Our team, ~52% WR average
Their team, 2 stack over 80% WR and the other 3 ~49% WR
Hidden MMR thinks it’s “even” but it isn’t. When will Blizz understand that 2 exceptional players vs a bunch of 5 average solo players isn’t even nor fair?
geez…
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Even if they wanted to block said matchups in 2025, it’d be impossible due to the low player base.
How many would be willing to wait 60-120 minutes for a truly fair 2015 style match when the game had millions of players to work with?
Tbh, I see the matchmaker breaking all the supposed rules, all the time. On rare occassions, even creating heal vs no heal in qm just to get a match going outside peak hours.
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The size of the player base has nothing to do with it and I really hate you using that as an argument. The smaller the player base just makes it so that the same solo player could run into a specific premade much more often. Even if the premade is composed of poorer players, an individual on the receiving end will leave the game with a much different conclusion - one that he might experience a much better treatment elsewhere.
The real question is one of convenience and if you are playing in a larger group by all means should expect to be treated differently by the matchmaker.
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As stated before, the matchmaker is already setup to pit groups vs groups.
The smaller the player base, the harder it is for the matchmaker to find what it needs. If you have 100 000 people playing, it’s easier to find a group of the exact same size and same player MMR than if you’re looking among 600 players.
Player base size absolutely makes a difference.
It’s blatant favoritism at the cost of solo player experience.
Matchmaker will correctly match one large premade against another, but in case of premade vs random, all rules of fair play are too often disregarded.
A premade team at a MMR deficit will consistently beat a team of randoms because of all other advantages (team experience, drafting and communication).
In case of equal MMR, the matchmaking could already be described as a rude joke at the expense of randoms.
Usually the premades are favored in every kind of way, hence why many of them casually start off at around 60% winrate and climb to an even more absurd extremes.
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QM isn’t ever going to be “even”. Blizzard has known this; you have had years of people telling you this, there are years of forum/reddit/whatever community forewarning everyone else about this.
If you want an “even” game, then you don’t play QM. QM is a trashheap to incentive people to play other modes. The purpose of QM is to ensure you get a specific hero pick, and then the consequences that come from allowing a hero like Nova to be a top pick in a mode of randos.
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Playerbase does have a key role in matchmaking-service quality.
So many videos exist that try to explain the magical math of “what matchmaking sucks” for pretty much ‘every’ online game that has a ‘competitive’ goal relying on that matchmaking. Have a game, and you could probably find a video specific to that community explaining the math of matchmaking on where ‘x’ type game needs ‘y’ amount of players to function.
If 10% of your players are going to play a ‘tank’, and 20% are expected to play, then it takes a “playerbase” of people to fill in the gaps. Every constraint considered for making a match multiples that factors incremented for the potential playerbase needed to try to fill that need.
It’s not as if there isn’t an absence of guides, discords, replays, and a host of other outlets to try to encourage what players are there to try to be more than the average cannon fodder they content themselves to remain.
So, if they aren’t going to change themselves, then it’s going to take numbers to be the alternative instead.
Even if the game remade the roster to be mostly "tanks’ and “healers”, the ‘typical’ player would probably still skip over filling that role and expect anyone else to do it for them instead while they pretend they’re going to ‘carry’ the game and tin-foil theory that is magically holding them back, year after year, game after game.
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What?
Matchmakers always been able to get more fair matchups faster when you have more people actively playing.
People after a certain amount of time, just quit the queue. If people were all willing to wait longer, the player begins to matter far less. So more players allows anyone running a matchmaker to keep the time low, while clamping down on how much variance in skill between teams is allowed.
But “playerbase has nothing to do with it” is simply nonsense.
Sources: I play an indie that grew from WC3 customs on Steam, and they literally have a queue that every couple of months someone asks why one of their modes doesn’t focus on ranks, and their answer leads with playerbase vs team size.
Their mode with half sized teams has a working matchmaker which is excellent.
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But people really in general don’t see to understand matchmaking and matchmakers in general.
The whole “blizz force 50% winrate” thing, which is an ideal perfect matchmaker will result in a 50% winrate if it is perfectly accurate.
Making a ranking table with 600 players in a 5v5 game accurately is impossible. In such a system even a random plat 1 could be worse than a silver 1 due to sheer luck.
In a game with 6 million players rank differentiation becomes extreme, there is a clear and nuanced difference even between a gold 5 and gold 1 with so many players online.
That’s all the more reason to stop premades altogether. There isn’t a large enough playerbase to make them fair anymore.
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Blizzard (well, Microsoft) did go that route in Master+ in April 2025 because the current low population makes gaming the system too easy with all kinds of trickery, so you’re only allowed to duo queue in that rank now.
- Reduced maximum party size for Master and Grand Master players to 2.
IMO, if they extended that to other ranks too, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Hero League was solo/duo only at first too. There was a separate Team League for those who want to play as 5 (which wouldn’t work with the current low population).
I would quite prefer it if SL was solo or duo only. Solo only works too.
Just because you feel that QM is meant to be a “trashheap”, doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t make attempts at trying to fix it. Go play ranked and leave your opinion about QM outside of this discussion if you don’t anything productive to say.
There is a quick and easy solution to the stack “problem”:
Quit being an antisocial twerp and find yourself 4 other players to play with.
HotS is a team game. Play it like one.
Just had a game
My team: All solo players, average WR: 52.7%
Vs
5 Stack: average WR: 78.1%!!! One guy had 83.2%WR over 3200 games!!!
COME ON PEOPLE… THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR FAR TOO LONG…
This game released in 2015 and the earliest thread I can find about pre-made is back in 2016, even people were concern and joking about pre-mades stomping in QM
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/735939-heroes-of-the-storm/72964831
if hots is a “team game” then the game should FORCE people to be in a stack.
For example, 5 solo players will queue, the game will put them in a group for that game, the players can choose their heroes, see each other’s heroes and the it will requeue them.
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Its a team game regardless if you queue up solo.
Find 4 players to play with you. Thats how the game is played best.
Stop unnecessarily sabotaging yourself by queuing up solo.
Speaking of a ladder that accepts both solo and parties, such a thing can have no legitimacy.
With a clownshow matchmaking like this they should just start matching according to party size and loosen MMR restrictions. The worst that can come out of it is solo player experience becoming statistically more bearable and if premades start complaining about overall fairness, such a turn of events is long overdue.
Now this is likely an issue of the MMer gives up, because their shared MMR is to high, so if breaks QM given relatively small playerbase.
Literally just a playerbase problem.
Dunno a good solution for goth sides of these matchups. 
Not without massive playerbase expansion, that is.
True… A person who has little to no clue could fill in as healer for a GM team, drag the team average rank down to plat and rise to a rank they have absolutely no business playing at having a win rate of 90%+. (No longer possible since the April patch that limits GM’s in a party to 2)
The ladder is quite a mess and a result of 10 years of experiments by Blizzard. Fortunately it’s at least slightly self correcting, so someone who got boosted to Master (usually) doesn’t stay there for too long if they are brave enough to continue playing solo.
The stacks chose their bed, they should lie in it.
They should suffer with long queues till they find a match worthy of them, rather than making a group of people who through no fault of their own, would otherwise face a game with extremely lopsided odds.
It’s as simple as that. Better for the team that’ll win more to wait longer, than for innocent players to suffer through games you might as well quit rather than play.
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