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Cards Blizzard missed in their rebucketing, Part 1 (with pre-patch offering rate data!)

So in the process of finding the inital buckets in The Rumble, Arenadrafts provided me with all the draft data from the first week. After helping sort the buckets, I started working on a side project to turn that into offering rate data. The spreadsheet is here for reference. I can add neutral card data but that's going to be extremely flawed with the number of drafts I'd be pulling from.

Notes on the data: There is some image recognition issues with AD that effects the data somewhat, so there is a chance the data is flawed. Also, it is from a small number of draft sets (from 39 Shaman drafts to 201 Warrior drafts) so there is room for error here. However, I believe the data is good for being in the general vicinity of where the cards are offered.

Iksar in the megathread confirmed that the rebucketing happens due to pickrate data rather than winrate data, explaining why Keening Banshee (a card that, as one of the best Rogues in the world, I would pick over a Vilespine sometimes if they were offered together) fell into the 7th bucket in spite of its power. I figured I'd use HSreplay data (% of decks * copies/deck) to determine which cards may have been missed by the Blizzard algorithm. I figure that at random, a card would be picked 33% of the time ideally outside the very top/botttom buckets. So, if a card gets picked 40% or more, it probably should be moved up, while if its under 25%, it should be moved down. This large a range should account for both any minor errors in my calculated offering rate data and differences in the HSreplay data.

I don't know how to write a script to pull HSreplay data, so I'm just going to pick and choose cards I feel are misbucketed (aka, I would rarely/ever pick, or always pick) and see which cards show up. (if someone wants to, that'd be appreciated :p) Obviously, HSreplay data differs from the masses, so its possible that some cards are sexier or less sexy to the 0-3 win players. However, this is more of an experiment on my part just to get information. Also, I'm taking data from when the expansion released, so it will have the last 24 hours of new buckets/offering bonus, but that shouldn't make a massive impact on things.

Druid

Card Offering Rate Pick Rate %
Crypt Lord .9 .2035 22.6
Landscaping .88 .1408 16
Tending Tauren .65 .1122 17.3
Wispering Woods .13 .034 26.2
Dendrologist .18 .041 22.8
Mulchmuncher .06 .024 40
Webweave .29 .2046 70.6

Conclusions: I genuinely think Webweave is being kept down because someone on the Arena Team hates the card for some reason and manually keeps it in the 7th bucket. I double checked the data and nothing is weird, and it lines up with other cards in its bucket, so for a card to be picked 70% of the time, and not get upgraded massively indicates a serious flaw in the system that this can be overlooked. Unless 0-3 win players fear poison and never pick, I don't get how Webweave is still a 7th bucket card.

Among other cards, Landscaping and Tauren are both cards that are good cards but just always against better cards, no idea why they haven't been moved. Crypt Lord, Dendrologist, and Mulchmuncher are borderline cards that should be moved but their pickrate isn't too outrageous. Wispering Woods is low but in the bounds I set, and may be a card I need to check my bias' on.

Hunter

Card Offering Rate Pick Rate %
Jeweled Macaw .49 .1936 39.5
Savannah Highmane .52 .4488 86.3
Crushing Walls .49 .111 22.7
Wing Blast .9 .1903 21.1
Spider Bomb .36 .176 48.9
Bomb Toss .8 .117 14.6
Spirit of the Lynx .12 .021 17.5
Goblin Prank .08 .009 11.25
Tol'vir Warden .08 .024 30

Conclusions: No idea how Highmane isn't top of bucket 1 if its by pickrate data, considering how much it gets picked. Spider Bomb, which I thought should be lower, I'm surprised how high it is, but I think that's the constructed influence more than anything. Obviously, there are a lot of cards that are either just real bad (Lynx, Bomb Toss, Prank) that didn't get moved for whatever reason, or decent cards (Wing Blast, Walls) that are just against cards that are better and likely should've been moved down as well.

Mage

Card Offering Rate Pick Rate %
Arcane Keysmith .38 .1507 39.7
Unexpected Results .51 .066 12.9
Book of Specters .6 .2376 39.6
Curio Collector .15 .024 16
Deck of Wonders .07 .021 30

Conclusions: I'm shocked Specters didn't break 40% personally with how strong it can be, although that might be the decks that have spells turning it away. Unexpected Results and Curio Collector obviously need to be moved, but for the most part I'm not sure what to examine in Mage as most of the cards I feel are fine for where they are. Deck of Wonders was just to see if it was still being picked a lot, and yes, it is.

Anyways, I have to stop here, don't have a chance to finish up all the classes. Leave comments here if there are specific cards you want me to look up, and I'll try to finish the other classes tomorrow.

