Which players and teams topped the new GosuRankings after May? Here's our report

What are the GosuRankings?

The GosuRankings is the most extensive player database in existence for Hearthstone. Fueled by the GosuGamers tournament database which currently spans over more than 500 tournaments and 13,000 matches, the Hearthstone rankings track players’ career-long performance in all tournaments, qualifiers and showmatches they take part in and appoints them a certain numbers.

Since last month, the rankings are using a proprietary algorithm, specifically designed to reward consistency, a changed tailored to the nature of the Hearthstone game and scene. The rankings also take into account the so called “tournament importance” meaning winning the World Championship means more than coming on top of a weekly $100 open cup.

Below, we take a look at the bigger events that happened in the month of May. To exemplify the ranking importance, we've provisionally tiered them on the scale of "Tier 4" (lowest) to "Tier 1" (highest).



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

Note 2: Tournament importance varies 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.





World's top 3

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





From what we can see, nobody’s stopping Firebat easily. May might not have been the best month for the Archon headliner – then again, there weren’t that many tournaments to begin with – but just before that he was absolutely ablaze. Back-to-back Gfinity wins made him the first defending champion in Hearthstone’s history, and coming into Summer Masters I he can be nothing short of the biggest favorite.

But the London arena wasn’t the only battlefield where Firebat did well. At the end of April, he placed second in the first DreamHack of the year and since then he’s made it to the playoffs of other major tournaments like KPL.

With all the successes, however, Firebat has one person to thank for his first place today: StrifeCro, who narrowly lost the finals of the Viagame HouseCup #3, putting himself just three points behind the reigning world champion.





StrifeCro is probably very mad at himself. For all his career-long consistency and top form, he’s still lacking a major offline championship. Though it’s not for the lack of trying or lack of skill – we all well know he’s doing great in both.

On the recent online front, StrifeCro added to his rich collection of trophies a bronze medal from KPL after absolutely destroying the group stage, and he managed to get top 4 in the HTC Invitational as well. He even reached the finals of HouseCup #3, not dropping a single game before the semi finals, and this is where the curse of the offline environment returned. Within one game of a spectacular comeback against eventual champion Lifecoach, StrifeCro’s Zoo fell to the power of the wild.

There’s not much more to add about StrifeCro, honestly; he’s been on these pages more than almost any other player. While he’s searching for his major championship, StrifeCro casually has an overall win-rate of 64%, has proven himself resilient to every metagame change and is always counted the favorite no matter what tournament he attends.

If you think we’ll be reading about him again in one month’s time, you’re probably correct.





In the entire world of Hearthstone, there’s probably no other player who’s had a better 2015 than Lifecoach. Going full-time Hearthstone after joining Nihilum did wonders for the German and between February and March he was on the ridiculous 86% win-rate. Nowadays, the numbers has dropped to “only” 65% but that’s OK because he’s winning even bigger tournaments nowadays.

Indeed, where Lifecoach’s previous wins came in small-time online invitationals and major results were lacking, the modern version of Mr. Koy is nothing like that anymore. The former poker player came within inch of winning the Kinguin PRO League but made it up to his Nihilum team-mates by presiding over HouseCup #3, showing prowess not only in standard conquest, but also in the demanding and complex format of the Viagame tournament.

Lifecoach’s climb up the rankings will continue to be a story to follow in 2015. After being an on-and-off player in 2014, today the HouseCup champion is ready to overthrone veterans like Firebat and StrifeCro and their multiple tournament wins. A couple more wins, and the GosuRankings might have a new king in July.



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 teams 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.

Note: The averaged rankings have been calculated as of June 4th.

As we can see from the table above, a lot of new teams made it to the top 10 rankings, which caused several teams to drop down in the standings. But let’s start from top to bottom.

The race on the top continues to be between Cloud 9 and Nihilum, as these teams’ front-liners continue to perform when it counts. The brightest example of that was during the last HouseCup where Nihilum and C9 met once again with Lifecoach playing StrifeCro in the final. The difference between the two powerhouses in marginal, mere 4 points, but at least this month Cloud 9 will go to bed as the winners of the rivalry. In third place we have Team Archon once again. Amaz’s team hosts a number of prominent champions but those couldn’t quite get them into the top 2.

At #4 and #5 we have two newcomers and the former is the recently founded Team Celestial. Harboring the talents of China’s #1 player TiddlerCelestial and ESL Legendary Series winner SilentStorm, Celestial is picking up pace but it needs to start sending its other players to events as well. Right now, it’s Tiddler and SilentStorm carrying the roster, but a month of bad performance and Celestial might come crashing.

Following Celestial are Team Liquid, finally picking up a third active member in Sjow. The horseheads have been omitted from the rankings thus far due to their small roster but the Swede brought the European trio to an average ranking of 1078, wrapping up the top 5.

Here comes the big gap between the leaders and those trying to catch-up. Trig fell out of the top 5 and are whole 28 points behind Liquid. Breathing in their neck is China’s finest squad Yolo Miracle. Look out, Faramir, Powder and DTwo, the East is coming for you.

At #9 we have Tempo Storm, seeing a major drop of four places. Once a top 3 regular, Reynad’s command is in tough shape as they’re still on the hunt for a championship, but bar Gaara’s minor success at HyperX, none such is coming. Maybe Reynad will turn it around for his team at Nvidia Pro/Am and ESL Legendary Series S2, who knows?



More on Follow @GosuGamersHS



