10. DEC. 2013 Hearthstone Patch Notes: new rank system and more.

Hearthstone™ Closed Beta Patch Notes - 1.0.0.4217 - Become a Legend! patch was announced the other day: "Our latest Hearthstone patch is here! We’ve included a lot of great features and bug fixes in this update, including the ability to abandon one Quest per day, animations for all of our Golden cards, and the addition of the epic rocker Elite Tauren Chieftain! That’s not all—we’ve also added a completely new Ranked Play system, where you can work your way through the ranks to become a Hearthstone Legend. Check out the details on the new Ranked Play system below, along with the full patch notes."

Along with a few other things like adding print screens to your desktop using the dedicated keyboard button (that wasn't a thing you could do on the previous day) or the changes announced before in regard to cards such as Unleash the hounds, Mind Control, Shattered Sun Cleric, Starving Buzzard, Flame Imp Argent Commander, we also had a remake of the older medals ranking system and their interface buttons. Unranked mode is now called Casual and it looks like this:

"All players first stepping foot into the revamped Ranked Play mode will start at Rank 25: Angry Chicken. In Ranked Play, you’ll be pitted against opponents equal to or as close to your rank as possible. You and your opponent’s ranks will be visible to each other as you battle. Every time you find yourself victorious against your opponent, you’ll gain a star above your medal. Collect enough stars, and you’ll eventually find yourself attaining the next rank—Rank 24: Leper Gnome. There are 25 different ranks to attain, starting at Angry Chicken and going up to Rank 1: Innkeeper."

So it already sounds a bit more interesting even tho the previous medals didn't look half bad themselves. In the previous play mode players could duel other players to increase their medal ranking by clicking on the medal in the top corner, which switched from "Unranked" Play, to "Medal Earning" Play, while relying on the Battle.net matchmaking to pair them up against worthy opponents.

Novice

Journeyman

Copper

Silver

Gold

Platinum

Diamond

Master

Gran' Mastah

On the other hand the new setup does give a bit more context and brings the whole thing into tune with the overall theme. But wait! There's more! And here's where it gets a lot more interesting [and sort of answers what I was asking myself the other day while testing out some decks in normal play in regard to the games overall reward system and goals to play and grind for besides well... just the game]:

"As you progress through the ranks, you’ll continue to be matched with opponents of equal or close-to-equal rank. If you hit a win streak, you may notice you collect more stars per win. However, once you progress up to Rank 20, a loss will cause you to lose stars, so play carefully! Win streaks will also end starting at Rank 5 through Rank 1, so every match will really count at those high ranks."

Omfg?! Woot? And wait! There's more!

"Once you become a Rank 1: Innkeeper with five stars to your name, another win will push you into a special rank: Legend. Legend rank will be represented by a Legendary orange mana crystal with a number in the middle of it. That number tells you exactly where you rank against other players in your region. If your Legend rank shows the number 300, you’re the 300th best Hearthstone player in your region.

Legend Ranks and Matchmaking Rating

You’ll continue to be matched against opponents of equal or close-to-equal skill in Legend rank using a hidden Matchmaking Rating (MMR). Matchmaking Rating follows a couple of simple general rules:

• MMR is gained with wins and lost with losses.
• The amount of MMR gained or lost is dependent on the MMR of your opponent.

Legend rankings in your region will only be displayed for the top 10,000 Legend players, so battle on if your Legendary mana crystal doesn’t show a number. Keep racking up those wins, and you may become the #1-ranked Hearthstone Legend!

And So Begins Test Season 1

With all that said, this patch marks the start of our first test season of Ranked Play mode. Since we’re in closed beta, we expect some things to break along the way, and we hope you’ll post your feedback and findings on the forums and contribute to various discussions revolving around the updates we made to this mode.

Every month of Ranked Play is called a “season,” and Ranked Play rankings are intended to reset at the end of every season. However, since this test season is starting a bit later in the month than a season normally would, it may act a little strangely. Casual Play will not reset on a monthly basis like Ranked Play does—Casual Play will continue to match you with other players of similar skill. We’ll keep an eye on things as time goes on and make changes as necessary.

During this first test season, Ranked Play rewards (alternate card backs and Golden Heroes) will not be available. We want to make sure the rewards for Ranked Play are available to anyone who wants to attain them—with your help, we can get Hearthstone out of closed beta and let the game loose to everyone!"

