How's ranked so...broken? Even above "low elo"

General Discussion
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Played 110 ranked games this season, which have been, for the most part, a back and forth, so I see a good chunk of the players quite often. With that being said…how do people that continuously underperform in all matches I’ve seen (both on my team and enemy team), somehow not fall out of diamond? Without the smallest exaggeration, over 10% of the players I’ve seen in these games aren’t even close to the average skill level of rest of diamond, even on their main role, which of course is ranged assassin or, less often, healer.

And then…I win a total stomp, I get about 180 rank points. Not bad for a stomp. I lose to a stomp at some point…and I think I lost over 230 points. In 110 games, I’ve had about 1-2 stomps, and my team got stomped 2-3 times, and all followed this pattern. To define ‘stomp’, I’m talking about a game where losing team has 1-3 kills, and other team has 20+.

I’ve won over 50% of games, I think no more than 2 games awarded me at least 200 points (the average has probably been 190 or less), while a lot more losses have gone to -210. And that’s by using all my best cards: meta picks, checking my teammates and picking what their worst role is, sometimes even “stealing” their main role, because they don’t even know what their best role is; spamming pings to save the bad players every game, or pinging for them to know what to do when they run like headless chicken or they start spreading and creating vulnerabilities.

And players that can’t even react to ‘retreat’ pings, can’t follow-up simple commands as ‘rotate as 4’ (instead they break off from the other 3, and start laning other lane, or during a camp they go lane, and collect some 4+ deaths during a game just from solo-ing as healer/ ranged assassin), face check bushes, go behind enemy team to gank 1 vs 4 as healer/ ranged assassin and pick non-meta picks (often countering themselves, like picking a 2nd tank when they see multiple % dmg enemies), not knowing to focus lower hp enemies when multiple are in range, instead everyone picking a random hero to attack… they play 10+ games a day, hundreds of games in total, slightly above 50% winrate, and not dropping out of the same rank. How do they even win? How many rank points can they get, so their lower winrate keeps them at same rank? What’s even considered when someone gets/loses more/less than 200 points?

To mention some good things about ranked, it’s definitely closer to a decent quality (in terms of the actual match quality, not the rank points); the other modes are not even close to ranked. Parties get matched against each other only if they’re same size, which is a move in the right direction.

With that being said, despite being same size and similar ranks, 1 party is usually worse than all the other players in the match (the amount of duos that literally go in 2 vs 5 without pinging or chatting, just feeding repeatedly is astonishing) while the other party is often way above the skill of all other players in both teams. I’ve been carried 1-2 times by a 3 party that consistently wiped enemy team 3 vs 5. I’ve also lost with a 3-party that took both ranged roles + healer, the rangeds fed solo while the healer wasn’t really healing anyone besides his babies.

And somehow both the best and worst players I’ve seen, all have 50-54% winrate, and none of them really get out of my rank bracket, one way or another. A lot of the satisfaction of climbing ranks is lost when I see I played plenty games over plenty seasons to climb to a rank that someone else got … while playing at silver level on their favourite hero.

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IF it that still happens, then it means the search algorithm need some work, and I feel the same about Quickmatch which needs a different direction too.

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if their winrate isn’t below 50%, then they’re not going to fall out of rank. If you want to see how they ‘win’ games that you aren’t in, then you’d have to look at each person, find replays of them winning games, and see how they contribute.

“Ranked” is still just a sorting system that works with what it has. It has a ‘high score’ for distributing the player base, and the few select that score a little higher than the rest climb up the ladder. That is it. People that keep looking for some magical reasoning behind “ranked” regardless of mode have to understand that at the core all it is is a number sorting system.

There are not hard-checks for specific skills, and even brawl-mid players will eventually have someone climb to the top of whatever hill that is as any game will eventually end, and thus determine someone is a ‘winner’ to get more mmr. People continue to be bad at this game because there is no requirement to enforce a particular skill that ties directly into success. So the game is rife with superstition, false positives, and fault-finding to the point that some players create meta-games out of projecting boogieman stores at people capable of typing a sentence on the forums or reddit.

