No one can say 100% one way or another without seeing the match making algorithms (which we'll never have access to).
I would say it happens too often that match making works against you for it to be completely random. I lost count a long time ago of the times I tech against a popular deck and then never see it but if I remove the tech options from that deck I instantly get the deck I originally was trying to counter.
You'll get people trying to prove to you with their 'facts' but the truth is only Blizzard knows.
What bugs me about these ideas is that it's always ALWAYS against the person posting it. If a match making algorithm isn't random then whatever system is being used should have the reverse as well: people who, no matter what changes they make, keep getting good matchups. Once a system is no longer random, it becomes a solvable puzzle that can be manipulated and gamed.
"only blizzard knows" is a cop out. The entire field of Statistics is meant to show the pattern behind the random, and humans are notorious for being very bad at hiding non-random elements. Whatever non-random system people claim, beyond any "it will know you are looking for it and hide itself" theories (which is solve by toning down on your distopian sci-fi stories), you can show evidence to suggest it actually exists.
That's not to say "It would've been found if it exists." I can very much believe that those that disagree do so blindly while those that believe ..well, do so blindly, and nearly no one has actually bothered a long-form testing, given how bloody impossible it is to actually see anyone post results either way.
But put down the "no one could know the truth.. so anything can be true" card here. It's not a good way to quiet or ignore dissent and it's far too good at ignoring whatever information doesn't fit your current bias when it SHOULD be used to question your own beliefs as well. It also spits on a very major branch of mathematics in this case.
I know many well made decks have a 'God mode' where everything just syncs together and the deck is unstoppable. If I see that then I know that my loss isn't due to my deck or my ability or even bad luck but just the deck hitting God mode. I still play it out in case it's "mostly a God mode" and an opening shows up but when the loss comes I shrug and move on.
What bothers me is when losses DON'T come from God mode. If I know they are playing poorly and didn't get lucky. When it's a deck that needs a key card and that card never shows, and I still lose. That sort of thing. Then I KNOW it's not RNG and it's instead my deck or myself that lost.
But what REALLY brings the rage? When "I" have God mode in my deck, I know they don't, and I still lose. Then I can't blame myself or my strategy or RNG or my opponent being better or even having a better deck. I lost because the deck I'm playing, the deck I probably made or simply really REALLY like playing, SUCKS right now.
I'd take 5 days of God mode losses over that day I felt earlier when I realized that heal paladin just isn't going to work at all even with good luck. When that happened to ALL of my decks, I closed the game and really considered not opening it anymore.
An idea based on what's said here: instead of 0 health have a mechanic that instantly kills the minion on battlecry. Thus when the minion is played, it instantly dies.
On first feel it'll end up feeling like a spell when you do things like "Battlecry: instantly dies. Deathrattle, deal 2 damage to all minions" However, it does mean that it interacts differently with other cards. Recruiting it means it just turns into a normal minion. OTOH, it bypasses counterspell. OTOOH, it means anti-minion cards work against it. OTOOOH, other cards can interact with it: knifejuggler works, minions that react when a minion dies, so on.
It does let you do crazy things, like, a 2 mana 5/5 that dies instantly (thus you want to summon or recruit it). Or have an effect that attaches "dies instantly" to an opponent card in their hand. Thus your opponent now has, say, a mountain giant in their hand that just dies when played. You can even do wild stuff like "dies instantly, at the begginng of your turn revives and silences itself (so that it doesn't keep reviving :P).
Though essentually putting it as a battlecry makes it more intuitive. You may not know WHY you would want a minion that dies like that but you know it will if you use it.
1. Silence/transform/ext. Note that instakill helps me as I make big mechs to make them die. So bouncing/silencing/so on easily ruins my day, especially if I go all in.
2. Killing small mechs. The exception comes here. Having to play small mechs due to pressure then seeing them die doesn't really help me much. It's also a good idea because, at least in my version, I tend to be able to dump A LOT of stats into a standing mech especially if they've been buffed or had their mana lowered.
So basically do both. Put a bit of pressure early on so that I can sit around until I can stack 3 cheap mechs on top of each other and have to either put smaller fry on to hold the board or dump everything into a big boy. Once the big boy shows, silence/transform/ext and the game ends.
Just barely started it just ot see and realized something: starting even Normal mode with the random added effect on might not be a good idea.
