We know that HOTS has never been a serious game; it’s actually a casual one. That’s why we’re asking to make Quick Match an enjoyable experience, as it’s the mode people play to have fun. In this mode, we just need to press a button and jump into a match, without needing to pick anything else. That’s the kind of casual game we like. However, the experience has been awful. Many use Quick Match to level up characters, complete missions, or play with heroes they aren’t good at.
It would be ideal to remove certain characters from this mode or prevent them from earning experience. Make it so players can only earn quest points by playing against AI, and they should be able to level up their character to level 10 against AI before being able to play in PvP. The game becomes much more fun when there’s a tank with crowd control (CC), an off-tank also with CC, mages, DPS, and healers. When this combination is present, the experience is very enjoyable. Additionally, I suggest that tanks and healers don’t earn experience from minions and receive damage penalties against heroes. This would prevent some players from picking tanks and focusing on doing DPS, which weakens the team.
Please make team fights more enjoyable for those who love Quick Match.
I am not sure you have thought about the consequences of your suggestions. For one, it would all but guarantee fewer people will queue as a tank or healer. If my DPS aren’t hitting what I am targeting, if my bruiser isn’t picking up soak, and if the match doesn’t have a healer because all the healer mains said, “Heck with these restrictions, I am only playing ranked from now on!”, what is my incentive to tank? SL really is the best place for the type of match you want, but I am guessing you don’t want to fill. Sorry, but you just can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
The only QM fix needs to be how Blizzard creates team “comps” on QM matches.
For example, this was my most recent match:
Team A: Zarya, Nazeebo, Deckard, Zeratul, Azmodan.
Team B: Li-Ming, Mephisto, Anduin, Junkrat, Valeera.
One team is very well-rounded with a strong frontline support tank and two powerful siegers, with the bonus of having the best anti-mage hero in the game (we’ll just say this is coincidence though).
The other team is stacked with powerful but defenseless ranged, a very squishy moderate sieger (weaker at this than either of theirs), and a stealth that cannot frontline like other melee. No tank, no support, no frontline.
The match is already skewed massively in favor of the first team because Blizzard will ignore its “role rules” in order to reduce queue times.
And before the whole, “well it’s QM so deal with it” Nah. It’s one thing to have games with no tanks, or no healers, or all-ranged. These can be fun, and they do a great job of breaking up the monotony of standard “tank/heal/DPS” match. But for the game to give one team a massive advantage over the other team right off the bat just for the sake of faster queues is unacceptable, and they need to fix this. Faster queue times mean nothing when you get put in a 15-25 minute auto-loss.
There’s also the more uncommon bs of full premades being able to queue in 2 healers, which will never be matched because the game will never put 2 healers in on the other team unless they also queue as a full group (and we all know how rare 5v5 premades are nowadays). 2-heal should be impossible in QM period.
It matches ‘essential’ roles on both sides: healer, and ranged dps (neither have an actual front-liner.) Without other heroes to match, there are two stealth melee assassins (they don’t have matching obligations, but tend to end up together due to other limitations) and then filler. Support are regulated to ‘filler’ when a healer is available on both sides.
While people may suggest that the game needs to match more types of hero ‘roles’, we could probably find a topic that asserts that the Team B unfairly won against a similar Team A somewhere else because they had a ‘useless’ support instead of another dps and their ‘front line’ couldn’t tank all the damage.
And then the most ideal way for that to be matched so that each team has an equally fair composition is with a mirror match since everything is matched, pound for pound. However, then people complain about mirror matches and so it’s a never ending cycle of “we lost because unfair comp” to “Remove mirrors”.
Every single Quick Match feels like it’s predetermined. Just like Itsversayce said. It is very easy to tell which team will win from just the initial loading screen. Which team has better frontline protection, thus allowing their mages to deal damage? They will win.
