Seriously they are. Many people I know have finally given up playing hots because of this.
Not because of no updates or support. But because they can’t queue qm or ranked without a 4 or 5 stack on the enemy team half of the time.
It’s not fun, it’s not a challenge and it’s not a learning experience.
It’s a waste of time to play these games and it is frustrating as hell because these stacks are just farming statistics and usually have 80%+ winrates on all their members if you inspect them post-game.
This game at its core is one of the most fun games I know and I could probably play forever. But these stat farming 5 stacks are really making the good reasons to play hots disappear. And as more people quit the game it’s only getting more increasingly common to run into them.
I just don’t get why 5 stacks are even put vs solo q teams in the first place.
They already tried restricting groupes vs goupes by having 5 stacks play vs 3 stacks as minimum but as we saw it got removed cause 5 stacks complained about long que times and we back to square one.
Premades complaining about long que times and solos complaining about facing 5 stacks will always be a thing.
Weak people need support of others in anything they perceive to be even slightly difficult in life. People use cheat codes/exploits because they don’t value the journey of doing something the hard way, they want to skip any hardship and get easy results. No game company will prevent this, because the same people who need 5 stacks will be the ones to blow real money on the game.
Most 5 stacks especially in Quickmatch are just farming winrate by abusing broken team comp + comms vs a unco-ordinated group of solo q players who were just wanting a chill game, but instead get farmed all game by a group who will B Step around your core and drag out the game as long as they can.
5 stacks in QM should have to wait as long as they have to for a game that isn’t vs 5 solos or a duo + 3 solo’s.
Ranked… well we used to have team league and hero league but for some reason that got removed. I don’t know a solution for ranked besides re-add solo q mode.
I played on EU server and I can tell you I faced atleast a dozen of those 5 stacks in QM.
Getting camped at your core by a team full of master players with a single silver smurf to drag mmr down.
Facing a 5 stack that dragged the game out for about 45 min before they core finally got blown up by catapults while the 5 stacks were dancing/taunt spamming infront of us.
Getting farmed by a 5 stack full of master mmr players that taunt on everyone they kill and makes fun of thier victims in party chat. And all of them had 80-95% winrate playing only the same blow up comp with no healer.
Basically just people that know QM is bad and takes advantage of it just to stroke thier ego. No sane team walks around b-stepping/taunting his opponent so much that 5 stacks do nowdays.
And when you tell them to go play ranked they just spam you with laugh emotes and call you trash.
I got no problems with people that 5 stack if they also respect thier opponent but acting like a fortnite kid that need to stroke his ego on everyone he wins against is just bad sportsmanship.
Yea these are the people that are going to kill the game. A lot of people just want to play qm for the stress free environment but that experience is ruined by these 5 stacks.
Those people unironically real and I hate them in all my spite.
Some of those people are just “really good” and play in a 5 party that are really fair, but there’s this specific people who I am not allowed to name due guidelines here are some of absolutely abusive and rude people I ever seen, not only they have the huge amount of bad manners in everything they do, they are balantent cheaters with 95% win rate.
One of those people exploits the EU region to be #1 GM every season by queuing up into 5 diamonds while having diamonds on the team + win traders.
Those people get away with it and there’s nothing being done, but that’s because there’s logically not a way to prove it with the lack of moderation and support this game has.
I refuse to believe they are fair in any way when for the first time of my life, 90% win rate across all games.
I’ve heard also from other masters/GMs that those people also abuse bad match maker and low population times + shady comps so they can have the win in their favor.
Those people don’t just casually “queue” to play, they literally think its a sigma grind for statistic reasons.
On the other hand, there’s some 5 stacks that are 50% - 60% winrate, those tend to be fair.
But overall, the biggest flaw is what I said above, on top of the fact that highly good players of 5 makes it rather difficult to find balanced games.
Also the most common one is 5 stacks vs 1 duo 3 solo, iirc its almost out of the window you will ever be in a game of 5 solo of 5 stack.
I play Solo all the time and Destroy teams regularly.
However, the caveat being, it just so happens that my favorite characters are also Awesome at carrying. Even if i get stuck with a group of chumps, my Hammer or Azmo can pull it together for them, and turn Trash into Gold.
The sad reality is, some characters can’t carry for anything! They can do their own thing very well but, they cannot compensate for lousy players. So i can sorta see what you’re coming from, if your favorite characters have Zero carry ability. Then it would tottally suck if you’re a solo player getting stuck with chumps, and eating losses at the hands of 5-stacks.
My only advice: Only attempt Solo play when using your character’s that can carry well. Save your other guys for those times when you’re playing with friends, aka, your own 5-stack.
Solos are “killing the game” because they try to eridicate parties while bringing in no friends themselves. Instead of popularising the game within their social groups.
(I’m not serious with this post, but I do think that sanctioning ppl who want to play in a socialized manner is silly, and if someone highly refuses to party up, they’re less likely to cooperate well with their teammates.)
I see that kind of rank spread even in Plat. So often it will be a Plat 3 grouped, with four Silver players. This usually results with them being matched against maybe two Plats, but mostly a team of Gold/Silver players.
I can’t believe people are cheating in this game, it’s even more pathetic anyone is doing so in 2023. What kind of clout can someone possibly wield as Hots GM #1 in 2023?
Sometimes you run into groups, and it’s true that you can perform better on average on a team than with randoms.( or at least get a less frustrating game) But not all teams are good. And when you face a team and win, you wont even notice.
I’ve been in plenty of games with 4 other people where we lost every game. No one complains about that.
I mean, what’s the alternative? Tell players they’re not allowed to play together? In a team game?
Actually, the game still does this. It will try to match groups against other groups first. That’s why queue times are longer when you group. A full team facing a team made of all solo is pretty rare. And even then, the average win rate of teams is 51-52%, the game will match them against players with higher MMR if it can’t find a team with the same amount of grouped players…
It’s not cheating because it’s not mentioned in TOS but it has been known about since alpha (mainly because it occurs in other games as well).
Where people would queue up at the same time, using time to stack their teammates instead of partying (time stacking). This would lead to favorable outcomes nearly every time for the people doing this.
For example. 5 ppl queue at the same time with a comp they know will make it more likely they join on the same team. If only 4 of these players make it to team A, team B will have one of their players.
Guess what the one or two players does (usually one) when he doesn’t get on team A with the rest of their teammates?
And this is for every solo mode in various games where ppl use time-based queuing to control the outcomes. It happens a lot in games like Apex or Overwatch for instance.
An enhancement to this technique is to add your adversary to your buddy list so you can see when they are queuing. Which is used to play against people with known skill deficits or impatterned/cyclic/lazy game play.
I have seen a bunch of high-level players take this road and it is despicable. It is inting. It should be bannable.
Yes agree. On the other hand stacking is the only way to play this nightmare of a multiplayer game. Since Blizzard is not rolling out any updates you need to either deal with it or uninstall the trashcan.
The chances are increasing while the playerbase is decreasing, and for years now that you can have hours when you face the same players in multiple matches in a row.
They’ve been killing the game since before it was released. One would think that at some point in the past several years the game would have actually been killed, but they don’t seem to be capable of actually finishing the deed.