I have "randomly get rush/divine/whatever" and nearly got slammed by the third guy thanks to them getting rushing folks and me having my divine shield minion get divine shield and everyone else getting windfury uselessly.
And judging by how everyone seems to be winning with 0 maan sound the bells it makes me wonder about the difficulty of 100% completing this thing with every class, deck, and hero power.
The new buffs definitely WILL shake up the meta. They did some serious buffs to the cards they targeted. There is no way that competitive decks fail to emerge using those buffed cards. Particularly Luna's Pocket Galaxy and Pogo-Hopper
Oh that's true. However, the issue is, if I get it: "we're playing the exact same decks over and over and know just what's going to happen."
The new buffs will change which cards and decks we play, but it won't change the frequency. That is, instead of the current decks played over and over we'll play a new set of decks over and over.
And that's sort of the point when I get ranty again, because if your issue is that you want a wide variety of decks to show up then there's nothing that can really be done to change the issue, if 'issue' it can really be called.
Because honestly, wanting lots of varied opponents requiring differing strategies to solve is exactly the point of Dalaran Heist. Not only do the opponents change but also the decks used. You're given different 3 different starting decks and a random deck in each class AND 3 different hero powers to swap and change things up and 5 wings with different room effects. It even will change special effects if you unlocked all of the wings.
If the desire is variety, this is exactly the mode you are after. Not some hypothetical insanity of trying to get a mass of people driven through multiple scientifically researched mentalities to follow trends successfully proven by innovators and leaders.
Note if the issue isn't the frequency but the type of decks: that you don't mind seeing the same decks over and over so long as either you like the decks you face or you want multiple ways to deal with such decks, then the buff session might help things out by knocking down the decks you dislike or allow for a lot of tier 2 decks. But neither of them are netdecking issues either.
Why a separate topic when you are talking about the very thing the other topic is ..err talking about?
We don't need 10 threads of the same topic.
Cause if you read the post you would see that it deals with predictability in the current meta and not overall so was more of a post of the current meta and the limited amount of decks currently in the meta. But thanks for your complaint and adding so much to the discussion. And as MProdigy said it is just that; lack of creativity or maybe the player base has diminished and we are just left with netdeckers.
It still feels rather similar, but still I apologize for the post.
As for the topic, I don't think it's anything new. The meta grinding down to just a few top tier decks is about as common as multiplayer in general. People played pirate warrior about a year ago, tempo shaman before then, secret paladin before then, miracle rogue before then. It's why Ryu fireball spam is so common, and why Dio and Sieghart left a bad taste in my mouth. It's why certain old timely RTS players hate M&Ms and why too many people loved Donatello at the arcade.
People.. will ALWAYS.. netdeck. Even when a net didn't exist.
I don't believe it's gotten worse because it's always been bad. Secret Paladin took less time to be netdecked than it did to actually be a good deck: people were willing to spam a bad aggro version of it until the better tempo version was found. Folks screamed about how everyone was C'thuning for the first week, then quickly jumped into aggro Shaman with 'Four mana 7/7s'.
There has been a change in that the quality of decks have pushed up faster, but that's because the actual innovators have gotten a lot better. You could take advantage of the population playing bad C'thun decks and horrible aggro paladins. Now the decks are quicker to get.. not perfected, but good enough for ladder and we have a lot fewer people without enough of a collection to run them with. You can't even rely on F2Pers not having enough. Jeesh I opened the packs I plan to open and I still had 8k dust wasting away and more than enough cash to spend on the single player content.
So that's changed. But the majority of the playerbase jumping on trends and fads. That's always been there. Not sure how people haven't noticed it until now.
It's mroe than just 'is it a bad thing or a good thing'. The whole concept of 'meta' is the assumption that most players play the same way and copy each other. If they didn't a 'meta' wouldn't exist. The whole point of 'beating the meta' is beating those netdecks either through countering them or doing it better. It's a basic requirement to showing you can compete in a competition.
Netdecking isn't a curse or a bad thing, or good thing. It's just a thing. It's the 'surf'. You don't rage against it. You just grab a board and ride it. Or drown.
Well if it weren't for Blizzards new deck helper those would be valid points, but the new deck helper makes you able to finish your "deck idea" with some decent choices.
At least that's my opinion.
