LOL imagine thinking murky or qhira are “weak” heroes with lots of bad matchups. You do know the game factors in your hero specific MMR when matchmaking correct? If your MMR with one hero is particularly high, you’ll routinely get matched with players who are newer to their hero in QM. The more you win, the more likely the game will eventually match you against heroes that statistically perform well against your hero. This is actually why ranked tends to be a lot easier than QM, as you get some control over the team comps and people tend to pick heros that they are decent at.
2 Likes
WHICH. ONE. IS. IT 
These don’t contradict each other? My first quote was about players on my team.
2 Likes
Right, of course it’s both. It’s an omniscient and omnipotent God that pulls together perfect comps of five bad players that all deserve losses (but not you, you’re a really good player that just happens to need to lose) and also pulls together five enemies that need to win and also happen to have picked heroes that perfectly counter your random team… all in around 30 seconds. In a game with a middling playerbase.
Man, you’d think that if Blizzard could do all that, they’d just make perfectly equal matches that have a 50/50 for either team winning. Weird they wouldn’t do that. It’s kind of like bad matches are unintentional.
I’m not sure why you’re making it so complicated? The goal of any matchmaking system is to keep you at around 50% win/loss. If you go beyond that, it will do what it can to bring you back down to 50%. This includes giving you worse teammates than your opponents and matching you against heroes that perform statistically well against your hero, or a combination of the two. It’s not some all knowing system that is out to get good players, it’s a simple matchmaking system designed to keep you at 50% and make it progressively more difficult to have a higher win %.
4 Likes
I’ve replied in another such thread recently.
My theory is that there’s no 50% target margin or something, but that your ELO is too spiky.
You win a couple of games, and the system boosts your ELO really fast, putting you among people of MUCH higher skill than you.
Then you lose several games, and the system lowers your ELO just as quickly, resulting in you finding yourself among total newbies.
So you win again.
And so you’re constantly going through this roller-coaster, because each win or loss shifts your ranking WAY too much.
You get 50% as a median after playing hundreds of matches like that.
While this is true, the ideal situation is when you always play with people of your level, and that results in struggle and 50% win/loss at roughly equal odds.
What happens in HOTS, however, is that 70% of matches I play are extremely one-sided. We either win hard, or lose hard. BOTH are bad experience. This shouldn’t happen like that in a good game.
2 Likes
This is the correct response.
Emphasis added. The match maker does what it can with what it has. But the population is low, and in a downward spiral.
A good suggestion I have seen elsewhere in the forum is to allow players to set rules for match-maker settings, even for QM; e.g., healer required, match roles, etc. This might help the situation for those willing to wait longer.
1 Like
I would rather wair 10 minutes every time if I could have that.
I don’t like Draft though. Because I’m always forced to either play what I don’t want to play, or to play in a very bad team comp. Because most of the time you aren’t the first pick, and that means that everyone will just pick something they like and then you gotta try and salvage the composition with your pick.
Furthermore, the open-ness and bans means that your choice of heroes is limited to meta - everything else will either be countered hard or banned.
1 Like
this happened some months ago. It didn’t go well. A lot of people were pissed. This is why we have the bonus xp for tank-support heroes. I gues you were playing with lol around that time, so you missed it.
This. Point on. I would not care if I lose every single game, if my whole team played apt and on the same level. In the last 90+ loses i had one game where I enjoyed the loss. The team spirit was nice, no ‘idiot’, no flames, we tried our best, we listened to each other. The other team was simply better, but it was NOT A STOMP, we had great time.
But getting Stomped or even having a Stomp (aka the 3 level difference or even multi tier difference) is not fun. The latter is not as bad, cause hey you still won, but it is still not really fun.
Rare is the match you truly enjoy.
4 Likes
I’m doing it to highlight how ridiculous the conspiracy is. You can’t just flip a switch and “force someone to lose” in a game with ten players. Especially when you have to factor that all ten of those players would have be considered by that system. There’s a lot more going on.
That is not true. The goal of matchmaking is to make sure you have an equal chance of winning or losing. If you have an equal chance of winning or losing, you will trend towards 50%. An even win/loss is a byproduct of balanced design, not the goal of it.
