You mean the path where it has been left mostly intact and had not been butchered like other titles have? Not just within Blizzard, but across the gaming industry?
I am not saying HotS getting its plug pulled was ideal, but compared to fate of some other games this game got off easy.
I was looking at the blue tracker and typing in key words for ctrl+f and can not find anything on it. I hit a wall trying to find that post so it might have been back on the old forums.
I did the same, usually Sami or Xen can find these obscure things, hopefully they will pop in later.
Being wrong since decades won’t make devs right.
I don’t think you have 24 million dollars to throw away on a whim. Meanwhile, Activblizz were fined that much money for alleged patent violations in Call of Duty and World of Warcraft in May of this year.
Patents are not a good indicator for used technology in video games. There is zero code used for patents; code is protected by copyright, not patents. The more likely concern of a ‘patent’ is to try to curb “patent trolls” such as the one in my above reference to altprime.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/jury-finds-activision-blizzard-liable-in-23-4m-patent-infringement-case/
“Acceleration Bay”, despite is fancy claims, is yet another group of people using money to buy assets that have ‘patents’ and then claiming that any and everyone is infringing on said patents. It costs comparatively nothing for them to mindless sue, but it costs a noticeable amount for others to defend against these claims. So bigtech groups will fill a bunch of patents in the anticipation that something remotely resembling what shows up in their games is going to appear like some ‘patent’ claim and then cost them millions of dollars.
Activision may not have those assets in a game, but given the responses people have, people are going to suspect that they do, so at the least, they should make patents of their own to protect whatever it is that they actually do do for scripting their games and matchmakers.
While a number of companies are obviously ‘patent trolls’, there aren’t enough deterrents to frivolous lawsuits to prevent this sort of conduct, so activision may as well pay an intern to write up a ‘patent’ and then not use it.
Back in 2016, the internet got fired up over activision making said “engagement” patent for an FPS game – which HotS isn’t. Since people usually don’t know what patents actually do, people took up arms and had such a fixation that they:
I don’t care to burn 15 minutes on what is likely a clickbait youtube video, but of what I skimmed on the timeline bar, it looks like there is a screenshot of a activision patent from 2016, so I’m going to venture and assume that that is just more-of-the-same ignorance that was perpetuated years ago, and the creator is pretending they’re magically empowered for ‘discovering’ this [now].
Maybe he’s trying to address that stuff from back then, but it’s easy for people to rant for a dozen minutes about vague fault-finding and it takes longer than said 15 minutes to debunk that stuff.
It’s on this one:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/t/plz-explain-the-50-win-rate-to-me/38148/9
When devs leave, the forums will ‘hide’ certain outlets of their contributions to the forums.
Since blue posts tend to be highly viewed, it’s usually better to sort of the forums by views and look for topics with blue indicators. A general search of the forum (magnifying glass) could also find results if dev posts get block-quoted by someone else.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/search?q=azjackson%20forced%2050
In the linked search, the forum gives me a post by TimeSpike for the quote, and not the dev.
Oh thank you for the link! I didn’t know that!
I am pretty sure I remember the post your talking about, and similarly am not willing spend a huge amount of time trying to find it.
But I am pretty sure it was along the lines of, "MMR is the metric of how many points you get and what rank you are (we won’t show you that). Keep winning and your MMR will go up, and win against higher MMR opponents and you will get more MMR points. Eventually this system will even out to put you where you belong, and don’t even think about arguing about it. end quote.
Were you looking for this? Plz explain the 50% win rate to me
(answer from the blue at 9th post)
Someone pulled the post for me no need to go into a deep dive for it. My HotS life is a lie. The 50/50 thing is interesting because the “eventually” part of that seem to never come for some users just from noticing a lifetime of them being well above The 50% mark or well below it. Maybe that mechanism isn’t working the way it should and it’s causing things to feel more suspicious then what is really going on?
It’s typically going to be at least 1 of three things:
if people were to stick to their ‘best’ hero or role, they could probably maintain a higher winrate, but typically an average player’s average is going to be average. Since there’s 4 other players that aren’t that 1 specific player, their capacity to determine the game is going to usually be higher than their own ability to influence the game since they likely aren’t that much better than everyone else in that match – unless they’re smurfing. Without needing to deal with the ‘growing pains’ of different hero picks, select players can dedicate an account to a specific gimmick and have a higher rate while eating their losses on another moniker.
When playing tank/healer, a player lacks damage, and if they play damage, they lack heals and peels, so there’s almost always anything else they could blame for losing/winning.
Groups allow mmr deviation, especially with smurfing, so matches will typically be in their favor as is (ie, playing below their actual mmr) but it also doesn’t help that the ‘typical’ player on HotS thinks the mini-map is paid dlc, aiming skillshots is cheating, and blizzard is ‘forcing’ them to lose matches as rationale for neglecting their own ability to make more games capable of being the wins they demand.
“streaks” are usually the oscillations for when they’re the lowest vs highest mmr in their game. With ‘rainbow’ matches in mmr, the spread may be too big for win/lose to deviate all that much, so many players just sit in a middling-pool on their mmr and swing between being the highests or lowested matched player in the same matching range and doesn’t swing hundreds or thousands of points that people might expect from doing their ranked placements or leaver penalties.
Most of the concerns on ‘forced’ games are going to be from the expectation that the game “wasn’t close”. Part of the issue of that perception is that it comes from players that don’t realize that little shifts lead to sweeping victories. A number of videos use RTS games to show equal compositions leading to snowball victories.
