Next Steps and our special sauce

Hi Team Hearth League! Things are progressing better than I had hoped for the our alpha season. We have enough people and now all I need is for everyone (who hasn’t already) to fill out the Member Info Form on our site.


Once I have everyone’s info, I will post a list of all the teams and free agents, and the captains can begin recruiting free agents for their team. Speaking of captains, we have many more people signed up as free agents than captains, and one or two more captains will help to align the player to captain ratio a little better. If you signed up as a free agent but would consider being a captain, please email me.


Warning: wall of text incoming - feel free to ignore the following if you want. I’d like to take few moments to talk about the special sauce that makes our league possible - the “Player Rating” (PR) system. Last year I participated in a casual bowling league. My bowling average is about 150. For most league players, that’s really low. However, this league gave full handicap points. That meant that as long as I beat my average, my contribution to the team was just as important as another teammate whose average was above 200. The better bowlers on my team were always eager to help me improve, partially because the better I played, the better our team’s chances of winning would be. By the end of the season, we won the league I ended up being the MVP of the team just because I was able to consistently beat my very mediocre average. It was so much fun. I went from being self-conscious about my ability to feeling like a superstar. That was my inspiration for the Team Hearth League.


I’m pretty sure that there’s no good way to handicap a Hearthstone game. Instead of handicaps, we can “seed” players similar to how it’s done in a school tennis meet. Your best player (1st seed) matches up against the opposing teams best player and so on for all the seeds. The matches of the best and worst players are equally important to the team’s success. To make this work, we need a system to measure a player’s ability so we can match them against a player of similar ability. That’s the Player Rating system. Winning and losing will adjust your PR in a way that, with enough games under your belt, should be a pretty accurate measurement of your ability. The player with the highest PR on a team will be the 1st seed, second highest PR will be 2nd seed and so on.


Notice that there’s no direct method to ensure that your opponent has a comparable PR. If you’re the second best player on your team, you’ll play against the other team’s second best player. It’s quite possible for that player to have a much higher PR than you. This means that we need a way to prevent a team full of ringers. After all, it’s not much fun for a rank 15 player to get stomped by legend player who happens to be the lowest rated player on a stacked team. So we need a way to enforce parity between teams. We do this by having a “PR Cap”. The PR Cap is just a maximum number of total PR points that one team can have. Think of it as similar to a salary cap in pro sports. So it’s perfectly legal for a team to have really strong legend players in the 1st and 2nd seeds, but if they do that, they’ll have to sacrifice strength at the 3rd and 4th seed positions. Since 3rd and 4th seed wins count for just as much, this strategy compromises the team’s ability to win at all levels. A better strategy is to have well rounded team where you have a good chance to win at every level.


For more details on how the Player Ratings and PR Cap systems work, check out the Rules section of our site.