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

General Discussion
39

the only reason QM is the most popular mode is because they made ranked such a garbage mode.

HoTS just had bad leadership/design issues.

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40

Hero league is most certainly a clown fiesta. Too many players who play heroes they are inexperienced with because they believe in their comps meta and don’t actually exhibit any amount of skill or knowledge with that hero. Too many players focused on team fighting over macro strategy because they think "competitive game play’ is all about “carrying” the rest of the team rather than working with it.

While QM may suffer from it not being “serious business”, where most players are less worried about winning than they are about having fun with their hero of choice, I’ve found that these players are usually more skilled and have better knowledge of the game. This is a breath of fresh air after years of dealing with the clownfiesta that is Hero League.

41

I enjoy playing healers and tanks usually.

But in quickmatch? Lol… that’s borderline masochistic

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42

There are maps heroes are better on, just as there are compositions heroes are better against, or compositions heroes work better with.
But learning how to play differently than expected to make it work is part of the SKILL required in QM that you apparently do not have.

You can play Murky on Braxxis. But I’d suggest building him as an assassin, and having someone else take the solo lane. Murky is a decent ganker who can rotate to help assist the solo laner, then if needed suicide into a tower to near instantly report back to his 3v4 and help secure that beacon too.
There are places to place his egg that are very strong for keeping track of enemy rotations, since it’s a rotation heavy map. So I’d take the vision increasing talent over bribe, and go slime build with octo-grab.

Stay ez? I’m better than you, so what does that make you? :slight_smile:

I had a TL match last night.
I picked Lili, but our team drafted Auriel as a second support.
They had Abathur on bottom lane, so I was just pushing it without contest. Then Zeratul showed up and I was bullying him out because Abathur apparently switched his focus to their other allies.
It was a weird game where both sides had unexpected comps.
But because of playing QM a lot you learn to not panic just because things aren’t going how you would have expected, and focus on maximizing gains and minimizing losses.

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43

No they don’t care.
This is why you get mass reported trolls and also persons who didn’t play for 2 month into your games. Of course they ruin everything and the match quality is the worst in the industry. But Blizzard is a we don’t care about feedback company.

44

You are walking down into the heart of a mountain.
In it, you are told, is the one you have come to see.
Welcome to the hall… of the Mountain King.


Heroes of the Storm is infused with just the right amount of delightful madness! Like unique twists and custom rule-sets that turn everything you thought you knew about the game on its head.

https://heroesofthestorm.gamepedia.com/Dr._Boom

Heroes of the Storm is a Hero brawler and Brawl is infused within all modes.

45

welcome back :kissing_heart:

46

Speaking as a level 231 Murky, contrary to what most people believe, Murky vs Butcher is a huge advantage for Murky.

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47

The problem isn’t the number of players at all, it’s the ratio of players that play tanks/healers.

If you have 10+ assassins/specialists in the queue for every 1 tank/healer, then it doesn’t matter if you have 100 players in the queue or 10,000.

This is exactly why you see QM games with 0 tanks/healers all the time… because the ratio of players that play tanks/healers compared to bruisers/assassins/specialists is too low.

For fast queue times, in order to start a game with 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 bruisers/assassins/specialists on each team, you need ratios of…

  • 1 tank for every 3 bruisers/assassins/specialists
  • 1 healer for every 3 bruisers/assassins/specialists
  • 1 tank for every 1 healer

It’s pretty obvious from playing QM that this isn’t even close to the case.

This is why they added bonuses to playing certain specs and why tanks and healers almost always have the bonus active, because the ratio of players playing them is too low.

When they had the matchmaking restrictions a few months ago that led to the 10-minute queues… that was the queue times for bruisers/assassins/specialists. Whenever I queued as a tank/healer, I always got 15-30 second queue times. The problem is, the rewards of bonus XP, bonus gold and faster queue times for playing tanks/healers still wasn’t great enough to get enough people to queue as tanks/healers still.

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48

Please enlighten.

I am guessing it has something to do with octograb.

Also, a murky that fears dying (as he would if he was against butcher) is not a murky that is playing properly.

49

An interesting question:
Would the game be better off without the people who only play QM?

There is an argument that the game could actually bring in new players if they changed the game drafting structure. From an economic standpoint, are these QM players the one spending most of the money in the store and encouraging their friends to join the game?

I don’t have any stats on player growth and influence. I’m just skeptical that QM is keeping this game alive… if everyone who only plays QM left, would it really matter? Only blizzard has stats on this kind of stuff. One thing you could say is that they should have done something about it two years ago—it probably doesn’t matter now.

50

Casuals in any game make up the majority of the playerbase. In everything from WoW and HotS to Neopets and Club Penguin. Telling the casuals to get out is how video games die. Ask Wildstar’s devs how that worked out.

3 Likes
51

Casuals have always been most abundant within any gamer base. If you don’t make it fun for casuals and enlarge your player base then the hardcore players have no one to rule over and the game dies.

Here’s a hardcore game that has issues with low player base Street Fighter.

What bothers me is that the OP can either just play Unranked or he can be part of the solution and play either Tank or Support.

I would agree that playing Tanks can be quite toxic. Mainly because when Tanks engage you expect other players to follow suite. If that doesn’t happen you’re dead and people complain you’re feeding. This kind of has a snowball effect where people will start to engage without you putting your team at again a disadvantage. This is why I always side with the tanks usually because I know how hard and frustrating it can be.

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52

You realize that “casuals” in this game predominantly play Vs AI? Like by a significant margin.

QM statistically doesn’t make up that large of a pool, and the pool of QM players who would quit if it was removed is probably a fraction of that pool.

