skills? These are skill sets that are important for every game of Hearthstone the pilot will play, and players stronger in these skills tend to win more than players who lack this understanding
Specific deck skill: How well does the pilot understand the specific deck they happen to be playing? They'll want to know what the overall game plan is, how the deck intends to win on a primary, secondary, and tertiary level, what cards to mulligan for, what cards are vital to a deck and which cards are less important, and how to execute their plan. Players who understand their deck's game plans better tend to outperform those who understand it more poorly.
Specific match skill: How does a deck's game plan change based upon the opponent's class or deck? This includes knowledge of the metagame, including what decks exist, how those decks are piloted, what their game plan is, how that game plan can be countered, and how the value of various resources in a pilot's deck changes based on the match up. Pilots who understand how a match changes based on the opponent's likely plays outperform those who lack such knowledge

Now though you might be reading that and thinking, "Good players tend to win more than bad players; not exactly front-page news", many underestimate how important this factor happens to be when they're looking at a win rate or player opinion.

Let's say player X is a great a player and expects a 60% ladder win rate because of what a good player they are. They've maintained this kind of win rate ever since they started playing Hearthstone and consistently put out that performance season after season. This player posting a screenshot of a good rank with a deck - any deck - shouldn't come as much of a surprise. They usually perform 10% above the average in terms of expected win rate. That's a skill set they will bring with them to literally any deck they pilot, and we should expect good perform from them even if they use a bad deck. They could be playing a tier 4 deck that usually sports a 45% win rate, but the 10% that this player factor adds puts their predicted win rate around a 55% - firmly in the green. Granted, the pilot could be doing better overall if their deck was stronger and added a few more percentage points to their win rate, but we don't get to see how well they would do if they don't play those other decks.

Players also improve after gaining experience with a deck, both overall and in specific matches. There are particular ins-and-outs to master. However, this happens for basically every deck to some degree. Some decks will improve more with experience than others (what's typically referred to the skill-cap), so what we want to know how much a player could improve with many different decks over time to get a sense for how much player skill makes a specific deck better. Learning that a player's win rate improved with deck A by 2% after 100 games doesn't tell us how much they would have improved if those 100 games of experience were spent learning deck B instead.

In order to attribute a good win rate to a deck, we first need to control for the player-skill factor. This means understanding how good of a player the pilot is, relative to their opponents. It also means understanding how much they would improve with experience when playing deck A, B, C, or D. It shouldn't come as a surprise that good players tend to win with any decks you give them, or that players tend to improve over time with any deck they're playing. What we want to know is how much the decks themselves uniquely contribute to a win rate, outside of those factors.

The ranked ladder system attempts to control for player skill by matching you exclusively with players it believes to be roughly about your skill level, but that doesn't mean differences in skill don't exist and play a roll in explaining the variation we see in win rates.

Random Factors

Random factors are statistical noise that makes a win rate go up or down in inconsistent and unpredictable ways.

Drawn randomness: Did the player happen to draw the cards in the right order or not? No matter how well you understand the game plan of a deck, or how powerful the deck is, sometimes you don't draw the cards that help you execute it. Other times you draw the cards perfectly, relative to your opponents, and sore up in ranks.
Outcome randomness: Did the player generate the right cards for the right situation? Did you Rag shot go face when it needed to, or kill a minion when it was important? The cards offered during generation periods or random effects on cards can massively swing the outcome of games, but remain outside the control the of the players in a match.
Matchup randomness: Did you happen to queue into a favorable field of opponents? All decks have good and bad matches, so who you queue into can have a massive impact on your win rate. Now this factor isn't totally random - there is overlap with player skill in understanding the meta and how frequent your good and bad matches are likely to be with a given deck - but it's random to the extent that it can fluctuate meaningfully in ways that are outside of anyone's ability to predict them fully. Even in a field with 70% favorable matches, you can still hit unfavorable after unfavorable.

