by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Hearthstone is a pretty fun game by itself, just the numbers and cool abilities, different heroes, and the ever changing metagame. Even if some might regard to it as “casual”, Hearthstone has enough meat to it to keep an avid theorycrafter busy for days. But ever since Blizzcon, I’ve become pretty interested with other side of Hearthstone, and that’s its E-Sport potential. I’ve spent plenty of hours not only watching and enjoying, but also analyzing every aspect of Hearthstone’s E-Sport aspect.

Last week we talked about Presentation, but this week is all about the different Tournament Formats and what they accomplish.

There are two main things to consider when one talks about Tournament Format, one is how do participants advance through the tournament brackets, and the other relates to how the competitors of each match-up battle to determine the winner and loser of the particular series.

Knowing our Formats

The first is our classic Tournament Bracket Format, which are usually Single or Double Elimination, with the occasional Swiss or Round Robin format popping up from time. These Tournament formats are widely spread and used for many different types of competition, so we won’t lose time explaining them here.

The second is the Series or Match Format, and the most widely used in Hearthstone have been the Last Hero Standing and Conquest Formats. Other series formats are the Coup format used in the Pinnacle Tournaments, and the ESL Legendary Series Blind Pick Format. To all that, you gotta add the possibility of having a deck banning phase and also whether the series are best-of-five, best-of-seven, etc.

Last Hero Standing

Last Hero Standing is the format used on Last Years world championship, basically each player has an array of decks and each can choose which Deck to start playing with. When you win a game, you eliminate your opponents deck and he cannot use it again, but you are forced to keep playing the same deck until it is eliminated. When you eliminate all of your opponent’s decks, you are declared the winner and move on to your next opponent. Some times there’s also a ban phase, where each competitor can instantly eliminate one of their opponent’s decks before the first game is played.

As you probably figured out, being forced to continue using the same deck when you win allows your opponent choose a deck that is strong against you. This was a huge problem with these format as players could bring counter decks that weren’t really ladder viable and find great success with them. This created a disconnect between the Ladder Scene and the Tournament Scene and was deemed an important issue that has caused the Format to get phased out.

ESL Blind Pick

The ESL Legendary Series decided to innovate with the tournament format and introduced their own. ON this format before each best of 5 series, both players create a selected lineup of their three decks in an specific order and reports it to the tournament organizer. The first game is deck 1 vs deck 1, the second deck 2 vs deck 2, and the third is deck 3 vs 3. So lets say I’m playing JR in a tournament under this format. I report Shaman/Priest/Druid, he reports Hunter/Warlock/Rogue. Then the games are Shaman vs Hunter, Priest vs Warlock, and Druid vs Rogue.

Game 4 and 5 is where this gets interesting, and its the namesake of the format. After these 3 opening games have been played, now each player can select any of their 3 decks for the fourth game, if a fifth game is required, once again both players can choose any of their decks.

Pinnacle Coup

The Pinnacle Tournament also innovated with the match format, they use a variant on the Last Hero Standing format where the ban phase is not played out before the game starts. Instead, both players get a single “coup” each series, the “coup” allows you to ban one of their opponents deck at any time during a game’s mulligan phase. This allows you to negate a counter-deck, or also to get another chance at a better draw.

Conquest

Conquest is basically the reverse format to Last Hero Standing, it works very similar except that the decks aren’t eliminated when they lose, but when they “qualify” when they win instead. So objective here is to win at least one match with each of your decks, and once you notch a victory that deck cannot be used again. Here neither player is forced to continue using a deck, after each match-up both player can choose any of their still available decks, getting rid of the counter-deck issue.

This is the format that will be used on this year’s World Championship, and personally I think that announcing that so early might be a bit of a mistake for such a young discipline. Since Blizzard announced that the World Championship was going to be played under the Conquest format, almost every major tournament has adopted this format aswell. The problem with this is that there’s no room to innovate, to try new formats, and to evolve the scene.

