Three Reasons why you Should be Watching PVPLive’s HPL
by JR Cook - 9 years ago show comments
The $60,000 PVPLive Hearthstone Pro League is currently running, and on it we have eight teams competing for the honor, glory, and hefty prize pool. Each team is sending two representatives each, for a grand total of 16 players fighting it out in a Round Robin Format. Yeah, that means that your favorite players will have a whooping 15 matches each. The matches will be played out Monday through Thursday every week from June 8 to August 14, with the top eight players advancing to a LAN final in Texas.
1) The Players
The HPL boasts a roster of 16 quality players:
Cloud 9: ek0p | TidesofTime
Dignitas: Greensheep | Kranich
While some of these players might not have a great tournament notoriety or a big streaming following (yet), on this roster we can find many of the players that have been making a great bid to be included on the Hearthstone World Championships at Blizzcon. A lot of these players are Ladder Beasts, and stand in the top 15 of the World Championship Qualifiers.
2) Presentation
A while back I talked in-depth about presentation and production values in Hearthstone e-Sports, the PVPLive HPL looks like somebody read that article and decided to make it a reality. The neat overlays, transitions, decent sound mixing, and consistently stable stream, make the event a joy to watch. The way the Casters dress and speak make the event seem absolutely professional, and in my watching experience the HPL rarely has any technical blunders, and when they do they are expertly accounted for.
The HPL is what I’d imagine Hearthstone being in a reputable TV network, and while I believe there is room for improvement in the actual casting of matches, I still have to rate the overall experience as Legendary.
Even the Twitch Chat moderators are on point, constantly distributing information about the matches, players, and overall progress of the league.
3) Advanced Stats and Innovation
But the HPL isn’t just another Hearthstone tournament. They haven’t been afraid to innovate, coming up with their own format for matches, which I find absolutely refreshing and up to now the best representation of the actual ladder experience. But maybe more importantly, we have PVPLive’s emphasis on Advanced Metrics. Much like the Sabermetrics of Moneyball fame, the team over at PVPLive is studying the performance of players beyond wins and losses, looking at things like mana efficiency, damage dealt per game, and the now infamous blowback.
While at the moment I’m not 100% sold on the importance of the stats that they are looking at, and how they could correlate into winning percentages at the highest levels. The important thing is that they are trying, and as they compile more data and refine their weighted formulas, I think they have a big chance to establish a new way to look at Hearthstone. The analysis of these stats adds another layer of depth to the game, and in the future might prove to be a very valuable tool for players to evaluate their performance.
But don’t just take my word for it, head over to the PVPLive Twitch Channel and check it out for yourself.
What does the blowback stat means?
Its a measure of how players leverage their own HP to get an advantage in the game. Attack Minions with weapons, life tapping, etc.