My 2 Cents on the Match Maker

General Discussion
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as a warning because people are gonna be like “sauce? owo”, just a reminder that all of this is personal experience and no way factual, just my 2 cents, IDK how others feel or experienced like this but feel free to disagree and that’s ok, love you too, just don’t get your spider mines all over the thread

So I have a friend, totally new to the game and has been playing with me and a friend of mine for a while, he’s all the way from NA and his knowledge of the game is extremely limited back when we started months, playing mostly D.Va or Varian and still doing so while still encouraging him to play more like Raynor and Valla.

But there was somewhat of an issue that I think a lot of people relate to when they are veterans introducing new players to a game, the match maker is a total mess… For new players, in hind sight it’s actually working as intended, balancing an almost close MMR gap for all players in the match to fit the needs but the sad thing is not the new player.

The new player would at the end of the day suffer the hard way as in he’s matched against really hard players who know the ins and outs, in majority of cases a diamond+ player, all because he was in a party of high ranked players, you could say this is a good way to counter group smurfing and it is. But it suffers from false positive such as actual new players, this at the end of the day tend to make new players at least from a sense of joining with experienced players hard to get into tbe game, all because they are straight up matched into extremely experienced or outright OTPs who just know what to do vs someone who doesn’t know how to stutterstep (much) or when to take camps or correct positioning and so on.

So I made my mind and thought, if I want to guide them in a better safer environment maybe I should smurf and play ranked with him, and I did, made a new account in 2 minutes seconds (honestly it’s so dumb how fast it is kinda gross) and started playing in QM with him.

The first on sight is because he is a new player and I am a “”“new”"" player, the match maker proceed to balance around other new players but on the hand, wait times also got a little longer and it makes sense, the veteran pool is way higher than new players, this type of issue exists in almost any game, OW back in 2017 suffered a massive new player wait times of 1+ hours because the new player pool had a shortage, meanwhile the veteran/experienced pool had seconds to a minute wait time.

Anyways back to HotS, new player and a “”“new”"" player playing QM, the match maker immediately with no questions despite the slight increase of wait time gives me players of equal skills like the new friend of mine and the smurf account, the game ended up a total mess with no questions, no stutter stepping, no understanding of merc timing and sometimes seeing people just mindlessly split pushing gave me 2017 nostalgia all over again, you can say they aren’t just bad from my perspective they are outright new players vs new players (feat a sussy smurf (me or someone else))

So I decided to make it harder on myself and played my discomfort role, the heretic TANK ROLE or play hard carries that I’m messing with a lot (Kerrigan) I’m telling you it’s been hard so far to get the hang of it, so it’s a good workout while they try to get comfortable with players of similar skills as I try to get to play a role I suffer the most in playing, so far E.T.C. has been my favorite to learn while Garrosh has been rough, and Diablo is just outright pain to me and myself and the poor soul who just got rammed into the wall and died, Malganis… No he needs buffs wtf.

During those games I also noticed a repeating behavior I’ve noticed when I play in high MMR QM, solo or duo or just 5 man, players are just “”“focused”"", less likely to be chat silenced and most importantly less likely to throw through AFKing in spawn, I never seen this behavior since for a year from today, and it rarely happened. On the new account I… Have seen just enough, you have your average thrower staying in spawn and AFK that rejoins after timing out to AFK even further, silenced players it’s almost like toxicity is the law and my favorite is walking into towers and feed because some toxic player got into their pants and now proving a point by… Being as bad as them??? (This has happened multiple times.)

Although painful to see, it makes perfect sense, like think about it, Veterans have some what standards to follow suit, learned that the best thing to focus on is yourself than others which all end up reducing toxicity being a norm around them, the good ol’ “gg” is there when the match end, a lose or win, of course there are sometimes the opposite but it’s a rare sight.

On the other hand, new players queue feels like it came out from the Fallout series, everyone are just so full themselves and in denial, arguing what is right and wrong while lacking focus on how they just fed 10 times for not going Taunt varian or something like that, so it is a total mess.