Hearthstone eSports has always been pretty community driven, so I’m a bit surprised that Blizzard has put its foot down on this. Even when they are allowing different formats to be used on point awarding events, setting the WC format in stone will influence people to adhere to that format just to get accustomed to the experience

Issues with Tournament Formats

Every format has their strengths and weaknesses, and even when Tournament Bracket structure and Series/Match format are different categories, choosing complementary formats might be one of the most underrated factors when it comes to building a tournament. Maybe the Tournament Bracket Format will cover some weaknesses inherent to the Series format and viceversa, and thus you could eventually craft a really strong format.

But are the popular formats the best for Hearthstone growth as an eSport? Lets start by looking at the different problems that these formats bring to the table.

The Multi-Deck Problem

Almost every serious competitive Hearthstone Series Format has a Multi-Deck approach, this is something that kinda sets them apart from other card games where you bring only one deck to the table. These Multi-deck formats introduce a sizable entry barrier for competitive play, because you don’t only need to have one truly top notch competitive deck, you need between 3 and 5 of them depending on the format. You can immediately see how a new player can be discouraged at the titanic task ahead, but that’s not all. After you work hard to build your multiple decks, now you gotta learn how to use them, you need to practice your match-ups. Imagine all the time needed to really become an elite player, you need to constantly learn and re-learn how ALL of your decks match up with the popular meta choices.

But not only is the entry barrier very high, you also hamper specialization and deck variety. If you look around at the tournaments you’ll see most of the players running variations of the same deck concepts. Sure, you can argue that such a thing is bound to happen in every deck building game as some strategies are proven to be more effective than others, but having multiple decks only makes this worse.  It isn’t rare to see a tournament where a single class is represented by  EVERY player on the tournament, with all of them offering slight variants on the same archetype. This wouldn’t really happen if players were forced to pick only one deck to bring to the tournament.

Other factor to consider here is deck identity, if players could only bring 1 deck to the table, you might start to see some players become known for a special type of deck they are really good at, or that they really love. Maybe you’ll have this top guy who’s known as a Rogue player, this other guy who specializes in Druid, and this guy who always brings different meta decks to surprise people. This can happen currently at an extent, but having multiple decks really waters identity down, and your personal identity is a very important thing in Non-Team Sports where you can’t just rely on the legacy of the team.

So why would you use Multiple Decks then? Let’s move to the next problem.

The Match-up Problem

You’ve all seen how the rock/papers/scissors thing works on games, one strategy usually beats this one and mostly loses to that one. It’s crushing when you all the rock-hard work you put preparing for an event is flushed down the toilet when the randomness of the world decides you to pair you up against all your bad match-ups. By having multiple decks then you eliminate the possibility of running into the brick wall of a terrible match-up.

Instead, depending on the series format you give the advantage of getting the right match-ups to either random chance, the winner, or the loser, and honestly, neither option sounds much better. But can anything at all be done about it? How can we handle the Match-up problem?

Since match-up problems can be see in a lot of competitive disciplines, it makes sense that it is something to be addressed in the bracket format. Indeed, the double eliminations allows you to come back from bad match-up and give you a second opportunity to take home the gold.

Another way is having everyone play each other on a Swiss format, that way everyone has to play all their match-ups and there’s no bias on who the random number generator placed you against. The problem is that best of 5’s make for long matches and a tournament like that would last more hours than it’s viable to. But perhaps if people only have one deck to play with you could experiment with a qualifying Swiss round where you only play one match against everyone and the top players qualify to a playoff bracket. Maybe even allowing the top seeds to pick their first round playoff match-up first?

Really, there’s a lot of ground to explore when it comes to Hearthstone, and it is up to the community to test out all the possible options and find out where the future of Hearthstone lies.

That’s it for this week, but join us next week as we will propose new tournament formats and analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

In case you missed it last week, be sure to check out our piece on Casters, Overlays, and everything presentation.