Hearthstone GosuRankings to be reset when Standard hits

With Standard arriving in a month, GosuGamers is announcing a renewed - and reset - GosuRankings.

Over the years, our GosuRankings have become a very important feature of our section. Having its roots in our StarCraft section, the rankings were implemented in every new eSports section as GosuGamers.net grew. Nowadays our rankings are used for Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter-Strike GO, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft 2, Hearthstone and even for Overwatch.

Since its implementation in March 2014, we have had a lot of feedback on the Hearthstone rankings. In May 2015 we took a big step, by overhauling the entire rankings. From using an algorithm suited for little-to-no RNG games such as StarCraft 2, Dota 2 and League of Legends, we switched to an appropriate algorithm for a card game. The new rankings have rewarded consistency more than peak performances, resulting in Thijs “ThijsNL” Molendijk’s insane consistency in 2015 to repeatedly smash GosuRankings records: 1453 points at peak.

So far the Hearthstone GosuRankings has recorded:



Over 600 tournaments

Approximately 22,000 series

4365 players (of which the great minority is not ranked, as many players appeared in just one tournament)



A new era

With Blizzard’s announcement of the Standard format, a new era arrives for Hearthstone. The game will rotate its expansions continuously, causing for a faster change of the metagame than was previously the case. With the change of Hearthstone’s competitive format, it felt only natural to us to implement a radical, but long-desired change to our GosuRankings.

As we do not know exactly when the expansion will go live (somewhere at the end of April, or beginning of May according to Blizzard), we chose to announce this upcoming change far ahead. This way players, teams and organizations can provide feedback, and ask any questions they might have – we have valued and always will value the feedback from the community.

So, what will actually happen?



As soon as the new expansion, Whispers of the Old Gods, will go live (and with that, the Standard format), we will completely reset our rankings. This means that, for a short while, the entire rankings will be empty, as no matches will have been recorded. As soon as the first tournaments happen, the rankings will slowly but surely fill up with the players we’ve all come to love so much. However, by doing this we also give new players a chance to stand in the spotlight. More and more tournaments are at least partially open-qualifier, and the effort new players put in there has to be recognized. We think this is a great way to do that.



Only tournaments that are at least partially open-qualifier will be recorded. While we thoroughly enjoy seeing the established names within the community clash, we stand behind Blizzard's rule of awarding HCT points. Thus, as soon as Standard hits, full invitationals are no longer recorded in our rankings. As mentioned before, the HCT 2016 format will allow more rising players to gain attention. We felt it's no less than appropriate to adjust our GosuRankings to this change, as this change will create a new face of competitive Hearthstone.

And…. A new player joins the game!



We are delighted to announce that our new rankings will take match-up favorability into account as well. We have partnered with eSport team Tempo/Storm, whose website is mostly known for its Meta Snapshot, to keep our rankings as accurate as possible. A quick example: A player will lose less points for losing to a Control Warrior if he’s playing a Freeze Mage deck, or loses with anything to a Druid on turn 7. Using the competitive insight of Tempo/Storm’s extremely knowledgable analysts we hope to bring forth an even better ranking system than the one we had before. Our Hearthstone section leader, Radoslav "Nydra" Kolev, had the following to say:

"I've always respected the amount of effort Tempo/Storm puts in expanding eSports. Not only in Hearthstone, but in many other games they are actively trying to improve the competitive scene, either by working with some of the best players, or making guides to assist aspiring pro-players. I'm really looking forward to work with the guys from Tempo/Storm, and I am sure the collaboration will bring forth the best in both of our parties." - Nydra



A final word

It should be noted that, until the Standard format hits Hearthstone, we will continue to track the tournaments that are played. All the players have the right to know what ranking they are during April, and honestly we couldn’t live without rankings either! Please feel free to leave any feedback in the comment section below, on our forums, or any other means suited for this matter. We hope you are excited as we are!