Not saying netdecking is bad per se, but I think there is another solution for the arguments given.
I don't think that's how it works though? I'm not sure but I think it works by picking the very best deck available with the cards that you have. There are a couple of different 'layers' that the Deck Helper uses. The first one being the 'Meta Layer' which is an algorithm that looks at the most popular decks being played at your Rank. Then it proceeds to create a deck built around that.
So in effect you are creating a Meta Deck. Just with the cards you have. True its not 'Netdecked' per se but it is as close to a Tier One deck as you can get.
Which wasn't really the point of my OP....
I think that happens when you just hit the deck helper button without any cards. If you put in 10-15 cards (in your op including the treasure cheat) and have no idea on how to continue the deck helper will give you other synergetic cards (where the winrate is not horrible). At least that's how I understood the deck helper works.
WELLLLL....
The deck doesn't really hunt down synergies. It isn't that smart.
The deck is focused on win rate. It tries to make the best winning deck you can using the cards you added in. This is why adding 1-3 cards doesn't change the actual deck it suggests, because "the best deck + 3 bad cards is till the best deck".
To get a different deck, you have to put in cards where 'the generic best deck' can't work well with the cards you added. At around 10 cards, it becomes VERY hard to make a deck that ignores your cards work so it's going to end up with a deck that actually uses the cards you added in. The better the cards and synergies, the faster it hits the point when it hits that point.
So it's a very basic mentality that just happens to work out for what people will tend to want. If you aren't putting many cards in, you probably are just after a good deck. If you have most of the deck filled, you want cards that fit with the deck you made.
The only way this fails is the "make a deck around THIS card" mentality.
Note that the entire concept is "find the deck everyone else is doing well with." The deck helper isn't an alternative to netdecking. It's Netdecking Easy Mode.
As far as netdecking, that's not something you can force not happen. Like the deck helper, whatever limits you put into the game doesn't prompt creativity and uniqueness: just a new meta. Ban every used card and you'll create a meta different from the main meta, but it'll still be A meta and whatever decks come from it will be netdecked and played over and over. Just like how no matter what cards you put into the deck helper, whatever deck it'll make it'll KEEP making over and over. Even if you put some complicated rules, all players will do is game the rules to the detriment of everyone else.
Choosing to change things up for the sake of changing things has to be a choice by the players involved. You can't force people to do it. The best you can do is a whitelist, so that only those who play the way you like are together playing the way you want.
Tribes should have a characteristic mechanic or gameplay quirk that ties them together, in addition to showing up often enough to justify them. Murlocs are good at swarming, Demons have self-damage, Elementals have 'If you played an Elemental last turn', etc.
Dragon and Mech were both retroactively given mechanics to bring them in line with this - Dragons in hand and Magnetic respectively - so I think you'd have to consider how you'd be tying your Kobolds together. This is especially tricky, because you'd need to consider all the existing Kobolds and how they'd play with it.
I think Undead is the most likely next tribe. It has a ton of flavour potential, is moderately splashable in any set, and has a lot of space to explore with Deathrattle related mechanics for their unique effect.
An old comment but this.
Tribes are not something used for flavor or to match WoW. It's a game mechanic. It's used for a PURPOSE. Elementals got their tag not beacuse we had 'a lot of elementals' but because a very specific mechanic that they wanted to use and decided that the elemental minions would work well for it. Thus they got a tag.
Undead, Kobolds, all of those other things need a REASON to be marked with a tag. Not because they are 'undead' or a 'kobold' but beacuse there's a specific THING you want them all to do together. Without that, there's literally no reason to tag them.
If you want Kobolds, then give them a mechanic that specifically NEEDS them to be doing together that other cards shouldn't be doing.
There's a deck I've been using called Glowstone Paladin. It's a mech paladin that relies on either quickly making a high end threat very early or buffing/discounting a mass of mechs to create an obscene threat or as an almost Inner fire-ish blast to the face. One of the biggest issues is that it's VERY hard to get Glowstone operational since it's 6 mana and you really don't get many chances to drop a 3/4 that does nothing at turn 6+. That problem becomes much easier to handle at 5 mana.
Meanwhile I was sitting at turn 1 with nothing good to do till turn 3 and holding a crystology and knowing it'll probably pull Galvanizer. I then realized I would have a VERY useful curve if crystology was 1 mana.
