#maximum tinfoil

[hypexion]

You, a fool: Tyrek Lannister was abducted during the riot in King's Landing

Me, an intellectual: Tyrek Lannister's Planeswalker spark ignited during the riot in King's Landing

[hypexion]

Conspiracystone: The Pack Enigma

Welcome to Conspiracystone, where we consider the forbidden Hearthstone truths they don’t want you to consider! Who are they? None other than Activision-Blizzard themselves! Yes, the very creators of Hearthstone could be... up to something.

Here’s a fact: Not all pack openings are equal. The ‘pity timer‘ is a well know phenomena. For those not in the know, you can’t open more than 10 packs from a set without getting an Epic, and you can’t open more than 40 packs in a set without opening a Legendary. Not that Team Five, nor their nefarious  masters have actually admitted to such a thing. Heck, they only published the minimum drop rate information possible when pressured by law, which is pretty shady!

Drop rates for each rarity have been given. They’ve also been calculated via community efforts, so we know we aren’t being lied to directly. The average for Epics is one in every five packs, or 5% of cards open. The average for Legendaries is one in every twenty packs, or 1% of cards opened. As mentioned before, you can’t opened more than twice the average number of packs for a drop without getting a card of that rarity.

So, the rarity distribution for packs is dynamic, based on how long it has been since you opened an Epic and Legendary card in the given set. So how can we be sure that the card distribution within rarities is static? One explanation for the bug where Mean Streets of Gadgetzan packs gave excessive numbers of tri-class cards was that there are pity timers for class cards, and something was screwing them up. Which I find fairly convincing - something had to cause such an aberration, and if it was a serious error with the (untested) card distribution algorithm, it could easily lead to such a problem. And if class cards do have pity timers, it now means that cards of the same rarity no longer have equal drop rates. Which would help to cover up any other alterations performed on drop rates.

Let’s be honest: We can’t trust Activision-Blizzard not to screw with drop rates. This is a company that patented a system to manipulate matchmaking in order to push microtransactions. So any of the data they can collect about your playing habits could be fed into an algorithm to alter card drop rates. Play one class more than the others? Perhaps that class’ cards appear less often, to encourage you to play other classes and buy more packs. Uneven completion of each class’ sub-sets? The drop rates could change to favour the classes you have less cards for. You average game time is higher or lower? Perhaps the drop rates is alters to favour cards of certain costs. And maybe everyone’s statistics are considered. Cards for dominate classes appear less. Cards that are played more might appear less. A new hero is added, so the cards for their class appears more. And do we even need to stay within Hearthstone? Perhaps the drop rate of Priests might go up if Anduin is added to Heroes of the Storm. There are masses of statistics that can be collected and analyzed. Just what are they being used for? And can you really trust those packs?

Well, I hope you enjoyed this bout of paranoia. But remember: You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.