It doesn't bother blizz that the most popular game mode is a clown fiesta?

General Discussion
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Talking about quickmatch. The game mode that 80% of the players play, the game mode that new players play to get a feel of what the game is about. The game mode that almost all new players start with as their first exposure to the game in order to determine whether they want to play HOTS.

This most important first experience for new players, and the most popular HOTS game mode has the following features:

  1. An absolute clown mode
  2. Usually no tanks or healers (or worse yet, the new players play tanks and don’t have healers so they hate playing tanks and the problem gets worse)
  3. No drafting at all (so new players don’t learn the absolute basics of drafting)
  4. Heroes end up on unplayable maps (e.g. TLV on 2-lane maps) or maps they are really good on, by 100% random chance like russian roulette
  5. Whether your allied heroes have synergy with yours is another russian roulette
  6. Whether you get hard-countered into an unplayable game (chromie vs hammer, murky vs butcher, garrosh vs malthael etc) is yet another russian roulette (yes there are ways around it, but I don’t think new players will enjoy being hard-countered into the ground by random chance very much)
  7. 90% of games decided on the loading screen based on the draft and map (e.g. butcher is very popular in qm and tanks with cc are on the other hand very unpopular)
  8. You get trolls, afks and feeders every game because everyone expects it to be a clown mode (for the above reasons) and no one is really trying

Seriously? How many new players will play this garbage and think “hmmm, I will take the next step forward and try playing draft modes”? Or will they uninstall and go to LOL/Dota?

I honestly think quickmatch needs to be scrapped, Dota doesn’t have quickmatch and no one has ever asked for its implementation in dota ever

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You have the right problem discovered, but suggested the worst solution.

If QM is removed, the game dies. It’s that simple. 80% of the playerbase ain’t gonna stick around if you remove it. If you think the game is suffering now, imagine how it’ll be when half the QM playerbase (who will mostly be the worst of them, btw) invade draft with the intent of playing it like QM, and the other half flat-out leave.

At this point in the game’s life, it’s time to accept that even if it isn’t the primary mode, QM is the biggest, and it needs its fair share of balancing and consideration.

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Not all the time but a good amount is 5 v 5 assassin or just 1 bruiser on each team

We did have a MM for QM with a main tank and healer on both teams, but people complained that que times we’re too long like 10 min sometimes, so i’m happy people are like the new 25 min waste of time instead of 10 mins for a balanced and fair game.

People can literally play Unranked draft if they want to draft, QM is for playing a specific hero you want to play or test out a new hero.

That’s the point it’s random, my advice is to practice TLV in unraked because they are that unique.

Again random comps and random map, if you wanted to have synergy with allies go play a draft mode.

QM should not be balanced around because of random everything.

This is false, unless it’s certain heroes that need counters (Hammer)

Tons of tanks with CC play QM. You ever see Malganis or Diablo in QM?

Report them and move on that’s the best we can do.

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I rarely see Big Top Gazlowe myself.

Not even other circus members, like Ringmaster Greymane. Not in QM or in draft, or even versus AI.

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Quickmatch isn’t the most popular mode?

I’m a solid 90%+ sure that Versus AI is the most popular mode.

Where in the world are you getting 80% from?

Based on the not accurate hotslogs, in the last 7 days, QM has about 45% popularity per the last 7 days on hotslogs. And that excludes versus AI.

Sure, Hotslogs is far from perfect, but expecting QM to over double in popularity (Assuming versus AI games would only drive down QM to 40% of all games played) is pretty unlikely.

Date I calculated with a quick check from hotslogs:
17851-brawl
9405-URD
30535-ranked
47351-QM
105142 games total

Okay, you got this part right.

Usually they tend to have one or the other, or both.
Sometimes it is just “support” and assassins/specialists however. But I think that over 50% of QM games either have:

  1. tanks on both teams
  2. healers on both teams
  3. both tanks and healers on both teams.

You have no evidence, please cite if you want to use “usually”.

This is a feature. And a damn nice feature. All the people who suggest blind draft and otherwise instead of QM… No.
Being able to play who I want to play is a FEATURE. F-E-A-T-U-R-E.

Yes, that is correct. Trying to make a matchmaker consider all the variables would be hilarious. I would love to see it.

if we’re assuming relatively equal skills, and that people are bad, the concept of hard counters is funny. Because you’re assuming people know how to play the hero to hard counter the other person.

This is a valid point in terms of compositions, but not nearly as large an issue as you try to make it.

What draft? Seriously, you just complained that people don’t learn to draft, now you’re talking about drafts.

Again, I rarely see Big Top Gazlowe or Ringmaster Greymane.
And this is not my experience. Nor that of players I know.

3 Likes
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I share your experience, original post, and I would add:

The game is designed with a communist theme where individuality is minimal and the gods that are your government (Blizz) silence and eventually ban players like Grubby; a streamer that is so rated-G that your 6 year old could watch.

Using a theoretical biological example, the game is also designed with a feminine theme and ignores masculine directives such as ‘the ape sensation of domination’, & individuality (‘peacock feathers’). They do not find a median between the two, they go other direction to an extreme. Then you ask, how many players are actually female, and then you ask why the game isn’t performing well with Blizzard silencing streamers like Grubby & others as a cherry on the pie.

