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Hearthstone8 years agoRadoslav "Nydra" Kolev

Who are the best players and teams in Hearthstone at the start of 2016?


 

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 580 tournaments and 20,000 matches, the Hearthstone rankings track players’ career-long performance in all tournaments and qualifiers they take part in and appoints them a certain number.

Since May 2015, the rankings have been using a proprietary algorithm, specifically designed to reward consistency, a change tailored to the nature of competitive Hearthstone. 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. Tournament importance is determined through a variety of factors including format, offline/online, prize pool, invitational/partially open/open, having HWC points and more.

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

  • Note 1: Recent 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.


 

Event & prize poolTierWinnerRunner-up
WCA 2015 • $190,000Tier 1Korea DawNUnited States Firebat
i-League 4 • $78,000Tier 1China SwordChina Izoro
Truesilver Championship • $30,000Tier 1Romania RduSweden Legendaren
Celestial Invitational • $25,000Tier 2Germany LifecoachTaiwan Tom60229
WePlay League • $5,000Tier 3Germany XixoGermany MrYagut

 

World's top 3

 

All ranking numbers are as of January 12th. It's possible that rankings have changed at press time.


 

Ryan “Purple” Root couldn’t hoist the World Championship trophy but he’s had more than a fruitful tail-end of the year. Albeit disappointing, his Blizzcon campaign got sandwiched between two major successes – his first places at HWC America and DreamHack Winter.

It was the event in Jonkoping that helped propel Purple to the top of the rankings. Losing only one series the entire weekend, GamersOrigin’s coach scoreboarded a 12-1 run, winning skirmishes against the best in the business: SuperJJ, AKAWonder, Powder, Hulk and more. Purple’s trip to China for WCA 2015 wasn’t bad either and he took all but one of his group stage matches and made it to the top 16 before ending his run there.

A recipient of praises galore, Purple should look forward to further back up his end of the year achievements.


 

After having had a fantastic 2015, Frederik “Hoej” Nielsen finally made it to the highest layers of the GosuRankings. The Dane has been pursuing the competitive peaks ever since HouseCup #2 became his break-out performance. In September, he finished first at Gfinity Summer II and took top four at DreamHack Winter in November and it’s been nothing but consistency in between.

It’s exactly Hoej’s career-long high win rates that elevated him so high, unlike Purple whose rise happened in the last quarter of the year. Hoej maintained a 64 percent win rate throughout 2015, a very respectable number observed in just a handful of Hearthstone players. In fact, when we think of how to best describe Na`Vi’s player in 2015, a comparison between him and the #3 player comes to mind.

ThijsNL didn’t have the best time during League of Explorers. After smashing GosuRanking records and losing at the World Championship in the round of four, the Dutchman returned home to find a sticky slump waiting for him. In November, he hit the lowest point of his career at 28.5 percent win-rate. Even though he improved in December, he still failed to break the 50 percent.

The fall of ThijsNL was long and rough and had it been any other player he would’ve been likely out of the top ten altogether. But ThijsNL is no ordinary player. At the time of his GosuRanking peak, he was sitting at 1453 points, at one point having a 200 point lead before the runner-up. Even at the time of his decline, it took two months for the rest to catch on and it was in mid December that David “Dog” Caero took over the #1 position.

Nowadays, ThijsNL has fallen down to #3 but he’s not too far from reclaiming the top spot if he recovers form. The gap between him and Hoej is less than ten points, basically closed with a single win.

 

Team rankings

 

The GosuRankings automatically track and calculate team rankings for all Hearthstone rosters available in our system. The ranking points you see are calculated based on several factors:

 

  • The team ranking is an average of the individual rankings of its players.
     
  • When averaging, the system only accounts for the active (currently ranked) players on the teams. If a team has 5 players, but 2 of them haven't had a game in two months or haven't had played their 15 "placement" matches, only the remaining 3 will be included in the calculation.
     
  • Teams with less than 2 active players are not ranked.
     
  • The ranking system doesn't account for team's wins/losses as collective in team tournaments like ATLC or NEL, it only feeds on the performances of the team's players. This is done as not all HS teams have the opportunity to participate in the few team leagues available.

 

If you feel like a team is missing from our database or is not fully updated, drop us an email at radoslav[at]gosugamers.net.

Note: The averaged rankings have been calculated as of January 12th.

 

#TeamPointsChange
1.Natus Vincere1,208-
2.Cloud 91,149+3
3.G2 Esports1,148-1
4.Team Archon1,139-1
5.Team Liquid1,118+2
6.GamersOrigin1,105N/A
7.Team Dignitas1,100-3
8.Complexity1,082N/A
9.All Killers1,078-
10.Hearthlytics1,076-2
11.SK Gaming1,073+3
12.Yolo Miracle1,067-1
13.Luminosity Gaming1,050N/A
14.Team Celestial1,049-8
15London Conspiracy1,040N/A

 

It doesn’t look like Na`Vi will soon be dethroned from the first place position they’ve been holding on to since their creation. Xixo, Hoej and Ostkaka all seem in top shape and it will take a roster-wide drop of form for Na`Vi to surrender the top.

Thus, let’s move on to the runner-ups. Just one point apart (so virtually tied for second) are Cloud 9 and G2 Esports, with the former in the lead. C9 are still being carried hard by Kolento, who currently holds the respectable #5 worldwide, but they’ve also have had help from Ekop who climbed back to the top 30 by the end of the year. G2, on the other hand, are finally experiencing the weight of Lothar’s competitive record and even though Thijs, Lifecoach and Rdu are all in the top 20, they barely lost the race for the silver, especially after the rough end of the year that the former two have had.

On fourth place come the boys from Archon, still led by the brave Firebat and his side-kick Orange. Apart from them two, however, things are not looking brilliant. Zalae is towards the bottom half of the top 50 and their captain Amaz is even lower.

Finally, we wrap up the top 5 with Team Liquid, the rating resting on the mighty shoulders of Dog, currently world’s fourth best player. The former Complexity star is far ahead of his team-mates and despite their occasional successes, Neirea and Sjow are still towards the end of world’s top 50.

For the first time in a long while, we see four newcomers to the rankings. GamersOrigin parked just outside the top 5, largely thanks to Purple’s meteoric rise to power. Similarly, Complexity have landed on #8 through SuperJJ’s end of the year wins. Luminosity and London Conspiracy also found their way to the top 15, but are far behind the leaders still.

All in-article photos by: DreamHack
Front page photo: Sebastian Ekman / DreamHack

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