by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

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ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZED PLAY

In gaming, the term organized play refers to the system of tournaments and player rewards instated by a game’s producer. Such a system generally culminates in tournaments highlighting players of unparalleled skill and offering the biggest prizes. Magic: the Gathering has a tiered system where public Grand Prixes feed into invite-only Pro Tours which feed into the World Championship. Every Magic player strives to make it onto the Pro Tour, making Magic Grand Prixes some of the most heavily attended card game events in the world.

Blizzard recently dropped big news about Hearthstone’s organized play system. [DKMR]Varranis is here this week from team Don’t Kick My Robot to let you know what Blizzard’s Hearthstone World Championship announcement means for the game’s competitive landscape.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The Hearthstone World Championship will be held in November at BlizzCon and will have only sixteen participants. These sixteen players will be determined by regional qualifier tournaments and will comprise four players each from the Americas, Europe, Korea/Taiwan, and China.

In turn, players must qualify for their region’s qualifier tournament. In the Americas and Europe, invites will be given to each of the top 16 Legend ranked players each month from April to August, winners of certain weekly community tournaments, and top players from other specific events including a Last Call Tournament held immediately prior to the qualifier tournament. Taiwan and China will also have qualifier tournaments with invites based on as of yet unannounced criteria. Korea will send two players to the World Championship from the OGN Hearthstone League. For the Americas and Europe qualifying tournaments, performance on the ladder from April to August will determine seeding.

While there are still a lot of details yet to be confirmed, there are a few items regarding tournament qualification Blizzard has clarified. Some of these items are as follows:

A player may qualify for both the Americas and Europe qualifier tournaments but may only play in one.
If a player would earn an invite to their region’s qualifying tournament based on a top 16 ladder performance but already has an invite, their invitation will be passed down to the next highest ranked player.

I WANT TO BE A WORLD CHAMPION!

At the end of the day, every player who takes the game seriously is going to be looking to get an invite to their regional qualifier tournament for a chance at the big stage. There will be 80 invites (5 months times 16 places) given based on ladder rank, an undetermined number based on weekly community tournaments, and an undetermined interval of 3 invites based on one-off licensed events.

Based on these numbers, we suspect Blizzard is looking to fill a 128 person bracket for each qualifier tournament. This allows for 20 invites for each of two community run weekly tournaments for the twenty weeks from April to August, 6 invites for two high profile licensed events, and at least 2 invites for the Last Call Tournament. Blizzard could look to fill a 256 person bracket if they wish to include more than 2 weekly tournaments and many more one-off licensed events. While we’re very comfortable with these conjectures, note that they are merely educated guesses. Blizzard could surprise us with a completely unexpected format.

So how do YOU get one of these invites? Invites are already up for grabs on the ladder, and possibly in tournament play. No additional details had been released as of the writing of this article, but we believe the weekly community tournaments most likely to provide invites are the Sunday NESL Cups and Saturday Zotac Cups as they pull the biggest crowds and hand out the most substantial prizes. Blizzard indicated tournaments in April would give invites, so it’s possible winners of the April cups will retroactively receive invites. Whether that ends up being the case or not, playing in these and other tournaments is not only a great way to possibly score an invite, but an excellent way to practice for tournaments that will give invites or for the qualifier tournament itself.

TOURNAMENT FORMAT

Perhaps the biggest impact organized play will have on your daily Hearthstone life is that it will set a standard for competitive formats. In the initial years of Magic: the Gathering, the game didn’t have deckbuilding rules, let alone organized play. You could have run a deck of sixty Lightning Bolts if you wanted! The game’s competitive landscape has had many years to evolve. Nowadays, if you play in a Magic tournament, you’ll be running no more than four copies of any one card, you’ll be playing a best of three match with fifteen card sideboards, and you’ll probably be playing Standard (term for a particular subset of cards you can use).

So what do we expect the most common format in Hearthstone to be? Blizzard has adopted the best of five “Last Hero Standing” format for both regional qualifiers and the World Championship itself. In this format each player creates three decks across three different classes and uses those same decks for the entire course of the tournament. A player may start with a different one of those three decks each match and must choose one of his or her remaining decks after suffering a loss. A match ends when one player has won three games, defeating all three of the opponent’s decks. This format is already used for most King of the Hill (“KOTH”) events, and we expect it to gradually become more widely adopted by high profile events. Larger tournaments currently use variants of this format with best of three or best of one and fewer deckbuilding restrictions (some allow sideboarding).

Adopting a singular format across various events generally encourages attendance since players are more likely to be familiar with that format and have cards to play it. With the current card pool, access to cards isn’t a particular issue, but familiarity with format is. Best of three formats require slightly different deckbuilding considerations than best of fives since you will only ever see two of your three decks per match in a best of three. Allowing sideboarding introduces an entire new gamut of considerations.

Many tournaments also use widely different sideboarding rules. For example, the NESL Cups currently allow you to completely change your class and deck, win or lose. In such a format, narrow cards such as Acidic Swamp Ooze and Big Game Hunter have significantly less value. You won’t know if your opponent will play a weapon class, so it may not be safe to play those cards. In a tournament that forces you to keep a class you win with, however, Acidic Swamp Ooze or Harrison Jones can be one of your strongest cards since you’ll know whether you’ll be up against a weapon class.

In this way, tournament formats impact the meta and influence what cards you should be playing. Diverse tournament formats make participating a daunting task since players who wish to perform well will need to understand the individual meta created by each format. Most card games adopt a common format in order to make participation a more welcoming experience and to allow for a more refined evolution of the meta. While some smaller tournaments may continue to use various formats, we expect the larger tournaments will gravitate toward the best of 5 “Last Hero Standing” format Blizzard has adopted for its premier events.
So go play those tournaments and good luck earning your invites!

[DKMR]Varranis streams every Sunday from 10 AM – 4 PM EST at http://www.twitch.tv/varranis. You can find all of DKMR’s streamers on their website with times and the days they stream!

Written by [DKMR]Varranis
Discussions about this topic brought to you by Team [DKMR]

DECKS TO WATCH OUT FOR

This week we have a glut of decks from Dreamhack Bucharest. Gaara ended up taking the tournament down using this Ramp Druid deck. Some other interesting innovations came out of the event. Reynad eschewed Stampeding Kodo for Tundra Rhino. Strifecro played a standard Druid Midrange list utilizing Violet Teacher and Power of the Wild over Chillwind Yetis in order to combat Hunter. Power of the Wild allowed him to push damage without playing into a large Unleash the Hounds. Note that as of this article’s writing, official decklists for Dreamhack were not available, so the lists depicted may be a few cards off. Finally, we have Kitkatz recent build of Control Warrior tooled to combat the Rogue and Hunter heavy meta.