I'm very curious as to how the deck will work with those buffs.
Not yet since the site is still new. I'm guessing..well hoping that since pwn is shutting down and it sounds like the original owners don' treally care that nothing made over there is being locked down by copyright or what not. Meaning things like innkeeper can move over.
Blast it. New forum and I can't find a way to add my old icon here!
(ok this was just an excuse to post to the salt forums as I just came here after the Hearthpwn announcement)
...but seriously, can't wait till I can add my own avatar. Or until I figure out how if it's already there :P
I hate when I go to new forums and people don't know they can go to their profile and choose to add an Avatar! Especially when all they need to do is scroll to the top of OutOf.Cards, click "manage" and then scroll down until they see the option to upload a personal Avatar image! COME ON, PEOPLE!!!
And I hate it when the options for doing that don't show up when you haven't maximized the window.
And people DON'T GET THAT AT ALL! NO ONE UDNERSTANDS ME!!!
Loving the decks I've been getting to play. I have a love for grindy "drain all of your removal and keep dumping stuff" decks that AREN'T infinite. Glow Paladin is utterly rocking my opponents in particular and it's going to get a LOT better once the buffs kick in.
What bugs me about these ideas is that it's always ALWAYS against the person posting it. If a match making algorithm isn't random then whatever system is being used should have the reverse as well: people who, no matter what changes they make, keep getting good matchups. Once a system is no longer random, it becomes a solvable puzzle that can be manipulated and gamed.
"only blizzard knows" is a cop out. The entire field of Statistics is meant to show the pattern behind the random, and humans are notorious for being very bad at hiding non-random elements. Whatever non-random system people claim, beyond any "it will know you are looking for it and hide itself" theories (which is solve by toning down on your distopian sci-fi stories), you can show evidence to suggest it actually exists.
That's not to say "It would've been found if it exists." I can very much believe that those that disagree do so blindly while those that believe ..well, do so blindly, and nearly no one has actually bothered a long-form testing, given how bloody impossible it is to actually see anyone post results either way.
But put down the "no one could know the truth.. so anything can be true" card here. It's not a good way to quiet or ignore dissent and it's far too good at ignoring whatever information doesn't fit your current bias when it SHOULD be used to question your own beliefs as well. It also spits on a very major branch of mathematics in this case.
In truth, I feel better about those situations.
I know many well made decks have a 'God mode' where everything just syncs together and the deck is unstoppable. If I see that then I know that my loss isn't due to my deck or my ability or even bad luck but just the deck hitting God mode. I still play it out in case it's "mostly a God mode" and an opening shows up but when the loss comes I shrug and move on.
What bothers me is when losses DON'T come from God mode. If I know they are playing poorly and didn't get lucky. When it's a deck that needs a key card and that card never shows, and I still lose. That sort of thing. Then I KNOW it's not RNG and it's instead my deck or myself that lost.
But what REALLY brings the rage? When "I" have God mode in my deck, I know they don't, and I still lose. Then I can't blame myself or my strategy or RNG or my opponent being better or even having a better deck. I lost because the deck I'm playing, the deck I probably made or simply really REALLY like playing, SUCKS right now.
I'd take 5 days of God mode losses over that day I felt earlier when I realized that heal paladin just isn't going to work at all even with good luck. When that happened to ALL of my decks, I closed the game and really considered not opening it anymore.
An idea based on what's said here: instead of 0 health have a mechanic that instantly kills the minion on battlecry. Thus when the minion is played, it instantly dies.
On first feel it'll end up feeling like a spell when you do things like "Battlecry: instantly dies. Deathrattle, deal 2 damage to all minions" However, it does mean that it interacts differently with other cards. Recruiting it means it just turns into a normal minion. OTOH, it bypasses counterspell. OTOOH, it means anti-minion cards work against it. OTOOOH, other cards can interact with it: knifejuggler works, minions that react when a minion dies, so on.
It does let you do crazy things, like, a 2 mana 5/5 that dies instantly (thus you want to summon or recruit it). Or have an effect that attaches "dies instantly" to an opponent card in their hand. Thus your opponent now has, say, a mountain giant in their hand that just dies when played. You can even do wild stuff like "dies instantly, at the begginng of your turn revives and silences itself (so that it doesn't keep reviving :P).
