This is something I've been thinking about the past few days, and kind of worked it out in my head. It still needs to be fleshed out a bit more (so I'd love comments/suggestions/thoughts), but I think the base idea is solid.
I think implementing a win trade feature could be very useful, and a win-win for both the user, and hearthranger in general.
The first thing worth mentioning is, the idea would only work well with the following caveats
1) The more people who use hearthranger and opt into win trading, the more likely it will be to work.
2) People have to opt into the feature understanding that some times they'll take a loss, and some times they'll take a win.
To implement this, the following things will need to be done:
Hearthranger's backend will need to support win trading. Basically, it will need to track who has it enabled, and how many wins/losses they've received.
An algorithm needs to be created to decide who takes the win and who takes the loss
An "enable win trading" option needs to be added to the client.
How it would work:
Every day, Hearthranger's servers would pick a set of arbitrary times throughout the day for people to queue up for win trading (known forth as "queue up time").
Anyone with win trading enabled, must be logged in at least 10 minutes prior to the queue up time.
Any bots who meets those requirements (win trading enabled, logged in at least 10 minutes prior to the queue up time) would stop queuing up matches 10 minutes before the queue up time (maybe even less, but we want to give bots enough time to finish up matches, and not start a new one).
Once the queue up time hits, all bots with win trading enabled will queue up ranked at the exact same time
Once the match starts, the bot sends a message to Hearthranger's backend that a match has started, their own battletag ID, as well as the battletag name of the person they are playing against.
If confirmed both players are bots with win trading enabled, Hearthranger's backend then uses some algorithm to decide who takes the win, and who takes the loss.
From there, the bots would play as normal except the losing bot purposely skips turns, skips attacks, makes bad value trades, etc. Alternatively, the bot taking the loss can just concede, but I think if that happens too much it'd be too easy to detect.
Repeat again at the next queue up time.
Additional Ideas:
The queue up times should be fairly common (2 or 3 times an hour, maybe more). This will allow for maximum gain, and allow more bots to take part
The queue up times should be randomized every day to keep it from being too obvious.
Besides the "enable win trading" option in the client, there should also be a "ONLY win trade" option for people who ONLY want to take advantage of win trading. This would allow them to maximize their ranking, by not queuing up normally, and only win trading.
While this would take a good deal of work to get implemented (creating the back end, and implementing the features into the client), I think it would be worth the extra work.
1) The more people who use this feature, the better it would work. That means, more people would be likely to use hearthranger over other bots
2) While it could be useful for people who use the free trial 4 hours, it would work best when you have a real account, meaning more incentive to convert free trials into paid accounts
3) People are who only interested in ranking have a better chance at ranking up higher with weaker decks since you aren't really playing the numbers game
4) Besides coming up with a fair algorithm to decide who takes the win, the back end work to set up win trading shouldn't be that difficult to implement.
I'd love to hear other's thoughts about this, as well as if you'd use this feature if available. Like I said originally, the idea still needs a bit more fleshing out, but I feel like this is a good start.
