Dean “Iksar” Ayala has been sharing lots of stats lately, which we really appreciate. It’s great to have them from the first hand – while many deck trackers also gather similar statistics, their sample size and reliability is always lower.
This time he shared more stats about Battlegrounds MMR distribution – if you have X MMR, where it puts you. If you’re at 5000 or below, you’re among 62% of “lowest MMR” players (which means that slightly below 5k has to be the cut-off point between “below average” and “above average”). It also means that at 5k, you already have higher MMR than half of the players. Then if you’re lets’s say at 7k, you’re among Top 1% of players and if you’re at 8k, you’re among 0.1% of best players. Given that the Constructed stats shared a few months ago indicated that 0.3% people make it to Legend, the Legend equivalent in BG would be somewhere between those two, so roughly at 7.5k.
You can find a full list of shared MMR stats below:
- <5000: 62% of Players
- 5500: Top 20%
- 6000: Top 10%
- 6500: Top 3%
- 7000: Top 1%
- 8000: Top 0.1%
- 8700: Top 0.01%
Battlegrounds Rating Distribution!
Only includes players that have completed at least 5 games of Battlegrounds in the last 20 days.
<5000: 62% of Players
5500: Top 20%
6000: Top 10%
6500: Top 3%
7000: Top 1%
8000: Top 0.1%
8700: Top 0.01% pic.twitter.com/KU6Pi1lsaX— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) March 8, 2020
I could not disagree more with the people commenting that the game is nothing but RNG. Like many who play, I was hundreds of games in and hovering in the 5500 rankings.
Well, I watched some YouTube videos from the pros, got some tips off there, and started applying those skills. Within a week I have gone from 5300 to 7100 and still climbing.
There is certainly RNG, and please god nerf the 1M health Morlock’s with divine shield, poison, wind fury, but overall, the game is 95% skill and knowing how to make the RNG less random.
I for one find this quite useful, so thank you for sharing..
For me, this mode is less random than others make out. I started out thinking it was very random, but really I just needed to get a feel for it.
Yes, there is still a large random element.. But the same applies for every card game, and without things would often play out exactly the same. The skill is always about risk reward analysis in terms of potential plays, and there are a lot of factors in that decision, meaning decisions are rarely dominated.
The only thing I dislike about BG, is the disparity between PC and mobile. PC players are able to just do more, thanks to ability to reload quickly skipping battles, and quicker animations allowing more actions in a single turn. I didn’t even realise this was a thing until watching some vids of PC players doing late game single turn murloc transitions. When I began playing, this is something I didn’t know was even possible, and takes considerable skill to orchestrate without mistakes – again, this just reinforces that this mode is not entirely random.
I really wonder who cares (no offense here)!?
It’s a nearly completely random game mode with nothing to ‘win’ except having fun (this, sadly, often mitigated by said randomness).
And yes, I know that ‘having fun’ for some people means being the best. 😉 But those should be covered by Blizzards officiall ranking.
Exactly my though, who cares the MMR of this full RNG mode, on the 10 games i did, i won 6 times, and the whole games were full RNG. I stopped playing that …
But BliBli had to give kids another dick-meter …
I would argue that more people than you think. Most players are competitive and they want to be good at something. It’s not fair to call the mode “completely random” when it’s not – your skill still matters a lot. You can be bad at it, you can play hundreds of games and never go past 5k rating. And then you’ve got lots of pros consistently at the top.
Ranking in HS also doesn’t really matter. Outside of some minor differences in your end of month chest, it doesn’t really matter if you hit e.g. R5 or Legend. And some players still grind hundreds of games to get there. Sometimes to prove themselves, and other times because they just like it, they want to be among the best players.
Of course I would be lying if I said that Battlegrounds is not heavily RNG, but I think that the regular formats have already proven that the mode can be RNG (Constructed, not to mention Arena where your drafts are also heavily random) and skill can still matter.
And in the end, what’s the problem with them sharing that info? 🙂 People who don’t care can just ignore it, others might find it interesting.
Sorry, but as long as you’re not a donkey (yes, I’m debasing donkeys here) anyone can play BG on an acceptable level. The reason why Pros are on top is simply because they grind that play mode all day long.
And yes, your argument on ladder ranking is valid. That’s the reason why I only grinded for legend once (card back collector) and now play ’til R5.
In the end, I still don’t understand the relevance of those statistics; as I mentioned, the official rankings give a reasonable overview over the very best players in each mode.
Happy gaming!
“You can be bad at it, you can play hundreds of games and never go past 5k rating.”
Oh HAI! 😀
I’m currently at about 5.2k with about 250 games under my belt; I only started playing BG again after they added dragons and the meta had changed enough that I had no idea what I was doing initially, so I dropped to about 4.5k fairly rapidly. It took me a couple of days to get the “feel” for current meta and start getting a positive win rate again.
The saying with MtG used to be something like “you’ll always win 1/3 of your games and always loose 1/3 – it’s the other 1/3 where skill comes into play”…
Hearthstone is similar except I reckon it’s closer to 80% random luck and 90% in Battlegrounds 🙂 … but skill does make a difference.