Saturday, February 28, 2015

Hearthstone February Results

The 11th Hearthstone ranked ladder season ended at 4am. I ended up finishing at 968th place, and I'm pretty sure there were over 2k people who made it to legend so I was in the top half of legends. The claim is that only .5% of people made it to legend in the first few seasons, so it's entirely possible that I'm what, 1 in 400? Not too bad.

Of course, 968th place is worth no qualification points towards worlds, so it isn't actually very good. My goal is to get top 50 in a month, or top 100 in two months, and I now have two failed months. (One because I didn't play, and this one.)

My peak ranking was actually 40th place. But I got to that point on the back of a 10 game winning streak. I then told myself I wouldn't play unless I dropped out of the top 50. Enough people played and passed me that I fell down to 58th and then I lost my next game and tumbled out of the top 100. I never made it back up that high.

The really sad thing is I ended up going 79-78 after the 10 game winning streak that put me at 40th. So going better than 50-50 still meant falling from a good standing to middle of the pack...

The whole thing is reminiscent of the old Magic rating system where I was qualified for Nationals and GP byes and the like but was prevented from playing most games for fear of losing those rewards. Card games simply have too much variance to make it worth playing against people significantly below your rating. And in Hearthstone it seems like they're more interested in getting a fast match going than in pairing you up against an even match. (If my matches were close to even then my ELO should have remained similar after going 79-78 instead of falling so much I fell from 40th to 968th.)

On the plus side I now have 2 decks built and I'm learning more and more about the format every day. So I should be able to do better in future months! Maybe?

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