If you are winning lots, you are facing opponents who are not your skill level. Vice versa applies. Your MMR will trend towards your actual skill level.
Here’s the thing: why would they want to implement a system like this, and just pretend they didn’t? What does Blizzard gain by keeping Murky mains at 50%? If there’s no reason for something to function that way and it would require some effort to create and maintain, then Occam’s Razor dictates it probably doesn’t exist.
Is the matchmaking in HotS perfect? Of course not. But there’s no conspiracy at play. It’s just the law of large numbers.
2 Likes
The goal is to offer an equal chance of winning or losing; having an even chance of outcomes is deemed “fair”.
The issue of topics like these is they seem to claim that the system can correctly appraise ‘skill’ and thus know who will be able to force the wins and loses to the purported goal of “keeping a 50% winrate”
This fundamental issue of that claim is that these systems can’t appraised “skill”, they just surmise probability of winning in relation to other variables. If the system could ‘force’ the loses - as speculated - then it could appraised skill correctly, if it could appraised skill correctly, it wouldn’t need to ‘force’ losses.
The initial claim people make on how matchmakers work is incorrect and belies hearsay and superstition rather than an understanding of math or ‘logic’ – as computers and math both have logic – but that’s not really surprising given that “math is scary” and computers are made from the crystalized souls of the dead.
Also it’s much easier to assume the world is against [you] the protagonist of your own life story and dehumanize any other character element as a npc – is the capacity for people to have their own influence on the matchmaking is clearly impossible, and thus they can’t actually be products of free-will (ie, a person) and are just cogs in the wheel of anti-fun that evidently is this game!
Also, its worthwhile to note that said topics tend to espouse mastery of the hero so chosen to play, and yet the shackles for the 50% clearly don’t bind all players, which would thus suggest an element of skill lacking in the foretold cases for 50% – as they’d have the means to improve their level accordingly – so the express concern of said “mastery” seems akin to the tales of wo that bemoan the evil matchmaking empire that enslave the rest of us to arbitrary matches!
While on the one hand you can claim it can’t be an “all knowing system” the implications of what you’re trying to suggest on how it realizes it’s goal would generally be made possible only by being an “all knowing system” as that line of rationale removes all other variables that denounce that possibility.
The tl;dr isn’t that the “matchmaker goal is to force people to 50%” its that it tries to make a ‘fair’ match based on a flawed metric of appraising how people contribute to their side attaining victory in the game. However, the ‘real world’ doesn’t really care much about “fair” at all, so the artificial means of creating it are going to be problematic.
However, rather than people being concerned with the processes of getting the variables used to ascertain the ‘probability of winning’ (not “skill”) people get caught up on the superficial end result and bemoan the wrong thing. The distraction of such tends to cause people to not notice the consequences of their own claims to be base more on superstition than ‘facts’, which isn’t all that surprising, cuz if they were aware of such, they wouldn’t be relying on superstition in the first place.
1 Like
There is no theory for me. I recently had a pleasure of being in both teams and inspecting their rough skill levels. Matchmaker had put master level players together with gold level players. This is all what I need to know. How system forces 50% is known for a long time, I’m surprised that nobody bothered to bring this here too. The higher you go, the bigger your MMR. Suddenly you become biggest fish in your pool. Matchmaker will try to balance your team MMR rather than putting you with people of your level MMR. This means that for example, you are of 2000 MMR. Your teamate is of 1000 MR. Together you are 3000 MMR. Enemy team is made up of 2 players who are together of 1500 MMR. Both teams are equally matched, but in reality, they are not. What we get is one player overperforming everyone in a match, but he is unable to carry, because it is team based game. So, those 2 players might be worse than that one star, but together they tend to play better and make less mistakes. This is why they win far more often and why people get frustrated.
LoL and Dota 2 has exactly same problems, but there people complain about someone carrying crap out of some team, in Heroes of the storm you can’t carry because game is not designed around that. Yet, here 1 potato has a lot bigger impact than in any of those other games. So in conclusion, one carry is unlikely to win you a match, but even one total potato almost ensures that you gonna lose badly that match.
Summary
I encounter this in Hots so often. As a tank when my carries are potatoes, no amount of initiation or zone control is possible. My assassins are completely inept and they can’t poke or kill anyone. They are always victims of someone’s else aggression.