That’s not the case anymore when I moved to ranked much, but I’ve also noticed a similarity in Silver league, you have the casual throw fest, all over the place and everything I’ve said in the QM experience also applies here, fortunately this issue decays the higher you go in ranked and surprisingly becomes bearable because everyone wants to win so they think selflessly to (close enough) draft something that fits the draft selection with the generalists.

So in my honest opinion? The match maker has this weird experience depending on where you start and where you end up, the higher you go the less torment you will find yourself in because people are focused on how to simply win and amp the draft if possible, not the case of new players nor low league MMR.

But does that mean it’s impossible to climb?

No, bad players can be easily telegraphed just from having the knowledge over the heroes they are playing and it’s no surprise, I’ve made a lot of gambits dried out to 0 for Valla or Lucio physically making me cringe when he never swaps to movement speed and get played like a heal bot, timing is a struggle, so CC goes full on loose which others I’d get destroyed by a simply times High Five Lucio otherwise.

As for high MMR party abuse that’s just another story for another day but the point here is, match making works in majority of circumstances, tries it’s best to average over MMR when possible and give you players who are likely experienced regardless of their SL rank and such, while new players play against new players featuring a smurf or 2 among us.

Anyways feel free to disagree or share your experience lol.

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It’s sad that you have to even say

as a warning because people are gonna be like “sauce? owo”, just a reminder that all of this is personal experience and no way factual, just my 2 cents, IDK how others feel or experienced like this but feel free to disagree and that’s ok, love you too, just don’t get your spider mines all over the thread

I don’t think the problem you’re describing will ever go away because of HotS being F2P. Regardless of smurfing, people make new accounts to bypass the low population at higher ranks which in turn skews lower level match making by effectively robbing new or ‘bad’ players of wins by effectively smurfing in several leagues below your actual skill level (regardless of intent). This snowballs the match making issues by pushing players down further in rank so they play with consistently worse and worse players.

It was a massive oversight that has had huge ramifications on the ladder system within HotS and highlights that in competitive multiplayer, team-based games, you need to have anti smurfing/anti alt account systems in play to curve the worst of those aspects.

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IMO Smurfing has been quite easy to pinpoint who is smurfing or not and even got my fair share of whispers from other smurfs taking a notice that I myself was a smurf too despite shooting my legs in like 3 places for playing tank.

Point is, at least from this thread, MM actually seems to work but has no way to pinpoint smurfs, has ways to counter measure it but has the issue of false positives (e.g actual new players playing in high MMR party).

So if we look at all of this, it seems to work as intended in majority of circumstances with few minor issues that are usually highlighted here on the forusm.

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I think you’re mostly correct here. There is no realistic way for the system to figure out who is and isn’t a smurf.

I don’t think the system is currently working as intended though, it was clearly designed for a much larger playerbase and the cracks in HotS match making really start to show once the community shrinks to this size.

Your listed example isn’t a new phenomena, lots of people have had this happen myself included.

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As much as people want to call out blues/devs for ‘lying’ any chance they get, back when the game had active support and posts regarding matching, there’s not much reason to expect them to ‘lie’ about the game and claim things are worse than otherwise experienced.

Matching had goals and metrics to track those, and I think the intent conveyed through those posts (not going to look 'em up to reference directly) holds up with what was attempted with the game. Learning a DotA-like game is really hard to do alone and – I would say, like driving – demands someone else to teach someone how to observe enough that they learn how to learn. As much as other games may have tried, it takes something extra this game cannot really provide to get people to take the plunge, and stick with it long enough to get traction from there.

Back when I was introduce to Dota-Allstars, I had to have friends get me started and stick with it, and I think HotS devs are aware of the time and effort it takes to get over the hurdle, and they tried to incorporate that into some matching expectations. A game that needs/demands ‘teamwork’ to start, learn, and play has to make concessions on the kittens vs lions things (reference to a matching conference that got posted here so many times)

Of the times I’d see people complain about ‘broken matching’ and look at the replays they would post, the ‘issue’ they had was very different from the source of the complaint. A lot of expectations around “matching” are more superstition than not, and it sets up people to have a bad time if they don’t learn to buffer the observations and actions and do more than just loop the same complaints.

