Who were the players who topped the GosuRankings after January?

Welcome to the first GosuRankings report of the new year. It has really been some time since we last did one of those. Five months, to be precise, so it feels good to be back.

As usual, in this article we'll look at who were the best players and teams in Hearthstone and how exactly points are earned and lost for the former. We'll pay more special attention to the top three finishers because, well, they kind of deserve it, and we'll wrap up with the rankings breakdown per region. So here we go.



What are the GosuRankings?





The GosuRankings are an Elo-based ranking system for players and teams, improved with a number of secret sauce modifications. The system uses the GosuGamers tournament database - which currently has over 450 tournaments, qualifiers and showmatches recorded - to track players' performance throughout their lifetime careers and calculates their Elo rank based on who and where they play.

One important factor of the GosuRankings are the different tournament imporances, which themselves are determined by a number of factors like player and prize pools, offline/online events, international/local, format and so on. The higher a tournament is ranked, the more points are lost/gained while playing it in, so winning the World Championship means more than winning a qualifier for an online cup (obviously).

Below, we take a look at some of the bigger events that happened in January 2015 and who finished high in those. To exemplify the ranking importance, we've provisionally tiered them on the scale of "Tier 4" (lowest) to "Tier 1" (highest).

Note 1: January's results aren't solely responsible for the final rankings; they merely add to players' lifetime career performances.

Note 2: Tournament importances vary even within a particular tier (i.e. not all tier 2 events are equal)

Note 3: Tiers are NOT the official way of determining/naming tournament importance by GosuCrew. These are used so that some basic mechanics of the system are articulated better to our readers.

Note 4: We've counted Battle of the Best even though it was technically held in the first days of February.







World's top 3

All ranking numbers are as of February 3rd. It's possible that rankings have changed at press time.



As it can be seen from the table above, January was a slow month to say the least. There was only one tournament with prize pool in the five digits and it was all the way in China. In the west, players had to settle with smaller, online invitationals. These are circumstances where players' past careers and overall performances make their strongest cases: small-scale tournaments rarely breed new stars but are perfect for reinforcing decorated records. That's why it is no surprise to see that guy on the top:





Cong "StrifeCro" Shu might still be missing his second offline win after SeatStory Cup I but there's no denying that the Cloud 9 ace has been one of the most consistent players in all of Hearthstone since the very start of the tournament scene. As every player, StrifeCro, too, had his periods of ups and downs and even long weeks of no or diminished activity but looking back at his record from the past months, we see just why he's the current king. There's the 66,67% win-rate in November, including top 4 at DreamHack and top 8 at the World Championship; 82% in December, with wins at Kinguin Invitational and G2A; and 75% in January with The Pinnacle 2 gold.

It's almost scary how unaffected by metagame shifts StrifeCro has remained and just how better he gets as said metagame gets figured out. By the end of the vanilla period, StrifeCro had about 95% win rate across June and July and maitaned close to 64% in August, when most of Curse of Naxxramas was getting released. As evident from his records in December, StrifeCro wasn't even slightly tilted by the coming of GvG, a period during which even mighty players like Kolento experienced a downfall in their performance.



The professional career pf James "Firebat" Kostesich can be divided into two completely different halves: before BlizzCon and after.

During half number one, Firebat was a player recognized for his theorycrafting and use of statistics to analyze Hearthstone matchups and his uncanny ability to place top of the ladder season after season. Regardless, invitations to online events were not coming and Firebat remained one of the many good players nobody actually talks about.

November changed all that. The $100,000 cheque and the BlizzCon trophy turned Firebat's status quo upside down. Nowadays, the Archon spearhead is everywhere, as he should be, and he's been proving that winning the world series wasn't a fluke. Since BlizzCon, Firebat won The Pinnacle, placed third in Kinguin Christmas and second in Kinguin Winter and Battle of the Best, took a couple of more top eight finishes and generally performed excellently. His streak of achievements might not have been as long as Dima "Rdu" Radu's or Aleksandr "Kolento" Malsh's in their prime but one thing remained certain - Firebat is world champion for a reason.





After he won DreamHack Winter, Aleksandr "Kolento" Malsh was the undisputed #1 player in the world. And not just by our rankings: the majority of the community placed the Ukrainian above the world champion himself and there was a good reason for that. The tournament in Sweden was stacked to bursting, featuring the very elite of the western scene and was dubbed the most difficult event to win in all of Hearthstone's competitive history.

Then, Kolento collapsed. It wasn't some kind of mini slump, he consistently performed poorly, facing several round one eliminations and reaching his all-time lowest win-rate of 12,5% in December. Everybody can have a bad month but when that happens to GosuAwards player of the year - a guy who rarely dropped below 70% win-rate in his lifetime career - it's an event of its own.





Thus, Kolento started 2015 with the risk of dropping out of GosuRanking's top 10, until Kinguin Winter came along. One of the first bigger online tournaments of the year pitted Kolento against Janne "Savjz" Mikkonen, Raphael "Hosty" Tsantili, Harry "Massan" Cheong and Firebat, the latter of who fell defeated 2-4 to give his opponent yet another gold medal. Kolento still has lots of work to do before he's back on the top but at least Europe's throne is back in his domain.

Team rankings

Unfortunately, the GosuRankings still doesn't allow us to adequately track team rankings. Future iterations of the ranking system are planned to include an algorithm which can calculate that based on members' individual performances (i.e. every win a player scores helps not only him but his team as well) but for now this is still uncharted territory.

Nevertheless, we believe ranking teams is fun even if it's based on the simplest math of averaging Elo scores. Note that only players with at least three actively competing team members have been ranked, so if you don't see a particular team for which you know its players are good and winning tournaments, it's likely because of that.

Cloud 9 is on the top of the team rankings to the surprise of nobody. The American organization currently has the most stacked roster in all of Hearthstone, advocated by having two players in world's top three. Even if players like TidesofTime and Ek0p are not in their best form currently, their previous record readily support the recent achievements of StrifeCro and Kolento.

Cloud 9 aren't that ahead of the competition, however, as Amaz's own team Archon is right behind them. Like Ek0p and TidesofTime, Amaz is no longer in his prime but his eye for talent has definitely paid off. Signing Firebat a month before he became world champion and getting Xixo - one of the best online players in Hearthstone at the moment - later on is what propelled Archon to #2.

This is where the gap between the leaders and the challengers becomes bit as #3 in the team rankings, Tempo Storm, are good 50 points behind Archon. Reynad has been slowly climbing back into the top of NA after several good finishes and acquiring MagicAmy also helped the team a lot but Hyped is strill struggling and Gaara can no longer carry the team on his own.

Georankings breakdown

World top 30





Europe top 30





North American top 30





China top 30





Asia top 30