But, it may be too late to remove QM and get any benefit at this point anyways. It would have to coincide with the 3.0 launch and a bunch of advertising – and they would have to dramatically improve Unranked/Ranked to compensate.

I honestly would just love for the AI to be better. If the AI was good enough, it would fill the niche that most people who are die-hard QM players really want anyways. It isn’t like you can talk with your opponents anyways. I bet if the AI was good enough Blizzard could add a random name generator for the bots, make it always pair you up against bots in QM, and most people wouldn’t even notice. That being said, the AI has been going backwards of late, so this isn’t that viable.

53

Yeah, A well-programmed AI would be best way to attract new players…After all, there were many players out there actually prefer single player game vs AI. Evidently, vs AI is what made Starcraft 2 Co-op a rather popular mode. My friends who never like playing ladder or ranked, can’t stop himself playing co-op game. They even spend a lot of money to buy new commander and stimpack just for vs AI mode.

Unpopular opinion, I think HoTS should have a campaign too.

54

I play Murky very aggressively. I made a long post about it a few weeks ago, with 4 different comments about playing against Butcher. Here’s a link, there’s 2 long posts I made in there…

EARLY GAME
Basically, you’re safe as long as your bubble is available and you’re not out of position. You can actually bully Butcher, believe it or not.

Butcher can’t solo Murky early-game if Murky’s bubble isn’t on CD, even if Butcher lands his Charge (stun). Even if he stuns you at level 4-7 before you get your bubble off, which is sometimes hard to bubble if he charges from melee range, he can’t kill you fast enough without help and you can just bubble after he stuns you.

LANING vs BUTCHER
Murky can bully Butcher out of the lane early in the game by poking him to death. Slime and run away. Slime and run away. Throw your bomb down and AA him while he kills it. Slime and run away. Just don’t push too far out in the lane if you can’t see their entire team. I usually don’t go past mid-lane (or less if someone is missing). As a bonus, Butcher will actually feed Murky easy stacks toward his slime quest. You’re not going to be able to push the lane, but you definitely won’t lose your lane unless he gets help. You’ll oftentimes be able to force him sippy-cup and hearth, at which time you can push the towers for a wave or two.

LANING vs SOMEONE ELSE IN A GAME WITH BUTCHER
Never push too far away from your towers (close enough that you can bubble and get behind the gates) if you don’t know where Butcher is, because he’s going to try to gank you of course. He can’t solo you, but him + anyone else can.

LEVEL 10 or 200 MEAT
When he completes his meat quest, he can then deal damage quick enough to kill you with his Charge if you don’t bubble in time, or at level 10 with his Ult by using his Ult+Charge in either order because you can’t bubble both.

OCTO-GRAB
This will oftentimes completely shut Butcher down when he dives into your team, unless the opposing team blows Murky up during his ult of course, so don’t go diving into their team to use it. As long as your team hasn’t fed Butcher, you’re probably going to be his biggest nightmare. Even if he’s well fed or when he does complete his quest, you’re usually going to be the one that has to shut him down and/or save a teammate that get’s Charged or Ult’ed with Octo-Grab, provided your team can blow him up quick enough.

Hopefully, the other team doesn’t have a Genji or Illidan, because they are awesome targets easily shut down by Octo-Grab as well.

Whenever I play against Butcher, Illidan, Genji or TBVarian, I let my team know I will be primarily saving Octo-Grab for them when they dive and your teammates will oftentimes be waiting for it because those heroes are a big threat to almost everyone.

1 Like
55

This is patently false. Planar posted some numbers earlier in this thread (excluding AI games)…

  17,851 = Brawl (17%)
    9,405 = URD (9%)
  30,535 = Ranked (29%)
  47,351 = QM (45%)

105,142 games total

• Almost half the non-AI games played are QM.
• More people play QM than Unranked and Ranked Draft combined.
• More than 1.5x as many QM games are played and the next closest mode (Ranked).

QM is very popular because players can play any hero they want. No one can ban or counter-pick the hero they want to play and they won’t be forced to play a spec/hero they don’t want to.

2 Likes
56

As QM players are probably less likely to upload replays it is to be assumed that the actual PvP-distrubution is even more shifted towards QM. The last numbers from Blizz had QM at near 60% short after UD introduction (Blizzcon 2016) , and was even higher before and probably again after all that time and the falir of the new gone.

2 Likes
57

The game had it’s most active players when HL was solo only and TL was a 5 man ghost town. There was no smurfing or boosting, so people were a more careful to not get their account banned. That’s really what we need to go back to and just let TL suffer until they can implement a Clan or Roster system with more social features. I get that Blizz has wood for this game being about teams and friends, but they also never built the infrastructure for it either.

QM had much better comp when there wasn’t so much hyper mobility and ubiquitous CC. I used to love being able to tank as Chen.

I also feel like Unranked mode has hurt both QM and Ranked modes. I’d really like to see the active player distribution before and after Unranked was added.

June 1, 2016 - MMR Normalization and Seeding
June 14, 2016 - Ranked Play Revamp

1 Like
59

I would like to see QM and Unranked consolidated into Blind Draft/Queue as Hero mode.

Rules:

  1. Any party size
  2. Like QM you would pick a hero then ready up/queue
  3. You see the map
  4. You do not see the other teams picks
  5. You get 30-60 seconds to keep or change your pick - 1st come 1st serve TL style, but no locks if you want to change after your teammate swaps
  6. This mode allows heroes to be duplicated on opposite teams but not same teams
  7. When the timer is up the game starts

Also have Solo Only queue option in new Ranked consolidation.