In the first place - I played with a team and without a team - it is not playable without a team, even average teams very easily defeat very strong random just caouse of communication. And since the game for some reason puts teams against random, which should not be - the fate of random is obvious
Secondly, there is a broken ranked. No one will ever play this because you have a broken ranked that puts unequal players together and against each other.
And thirdly, the same 1-2 thousand people are playing it now, and hardly more, so that in silver, that in the master, you play with the same people in fact, no novice will obviously tolerate it ofc, there is simply no place for them here.
No one no for sure how many are left but who who still stick around are the people that are still loyal to this game even tho it has been arbandon in a trash bin. Rainbow matches is what are left in this game now and you either play them or wait and see what MS are going to do with it.
yes entirely you said which is true, i just tested this, iâve made a pre made team with really good players, won many times, makes totally sense to me, Iâve never interested in a pre made team, i thought Solo Q wouldnt be a problem but just tested it, yep its a broken game if you just make your own pre made team, i hope this wont happen in diablo 4 pvp too, they need to add 2 options before entering field of hatred zone, 1 option for solo q, and option 2 for pre made team vs pre made team, problem solved, same thing with HOTS
Itâs optimal to play Hots as team yes, but Iâve beaten more 5 stacks with solo players in ranked, than 5 stacks have beaten me.
As for QM, thatâs when 5 stacks can be a problem as they can take advantage of comp rules, such as having double stealth or double healer, rules solo players canât break. They also have the advantage of being able to essentially draft, so itâs a fair complaint.
They should probably tighten up matching for flex roles such as melee assassin and some of the bruisers, but that could inflate queue times in a game thatâs already struggling.
Donât disagree, from the moment SL was announced, and the patch notes said players could group 2 ranks apart, I was against this. The whole point of ranked has always been âAs you climb you play with players of your own skill.â So I shouldnât as a Plat, be playing with Silverâs because one Plat on my team has 3 silver friends they are tying to boost.
Pragmatically, if the two rank rule wasnât in place, maybe even fewer people would be playing ranked and queue times would be even higher.
The Devs released some stats when Hots was in its prime (Maybe Xen will be nice enough to find the graph for me) which showed that unlike other MOBAâs, Hots had a disproportionate number of players in Bronze/Silver and Gold. There were very few at the top ranks, so naturally now Hots is frozen, the problem isnât going to self correct.
You have some valid points, but unless MS decides to renew the active development of Hots, youâre essentially flogging a dead horse, most people are aware of all the issues in your post, yet keep playing because they like the game, faults and all.
MM works fine in solo queue, very well ordered in majority of cases, itâs pretty horrendous for groups though, almost entirely made out of players who do very exploitive comps that kinda throw it into rainbow match making.
I certainly not enjoying my time when I play with a 2 randoms who donât know that they can end right now and instead taking a bruiser camp in DShire.
Or it could just be due to burnout. The game is doomed to lose another big chunk of players with the release of Diablo. One problem Blizzard seems to be having is attracting entirely new players and existing ones only keep reshuffling away from one franchise to the other as fresh new content gets released. We just keep being charged increasingly more and more each time for what has mostly been the same product over the last 20 years. The only reason why this model is sustainable is because the fan base which helped with the early growth now enjoys having their own personal disposable income. I may have more money than I did in my teens, but I have less free time. It is propped up to fail eventually. Blizzard is otherwise one of the most creatively bankrupt companies.
Itâs unknown how the population distribution has shifted since then, but if people think of the ranks as mirroring each other then there is a larger proportion in the âbadâ side of the ranks than there are in the âgoodâ if people think of all of bronze as an offset to all of masters instead of seeing âgoldâ as a shared midline and bronze 5 specifically as the offset to master rank (where most exceptions happen). Similarly, the population increase to platinum and diamond may be why people assert match quality went down since that shift as âgoldâ (average) players would then be pushed into ranks higher than the effective âskillâ
since ranked points are awarded to map the distribution of players to have a particular mmr.
What you linked is how bronze 5 in particular has a larger cut of the mmr allotted to bronze rank because it has to âscrunchâ the numbers (decrease their value) to keep mmr in the positive.
One of the issues of ELO-based systems is that they try to predict how often one wins over another, but it has to assume the player is trying to win at all. Since players have free-will, they can ruin the intent of mmr systems, esp for the less-skilled population.
Itâs not seen as an issue to âfixâ because the sort of population in that range arenât looking to get better, learn more, or understand how something works: theyâre just looking for something to blame and theyâll draw all sorts of errorenous conclusions because their conduct loops cause/effect to just keep on repeating the same things and look to blame
anything else that isnât themselves.
Thatâs part of why OP will feel assured their complaint is correct rather than âdota-likeâ games having popularion declines because they donât toss enough sparkles and glitter at players to
help them feel good about failure and mediocrity in the age of auto-play mobile games
The game as abandoned. All the algorithms can do in the current state is to find some game. This leads to frustration and more people quitting the game.
All you can do is to find a way which is fun for yourself to play the game or leave it behind. There is no development and marketing.
This is probably personal experience talking, but if I were to objectively critique the skill of the players I group with, theyre actually not much better than random players. I feel like the big key difference is that youâre more tolerant to their misplays because theyâre youâre friends. If a rando were to make the same mistakes youâd be all up in their junk.
When I was a kid I used to play Golden Eye with my brother. Sometimes on the weekends the neighbours would come over and we would play together, but that was pretty much it.
Personally, I enjoy having an intimate understanding of the other people in my dojo. Hey, itâs what made classic WoW so charming.
