Are there any non-srank players left in the game?
I feel like everyone who still plays is s-rank. Idk if it’s because the game lost a huge portion of its players at some point and only some veterans remained or if s-rank is just too easy to get.
To me it seems like it’s a combination of both.
According to my ingame friend list there are definitely still players who have never hit S, including long time players. New players also still apparently exist, so they count too.
That said, I agree that S-rank has become easier to reach. Combined with the smaller/less active playerbase I can see why it would give the impression that only S-rankers are left.
I don’t usually bother about S-rank and play stupid and funny stuff in diamond till the end of the season.
I had S a couple of time in the past tho. And previous season.
I’ve never even hit diamond. Not alone either.
Same here. Problem is, few are playing fun decks, so constantly facing Xor, Wanderer, Fault kind of kills the fun…
But leagues have become meaningless; Silver / Gold – S matches are no rarity.
Never hit S, stopped trying a long time ago though
Most of the people I interact with are non s rank players.
I myself don’t really care, unless I have a specific deck I want to show then I’ll try to reach for s rank.
Got to s rank twice with a (at the time) meme deck, saw that I can now any care is out the window.
I guess you get s rank since you are in s rank.
This is something that I’ve seen happen again and again with quite a lot of games I used to play in the past; all suffering from a bad balance team.
At the start of the game everyone just starts playing whatever class or hero they like the most aesthetically. Everyone is going to be trying to figure out how the game works at that stage not caring much about the balance.
Now if one of those heroes or classes is completely broken, what happens next is that there will be a higher congregation of players of that hero or class at higher ranks whose voices will be heard more loudly by the devs. And since obviously everyone is always asking for buffs for their class or hero and nerfs for everything else, the best class keeps getting better and better and everything else keeps getting worse and worse. Eventually players of other classes or heroes who feel alienated by the devs leave the game and what remains is a circlejerk wasteland of a bunch of entitled whiny players all playing the exact same broken thing.
At some point during all of that playing those other off meta weaker heroes or classes becomes some sort of a status symbol. So the playerbase starts to claim they main those other off meta heroes or factions. It also gives them a very good chance to further justify the nerfs. “Hey! I main V and I don’t mind the nerfs maybe you should just get gud noob.” Meanwhile has only 2 V ribbons and 25 M ribbons.
I honestly think this is what happened here. All the signs are there.
This exact same thing happened to overwatch at some point. A game I used to enjoy a lot until heroes like Moira and Briggite were added but I diagress.
Oh no. Only the users of the “class” want to buff it, everyone else wants to nerf it. We have several top tier classes nerfed to the ground - Vet, Hai, Lyonar, then Vanar were in the same shoes once, dominating the ladder. Who remembers that now?
Now is a turn of fckn lizrds. For an eternity, cause nobody bothers anymore…
Yeah but if the devs are bad at finding out what is objectively broken and balancing it which seems to be the case with this game and it certainly was with blizzard, they usually just go with the flow and do whatever the community tells them to do.
And whose opinions are the devs more likely to listen to when it comes to balancing? An S-Rank player or a bronze player? The S-Rank players. Whether they got there because their hero or faction was broken or if they were actually good at the game becomes irrelevant because again, bad devs means they can’t distinguish what is objectively broken and what isn’t.
Btw is it just an odd coincidence that a portion of the dev team were ex blizzard employees? lol
I don’t know. I just find that hilarious.
I’ve never been S-rank. I’ve been S-rank since I loaded up the game the first time. Git gud skrub. 
Although the league system helps with that a bit … Let those guys get to S then chill with us in gold. In the second half of the month gold you only get people who play non-busted decks, or at least for the most part. And I think you are being a bit harsh on the devs (please don’t get pissed, I hope this doesn’t start a rage campaign) since it’s really hard to balance stuff. You fix one thing, anotherone gets busted and without shifting enough focus from their current project and doing rebalancing properly, I think it’s better that the devs don’t do anything drastic.
That being said, showing a little extra love for their currently operating game wouldn’t hurt either.
With all due respect, how many Duelyst metas have you seen, how many expansions, balance patches? What may be true for Hearthstone doesn’t necessarily hold for all other CCGs out there. You make a mistake here, my friend, using a proof by induction with a sample set of size 1.