Your ‘typical’ player is isn’t motivated to “play their best”, climb the ladder, and show how awesome they can really be. They’ll be dehydrated, or inebriated, or running on fumes or autopilot, and playing a dead game that fits into their patterned behavior enough that they get something out of the experience, even if it’s only to garner another excuse to fuel their complaint cycle.

Reminder: this is a dead game that had 10 years of people thinking basic skills are a form of cheating. Top players can clown around at even GM games and hold multiple slots on the leaderboard if they so cared to put the time into it. Gm is a ‘joke’ and diamond isn’t any better.

If it helps you put a reality check on understanding the disparity in ‘skill’, a number of professional sports – players that spend their ‘life’ on a single activity and then get millions of dollars for it, tend to have middling, if not ‘bad’ stats depending on where people put their emphasis.

For example: a top baseball player has a hit rate of 30%. Is the focus supposed to be on their own effort, or as a comparison to how they react compared to the other team?

Without substantial motivation, coaching, teammate cooperation, etc etc, people are only going to be ‘good enough’ for whatever level of obstacle they have before them. If they can hold their place playing like crap, and then claim they’re amazing for it, then that’s the extent of what they’re going to do.

And that level of performance is then going to be all that the game has to sort when it looks for “fair matches” as the outcome of the match isn’t based on the rank, or mmr, it’s based on what people actually do in the game they’re in.

Once people think they’re already ‘going to lose’ they’re not going to pull out their ‘true potential’ and rise to the challenge, they’re going to use that as an excuse for whatever it is they already convinced themselves to do, blame anything else that doesn’t agree with them, and then loop the same complaints.

The game isn’t offering carrots or sticks enough to break that status quo, and the few select players that try to make more of this game than than are in custom games making their own matches instead.

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heres my 2 cents.
the skill range in diamond is fairly dramatic.
What I believe happens is because there are good and bad players in this rank (relative of course, it is still diamond rank after all), games can be a bit lopsided skill wise.
Plat-diamond or is is also when people really start to learn how to end a game of hots so things are usually more decisive. Similar thing happens in draft. Up to a point, it doesn’t matter all that much what you play in low ranks. People are often not skilled enough to really exploit hero weaknesses and counters. While in higher ranks, your hero pick does matter

Late night mid-high elo QM also seems to work the same way.

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Definitively the case as is with those games where people just give up. It’s sad to see it, I’ve even seen old players and experienced ones do it.

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I’m probably an exception but I still try to do my best in solo QM.

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You have make the mistake of believing that the ranked ladder is anything but an engagement farm. It’s only purpose it to ensure that you keep playing the game.

Play Quick Match or join a tournament league otherwise you are just a cog trapped in an algorithmic psyop.

You have been warned. Good luck. Have fun.

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You have make the mistake of believing that the ranked ladder is anything but an engagement farm. It’s only purpose it to ensure that you keep playing the game.

There used to be skill differentiation between even a gold and a plat - but that was 8-9 year ago when this game had 200x the player base it does now.

The game being what it is now (including upper-mid ranks like diamonds receiving their ranks through beating rainbow enemies), it’s an ARAM tier dice roll whether you get skilled teammates or not all the way until Master+ which at this point is only about a hundred people.

There are still good people playing in plat-diamond. It’s just a total draw of the luck whether you get one on your team or not.
In the worse case, you might also get one of the 1% who paid to have their account boosted from Bronze to Diamond and don’t really understand the game at that level.

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I am used to people deciding the game is lost, but they usually don’t find overly complicated means of hard inting, like repeatedly trying to go behind enemy garrosh as auriel, imagining somehow stunning him into the allied tower, and later on blaming other players. Or tychus seeing a stunned enemy and using Q instead of minigun all game. I think you’re giving them a lot more credit than they’re worth.

