by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

The Hearthstone Ladder is often criticized, mainly because its not a really good “ranked play system”. I won’t go into the details of what makes the Hearthstone Ladder a questionable decision when it comes to establishing a serious competetive play field, because it’s been done to death. But I will tell you, that many people want the system changed.

There are solid points made towards changing the Hearthstone Ladder, but why hasn’t it been done yet? I’d argue that despite not being the best choice for “Ranked” play, the Hearthstone Ladder is actually a genius system, just let me explain how.

Player Progression

When the average player is tackling a new game, they are likely to want to progress through it. Getting stuck is not a fun experience, and Hearthstone is completely built to protect the new players. Think about it, all you need to climb the ladder is having a win-rate over 50%, it can be 50.5%, but if you play enough, you’ll keep climbing. When you add the bonus of winning streaks, you can get away with climbing the Ladder without being the most skilled player out there.

While having higher win rates will make your climb a lot easier, Hearthstone provides a lot of excuses to cover your losses. Blaming RNG is an easy cop-out, lots of players will end up blaming the fact that their collections weren’t as complete as their “pay-to-win” opponent, that they had a bad match-up, or that they simply drew poorly. Even if the reality of the matter is that they could’ve won the game, had they played better.

Hearthstone doesn’t require you to be a card slinging god to achieve Legend status, it’s a game that encourages you to just keep playing. Just hop into the next game, maybe you will have better luck next time. Tying player progression to the amount of games played rather than the win rate is a very interesting proposition, if you play an insane amount of games, you are bound to see many different decks (or maybe just an insane amount of Secret Paladin). If you see many different decks, you might be inclined to try some of them out, maybe you’ll throw some money at the screen to acquire the required cards.

Your progression through the game will feel very natural. As long as you keep playing, you’ll keep climbing. Unless you are stuck at rank 20 because of abysmal win-rates, your time spent in Hearthstone will be rewarded with stars and ranks. As you play more and more, you’ll get better at the game. You should be getting farther, and farther in the ladder as the months go by. You’ll keep progressing, and you’ll have plenty of reasons to keep playing.

Play my game

We’ve been discussing how Hearthstone protects weaker players, giving them chances to steal games through RNG, and giving them a lot of excuses so they don’t necessarily feel that they are worthless at the game and drop it. Hearthstone is being designed not to be a fair and competitive game, but rather an engaging experience. The high amount of variance makes sure than not every game is played the same, random effects will ensure that you face different situations on different game, it tries to keep the game fresh, which is actually good for players who aren’t into the hardcore high level of competition. By virtue of being an engaging and dynamic card game, Hearthstone encourages you to play a lot of it. And again, if you are spending many hours of your days playing Hearthstone, maybe you will be more inclined to shell out cash for those new expansions.

As we talked earlier, the current Ladder is the perfect complement to this type of game design. Hearthstone is giving you many reasons to spend lots of hours grinding the ladder, its giving you reasons to spend many hours dealing with the random Hearthstone shenanigans. Team 5 is having a great success keeping players invested in the game, and I have to believe that the current incarnation of the ladder is a key part of this.

What about Ranked?

Sure, the current Hearthstone Ladder might be genius, as it keeps a high amount of players engaged with the game. But what about a real ranked experience? What Hearthstone has been lacking, is a support system for those who want to take competition to the next level. The Hearthstone Competitive Scene has always felt less of something that Team 5 carefully engineered, and felt more like a happy little accident.

I believe that Hearthstone doesn’t really need to revamp the current ranked system, but needs to add an entire new system on top of it. Hearthstone has long needed a tournament mode, it also needs a real league based progression system for aspiring competitive players, and that’s what we have to mend.

Next week, we will take a hard look at different “ranked play” systems from different games, and we will try to figure out what can be done to complement the wildly successful Hearthstone Ladder.

Until then, have a happy Monday and a great week of Hearthstone!

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