Other awesome things worth mentioning are as follows:

General

• You are now able to abandon one quest per day. When you abandon a quest, you’ll receive a new, random quest in its place.
• New Feature: Recently played Opponent – Your friends list now displays the last person you played against, provided they were not a Real ID or BattleTag friend. If you had a particularly great match against someone, you can now friend them for future play!
• New Feature: Players Near Me - You can now opt-in to seeing other Hearthstone players on your local network in your friends list.
• Parental controls can now disable in-game Shop purchases. (You are fucked kids!)
• You now have the option to keep the sound playing while the game is running in the background.
• The amount of gold gained by winning games in Play mode per day is now capped at 100. This cap does not affect gold gained through Quests, Arena, or Achievements. There will now be an indication within the game when this gold cap is reached. This cap is intended to combat certain methods of gold acquisition that violate our Terms of Service. The spirit of fair play is extremely important to us, and we will continue to monitor gold acquisition activity closely to ensure a fun and enjoyable game environment for everyone.

Ranking

• The Ranked play system has been completely redone
• There are now month long seasons that reset at the end of each month
• There are new ranks and minion portraits for all levels of play
• You earn a star for each win and lose one for each loss and your stars determine your rank
• Players who get to top rank of legend and are in the top 10,000 players have their exact region-wide ranking displayed
• There will be rewards for playing ranked mode in the future, but they were not implemented with this patch, and will be added at a future date.

Arena

• The number of matches you can win in Arena has increased to 12 (up from 9).
• Arena rewards have been restructured.

Zerith the community manager ^^, said the following about this:

"With the Arena reward restructuring, we pretty much just took the rewards that you would normally get in Arena mode and... WE DOUBLED IT!!! (oh wait...no, that was another game, where's that Jay when you actually need him?:|) ...put them into fewer boxes. So, for example, instead of opening five boxes and getting a pack and four boxes full of 5 Arcane Dust each if you didn't have a great Arena run, you'd get a Pack and a box full of 20 Dust. 

The rewards should also now clearly be better the higher up in wins that you obtain. So there shouldn't be a reason to quit out at 8 wins, as an example, and it should drive you to strive for the 12 wins and the best Arena loot possible.  We're not trying to hide anything - our intent is quite the opposite. Win more, get more." 
[yes, they had to SPECIFY that they aren't trying to screw us and that they have the best intentions at heart here]

The main idea behind this is to create a bigger incentive to play arenas, whether for gold or for real moneyz and I believe a good job was done in this respect: we now seem to need more overall wins, to make the same amount of gold that made it possible to queue for several arenas based on previous winnings. Even if the rewards seem larger (due to adding 3 more harder-to-get-to levels), the general aim must have been to lower the chances of a larger portion of the player base to access this "arena loop" and to lower the overall chance to get an actual profit. You still need around 7 wins in order to secure a profit or even to obtain a balance before getting booted from the arena. Of course the high end rewards seem to be really impressive, but you must account for the fact that in order to reach that high you will need to try your luck *cough* skill and aim for a much tighter streak. Thus, the chances to be out of the competition rises both at a general level (since more ppl will fail to go that high) and at a player level since you will have much more chances to score a loss before reaching your target (1:4 ratio versus the previous 1:3). This could also translate into fewer people running arenas as often as before (at least using gold to pay the entry fee that is :p).

Here's a Reddit link for "compiled" arena rewards or the stuff on the official forums right HERE in regard to our precious LEWT! Thanks to Achilles we have a general (yet uncertain) view of rewards and in his own words the conclusions are as follows:

- you still need 7 wins to guarantee you 150G (another free Arena entry)
- seems like 8 wins and 9 wins now yield you less gold than before, I remember I could retire at 8 wins and can get around 220G to 285G, looks like blizzard wants to emphasize on card collection (give out more cards / golden etc).
- the gold you get from getting 10/11/12 wins varies widely (above shows with 12 wins it ranges from 180G to 505G)
- the new rewards allows skilled players + good RNG to get more gold than before, though it is harder to sustain infinite arena for some? we'll have to see.
Edited by Achilles on 12/11/2013 10:02 AM PST

Gameplay, General

• All Golden cards are now animated. [Goodie!]
• The visual effects of some cards have been improved. [see below]

• Ysera now summons her Dream cards directly from the Emerald Dream!
• King Krush now makes a dinosauric appearance when played!
• Al’Akir the Windlord now rides into battle on the tempest itself!

UI

• The chat UI has received additional improvements.
• Your player rank (icon and number) is now visible in the friends list, the versus screen and your BattleTag in-game.
• The PrintScreen key now takes a screenshot of your game and saves it to your desktop.
• Custom art has been added to headers for each class in the collection manager.
• The toggle between Casual and Ranked Play modes is now more explicit.
• The art has been updated for the box and pack opening screens.

For the full official coverage visit THIS LINK.

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May your draw be lucky and your hand stronk!