As a healer I always find that no amount of CC or healing is ever enough for my potatoes. They will gladly get poked to death. Never make us of time given by CC. They will always be out of position and I will feel working extremely hard with my toolset just to keep team from collapsing on itself.
As a bruiser, I often find that it is my job to initiate as tank often is a special little case. Often I will get someone like Stitches who thinks he can tank while in fact he just yolos into enemy team to soak as much damage as he can. Such tanks just farms damage on themselves and imagine that they do a good job. Or even worse, makes overly aggressive initiations on which their team can’t follow up and then proceeds to lose teamfight because of it.
2 Likes
This is so false and you need to stop pushing this. If the goal is to get a 50% winrate, this means you will do it EVEN if it makes matches unfair. Forcing someone to lose because their winrate is at 51% is not fair or well functioning.
- If the playerbase is small and can’t find people who are all equal skill level it will purposely give someone bad teammates to decrease their chances of winning. This is not fair for that player.
Your argument is like saying that people with tall legs should not be allowed to perform in olympics because it gives them an advantage. Someone with inferior genetics should have the same chance of winning.
And in mobas you think that better players should have the same chance at winning as bad players. Your logic is flawed and under the premise that getting better at the game should not increase your chances of winning. So no I don’t agree with you, it’s wrong.
Your logic is that 50% winrate is all that matters.
This means that skill level, and how well you do should not matter in games.
Using your logic, let’s say that tournaments banned certain teams because their players were so good that it made them have a higher chance of winning over other players. This is the logic of people who think 50% is the goal.
If 50% is the only goal, this means that you will purposely stack 1 team to make sure that they win, to bring the other team back down to 50%. It is the worst logic you can have for your matchmaking system to force people to a 50% winrate. The worst part is you kinda admit you were wrong already, you said that the playerbase of this game makes the system not work.
So if the system doesn’t work in certain circumstances, then it is objectively false to state that all games should aim for this regardless of their circumstances. All matchmaking systems should be determined on a case by case basis. I will never agree with people who say that bad players deserve to win the same amount of games as good players.
This is true you cant “force” someone to just lose but you can make it statically unlikely for them to win.
1 Like
I don’t know how anyone in this community can play this game, and not notice the matches where one team has 0 kills, and the other team has 29 kills. Have you people never stomped a team before in this game? Am I the only person in this community that utterly stomped the enemy team, and we had 0 deaths?
These matches are proof that there wasn’t a 50% chance to win. If there was a 50% chance to win heroes of the storm, then the enemy team wouldn’t have lost in 7 minutes. This isn’t even subtle, it’s very blatant to me. I really would like to see what the counter argument is to a match where one team outleveled the enemy team by 4 levels and won by the 7 minute mark.
I want to hear how you rationalize that outcome and say it was a 50% chance to win. Matches are decided at the very beginning, otherwise there wouldn’t be one sided matches.
2 Likes
OP, what follows is just a general comment on threads about this topic. The usual tone of those posts, and not refencing anything you said in this post specifically. Although, not every hero is good on every map and against every comp, so focusing on only one hero is an uphill battle.
So much subjective analysis, anecdotal evidence, and paranoia. Also, one unquestioned assumption in all posts about this.
“It’s not my fault I lost. It’s my teammates, and Blizz conspiring against me. When I win, it’s because that’s my actual skill level, and when I lose it’s someone else’s fault.”
It would be so refreshing to see a thread where someone posts their replay, and asks if they could do anything better. Maybe they would realize that they are good at snowballing their matches in the direction they are already headed, rather than making impactful plays.
2 Likes
All my matches end with one team killing all forts while one team didn’t even get a gate. Best match this weekend was a fun shut out. 26-0
2 Likes
Your post goes with the assumption though that the players aren’t actually good though. So it falls under the subjective analysis and anecdotal evidence. Let’s be kind and go your way. Let’s assume that everyone here is bad and needs to get better at the game. What’s the point in them getting good at the game, if it doesn’t increase their chances of winning?
If you want people to blame their self, you have to first convince them that forced 50% winrate isn’t a real thing. If you don’t, then it makes no sense why people should take your advice.
3 Likes