In Hearthstone, one's win rate can be quite variable from game-to-game or day-to-day on the basis of these random factors. Not that any veteran player of Hearthstone doesn't already know this on an intuitive level, but it's interesting to see it tracked explicitly. Here, for instance, you can see my results with the same deck over 20+ days in a month. The same player, with the same deck, playing hundreds of games over that time, can see their win rate jump from 32% on day (over 28 games) to 70% the next (over 44 games). If those were two different players testing out the deck, they'd walk away with much different perceptions of its power.

Controlling for random factors is possible through very large sample sizes because, over time, luck should favor you as often as it disfavors you. However, those samples need to be large indeed. In the ideal sense, we're asking about what would happen over an infinite amount of games. In the practical sense, we often have to settle with what happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of games. The more games you record, the more randomness you tend to remove.

This gets hard to control for on an individual basis because over what a typical player would consider a large number of games - let's say 200 of them - randomness can still play a large role.

Let's think about what a deck with a 60% win rate over 200 games means: it won 120 games and lost 80 of them. That sounds like a powerful deck. However, to return that win rate to a 50% - which is a massive decline - all it takes is 20 games where random factors swing a different direction: a bad created by, a few poor matchups, opponent's drawing the nuts, and so on. It doesn't sound too outlandish to imagine getting lucky or unlucky 20 times. It starts to sound downright plausible if you have, say, 200 players all playing the same deck 200 times. The odds that a few of them get rather lucky or unlucky is now quite good, even if they spent an entire month playing those 200 games. To see what I mean, just sort HSReplay decks by win rate from highest to lowest. You'll always see decks with very high win rates sporting very low samples on top.

This ties back into the player factor as well. It's hard enough for one player to fully get a sense for the performance of a single deck because of the large sample size required to get random factors out of the way (especially if you want to talk about how much skill matters). Asking that the same player also play hundreds or thousands of games with many other decks is simply too much of an ask on their time to be possible. This, by necessity, can limit experience and bias perceptions.

Unfortunately you're far more likely to see the success stories posted and passed around, where the failure stories don't get shared or end up ignored. This can make a good string of luck seem attributable to a deck.

Deck Factors

Finally, we arrive at the thing we're usually trying to figure out: how good is the deck itself?

Power Cap: How strong is the deck's overall game plan, relative to other decks around? All else being equal, decks that do things like generate more cards, draw more cards, put more stats into play, burst for more damage, hit their synergies more consistently, and so on, tend to outperform decks that do these things worse. This simply refers to how much a deck is expected to actually improve your win rate because it has a strong plan, relative to its competition
Skill Cap: How much does the deck's win rate improve with experience? As we mentioned in the player-skill section, all players tend to improve with a deck over time, but some decks offer more room for improvement than others. One deck may have a very linear plan that can only be improved by 1% after hundreds of games, while others may be improved by 3% or more.
Meta Fit: How many favorable matches is a deck likely to find, relative to unfavorable ones? Some game plans naturally match better or worse into others, and decks with more favorable matches tend to do well than decks that run into more unfavorables. While this is partially a function of luck, there are predictable aspects to it, if you have the ability to generate a good estimate of your likely field.

It's important to account for all these factors, as they do represent different ways a deck can give you a good win rate and, as such, a good win rate may not generalize well to different times or places. A deck can have a high power cap (increasing your win rate), but find itself heavily targeted in a meta, making it a poor fit at the time (and lowering your win rate). Some weak decks can succeed if they find a meta made up heavily of favorable matches, but perform more poorly in a diverse field. A deck can have a high skill cap (improve a lot with experience) but still end up having a low power cap even after all the experience gains have been taken into account.

To know how good a deck is, we want to know not only how well it performed, but the reasons for that success. The why is crucial for accurate interpretations.

