Aside from all the other things he said, at least for games — 1 out of 20 people get there, and the vast majority of people who play a game play very casually. So if you put a reasonable amount of effort at all into getting good at a game, you’re likely to make the top 5% of players or close to it.
I play hearthstone about, I dunno, an hour a day or so, while I’m on the train. I’ve never made it to the legend rank, but I make it to rank 5 easily most months, which puts me in the top 6%. A lot of months I’ll end up rank 2 or 1, which puts me in the top 3 or even 1%
I don’t think I’m particularly good at the game, I just play good decks and pay attention to the meta game so I know what to expect from the other decks. I don’t tend to plan multiple turns ahead, I don’t try and figure out what’s in my opponents hand, sometimes I’m barely paying attention to the game at all, and sometimes make just obvious mistakes like missing lethal.
But none of that really matters up until you get to rank 2 or 1, where you start playing against people that basically don’t make mistakes.
In fact one of the hardest transitions for me to make in the game was understanding that when my opponent appeared to be doing something stupid in a higher ranked game, they were probably not, and that I need to spend time thinking about what it meant, rather than just assuming they were bad at the game. That doesn’t happen until you’re already in the top 5%, though.
this is because improving your rank at hearthstone is a matter of playing as many viable games as possible. the outcome of most matches is mostly dependent on randomness as opposed to player error. The largest source of randomness being the order of card draw, which can turn around a highly favorable or unfavorable matchup between decks.
the actions of players have very little impact in hearthstone. in a typical game, the player is presented with somewhere about 2-7 choices every round (increasing in the late-game as the board becomes more full) and most of them are obviously good or obviously bad.
my point is that while being top 95% in most tasks is a matter of practice/repetition in new situations to build skill, achieving legend in hearthstone- while it might require you to build some minimal amount of skill in guessing what cards your opponent has, or estimate the odds of drawing a given card in the next few rounds the difficulty of the game will quickly drop off due to it's low "skill ceiling"- is mostly about repetition for the sake of reaching 15,10,and 5 rank level checkmarks.
hearthstone is a card game played by blizzard, the objective of the game being to make as much money as possible over the course of it's lifespan. the current meta in collectable card games is to make players believe that their actions have consequences over a randomized card game, and that their invaluable collections will continue to exist when blizz unplugs the servers after it stops making money for them.
1) naming yourself "hearthstonebad" isn't conducive to good discussion
2) the commenter stated his time budget: an hour a day. This doesn't seem excessive to make the argument "rank is merely a function of game time"
3) 2-7 choices is an under estimate. Past MtG pros have observed that attack ordering has more tree breadth than MtG attack phases. Saying the choices are straight forward is misguided when top players will consistently make the better choice that weaker top players miss
4) a high amount of randomness doesn't necessarily negate skill. See Poker
Indeed, the skill is designing a deck to be less sensitive to such randomness, adapting a side deck, reading the opponent's tactics to counter them or exploit them and responding correctly to the challenges if things go wrong.
Essentially, making your own luck.
Tree depth in card games is about the same as the deepest card combo times hand size, and for every card you can also hold it or get it burned.
> this is because improving your rank at hearthstone is a matter of playing as many viable games as possible. the outcome of most matches is mostly dependent on randomness as opposed to player error.
I think because of the matching system it seems that way because you quickly get to people at your own skill level so randomness and luck feel like they have more of an impact. You pretty much by definition get to players you’ll lose against half the time pretty quickly. From then you have to figure out how to get just a 1 or 2 percent edge and play a lot of games.
I lose half my games at rank 3, but put me up against rank 20 or even rank 10 players and I’ll win 80 or 90% of my games. I’ve done the climb from the bottom a few times and it’s basically trivial. Even against people playing well tuned net decks. So yeah, skill matters.
Edit: I remembered incorrectly, child comment has a better explanation.
Even if you win exactly 50% of your games, you will still eventually rank up. This is because you gain an extra star when you rank up. For example, let's say you start at rank 3, 4 stars.
* Win: Rank 2, 1 star
* Lose: Rank 2, 0 stars
* Lose: Rank 3, 4 stars
So even though you went 1-2, your rank didn't change.
I play hearthstone about, I dunno, an hour a day or so, while I’m on the train. I’ve never made it to the legend rank, but I make it to rank 5 easily most months, which puts me in the top 6%. A lot of months I’ll end up rank 2 or 1, which puts me in the top 3 or even 1%
I don’t think I’m particularly good at the game, I just play good decks and pay attention to the meta game so I know what to expect from the other decks. I don’t tend to plan multiple turns ahead, I don’t try and figure out what’s in my opponents hand, sometimes I’m barely paying attention to the game at all, and sometimes make just obvious mistakes like missing lethal.
But none of that really matters up until you get to rank 2 or 1, where you start playing against people that basically don’t make mistakes.
In fact one of the hardest transitions for me to make in the game was understanding that when my opponent appeared to be doing something stupid in a higher ranked game, they were probably not, and that I need to spend time thinking about what it meant, rather than just assuming they were bad at the game. That doesn’t happen until you’re already in the top 5%, though.