Again, the game is great but the dev. team does not have critical faculties on these matters and thus leave the game in an awkward state.

I’ll probably somehow get muted and suspended for this post somehow. People are TERRIFIED in HotS and often don’t type or use voice chat because of this North Korean Surveillance nonsense.

2 Likes
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I’ll be honest, I didn’t read the rest of your post, I skimmed it, but seeing this brought a massive smile on my face. It is hilarious.

I do find that few people use voice (in QM, much more often in ranked, especially if you ask) but those who do are happy to talk.

And, uh. As if North Korea has the internet bandwidth to waste monitoring HotS communications of all things…

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  1. The first gamemode they pkay is vsAI
  2. The community chose the clown fiesta for the most popular gamemode, why should it be a problem if the ppl chose it despite having UD as an option?
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Blizzard has done what the community (or at last a part of it) asked them: faster queue time possible.
That means that to put players into a match in matter of seconds, the already flawed MMS doesn’t have the time to search for appropriate roles or equal skilled people and so on.

About drafting and knowing the map, you probably missed out Unranked mode, since QM is where people have just to choose the Hero they want to play no matter what.

Afkers and feeders are found in all games, we can just deal with them with the tools we’ve got: report and move on.

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“Planar: I do find that few people use voice (in QM, much more often in ranked, especially if you ask) but those who do are happy to talk.”

I find the opposite to be true. When you ask them to join voice, you are extremely lucky is 1 person does. I have played 9000 matches of HotS and gotten master league in solo ranked. I especially play a lot of Unranked. People don’t even type anymore m8. I do NOT blame the supposed ‘toxic community’ for this. At some point the company should take some responsibility for the game design that leaves most people feeling like something is missing (individuality). I have a recommendation on this topic, but its superfluous to this post.

“Planar: I’ll be honest, I didn’t read the rest of your post, I skimmed it”

That is why you completely dropped the ball on comprehension with:
“Planar: And, uh. As if North Korea has the internet bandwidth to waste monitoring HotS voice communication of all things…”

I have on words on that, lol.

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yes, I did mistype with voice chat on the brain.

Regardless of them just monitoring the text in the game, it still is precious bandwidth which reaches outside of North Korea, which is a limited supply.

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The reason they chose this clown fiesta is because it doesn’t take forever for a game to start.

The solution is to drastically reduce the time it takes for unranked draft to start by removing bans and drastically reducing hero pick times or allow heroes to be picked before the game and then changed during the drafting phase to speed it up.

Just because the alternative to qm is unappealing doesn’t mean qm isn’t garbage.

Think about it. I don’t know about you but I enjoy draft modes WAY more than 5 assassins vs 5 assassin clown games. But even I play quickmatch a lot more often because unranked draft queues are just way too long and the drafting phase way too long

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so your solution is to wreck Unranked draft. lol.

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UD and TL is pretty quick in queue as well, quicker than QM sometimes.
If you can’t stand the few extra seconds of bans and picks, you are one of the reasons why QM is the “mainmode”.

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No my solution is to speed up unranked draft.

Drafting in dota takes less than half the time it takes in HOTS, and every mode is a draft mode in dota there is no quickmatch.

And I can tell you, there are way more complains in HOTS about quickmatch being garbage than there are in dota about how heroes are drafted in every mode

@karabars, actually, unfortunately UD and TL is completely dead in my region (Singapore server) so maybe my view is a bit biased. But yea. The choice for me is a very long HL queue or a 5v5 clown mode. That is the choice for every single server that isn’t as populated as NA or EU (korea, taiwan, australia, singapore etc).
Oh and new players don’t get a choice, they can’t play ranked. For new players on all these servers, it is clown mode or quit the game, so they quit the game

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So reduce the time for picks and bans in URD?

URD is currently a useful tool for doing draft play due to:

  1. anxiety about rank
  2. practicing drafting
  3. wanting more casual experience

This just guys URD.

I understand how dota works, and it isn’t a draft like you’re speaking of.
The equivalent in Dota to rannked play in HotS would be Captains mode.
(how have they not renamed that mode 0.o.)

I spent 7-8 years playing dota, before the playerbase on WC3 got low enough that queue times were too high for me, given the lack of matchmaking.

Yes, and I, and many, many other people would not play HotS if they scrapped Quick Match. I don’t want to deal with someone stealing my hero or that BS. I want to play my hero.

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Because they once said, that they want QM to be the Wild West, where crazy things happen.

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Oh QM, the game mode that pretty much single handily killed any and all competitive drive for HOTS.

It’s far to late for the dev team to be bothered by QM or do anything about it. The damage is done. All they can do now is live with it and keep it as fun as possible.

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QM is the one consistent thing that has held this game back it is also the mode i play most and i agree that it going away can only make the game better and more competitive

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I agree there has been to much consideration given to bad modes that held the game back.

The draft modes should be abolished or at least put under an “Arcade” tab so that people know they are fringe modes not to be taken seriously. That way the devs can focus on the relevant modes (AI/QM/Brawl) who are actually liked and played by a non-marginal proportion of the players.

5 Likes