Tempting, although it would be very tilting to see either 1) they’re magically better in a certain context, knowing how to play a hero I’ve just seen them repeatedly troll on, or 2) they somehow get matched vs worse players, that also magically don’t drop out of the same rank, despite most of these players playing 200+ ranked games this season…so eventually the awful ones should have been filtered by…just playing.

Very grim, but unfortunately true. I’d put it on the only resource being shared, and the report system being awful, for the most part; the 0/10 player would have less reasons to think he carried just because he won, if he also got banned for a week at end of match (not at end of decade of feeding).

That’s if you can enjoy the absolute sh1tshow QM is. Unfortunately, it’s likely that they won’t fix neither QM nor ranked unless people stop playing it. Until then, QM is for 5 stacks to abuse people that haven’t learned of XP, and ranked is for 3 or 4 streamers to do “bronze to gm” by partying up and playing a trillion games so they eventually win the coinflip part of ranked (“eventually climbing”)

Absolutely. One game you CC enemies for 5 secs and your chromie absolutely destroys them, next game you get melee hanzo…

Played a few more games today; absolutely horrible experience. I’m playing vs a supposed 48% wr player this season that’s absolutely stomping us, and I have a 56% wr player going on his main that eats every blaze stun at max range.

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I enjoy QM just fine.

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As it is hard to be read around, Minky asked me for a question in this thread and it is all about unfairness you are writing:

Solo league -old SL- was deleted after 2.0 without enough thought, just to lower queue times; a different approach would have considered the vast majority of solo players creating smurfs since then as a heavy sign of MMR malfunction.

Solo players choose to create new accounts, not initially because they wanted to become a troll, but to get better roll on ranked placement and escape time lost to rank up from ELO HELL. But it also led to chaos into MMR, especially when groups exploited “smurfing” too.

Those events bloated ranked for everyone since, preventing any competitive incentive, especially for new serious solo players. Because that’s the key point of that reasoning: if the game only utilizes fresh blood to feed the groups, no new group would ever be created, and the game dies slowly but inexorably.

As an answer, Minky, I’d propose to go back to the old solo ranked for one part, to offer a fair competitive ground for solo and new players. For a second part, to keep the ability for solo players to queue along teams in the actual Storm League, but with a distinct Multiplayer-MMR, and an explicit incentive to do so.

For the whole HOTS to be sexy again, all skins/goodies system from 2.0 and 2.1 should also be wiped. Best skins have to be locked behind a skill wall, a level wall, and maybe for the greater ones behind a paid wall. Cumulatively. It may be hard to do so now, but if any HOTS 3.0 would come to life, I can’t see how you build any desire to play and stay on the competitive part of the game.

To be more precise, free stuff and in game currencies can stay for very common and fun stuff, but for the majority of the best ones, and every potential new skins, players should prove skill and/or level, and/or ranked assiduity, and/or seniority, and/or real money for the top skins. Also, limiting the number of free heroes by class, could be a thing (e.g. 3 distant DD max for free, 1 support max etc.), perhaps even harder or newer heroes always for a fee.

As a side note, I used to write on the old forum, a long time ago, that a tiny subscription (between $0.99 and $4.99) for playing ranked more than x games a month, or after x league, would be a way to get rid of smurfs. I was denied and mocked then, but as you, dear Minky, asked for some propositions, I put this one again on the table.

TLDR :

    Solo ranked queue
    Keep actual Storm League and queue times as low as possible for groups (distinct MMR, incentive for Solo players)
    Reset 2.0: best skins/tags/mounts etc. under skill/level/seniority wall + fee for some. Free fun stuff open to a limit.
    Limiting free heroes by class; others have to be paid (low fee but yet a fee)
    Tiny subscription (between $0.99 and $4.99) for ranked at some point: Gargamel effect.
    3.0 launch on Steam for queue times and fresh blood
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I remember reading your post. I personally wouldn’t pay for hots, even if it was fixed; I’d have a hard time believing it was fixed to begin with :smiley: .
Also having free heroes and paid heroes is very, very hard to balance; besides the loud minority of f2p players that complain even about non-gameplay features not being accessible enough for free, it’s hard to make paid heroes that people want to buy, but somehow aren’t making people without them quit the game.