Why Data Matters

With all that in mind, let's finally turn to a recent meta report from Vicious Syndicate, as these tend to generate a fair bit of discussion. Reports like these are useful precisely because they encompass a lot of data from a wide range of players. The more players and games you have recorded, the more able you are to account for the player and random factors. To put that into examples:

A single, very good player is likely to win a lot no matter what deck they're playing. This makes their particular win rate less generalizable because it's confounded with player skill. When looking across a wide range of players, skill is less of a confounding factor and can be understood better.
A player/deck has the ability to get lucky over a small number of games that seem large (dozens or even hundreds). This makes that particular win rate less reliable because it's confounded with random factors. When looking across a wide range of games, randomness is less of an issue.
A player may achieve a good win rate with a deck because of a good meta fit, but that meta fit may not exist elsewhere on ladder or at a later time. This makes that particular win rate less reliable because it won't generalize to other metas or over time as the meta shifts. When looking across a wide range of games, this meta fit is less of a factor and the underlying power of the deck can be better understood.
A player may find that their performance with a deck far outpaces the deck's average performance. They may chalk that up to a deck having a high skill and power ceiling, when in reality their win rate is good because they're a great player overall who would have done well and improved with any deck. Since we (and they) cannot see their hypothetical performance, their reported win rate isn't reliable. Once we see how much other decks improve their performance and how it performs in other player's hands over time, these factors become less of an issue.

What we can see from these examples (as well as others) is why anecdotes - individual stories of success - are likely to confuse and mislead. We want to understand how good a deck is, but often end up seeing the impact of unrelated factors. As there are many factors that go into determining a win rate and we're not well equipped to understand them accurately and intuitively, to get the most out of the data - whether for figuring out what decks are good now or how to improve them in the future - you want to be equipped to understand what does and doesn't count as useful information. Avoiding being misled can be as important as knowing how to find the correct information.

submitted by /u/Popsychblog
[link] [comments]

anyone been getting this error?

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 03:35 PM PST

submitted by /u/JellyPractical6900
[link] [comments]

Is anyone else experiencing this Error?

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 03:39 PM PST

submitted by /u/SturmgeistOG
[link] [comments]

Scholar Jaina still hasn’t gotten updated voice lines

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 09:11 AM PST

Didn't they say they were going to update them like 5 months ago?

submitted by /u/Aleschyr
[link] [comments]

Expansion name possibly leaked? (Credit to ZelKnow via Twitter)

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 05:25 AM PST

submitted by /u/DeyanBB
[link] [comments]

Pirate warrior left 3 wankers and 2 apprentices on the board to set me to 1. Can it get any more satisfying?

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 02:56 AM PST

submitted by /u/Kai-xd
[link] [comments]

Perfectly balanced turn 3 board, as all things should be

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 09:37 AM PST

submitted by /u/ThaGabenator
[link] [comments]

Infinite value!

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 06:46 AM PST

submitted by /u/canmanshabam
[link] [comments]

Poker Legend Daniel Negreanu on Dealing with his Hearthstone Addiction

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 01:55 PM PST

submitted by /u/Ranlit
[link] [comments]

That's helpful

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 08:09 AM PST

submitted by /u/TheJerryCan
[link] [comments]

Jade Idol turned into Mark of Loa w/ Deck of Lunacy. Keeps the Jade choices but cannot select them

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 09:31 AM PST

submitted by /u/Cloontange
[link] [comments]

Bob: I think you can win this thing. Also bob:

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 12:54 PM PST

submitted by /u/JonyTheCool1234
[link] [comments]

What a turn .. Never thought i would take the win after i saw the stats of those elementals ..

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 01:04 PM PST

submitted by /u/DieDasDerFlori
[link] [comments]

[QOL] It would be nice for the ability to access quests/the collection buttons at all times

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 01:44 PM PST

If there was an expanding menu with these options or if you could hit escape and jump quickly to one of these, it would be a small but nice quality of life update.

Often I want to pick a certain class that I have quests for when doing duels/tavern brawl, so not having to go back to the main menu would be nice.

It would also be convenient when going for achievments, such as in battlegrounds. Currently I made a list with all the heroes I have gotten and just keep adding to it, but having the ability to just hit escape and check while selecting heroes would be nice.

TL;DR - it would be nice

submitted by /u/TurtleP3ANUTS
[link] [comments]

I DID IT

Posted: 17 Feb 2021 12:44 AM PST