Your logic seems legit, but the fact is that devs of this game always hesitated to listen to their community plus never buffed anything, just nerfed. So the world you built here is just completely different from reality.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be buffs. In fact it’s usually the new additions to the game that cause certain metas not buffs to previously exisiting ones. Going through the games history it’s not difficult to see how cards got more powerful and ridiculous.
Compare a card like Dark Transformation to Blood of Air, one is clearly the powercrept version of the other.
Or going through the trial of mythron expansion it blows my mind that a card like Swarmking Scarab or Mortar-maw was added and no one batted an eye. It’s the existence of stuff like that that makes removal so necessary not a measly Drybone golem (sometimes I wish this game was just a bunch of golems with no effects but again I diagress)
Or for example it doesn’t take much to understand that Sandswirl Reader is broken. Based on the card we can deduce returning a minion to their action bar + getting a exhuming sand tile + developing a 3/3 body is worth 5 Mana and one card.
Now if you wanted to get sort of a similar effect with Vanar you would have to Hailstone Prision (2 Mana 1 Card) + Endless Hunt (4 Mana) which already costs one more mana and you’re not getting the bonus sand tile.
It doesn’t take a lot to understand why cards like sandswirl reader, dreamshaper, lava lance, lucent beam etc are broken just based on the math alone.
And then there are these other cards that are broken but balanced (or even bad) in the context of the game like Swarmking Scarab that I mentioned. Some tend to be ridiculously polarizing as well like Plasma Storm.
Like whenever I say Plasma Storm is broken people love to remind me that Luminous charge exists which is another broken card.
Why add a broken card only to be forced to add another broken card just to counter it?
Why make Arcanysts or Warbird a thing to later be forced to add magesworn? Why have walls + winterswake in the game and later be forced to add EMP?
Here’s what I think: if you can’t beat it with a deck containing a bunch of golems with no special effects and no spells it’s broken. End of the story
That is just narrowminded as all hell, I’m sorry but it’s true. The “bunch of golems” deck you are talking about might not even hold it’s own in a practice match, so by that logic every card in the game with a text box is broken. Also, it’s good to see nerfing in terms of counterplay instead of direct nerfs. It fans creativity and lowers the power levels of the broken cards, but still allows the decks to do what they could before, if they are played well. Magesworn exist - Onyx seal exists. Walls exist - Lightbender exists. It’s this back and forth board swings that make the game fun and interactive. Why did I remember mantra all of a sudden? Huh …
In short - the meta can be influenced by pretty much any change in the game. It is just hard to find the change, that leaves the most people happy, but not adding certain cards just so they don’t become meta is just absurd.
I couldn’t disagree more.
It’s always better to nerf broken things (or removing them all together) rather than buffiing or adding equally broken counters.
Also I disagree with you on what “counterplay” is. You’re not doing “counterplay” in respect to walls when you’re including Lightbender in your deck. It has the “counter” part but it it’s missing the “play”. Building your deck is not “playing”.
Sentinels have counterplay. Not attacking with your general is counterplay. You are countering something by playing a certain way.
Or in a fighting game blocking when you’re expecting your opponent to hit and grappling when you’re expecting your opponent to block is counterplay but picking a hero that has a good match up against theirs in the hero select screen isn’t “counterplay” it’s just terrible design.
Replace the instance of “counterplay” in my post with “teching against meta decks”. Otherwise, I stand by my points.
They buffed cards though.
You need to explain your points. What good comes from taking impact away from the “playing” part and putting it into the “drafting” section of the game?
I don’t wanna beat you just because I had a card that counters you. I don’t feel like I outplayed the Vaath player just because I included Kron in my decklist. I don’t feel like I outplayed the Walls player cuz I happened to include and draw EMP.
That’s stupid. When I win I wanna feel like I outplayed you. In the actual game, not in the drafting section.
Going into a game with a deck that counters your opponent is like playing chess except one side has all queens and another has all pawns. Do you think the guy with all queens feels like he accomplished anything after his predestined win?! No and if you say so then it’s the same “I’m entitled to win” mentality I talked about earlier.
When I play chess or any other game I want the playing field to be level. I don’t want to win because I had an edge but because I actually outplayed someone. I don’t care about winning, I don’t care about losing, I just enjoy the challenge.
Never got to gold. Hoping to get it this season. My friend just started playing recently and according to my friends list, there are definitely some non s-rank players that are still active.