Announcing: Card Hunter PvP Spring Season

Noted. I'm sure that if it were 1 month you'd hear complaints about that, too, but I'll keep it in mind when organizing the next leg of this journey.

I have a lot of events and contests and competitions and such planned—some even written up—but I didn't want to start a bajillion things at once so I'm spacing them out. I have a few things up my sleeve that I think you'll really enjoy (and that some of our "rating grubbers" might not be good at), but at this point I'm thinking I should wait until after AotA comes out so as not to inundate the playerbase with New Things.

 

Week 3 blog post: http://www.cardhunter.com/2014/04/card-hunter-spring-season-week-3/

 

I'm curious to think what others have to say on the tactic of selective fighting. Is it okay for top rated players to purposely only queue against other top rated players so they gain more if they win and lose less if they lose? The matches should be harder, but overall less risky and more of a net gain. So, is this abusing the queue system to get a better rank or is this type of selective battling fair? Just want to know what other people's opinions are regarding the subject due to it becoming a possible issue.

 

I'd just blame the low amount of players. If there were enough players, everyone could always play against someone of roughly their rating.

Edit: It probably depends on deck you are using but I've made statistics about what rating range opponents are the best to play against and you are right - it's the higher ones.

 

It seems like there's no downside except for it taking longer to find matches but it lets you win more and lose less in Elo.

And I wouldn't say you can blame the low amount of players. When people SELECTIVELY choose who they are fighting then even even low Elo players could in theory only fight top players if they waited around long enough.

 

Well i play alot,and with the season been playing more, i must say i lose way more games to lower elos than to the higher elos than me. but in the end tend to balance itself. Maybe i lose thos egame sbecause im over confiant or i think they have a type of deck and have another dunno. Only know this is alot of work to keep elo,so im trying the number of wins

 

If there were enough players then noone could get opponents of different rating than themselves.

Also I feel like we are spamming. If you don't agree and want to reply, you can PM me.

 

Same. My deck is specifically designed to counter high level player builds. I'm just wondering if people feel it is okay if I specifically only play against people with 1500+ Elo since I tend to do a ton better against them (at least in terms of gaining / losing Elo).

 

Hey guys - honestly, take that to PMs.

 

I am not under the impression that you can actually choose who you play against. What am I missing?

 

I think it's a topic worth discussing, maybe in its own thread. Queue timing is definitely a thing, though I wouldn't consider the behavior Stexe is describing an "exploit." In any event, I'm not going to be disqualifying anyone based on allegations of it.

 

I'm not calling anyone specifically out, I was just posting his history when he denied it. I'm talking about the idea in general if it is frowned upon or not. I was just wondering what the consensus of people regarding the tactic was.

EDIT: Wait, you removed my link to someone's history data? Is that frowned on when trying to support a position? ...

The way the queue works is that it looks for people around your Elo and then slowly expands to include people in other Elos. If you're 1700 and queue only for 15 seconds at a time you'll only get matched up against people at 1500+.

Yeah, I could make a new topic for it if enough people are interested in discussing it. Just thought I'd mention it, but if you're not describing it as an exploit or disqualifying anyone for doing it then that's fine too. Just wanted some clarification. =)

 

Stexe, you can't prove much of anything with the history (from Farbs' site) of unaffiliated players (and you should know this already, we just discussed this in another thread). You can't see their matches against other unaffiliated players from there. Guild players (whose matches do show in the history) are generally more highly ranked than unaffiliated ones so it's easy to get the false impression that a highly-ranked unaffiliated player is playing "only" lots of high-ranked players. Besides, if the matchmaking is doing its job and there are lots of players on, high-ranked players should naturally mostly play other such players without expressly trying to do so.

If you wanted to show the real playing history of an unaffiliated player you'd need to trawl through the huge amount of Match Results and I don't think anyone cares enough to spend hours on it given how slow that screen is to browse.

 

Well, when he admits to me he does it I don't really need evidence do I? :-P

No biggie though, I'll just do the same to keep up. Probably not to the same degree because I actually like to have a few matches every now and then even if they are risky matches against lower Elo players, but whatever.

And MM doesn't really "do its job" if you can choose your opponents like that.

 

So you admit the history does not work for this, good. That was the sole point.

 

Seriously.

 

Will get this up in all relevant places ASAP, been a crazy weekend (Card Hunter expansion! Magic expansion! D&D! Descent!) and I'm flagging... but I got all the stats in order, I think.

Week 4 Stats are here!

 

Aww, you keep changing when you capture data... my Elo is 1709 now though. You really should state a time when you plan to capture it. There's no real negatives for it and it ensures you're not "playing favorites" or anything.

 

If your Elo is higher than average at some capture times and lower at others, it should all turn out fine, right? I'm def not playing favorites, but I am getting a little tired of you asking for the capture time. P) Seriously, if everyone plays their best throughout the week, the average rating across the season's weeks shouldn't be too affected by one week's minor dip.

 

There's no reason to note state when you capture. There's no way to "game it" in a sense any more than a random capture time. The benefits however would be more because then it would be neutral and not possibly biased.
Just because someone knows you'll capture it at X time doesn't mean they can "get one more game in before then" because for all they know they could lose that game and get a lower capture. I just don't see the rational behind a random capture time at all.