While I don’t have as much experience with any other game, I would read over their communities, and much of the same language and experiences persists; as much as people want to blame whatever they want, it’s not without reasons that much of the same issues come up in multiplayer games, and it’s not without care that devs attempt to address some issues, but the reality is there are pro’s and con’s that are weighed in the implementation of what they try to do.

HotS suffers a lot by trying to be ‘different’, but not teaching how it is ‘different’, or to succeed with being that ‘different’, so inner-squabbles are more likely to create issues per match than they might compared to another game. I don’t think it wrong to ‘hide’ the boogie mean of some matches as most matches do not really have some of that matter to what makes the match “fair” or not. A lot of the same hang-ups people take with matching also extends to how they behave in other activities, and how ‘willing’ they are to deviate from their complaint cycle.

It’s must easier for people to loop complaints, echo things they see other people do, then it is for them to learn how something works, why something might not actually be ‘broken’ and most parts are in their control to influence than they may consider. Most match makers are just some ‘math’ and what matters isn’t the “averaging” it’s how the numbers got into that state, and that tends to be the part ‘nobody’ cares to find out.

It’s a sad trope that computer customer service has to ask "is your machine plugged-in (or turned on) and enough say “yes” and start complaining while the answer – and hour later on the service call – ended up being ‘no’ all along. Expectations influence perception, so people looking to have that hard time find it, and then fault anything else contrary to their actual experience. And those tend to be concessions devs are going to have to make due to a lack of consistent ways to actually deal with imposed contradictions from chronic complainers.

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My stab in the dark for why this is so. I think the players you describe above are (mostly) “revenge accounts”, players who have been silenced/banned on other accounts and are doing their nasty thing. The other possibility is they are smurfs, but are lifetime Silver/Bronze players who think they are “stuck”, so make new accounts. This is why they will often argue as if they are “experts” at Hots. Many random posters to this forum have said they make accounts for the above reasons.

I’ve come to this conclusion in my own games, when I’m matched with a low level account who knows some subtleties like merc camp timing and other broader macro knowledge, but have Bronze/Silver mechanical skills. These players often rage and lecture and will AFK or call “GG” as soon as you load into a match and/or start to throw at the first hint of a setback.

You said these games were on the EU server? If so I’m pleased to know there are enough players to fill out the new player queue without too much of a wait. Last year I made a throwaway account to play with a friend who was new to Hots, but it was quite rare to have matches that didn’t mix veteran accounts and new accounts together after only a short wait. This is on the US server, from what I can tell the EU has suffered less player bleed.

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In the circumstances I played the first 30 levels I was being matched with accounts who somehow crawled out of their vs AI habit or just absolutely have no idea what they are doing.

The norm of revenge accounts are quite rarity unless they admit to troll from the start, but most of these people who do all of this are really just new players to the fullest getting trashed talked by other new or sometimes smurf players, it never felt like there’s a revenge account habit happening and I haven’t witnessed something so extreme as this yet.

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It should not surprice me if some players in this game only play to feed and afk to take revence on the company. On EU server we got two players who have spammed Gchat with racist words since october last year.

They get silenced and then comes back again 10 min later on a new smurf doing it all again.

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I also had a coach account because Master players with Newbs in a party, make a terrible experience for many, in return I also didn’t tryhard and played Heroes and builds I’m not as familiar with.

I found mostly genuine new players. And maybe 5% was “revenge accs” (just a baseless estimation, like I remember 1 Malfurion raging on me because as a Murky -below lvl 10-, I didn’t went to Volskaya objective. Told them in chat I can help after 10, with Heroic).

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Note I made my own topic on this but it got flagged and deleted. Your topic is more about how MM is working but the other thing you mention, smurfing to play with new players, needed to be fixed. So my response is more to that.

In another reality HotS has a mentor system. Veteran players can group up with newbies while in game the Veteran goes into spectate ghost form so the team will have 6 players on the filed but the Vet can’t not interact with the map but can still use a hero to walk around.

Only newbies you are grouped with can see your ghost and you can use in-game voice or w/e to talk to each other.

