Upcoming Hearthstone Ranked Play Changes Give Hope to New and Old Players

On January 25th, the Hearthstone team uploaded a video to their Youtube channel  that announced the changes that would be coming to Ranked Play for the March season and beyond. Game Director Ben Brode explained that the goal of the update is to make the climb at the top of the ladder each season less of a grind, improve matchmaking, while still providing a satisfying sense of progression at all levels. Players will be more evenly matched at the beginning of the season and this will allow them to still demonstrate their skills climbing the ladder, while knowing that each new rank is well deserved.

Beginning in March, each player will be reset four ranks back. The team’s motivation behind this change is that they feel the current monthly reset is too much of a grind for players who ended the previous month at the top of the ladder and that the players who ended the previous month lower on the ladder hit a progression wall very quickly. This will allow players who gain more than four ranks in a month to start the next month higher than their previous month.

Each rank will contain five stars and all players will experience the same amount of progression, no matter their placement on the ladder. Players will now have to win five games to get their monthly card back instead of reaching rank 20. Ben Brode made sure to give a disclaimer to players by explaining that there will be a brief window of time where elements of both systems will be in place, as the game transitions to the new Ranked Play system.

With any major change to a game’s competitive system, the community of the game will have their thoughts on if the changes are warranted or not needed at all. I reached out to the Hearthstone subreddit to see how the Hearthstone community was reacting to the Ranked Play changes.

Redditor lord_darkfire26 believes that the changes coming to Ranked Play are great move by the Hearthstone team, especially for new players.

“Overall, I personally think the ranked changes are a good thing, especially for playing aiming for high ranks. For me personally, it’ll be much easier to maintain rank 5, considering I won’t be thrown down to the bottom of the ladder at each season reset and for once I’ll actually have time to make the push for legend, at least over a couple of seasons.

For lower ranks, I imagine the change is not quite as helpful, as players aiming for rank 15 will have a slightly harder time getting there, but overall will help keep them at an appropriate rank in the long run.

The biggest advantage of these changes is probably the fact that there will no longer be such a massive clusterf*ck at the low ranks in the first week of each season, pitting new players against pros, but instead they’ll both be kept close to their respective ranks.”

Fellow redditor Ayenz was not impressed with the changes or Blizzard.

“Why do simple and obvious changes take so long in Hearthstone. This isn’t even a major ladder overhaul they said they were working on. Just about the only thing you can count on is new cards, which makes Blizzard more money.”

The upcoming changes giving them encouragement to push for Legend is why redditor woodchips24 is excited for the new changes to be implemented.

“I can make rank 5, but don’t have the time or energy to push to legend afterwards, because 5-legend is such a grind. If I can start my monthly climb at 9 rather than at 17, it’ll save a huge amount of time, and I might actually make the push to legend for the first time. And that’s exciting to me.”

Many more thoughts were expressed on the Hearthstone subreddit, but the majority of the responses favored the upcoming changes because of the promise to reduce the monthly grind. This will allow for players to actually feel like they are making significant progress each month and not hit a standstill period or spend time playing in ranks they have no business being in, such as a pro player having to play someone who might only play a couple of times a week.

Playing ranked in #Hearthstone right now is downright miserable.

I guess that's why I only play ranked long enough to get my monthly card-back and play casual the rest of the time.

— Jack Frost (@WrathMagik) January 21, 2018

Players will be able to expect many more meaningful and enjoyable games, during their time spent pursuing their goal of becoming the best player they can be with each new monthly season.

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