Though essentually putting it as a battlecry makes it more intuitive. You may not know WHY you would want a minion that dies like that but you know it will if you use it.
I run mech paladin. What tends to kill me are:
1. Silence/transform/ext. Note that instakill helps me as I make big mechs to make them die. So bouncing/silencing/so on easily ruins my day, especially if I go all in.
2. Killing small mechs. The exception comes here. Having to play small mechs due to pressure then seeing them die doesn't really help me much. It's also a good idea because, at least in my version, I tend to be able to dump A LOT of stats into a standing mech especially if they've been buffed or had their mana lowered.
So basically do both. Put a bit of pressure early on so that I can sit around until I can stack 3 cheap mechs on top of each other and have to either put smaller fry on to hold the board or dump everything into a big boy. Once the big boy shows, silence/transform/ext and the game ends.
Just barely started it just ot see and realized something: starting even Normal mode with the random added effect on might not be a good idea.
I have "randomly get rush/divine/whatever" and nearly got slammed by the third guy thanks to them getting rushing folks and me having my divine shield minion get divine shield and everyone else getting windfury uselessly.
And judging by how everyone seems to be winning with 0 maan sound the bells it makes me wonder about the difficulty of 100% completing this thing with every class, deck, and hero power.
Oh that's true. However, the issue is, if I get it: "we're playing the exact same decks over and over and know just what's going to happen."
The new buffs will change which cards and decks we play, but it won't change the frequency. That is, instead of the current decks played over and over we'll play a new set of decks over and over.
And that's sort of the point when I get ranty again, because if your issue is that you want a wide variety of decks to show up then there's nothing that can really be done to change the issue, if 'issue' it can really be called.
Because honestly, wanting lots of varied opponents requiring differing strategies to solve is exactly the point of Dalaran Heist. Not only do the opponents change but also the decks used. You're given different 3 different starting decks and a random deck in each class AND 3 different hero powers to swap and change things up and 5 wings with different room effects. It even will change special effects if you unlocked all of the wings.
If the desire is variety, this is exactly the mode you are after. Not some hypothetical insanity of trying to get a mass of people driven through multiple scientifically researched mentalities to follow trends successfully proven by innovators and leaders.
Note if the issue isn't the frequency but the type of decks: that you don't mind seeing the same decks over and over so long as either you like the decks you face or you want multiple ways to deal with such decks, then the buff session might help things out by knocking down the decks you dislike or allow for a lot of tier 2 decks. But neither of them are netdecking issues either.
It still feels rather similar, but still I apologize for the post.
As for the topic, I don't think it's anything new. The meta grinding down to just a few top tier decks is about as common as multiplayer in general. People played pirate warrior about a year ago, tempo shaman before then, secret paladin before then, miracle rogue before then. It's why Ryu fireball spam is so common, and why Dio and Sieghart left a bad taste in my mouth. It's why certain old timely RTS players hate M&Ms and why too many people loved Donatello at the arcade.
People.. will ALWAYS.. netdeck. Even when a net didn't exist.
I don't believe it's gotten worse because it's always been bad. Secret Paladin took less time to be netdecked than it did to actually be a good deck: people were willing to spam a bad aggro version of it until the better tempo version was found. Folks screamed about how everyone was C'thuning for the first week, then quickly jumped into aggro Shaman with 'Four mana 7/7s'.
There has been a change in that the quality of decks have pushed up faster, but that's because the actual innovators have gotten a lot better. You could take advantage of the population playing bad C'thun decks and horrible aggro paladins. Now the decks are quicker to get.. not perfected, but good enough for ladder and we have a lot fewer people without enough of a collection to run them with. You can't even rely on F2Pers not having enough. Jeesh I opened the packs I plan to open and I still had 8k dust wasting away and more than enough cash to spend on the single player content.
So that's changed. But the majority of the playerbase jumping on trends and fads. That's always been there. Not sure how people haven't noticed it until now.
It's mroe than just 'is it a bad thing or a good thing'. The whole concept of 'meta' is the assumption that most players play the same way and copy each other. If they didn't a 'meta' wouldn't exist. The whole point of 'beating the meta' is beating those netdecks either through countering them or doing it better. It's a basic requirement to showing you can compete in a competition.