I think if they fixed the game, it would be in a lot better place, without adding anything new (although it would very likely be much harder to implement than your ideas).

But who knows, given how alive qm and aram are, it’s not unlikely that there’s a very large market for an extremely casual “MOBA”. A Steam launch might secure enough bad players for the game to stay alive another decade. :no_mouth:

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I understand, but I can’t see another way to get rid of smurfs in Ranked… If it is not money, something has to motivate players to stay on a main account; the cosmetic part may fix that for some part.

That’s why it has to be a TINY fee, but a fee anyway at some point. Without any of it, MMR won’t ever be fixed because of smurfs. Concerning the number of heroes, yeah brainstorming needed, but the 100% free policy led to depreciate the main account, and broke the competitive aspect. Of course, the risk of HOTS becoming a P2W is also to be avoided at all costs.

Yep, Steam launch seems to be the more important for players like us, who want the game to live longer. But it is the last hope for HOTS, and that’s why I wrote those proposals here: if this happens, unless many features are thought again, the game as it is today would fail the same.

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I, for one, have only ever seen a smurf account not playing in a party with a high level account maybe once or twice in recent time (at least 300 games), and it only happened in ranked. Maybe heroes profile can research more on it (although letting smurfs and cheats hide their profiles from your own personal stats kinda tells something), but I suspect there’s not that many people just smurfing; they also stack, otherwise the fun would quickly run out as they get matched with 4 potatoes against 5 potatoes.

I advocated for “pros” with 70%+ winrate to not be able to party up in 5 stacks, but apparently it would be immoral to force such skilled players to play with commoners, even if it’s 4 greats for 1 randomer. And I guess as long as QM is alive, by popular vote, the people love getting smurfed on :slight_smile: .

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Plot twist: I got to Diamond by playing 300 plus games at 47% win rate. I experienced all the same things you did.

I’ve met master level shot callers in Silver. I’ve met master level players that consider every rank from Diamond 1 to Bronze 5 the same skill level. I’ve met a one trick Maiev player with 63% win rate stuck in Bronze.

I truly believe MMR hell exists just as MMR heaven also exists. MMR hell is where the more games you play, the more games you have to play and by simply playing a metric F ton of games, you’ll climb. MMR heaven is where an account attained a high win rate by luck, skill, or otherwise early on and has solidified loss forgiveness within the system and so their account wont drop from master rank back down to silver without intentionally doing so or someone else is playing the account. This is why people smurf, sell/buy high MMR accounts, or get carried on a team with high MMRs. They wouldn’t be doing it unless the concept of MMR hell or MMR heaven was real.

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I think so too; for better or worse, I think there’s also some very heavy “rank inertia”; I said multiple times on this forum, I only ever climbed ranks after taking a break from the game, and coming back during a new season. Otherwise, I’ve played plenty hours and ended up where I started; I’ve been “hardstuck silver”, then new season came, I got to gold, I was “hardstuck gold”, and so on now I am “hardstuck diamond”. Unless so many players are quitting that my relative skill skyrockets from 1 season to another, whatever logic the matchmaker uses is absolute crap.

From what I’ve experienced so far, the whole game is “MMR hell”, as you describe it; supposing a happy scenario where you win 200 and lose 200 for every game, you only need 25 more wins than losses to climb a whole rank, regardless of winrate; problem is, given the low agency in hots, if you lose the coinflip, you likely lose the game too. You won’t kill enemies as fast as your tank can feed, or solo kill enemies as tank because your dps is bad, or even kill enemies before your mispositioned healer gets burst. It’s a lot easier to get 525 heads out of 1025 coinflips, than getting 25 heads out of 25 coinflips. Unfortunately though, depending on your luck, you might experience all 500 losses one after another…

There’s likely no fix for this, except maybe add more infinite quests on heroes (not globe quests) to increase individual agency.

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