Petar Stevanovic · @TempoGaara
1st Apr 2018 from TwitLonger
My Prelim Qualification
I know it is easy to blame others and i know that Blizzard doesn't care at all (they are showing it with their actions), but i wanna write this down anyways.
Here is way Bllizzard costed me another Preliminaries in my opinion:
Europe is by far the most stacked and competitive Region, here is a comparison:
To make it to the First EU prelims in 2018 you need 33 Points -> 25/26 Last year
To Make it to NA prelims in 2018 you need around 19? Points -> 17/19? Last year
(These are not the exact numbers, this is just to show the exponential growth in competition in EU and it is very difficult to compare it to China, since they use a different system)
The way how High Legend Ladder worked was that everyone tried to put himself into a good starting position for the last days of a month, because everyone was pretty much "forced" to play on the last day, because of the volatility of the Ladder system, no Rank was campable except on Asia sometimes in the past.
So basically you need to have a good strategy to make it to EU prelims, because of the insane competition.
I decided to not go to any HCT tour stop and solely focus on Ladder, because it takes time to get a high rank and also it takes much more time to get it on 2 or like me on 3 Servers. I dont know who else played all 3 servers on High legend besides me this season?
So 3 days before the end of the season i was Rank 17 On Asia and top 100 on EU and NA. I decayed within 6 hours on Asia from 17 to 30, which is kinda normal for the volaitlity of the Ladder system and how it worked, So i had to play anyways. After i played i dropped to around 170, which is normally not a big deal, since you can climb back fast anyways, but suddenly the ladder felt very different, you gained very small amount of rating whenever you won and nobody really knew what was going on.
I saw posts like these on Twitter and i really didnt know what to do
https://twitter.com/Mryagut/status/979304808778780672
There was a Thread on Reddit about it, 2 days before the season end
https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/87vlh3/blizzard_changed_legend_ladder_randomly_and_it_is/
So i was kinda waiting for blizzard to give an answer, i wasnt sure if they change the ladder back, kinda like in the beginning of the season where everything was bugged and then they changed it back to the old ladder system. Obviously no reply from Blizzard except some bad apology on the last day of the season: @hsesports
https://twitter.com/HSesports/status/979886040189042688
So basically i had to play, because there was no more time left. i Played for around 40 hours straight with no sleep, i had around 70% winrate and i slowly climbed my way up from rank 250 up to top 50. The climb wasnt much harder or anything, it just took about 4x more time and time was the only thing they didnt give us, In the end i was rank 46 and 1 hour before Asia season reset i was 49 and i was forced to play a game (like in any other season, just that i had to spend 4x more time to get there) and i lost, so i ended up with a top 100 finish, which puts me at 30 points, but i need to have 33 to make it guaranteed as an EU player. Normally this is not a big deal. Thats why i spend all Month climbing on all 3 Servers, to guarantee my top 50 Finish on one of the 3 Servers, but now here comes the problem were blizzard really screwd me once again and there is absoltuely nothing i could have done about it at this point:
While i was climbing on Asia and spent an insane amount of time doing so i decayed on EU to around top 200 and on NA to around 240, normally these ranks are still good enough when you have around 6-12 hours to go before a season end, but with their "last minute ladder uptade" it was completely a waste of time to have these 2 Servers at all. It was physically impossible to climb from 200 to top 50 with the remaining time left except you have some insane winrates and i was already very exhausted, because i was already climbing for 40 hours. I tried climbing on NA, because i was forced to Skip EU completely and played for around 6 hours, since my winrate was only around 60% i knew i couldnt physically make it and passed out.
So basically all the time i spent to climb on all 3 Regions and even skip out on HCT tour stops to achieve that was a complete waste of time in the end, because blizzard changed the Ladder System 2-3 Days before the end of the Season with no announcement whatsoever.
I don't wanna blame anyone. I just wanna tell you my experience.
How are you supposed to come up with a good Prelim Qualification strategy with all the RNG the game already has, when you can't predict blizzards actions.
it is extremely frustrating, but the sad truth is that i am already used to it with blizzard.