Hey everyone! I just posted over in the Competitive forum with some ideas that could really level up the ranked play experience in Heroes of the Storm. If you’re interested in making ranked games more rewarding, balanced, and competitive, definitely check it out. It’s my first post in the Competitive section, so would love to hear what the community thinks!
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s being discussed:
- Extended Hero Selection Time: Adding an extra minute to hero selection so players can make more deliberate choices, coordinate team comps, and avoid those last-second panic picks that often don’t work out.
- Macros for In-Game Communication: Bringing in customizable macros to help players make quick, clear calls without relying on vague pings or stopping to type mid-fight. Think instant commands like, “Group up for objective” or “Help with gank” – it’d be a game-changer for team coordination.
- Better Rank Placement for Skilled Players: Instead of everyone starting at the bottom, placing skilled players in higher ranks right away so they’re competing with others at their level. This would reduce mismatches, cut down on toxic games, and give us all more quality matches from the start.
- Performance-Based Ranking: Recognizing individual player performance rather than just wins or losses. Skilled healers, damage dealers, and objective players would see their efforts reflected in their rank, even if the team doesn’t win.
- Pre-Select PvP Talents: A simple quality-of-life feature to let us pre-select talents so we don’t have to break focus mid-game to choose. The talent would automatically activate when we level up, keeping us in the action without interruption.
If any of this resonates, come on over to the Competitive forum and add your thoughts. Would love to get more voices in the conversation!
3 Likes
I’m for people putting up suggestions, but I think if anyone glances over at your competitive discussion, they’d be more keen to argue whether it’s alt-posting or AI copypasta. Dead topic with a few new voices all made in the same span of time all liking each other and excited for those ideas… :suspicious_emote_here
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some of the draw away from ranked is that draft takes "too long’ as is, so selling the idea of taking additional time in the lobby is going to take more than a post of pep talk. Some people use voice chat or discord to figure that stuff out with what time is given.
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There’s some merits to certain communication options: the game used to have a ‘chat wheel’ years ago. However, players can make their own (some offer links for downloads) or script macros for particular chat commands. So while it’s not as ‘official’, there are existing options, most of which involve that voice-chat Blizz (finally) added that people don’t use natively and instead use discord. Even pugs copy/paste discord links for attempting to coordinate chat for ‘real’ players.
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People don’t ‘start at the bottom’, but they also don’t get as boosted as they used to be. There’s also carry-over from one season to the next (not starting at the bottom) but this seems like a concern for alt-accounts that are convinced they are better than they can actually perform and seem to lack the foresight that similar assistance in placement could be used for ‘troll accounts’ that want to reach a certain level just to throw games and drag some down with them. That’s also why they pay to get boosted to get the ranks for trolling said levels.
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PBMM was tried, crashed and burned, and likely won’t be attempted again despite the ai for it potentially still running in the background (trying to learn to rank and predict better) Also, PBMM isn’t a fix – due to the disparity in stat padding between low and high ranks – it’s just coddling select players that think they’ll do better and look for ways to skirt around ‘lost’ games to try to make themselves look better.
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There are hotkeys for selecting favorited talents. If said competitive players are supposed to be sooo good at the game to have the ranks they think they ‘deserve’ on every smurf they roll, then they should be more than capable of setting the hotkey preference to preselect their talents. Ya know, so they can convince themselves that their one-trick pick is going to need that extra time requested above to figure out how they predetermine their game instead of adhering to the dev intent of adjusting picks to suit the match as it progresses.