Netdecking isn't a curse or a bad thing, or good thing. It's just a thing. It's the 'surf'. You don't rage against it. You just grab a board and ride it. Or drown.
Why a separate topic when you are talking about the very thing the other topic is ..err talking about?
We don't need 10 threads of the same topic.
WELLLLL....
The deck doesn't really hunt down synergies. It isn't that smart.
The deck is focused on win rate. It tries to make the best winning deck you can using the cards you added in. This is why adding 1-3 cards doesn't change the actual deck it suggests, because "the best deck + 3 bad cards is till the best deck".
To get a different deck, you have to put in cards where 'the generic best deck' can't work well with the cards you added. At around 10 cards, it becomes VERY hard to make a deck that ignores your cards work so it's going to end up with a deck that actually uses the cards you added in. The better the cards and synergies, the faster it hits the point when it hits that point.
So it's a very basic mentality that just happens to work out for what people will tend to want. If you aren't putting many cards in, you probably are just after a good deck. If you have most of the deck filled, you want cards that fit with the deck you made.
The only way this fails is the "make a deck around THIS card" mentality.
Note that the entire concept is "find the deck everyone else is doing well with." The deck helper isn't an alternative to netdecking. It's Netdecking Easy Mode.
As far as netdecking, that's not something you can force not happen. Like the deck helper, whatever limits you put into the game doesn't prompt creativity and uniqueness: just a new meta. Ban every used card and you'll create a meta different from the main meta, but it'll still be A meta and whatever decks come from it will be netdecked and played over and over. Just like how no matter what cards you put into the deck helper, whatever deck it'll make it'll KEEP making over and over. Even if you put some complicated rules, all players will do is game the rules to the detriment of everyone else.
Choosing to change things up for the sake of changing things has to be a choice by the players involved. You can't force people to do it. The best you can do is a whitelist, so that only those who play the way you like are together playing the way you want.
An old comment but this.
Tribes are not something used for flavor or to match WoW. It's a game mechanic. It's used for a PURPOSE. Elementals got their tag not beacuse we had 'a lot of elementals' but because a very specific mechanic that they wanted to use and decided that the elemental minions would work well for it. Thus they got a tag.
Undead, Kobolds, all of those other things need a REASON to be marked with a tag. Not because they are 'undead' or a 'kobold' but beacuse there's a specific THING you want them all to do together. Without that, there's literally no reason to tag them.
If you want Kobolds, then give them a mechanic that specifically NEEDS them to be doing together that other cards shouldn't be doing.
I don't but I'm extremely casual. Paying to help me in a game I play, at best, 2-3 games on a day at ranks 15-12 doesn't sound very...sound.
But the word I hear is that if you have any desire to move past Dad Legend (rank 5) then it's very much worth the subscription.
There's a deck I've been using called Glowstone Paladin. It's a mech paladin that relies on either quickly making a high end threat very early or buffing/discounting a mass of mechs to create an obscene threat or as an almost Inner fire-ish blast to the face. One of the biggest issues is that it's VERY hard to get Glowstone operational since it's 6 mana and you really don't get many chances to drop a 3/4 that does nothing at turn 6+. That problem becomes much easier to handle at 5 mana.
Meanwhile I was sitting at turn 1 with nothing good to do till turn 3 and holding a crystology and knowing it'll probably pull Galvanizer. I then realized I would have a VERY useful curve if crystology was 1 mana.
I'm very curious as to how the deck will work with those buffs.
Not yet since the site is still new. I'm guessing..well hoping that since pwn is shutting down and it sounds like the original owners don' treally care that nothing made over there is being locked down by copyright or what not. Meaning things like innkeeper can move over.
Hoping so.
And I hate it when the options for doing that don't show up when you haven't maximized the window.
And people DON'T GET THAT AT ALL! NO ONE UDNERSTANDS ME!!!
(thanks)
Blast it. New forum and I can't find a way to add my old icon here!
(ok this was just an excuse to post to the salt forums as I just came here after the Hearthpwn announcement)
...but seriously, can't wait till I can add my own avatar. Or until I figure out how if it's already there :P
Loving the decks I've been getting to play. I have a love for grindy "drain all of your removal and keep dumping stuff" decks that AREN'T infinite. Glow Paladin is utterly rocking my opponents in particular and it's going to get a LOT better once the buffs kick in.