Bad matchmaking, yeah, kinda. This game is more team-based than LoL is by a huge margin, so it’s harder to fill out equally skilled and cohesive players, regardless of their hero picks.
“Rigged?” No. That denotes ill intent.
“Poorly designed?” Absolutely.
Never just assume sabotage or intent when stupidity, laziness, or incompetence are also valid options.
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Simply put, if they wanted players to be at 50% wr, it would be easier to achieve through a matchmaker that matched people with similar skill against eachother than to force losses and wins through bad and good players on your team.
Eh, if it wasn’t a dumb system then blizzard would release the algorithm and stop feeding us BS. It shouldn’t be that hard to be a colossal company and invent an algorithm that cant be hacked or beat. I fear if they did release their algorithm or at least some short version of it, then blizzard players would be up in arms.
Put it this way, blizzard has never truly released exactly how the match making system works or how high the population of this game actually is. Everyone can speculate, but no one can be proved right. It does feel; however, that you are winning and losing the same amount and that you are running up an endless stair with no rewards worth the time. Snowballs, snowballs, and heart breaking defeats abound in this game which leave a terrible taste in your mouth. The community is incredibly cold and there is no relief from the corruption of attitudes once it spreads. You will win and you will lose…a lot and there’s no avoiding that fact. You will feel better than your teammates and worse than your opponents. You will feel worse than your teammates and better than your opponents. Very rarely does a comback occur.
In conclusion, this game is an arcade. Youre supposed to put your quarter in a slot and pull the lever and if you win, then “yay!” You won! If you lose, then “aww.” You lost. Literally. There is nothing really competitive here. Your teammates are rarely on the same page as you are, nobody really has a strategy on a map. Everyone kind of just does things. Maybe they contribute to a win and maybe they dont.
To put it plainly, you will win and you will lose, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
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Wow.
I kinda wish I could contort my brain to come up with something like this.
Where to even begin…
We’re not playing snakes an ladders dear, the system has no way to predict or calculate your ‘chance to win’. All it can do is calculate how well you do relative to the people you play against, and try to match you with people that have the same ‘skill’ (I.e. Win/loss relative to other players). This is your mmr.
What does happen, possibly as a result of the system trying to balance ‘fair’ matches and short queue times, is that it averages out mmr. Unfortunately this game makes it extremely hard to carry, and very easy to throw - in other words one ‘bad’ player far outweighs one ‘good’ player in how they impact the outcome of the game.
We experience the matchmaking as being ‘worse’ than other mobas because of the smaller playerbase (forcing the system to use tricks like averaging mmr to reduce Q time), plus the whole ‘harder to carry’ thing.
Pair that with the natural ability of humans to (1) see patters where they don’t exist and (2) want to blame others for their failure and you get the myth of ‘the system is punishing me for being so good and having winstreaks’.
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The reason this idea is popular had nothing to do with fact, but in fact is the need for players to place blame on a loss that is out of their control, so that rather than trying to improve they can instead whine and make excuses.
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This week I played 10 games. I had a 7 win - 3 loss record.
I play 4 games today: I won one. Lost 3. in 2 of the losses, we had an AFK. In the third loss, we had a team with 2 healers against a pretty well balanced enemy 5 man premade.
yes. Match making is suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurely not rigged. Maybe not on purpose, but I am pretty sure it does everything it can to stop winning sprees and bring you to 50%.
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MM should be like this:
My MM is 5
My team and enemy team should be all 5
If i win i become 6 and the loser becomes 4
No 5 available? Add a check box to make variation if u want less wait time.
From here you can add additional constrains for other cases such as trolls afk feeders… which should not be revealed so it cant get abused
The system should not place you close to 50%. There is no way u can win all matches with and against equally skilled players. But what is the harm to anyone if the majority is at 80% win rate?
Urgh
Just… Try to think about what you said there.
Take your time, you don’t want to hurt yourself.
Here’s a hint: unless you play against ai, in every game 5 people (half) will win and 5 people (half) will lose. In every game.
…
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Damn ![:sweat_smile:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/sweat_smile.png?v=6" ":sweat_smile:")
What I meant to say is why blizz is forcing 50% while there is a chance with your skill you can be at higher win rate. I was thinking that you can win more if you are skilled because it is a casual game but I did not count the loosing side. ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
Blizzard isn’t trying to force “bad experiences”, they’re trying to force averaged teams.
The lazy and clumsy way they do this (putting low MMR feeders on your team) is what creates forced 50% winrate.
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…How the hell would a forced 50% winrate make the company more money?
Its proven happy customers buy more. Not people grumpy at being held back.
So…what about the 16 games i just had where i won only 2? what am i supposed to make of that?
There are 5 customers on either side.
