If you ran the Hearthstone Arena as an 8,192 person tournament, here's what would happen:
· 0.65% of people would get 12 wins
· 1.12% of people would get 11+ wins
· 1.93% of people would get 10+ wins
· 3.27% of people would get 9+ wins
· 5.47% of people would get 8+ wins
· 8.98% of people would get 7+ wins
· 14.45% of people would get 6+ wins
· 22.66% of people would get 5+ wins
· 34.38% of people would get 4+ wins
· 50% of people would get 3+ wins
· 68.75% of people would get 2+ wins
· 87.5% of people would get at least 1 win
· 12.5% of people would go 0-3
Now let's distill these results and get a sense of what they mean.
Starting at the top, with 12 wins, that's really freakin' hard. To put it into perspective: a random NFL team is almostfive times more likely to win the Superbowl than a random Hearthstone player is to get to 12 wins. Only about 1 out of every 155 Arena entries makes it all the way to the top.
To get to 7 wins, you need to be better than roughly 10 out of every 11 players. Even to get to 6 wins consistently on average -- at which point you aren't even making back your entry fee -- you still have to be better than roughly 6 out of every 7 players.
Let's go even lower. Let's say you just want to get to 4 wins consistently. Guess what, you still have to be in almost the top third of all Hearthstone players.
Now let's go all the way down. Let's say you've set your bar real low, and only want to get 1 win consistently. It isn't trivial. Exactly 1/8th of Hearthstone players get a score of 0-3. This means that if you sampled 1,000,000 random Arena entries, about one hundred and twenty-five thousand of them would finish with a 0-win score.
In other words, all else being equal, the Arena is hard. Only a minority of players can post even modest (4-win, 5-win) results consistently, and that minority quickly dwindles to a minuscule size as you climb up to higher numbers of wins. Again, this is a hard mathematical cap: more than about 3.27% of players CAN'T get up to 9+ wins, period. It's not mathematically possible.
Does this mean you shouldn't play Arena? No! The thing is, most people don't try to get good. If you actually put forward effort to improve your play, you'll be doing something almost nobody else is doing, and you'll see great results. At the same time, people who casually write things like "it's not too hard to get to 5 or 6 wins" are wrong.
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