I had the same experience. Thatâs why I play in Silver with Plat/Dia skills and enjoy playing stoned to even the odds and still have a chance vs stacks. Smurfing is the only way to play vs other smurfs (majority of players nowadays).
Most of the Smurfs are not even at Plat/Dia lvl, and those who are and reach those ranks are technically no longer smurfs, they usually try to play lower⌠so why do you need to smurf exactly?
Your third point can just be attributed to the 50% win rate system. You correctly noticed that only Hots playerbase has a disproportionate players number in bronze and silver - this is a consequence work of that system.
Players were disappointed and lost motivation when they realized that the game after a certain number of wins begins to increase the rank of your opponents, and you slip a lower rank to level you dawn. Of course, this is disappointing.
Btw, a funny fact: if you check each of your teammate and opponent after a defeat in your losing streak (I mean the one that necessarily always follows the winning streak, lol. And who could have come up with such a thing, right?), you will see that in most cases your teammates in recent games have exactly the same series of defeats, and your opponents have wins. This means you are in a hidden field and you will lose for a while, the system needs to trim your win rate.
Itâs so funny and absurd at the same time that perhaps the devil in hell will definitely take them to work.
So, returning to the topic - the players were very quickly distracted by this and attention, the funny thing is that the development team did nothing about it 8 years after the game came out.
They didnât do anything about it even at the very heyday of the game, when the players talked about âstrange alternating stacks of wins and lossesâ and about âstrange balanceâ in matches, in addition to the main problem of the imbalance of premades and solos.
Instead, they decided to play freely with 5 premades against randomesâŚ
In short, this is the worst game in terms of balance in many aspects and is now playable only in a party of 5 good premades, and you can become really good at it only after years of playing in this game.
That is, you understand yes, the game was created for such a narrow audience. No wonder no one plays it.
Iâm also omitting the point that the support just deleted the posts of the dissenters for 6 years for sure.
I donât feel any pity for an inch - absolutely deservedly dead project.
P.S.
This is not new information, the players have really been saying for 8 years in a row that the game itself decides when you win and when you lose. If you âbreakâ this system - suddenly, nothing will happen, lol, it will just continue to follow the given order.
There is no randomness in it, the player does not decide his own fate, if you win a lot, you are guaranteed to lose about the same amount later. anyway. It can only be âbrokenâ by five players, especially when 90% of your opponents are random.
I really donât know who came up with this for the game that there were hopes for, but he needs to be given a Darwin medal
Itâs not ânewâ information, itâs bunk, as in, itâs not âinformationâ itâs fabrication people spout because theyâre afraid to actually learn things and just want something to fault instead.
You are spouting the same tin-foil theories that get passed around all sorts of games: these are not unique to HotS regardless of what you think hasnât changed in â8 yearsâ. âForced 50%â is not forced here the same way itâs not forced in Dota 2, but youâll see players crying about that there too despite the dev blogs they put out trying to address it.
Go over and read the complaints on LoL about the same thing. Heck, of these games, Lol even made a special label to for their âbronze 5â mmr dump just to add that little bit of extra âfeel goodâ for players that donât understand how numbers affect the display of their âskillâ.
Players actually climb ranks in this game despite all the naysay of people looking for anything else that isnât analyzing their own gameplay and looking to see how they can play better, give-up less, and stop flaming others for what ends up being that âpredictableâ âforcedâ loss they keep ranting about.
'bout the only repeating tripe you havenât repeated is the blizzard patent people use to try to claim that buying items from the shop should actually help you bypass âforced 50%â cuz⌠people claim that too.
âDarwinâ is another wonderful example of people reveling in misinformation because they have something else to scrapegoat.
The âwonderâ is that âpeople donât playâ this game because its dead. It didnât âdieâ because of the ârankedâ system, it died because the devs pulled the plug on this long before the tin-foil theories could figure out what âproofâ actually means. LoL â the model of competition for this game â takes a loss on their big events. When blizzardâs stocks hit a slump, the suits didnât like to cope with that, so they cut costs, and HotS is a cost for stock-appeal. The unfortunateness of the cost-cutting method is that it has flopped so hard Blizzâs uppermanagment has had to get bailed out by microsoft and get bought by them.
It doesnât help that the standard player is bad at this game, but thatâs also the norm for group-play blizzgames as you could hit up Wow and find people that have played for 15 years and still donât manage to do basic things (e.g. threat management) so they still wipe in vanilla dungeons, let alone raid content.
The concern of âForced 50%â continuing to fester among the lesser-skilled players in the game stems from people refusing to learn more, check information beyond bad confirmation bias, and acting like theyâre in on this big-secret that theyâre too far behind to tell that it was debunked long before they joined the train to rant on the same crap too.
Ya wanna talk about âDarwinism?â Congrats, you have evolved a feedback loop of false-positives because the consequences for being âwrongâ used to be death (eg. facial recognition in inanimate objects to be wary of hidden predators.) Since thereâs no real evolutionary advantage for losing that sensory loop, people keep going on and on about their bad takes because there isnât an actual boogie-man hiding in the bushes to metaphorically keep them from reproducing.
That said, that is an awkward metaphor for HotS cuz there is a boogie-man in the bushes and people need to stop face-checking those and then pinging their teammates for not bailing them out regardless of how many times they die to âhiddenâ ganks.
How do you explain the fact that peopleâs games alternate from a series of victories to a series of defeats?
Okay, you know, I realized that I donât want to write a huge text again, especially since I have already answered all these fairy tales from people with 10,000+ messages. The same thing, one opinion, which is liked by their own 10000+, with which no one agrees, but you probably donât care.
Letâs have a security question right away: in the end, why do 99% of Hots players have a ~ 50% win rate?
