Petition for modification in the ranking system. It's time

General Discussion
1

Hi, first I would like to present my self. My name is AxGames, fan and player of Heroes of the Storm.

I have been involve in the world of MOBA gaming almost from his beginning with DOTA, when it was a map inside Warcraft III. I played a little bit back then when I was in college.

But i really started to play MOBA games a few years later, inside StartCraft 2, in an Arcade game made by the community called Aeon of Storms. An awesome and fun game to play, with a bunch of problems, but still it was great.

Then i started with HOTS. The beautiful graphics, the characters that all know from StartCraft history, the shared experience system,iI just loved it.
I remember have reached gold rank in some point and i was not a very good or a very experimented HOTS player.

This times and over the last few years i have seen and it’s my feeling, although the game still running a lot of players have left. In my opinion many because of the actual ranking system.

The actual ranking system penalizes to hard in low level ranks. And that is in my opinion the major problem. Games like Call of Duty Mobile who are widely played by people all around the world let you go up in the rank if you think a little and get some practice and after a while you can get to the top of the rank where the top players are with out to be a genius of have to dedicate your life to the game. Once the player have reach the top of the rank, in this point you can apply a hard rank system because the players have already enjoyed the game while the were scaling up the latter to the top rank.

THE PROBLEM
The problem of the actual ranking system of HOST is:
The ranking system is brutal in all level of the rank. If you are bronze, or silver or master, doesn’t matter. If your team win, you get points, if you lose the match, you lose points.

THE SOLUTION
If your team win you get points. If your team lose you still get a few points or lose some depending on your personal performance. This aplied to all the ranks until you reach grand master, in which point you can apply a different kind of rule:
If you win you get points. If you lose, you lose points.

This will help the really good player to reach grand master much easier if they play enough and will create a bigger grand master pool players.

As a final thoght, i have enjoyed many hours playing this game, i have made many friends in diferent countries and i have learn a lot. Mi intention is to amke this game better and maybe bring back to older players who i’m shure woulb love to rach Grand Master with a new ranking system.

1 Like
2

The biggest problem with this is it is very difficult to write an algorithm that will actually track performance. Just having high damage/healing numbers doesn’t always mean you played well. For example, a hero like Lucio will always have higher healing numbers than a hero like Uther. This can have the unintended consequence of heroes being avoided simply because playing the “wrong” hero will result in a loss of points. There are drafts where Uther would be the better choice (Hi Zeratul!), but your team won’t have him due to a risk of a point penalty.

And how do you rate the performance of a tank? If your tank never dies, that may look good on paper, but having a Muradin hiding behind your Ming to protect his KDA is not a winning strategy. Having a tank eating a ton of unnecessary damage, stressing the healer, just so they look good on the performance meter could turn a sure win into a sure loss. In addition, good tanks do things that are hard to quantify like scouting, warding, body-blocking, peeling, and counter-engaging. In addition, like healers, some tanks naturally show up on the meter with more damage taken, just due to their design. Stitches and Diablo eat damage for lunch and heal themselves back up, where Garrosh and Anub’arak hardly take any damage due to their armor mechanics.

Mind you, losing points when you give it your all hurts, but losing games because your teammates are afraid to draft and play optimally hurts even more.

6 Likes
3

This is just a participation trophy. When you dont get penalty for loosing, you dont need to split it to legues at all. Eventually everybody would move up, but it wouldnt mean anything.

1 Like
4

If you want to climb fast, then you need a good coach. Too much players overestimate their skills.
PBMMR didn’t work for many reasons just like Hoku said.
Heroesprofile has this kind of rating in every match, tho.
In your last recorded game https://www.heroesprofile.com/Match/Single/54802880 you were quite in the average.
Thing is, you don’t need a point adjustment when the system averages itself through many games you’ve played. If your performance is stronger than your average team mates, you’ll climb in the long run.

3 Likes
5

But how would your performance be determined?

6

Hoku (and others) have articulated my own reservations regarding your suggestion that is very much like the failed PBMM that was already attempted, and I have nothing to add to that.

I don’t agree with this statement:

Ranked has always been the least played PVP mode, (not including URD), so any problems with a declining playerbase is more likely due to Hots being in maintenance mode, and the negative effects that has on the matchmaker.

If there was a change I’d make to Ranked, it would be that players can only group a single rank apart and perhaps bring in that AFK loss forgiveness the Dev’s promised all those many years ago.

7

Yes the AFK or Troll or w/e forgiveness definitely would have been the answer, and I think QM deserves a bit of love too as well.

8

Those who should realistically gain points even when losing don’t really need it.
But those who should not climb like that should have the mere chance of climbing faster.

It’s hard to climb, it feels bad to lose rank points. But a loss is a loss. And with a positive winrate, you’ll climb anyway.

9

This.

Ultimately the only thing that matters is winning. Extremely good players like Fan end up with 70% win ratios in the long term proving that winning does matter much more than personal statistics.

The average player with a 50,1% win rate has an extremely hard time climbing up. That is true.
But the real question is, does the 50,1% player at Silver or Gold deserve to be any higher than his current rank, given he loses and wins almost exactly half his games?

Rank should never be a participation trophy or something you “grind” towards. It should be awarded for being considerably better than other players in your rank.
And ultimately - being “better” can only be measured by winning more.

1 Like