If you buy into the whole conspiracy theory, this is how it looks:-
Every player is given an “engagement rating.” This rating covers things like
- average streak length before quitting.
- chance of purchasing items after a streak.
- average money spent on the game.
- what you’ve been looking at in the shop.
- several other factors.
In effect, it estimates how many losses you will accept, before you give up and leave for the day. The matchmaker will then use you as fodder to make 5 other customers happy, until you are at risk of leaving the game for the day. Then, it will give you a similar streak of wins (or a couple more if there’s a chance you’ll buy something from it.)
It checks what you’ve been looking at in the store. You will notice your loss streaks are broken by a master-level ally rocking that particualar item. If you’ve been staring at Li Ming’s “kit”, you will be beaten by a skilled Li Ming several times, then you end up with a GM Li Ming hard carrying you to victory. This is to show you another player doing well with Li Ming, so you decide to spend money on her as well (to share in the fun.)
Matpat madea vid related to this. Activision has patents out based on “player engagement” in a matchmaking system, which talks about this. Who knows if it reached Blizz MM, but what better game to try this out on than their very own MOBA?
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Of course it’s rigged. Always has been and the only people left denying it are the NPC-fanboys who aren’t willing to accept a hard truth. Most will not carefully analyze the obvious forced win or loss streaks, nor will they admit the artificial/beneficial effects of spending real money. HotS matchmaking is, like every other business practice, concerned with one thing only - maximizing short term profits and in this case it will cost them long term loyalty, which is warranted.
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yes it is rigged so beware when you have a good win streak because right after that you will get a horrible losing streak
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I have read articles about this marketing strategy and I did watch the video in question. I have no doubt it’s used, but I don’t think it’s used in HOTS, honestly half the time MM just seems random.
When at the end of a HL game I see my team or the enemy team was favored to win by 5 points, it seems more that the MM was desperate to create any kind of match, as this was once quite rare.
Yes, it is rigged, under the guise of something else and there are two ways:
-
“The Mentor System”: High level players are matched with low level players to teach them how to play. They are blatantly matching players who do not know how to play, are inherently worse, with better players. Anyone who has had to endure this can attest that the low level players are worse.
-
“MMR/Winrate balance”: Players on a win streak, or at a higher winrate, are placed with players on a losing streak or low winrate, if they are within the same MMR bracket. This is experienced often - you get teammates who work well with you, who know camp timings, who understand when to poke and when to engage etc. Life is good, though you do notice quite a few stomps. You do seem to win more than you lose and then… potato team. Camps don’t exist to them, soaking is a myth etc. Check their match history… ah yes, losing streak for the most.
Match-ups are supposed to be random, but they simply do not feel as such. Much like Apple felt they had to alter the Shuffle’s random to seem more random, Blizz feels the need to intervene as well, except Apple did it based on user feedback. Blizz… not so much.
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that would usually be grounds to make it seem less likely imo. Mattpatt is more particular to sensationalizing things to generate click-bait income and only gets enough resources as necessary to make the “theory” seem plausible.
You’ll typically see conspiracy nuts backing his vids while people with better knowledge in particular areas pointing out the glaring flaws. I haven’t seen any of his vids in years, and generally refuse to give him clicks at all, but I’d assume he still projects ‘worst-case scenarios’ to be more staged as something more likely than they really are.
afterall, math is ‘hard’ and people assume ‘numbers don’t lie’ so they’re more prone to accepting semi-authority if it coincides with something they already want to think.
The issue with patent-looking it is doesn’t indicate if something was actually made, or that it even works. Its not uncommon for businesses (or people) to get patents to act as a form of control or manipulation by having said patent, rather than even use it.
See, this is the sort of reply you’d get from people likely to eat up said “theory”. The two major issues of this sort of response is that hey offer no refutation of any point made that disagrees with them, and then need to overgeneralize and strawman any person that openly disagrees with them via namecalling.
Why put in the effort to make a worthwhile argument when you have something to just blame? Why put in the effort to play the game, when people can just blame something for being ‘rigged’?
Its the same sort of lazy response that seems more indicative that they have observational issues for processess and considering options that don’t occur with them in favor of just claiming they’re automatically right, and everyone is automatically wrong; since they’re “right” they should “win” and when they don’t, clearly its the system’s fault for keeping them down.
Its rather about specific details or observations, and all just this ‘theory’ of interconnected elements when its more likely people are greedy geniuses that are masters of manipulation rather than people being unobservant and incompetent (maker and audience alike)
When said posters assume themselves right/best, you can see how they don’t like options that include them being anything less than stellar and perfect as an explanation.
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Still writing novellas and expecting people to read them, eh? Well, we can obfuscate through wordiness but it won’t change the fact that more and more players are waking up to the rigged system. In this case, pattern recognition is more useful than verbosity.
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