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

    Currently, our rule for promotion/demotion is 60%/20% pick rate. The automatic suggested promotion or demotion is one half-bucket. We do go through the list of cards up for promotion/demotion by hand to determine if they should be moved up or down more.

    ​

    These are some examples of pick rates pre-patch:

    Highmane: 65.6%

    Landscaping: 21.6%

    Book of Specters: 32.5%

    Webweave: 40.6%

    Unexpected Results: 35.5%

    Curio Collector: 25.5%

    ​

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

    If I may ask, why is the promotion number 60%? That seems like an extremely high barrier for cards to hit to get promoted and a lot more difficult to achieve than being picked less than 20% of the time. I figured 33% would be the ideal number, and 60 is a lot further away than 20 is.

    Also, as a player, it is a lot easier to justify not taking a pick over taking a pick. Violet Wurm, for example, was most of the time better than the picks in its bucket, but something you might skip if you had too much late game. Or Supercollider, obviously insanely strong, might be skipped after the first one in a draft so you don't clog your hand. In these cases, even though they're insta-picks most of the time, sometimes they can go from insta-pick to never pick real easily.

    Thank you for the information. A lot of times we're wondering why a certain card did not get promoted, like Violet Wurm, and this helps understand a lot.

    Generally unless a card is being picked 60%+ in one bucket, it's unlikely to be picked at close to the ideal% in the bucket above it. That said, it is a human-picked percentage based on us getting a feel for what the percentages need to look like in order for a card to be truly misbucketed. We could move the percentage to 50% and see what happens, though my guess is that a lot of the cards in the 50-60 pick range would pingpong back and forth between buckets between each update.

  • Iksar
    Posted 5 years, 4 months ago (Source)

    The correct mathematical equivalent to 33% to 20% inversed is 55.5% btw.

    The treshholds feel like they were picked on intuition not math, but it's closer to correct relatively than what Tarrot suggests. But, your mistake is selecting 20% as your lower bound. For the upper bound, Tarrot's intuitions of 50% are correct mathematically.

    Mathematically, the deviation points should be 2/9, and 50% for your lower bound and upper bound.

    You'll get better results toward your goals with those guidelines than your current ones. Consult your new in house stats PhD for these guideline type things! Then let your pro players make final tweaks.

    Either someone was rounding and didn't think much about it (but as you can see, the rounding made a big difference in the results), or these lines were not mathematically computed.

    If you tell me your guidelines for how far buckets get moved 0.5 vs 1 vs 1.5, I can give you the mathematically correct guidelines for those as well so you can rebucket things faster, instead of moving with what seems like an effective 1.0 cap for everything besides the most blatant errors. Or, again, this is all things your math guy should be able to do easily.

    The fact that it took that wolf Witchwood 4-mana 3/3 9 months to move from 3rd bucket (or however high you guys had it) to 7th bucket in the latest update shows some problems with the efficiency of the process. Should have hit 7th bucket by the 3rd time buckets updated at absolute slowest.

    I can't tell if this comment is a troll or serious. In any case, no, Blizzard calculators do not show 60 and 20 as equal distance from 33.3. In terms of who controls the numbers 60 and 20, those were the numbers our GI team thought would result in the best outcome with a restriction of around 2 updates per 4 months. As for final tweaks, the designer in charge of that is Keaton. He reads some of the tier lists and feedback in addition to being a world class constructed and Arena player.

  • Iksar
    Posted 5 years, 4 months ago (Source)

    Hey,

    I hope you take a moment to revisit this thread. It's continued beyond direct replies to you, and the logic of adwcta's original complaint has been fleshed out. It seems right to me, and I'm a little embarassed it took me this long to grok it.

    Basically, given that the ideal pick rate of any card in this system is 33%, you need to have your "down a bucket" pick percentage and your "up a bucket" pick percentage be numerically equidistant. So, if you like a 20% pick rate as your lower bound, your upper bound needs to be 46%.

    Deviation from equidistance will introduce perverse effects into the overall distribution of cards between buckets. I.E., cards will move down at a much greater frequency than they move up, and underbucketed cards will be frequently be trapped below their value. In fact, you can already see these perverse effects in play, quite arguably, with the extremely small number of first and second bucket cards and the enormous card pools in Bucket six and seven.

    Thanks for reading.

    ​

    I quietly revisit all the threads on this forum regularly!

    As for the up-bucket and down-bucket percentages, we'll revisit them again once we acquire enough data from this last update just as we've done in the past. The 20/60 split exists right now based on data we've acquired from past up and down-bucketing. Bucket 1 and 7 show up less not because of 'perverse effects to the overall distribution', but by design. Based on feedback, very poor cards show up less often because they aren't very fun to draft and play. The most powerful cards show up less often because of the perception that drafting many of them resulting in unwinnable circumstances.

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