While group you just click the check box that you want to be a ghost so even in a full group it will just fill your spot with a solo players/ rando pairings. Checking the ghost box makes it so the MMR on your account is not included in the MM system while it’s pairing up groups. So you don’t have to switch accounts and “smurf” if you don’t mind sitting back and coaching and only being as interactive as just running around the map.
Win or lose, being in ghost spectate mode means these game will have no effect on your account personally.

In this other universe where HotS is the talk of the MoBa town and didn’t get stabbed in the back Sephiroth style, devs will figure out the kinks in the system like:

Rather or not you can ghost by yourself and just randomly spectate games
or if a whole 5 man can ghost and just spectate games as a group.

If the mentor system should be used in rank games or not.

Maybe add rewards for mentors and new players who group up with mentors!

There’s lot’s of little things to work on not including bugs and glitches but I’ll leave that up to the AU devs to figure out. They would even ask the player bases for suggestions on how to make this system work better since it will be the players who have to deal with it once it comes out.

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o.O

(/20 characeters)

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Was just going to make a topic on this kinda. More of a question. I’ve been noticing that the MMR of my Team is been constantly higher than that of my Enemies team.
So I don’t quite understand why. Like is it telling me You are SUPPOSED to win? If you don’t you lose a lot?
But why put me against a lower MMR team? Because I will win 90% of the time. And I am winning. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Been playing this is pretty rigged… Every win my Team has Higher MMR… Every loss the My team has Lower MMR and it shows in game. Literally fixed. There doesn’t appear to be any “Range” , it’s just flat out the winning team has Higher MMR every time.

I just looked and im noticing the losing team has a random Low MMR person on the team like almost 500 MMR lower than the rest of the team. So weird seem so fixed.

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and what are you using to appraise said mmr?

If you’re relying on heroesprofile, it does not reflect mmr that HotS uses. If you’re checking numbers after a game, then the ‘winning team’ will have a higher mmr because they won that game and Hp is making adjustments to suit the game it gets. As an example, of the account that I found looking up your posting idea on HP, some of the people in the storm league matches only have a handful of games recorded, so the outcome of the predicted mmr it displays is based on 1-10 games. If people don’t have many games on HP, then their mmr adjustments are going to swing really wide and generally ‘predict’ that the winning side won… because they won.

Similarly deal with hotslogs if that’s your choice of upload either; online replay parsers do not show accurate mmr and are heavily skewed to showcase who uploads, and who does not.

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There is a Pre Match and Post Match MMR.

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Yeah I have no ideal what in this post was against the tos but my message shouldn’t tick anyone off to report me over it.

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doesn’t invalidate a single thing I wrote.

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After watching my own recorded games I can say 8/10 games I have lost my team have always been the one with the lowest mmr. Even tho HP should not be taken too serious since its not 100% accurate it still make you wonder.

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Are you on a constant winning or loosing spree before playing that match?

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I’ve been a bit more scattered than usual lately (too much work!) I don’t think I was very clear in my reply to you.

I agree most revenge accounts are rare, but I think they are less rare on the NA servers. In my Humorous BattleTags thread I’ve posted some players who make it obvious they are trolls with names like “IwillFeed”, “Thrower”, stuff like that. I’ve only really encountered these players in ARAM games, not regular game modes.

My point was really that many players with new accounts are often lifetime Bronze/Silver players who think they are “stuck because of the MM” and are almost indistinguishable in skill (especially mechanical skill) from new players.

I read so often on these forums that many players who feel stuck in low ranks claim they have at least 5 accounts, which “strangely” all end up at the same MMR as their main account. As Froggy mentioned, you also have the kind of players who makes multiple accounts to cycle through to avoid getting banned so they can trash talk all they want without fear of punishment.

At least for me on the NA server, my friend and I were almost always matched with a mixture of veteran and newish accounts in QM and my feeling is most of the “new” players were just on ALTS. It seems to be a player population issue on the US server compared to the EU.

I do remember years ago that the Devs said they relaxed the rules for the new player queues as in some regions it was taking an hour to find exclusively new players to match.