The team over at Blizzard working on Hearthstone have announced some big changes coming to the game's Ranked Play system in the March Season, but what's important to note here is that these changes will need to be considered while playing in February, as these results will feed into this new system.
Starting in March, all players will be reset four ranks back, with Legend players starting March at Rank 4 and Rank 15 going back to 19, for example. "Currently, the monthly reset feels different depending on what rank players end at each month. Players at the top of the ladder feel like they have too many ranks to climb through, whereas players on the other end of the ladder feel like they hit a wall pretty quickly," Blizzard writes. "With this change, players who gain more than 4 ranks each month will start each month higher than they did the last."
What's more is that each rank will also contain 5 stars as part of this change too, meaning that all players will experience the same progression, regardless of their place on the ladder. Also, to get your monthly card back you'll need to win five games now as opposed to hitting Rank 20, and here's what Blizzard had to say about this:
"The change in stars at each rank would otherwise have a significant downside: While the monthly card back reward at rank 20 was only 10 wins away from rank 25, starting in March it will be 25. So, this change will also help make sure that getting monthly rewards doesn't become more challenging. Reward chests will still increase in value with each rank attained."
Since these changes are pretty big, there'll also be a transitionary period while elements of both systems are in place, and for more on the update as a whole check out the developer diary below. What do you make of these changes?