The same concept is how people make money from gambling and stocks. Win/loses there will also average 50/50, but it’s when people assert a particular value that ‘snowballs’ the value apart from the other players and small distinctions lead to bigger variance in the end results.
Yeah I mean, it makes it seem like they were doing it out of fairness, but it was kinda just to keep players competing with each other. If you go back to 2018 when I really started playing PvP modes blizz was constantly promoting streamers in the browser as if to say, ‘this could be you if you keep grinding’. Then when you improved your game it kind of rung hollow because it would put you with worse players and against better enemies.
I am not going to say it’s a terrible system, because I don’t want to come of as some conspiracy theorists, but it is flawed and doesn’t exactly work out as nicely as that tightly written post would like to say.
I still do enjoy playing this game, but I just don’t care about points or ranks anymore. Sounds apathetic, but really I just can enjoy the game now.
That’s not really how it works. If you improve your game, and that corresponds with winning more and increasing your MMR, on average, both your enemies AND your allies will increase. It’s just if you truly aren’t consistently better, you just won’t be able to carry your weight at your new MMR, so it just appears as if your allies are worse because you feel like there is less control you have to influence the match.
When I play my better heroes, I blame my allies less, because I’m winning more. It’s not necessarily because my allies are better, it’s that I am.
Hey Volun, I do appreciate the honest response in this matter, and the civility that has come with it.
I think where we disagree is that, if I have a loss, a real bad one, I can look at stats, win rates, and history, so if a player has a 30% win rate overall and I’m above 50 or even 60 why am I matched with them? And why after I’ve won 3 straight games?
I also agree when you say it’s not about blaming allies, it’s about how you can improve. But I just see this happen so often, and the player stats tell the story. I think this is why I team up as often as I can in ranked because those people probably are at your same level and will increase their MMR with you.
I’m glad you responded to my post Volun, I feel this can lead to intelligent discussions. I disagree that winning consistently will automatically give you better matches, but we can disagree and have a discussion at the same time.
Please don’t do that. The fact you are looking at the stats only when you loose badly is a sure way to do confirmation.
I said I can, I do it often in games I win or lose so I can get an idea of who I played with.
Also, please don’t tell me which in game tools I can and can’t use. They are there for a reason and I don’t use them to harass players after games after I loose them. It’s just for the information that many other players use.
I didn’t mean to tell what you can use or not. What I am telling you however is that, whatever tool you are using, use them properly. Typically, there is a high chance that, if you are looking at the stats only in some circumstances, you are making a sampling bias. If you are looking at the stats randomly or constantly however, that is a good way to see wat is actually happening.
Edit: by the way, I don’t know if this engagement matchmaker is actually used or not for HotS.
In fact, no proof is needed. Common sense is enough. Approximately 80 percent of all games are “one-gate” games with dominance of one team over an other with a difference of 2-4 levels between teams and this is a fact. This is visible to the naked eye. That is, the game hath real problems, regardless of whether is there a “force lose” or not.
The problem in your analysis is that win rates and MMR aren’t always directly related. You also shouldn’t just look when you lose badly. If they are at your MMR, that’s the most meaningful number. I’ve played with masters players that had 40% win rates that I didn’t think were great, but if you put that player in silver games, I have no doubt they would dominate most of their games. They maybe didn’t deserve to be in masters, and they probably would drop ranks if they continued at that rate, but they were still way more competent than the average player you encounter in QM.
Streaks also increases the uncertainty (the rate at which you lose or gain MMR). So after winning a lot of games, you’re now playing at a level where the average of both your team and enemies will be significantly different from the ones you were playing just a couple of games ago. The game is testing you if you really can handle this new MMR. Where you are making a leap, is just assuming that your allies are worse in those situations.
Unless you are checking the MMR of all your allies and all your enemies after each game, you are most likely just doing a bit of confirmation bias. It just would not make any sense to give you worse allies unless there just weren’t players to match you around your MMR. Even in those cases where you are the best player in the game, to create fair matches, the matchmaker would also need to find bad players on the other team to balance the MMR. So if you get worse allies, most likely the enemy would too, otherwise the game just wouldn’t match. So your original statement I had issue with just makes zero sense.
I’m not necessarily saying winning more matches will lead to better matches either. How you define better is subjective. When I got deranked, I was winning a LOT because my skill was better than my current MMR, but as I won more, my skill more closely matched my MMR and matches became harder, and I could no longer carry as easily as I did in lower ranks. My individual contribution to affect the game got less even as my allies (and enemies) got better. This also resulted me in losing more, but also “fairer” matches.
I already addressed this, I don’t always use that function like that, but I use it like many other players.
Oh man there it is, I responded to this post to someone else, and some how I’m talking about confirmation bias, and you saying you played with masters and therefore I’m wrong about everything.
There are less players around and even when there were this still happened. I’m sorry but you think it’s unimaginable that you could be grouped with a troll, or a Smurf, or a bad player. I really tried to be understanding, but you ignored large parts of my posts and reiterated stuff that I already debunked. I wanted to reply to Sky, who I’ve played with in ARAM, and all the sudden all these people jump in with the same argument.
I will revisit this tomorrow goodnight.
Welcome to the club, OP. Discretion gets more difficult once you start understanding, but its still worth it. Typically the people who can never figure out the forced 50% WR concept have low pattern recognition. Ignorance is bliss and they believe unfailingly in authority. The fact that people lie seems to escape lower IQ folk.