The fact that almost literally every single time I play Gazlowe and it automatically puts a very, very strong TANK as Gazlowe’s equal on the enemy team, when Gaz isn’t a tank in the slightest… is, just… I’m just sick of it. Gazlowe is just one example but its infuriating to me because I love Gazlowe and want to play him in QM but I basically can’t because the matches are almost always unfair. And before you tell me that he’s a tank, he isn’t. He used to be a specialist and now he’s a weird quazi sieger… thing. But he isn’t a tank. Not like Artanis is which is what the enemy team has most of the time.
Um, Artanis is not and has never been a tank. Yes, he has a large HP pool, and yes, he has self-sustain through shields, but he is very easy to shut down, especially if he is overly aggressive. Gazlowe, Artanis, Leoric, Malthael, Thrall, Sonya, and the like are considered bruisers, not tanks, and can and will be matched against each other if no tanks are available.
Yes, some of those matchups are harder than others, Leo can function as a tank much better than Malthael, but they are still within the realm of reasonably fair.
We used to have a thread that showed the teams, and people would have to guess which team won. Not surprisingly, no one had a high success rate at the guesses. Heroes Profile even has a page where you can play “Pick the Winner”! If all matches were so easy to call before the gates dropped, I would expect people’s guess rate to be more accurate than it is.
I suspect both confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy to be at play here.
when people think they’re already going to lose, then tend to play in a way to make that happen.
Hoku spelled out some of the matching particulars, but when people don’t know the how/why of select matches, it tends to mean they aren’t adapting to play to their own strengths and instead fearful fall back and allow the enemy team to win. Some people would rather be ‘right’ than to play.
I’ve seen this not actually be the case. A few times, one team will have a ranged DPS and the other team won’t. It usually goes badly for the team without ranged.
Matching is computer rules, so it’s going to follow those rules as ‘best’ as it can provided resource and time constraints are available. My particular post in this case is looking as a specific match – claiming it broke matching – and pointing out how it does not.
Low-populated servers (with long expected wait times) have other exceptions made to their matching; parties can also skirt the matching rules. If people want explanations, then they’re generally going to be available because computers realize results for a ‘reason’.
Well their marketing told you that. In the end it’s a MOBA with a ranked mode which also ran a pro gaming tournament. So it was more casual than others, but still a competitive game.
QM is just not made to run a comp which makes any sense. The matchmaking still sucks hard but that’s a different story.
You ask for things you will most likely get in SL.
Thrall, Rag, Xul, and Malthael are all classified as bruisers in-game, but the QM matchmaker matches them as melee assassins. Gazlowe does actually get matched as a bruiser by QM.
I think there’s definitely a case to say Gazlowe shouldn’t be matched as a bruiser in QM. He is certainly one of the least “bruiser-y” bruisers. I would put him in the same category as Rag and Xul and not match him as a bruiser in QM.
I agree that in order to better balance QM, the game needs additional labeling (name it Siegers or Pushers or you-give-a-name) and also make even team with these in mind:
Murky,
Gazlowe,
Zagara,
Sgt. Hammer,
Abathur,
Azmodan,
The Lost Vikings,
Xul,
Probius,
Sylvanas,
Nazeebo
Rexxar (probably)
You just cannot make Murky an assassin just by labeling him as an assassin. Same thing applies to all from above
Also some small balance changes are needed but I guess this is the easiest step to be done and with the biggest impact in my opinion.
However, it’s a Cho’gal game so… it’s matching based on stacks, or ‘parties’ in case you didn’t read my previous post. Parties can skirt some of QM rules standard rules. I don’t know what you thought you were trying to ‘prove’ by pointing out that QM stacks can skirt matching rules: it’s a known exploit, that’s part of why people select certain heroes for their parties. Uploading a replay would only confirm how many are partied up on either side, and not so much demonstrate that parties were matched, that’s already evident.
That said, your side has a ‘tank’ role matched and it has healer matched; it has two heroes that play well against Cho’gal teams (%damage and lane management) and you aren’t actually without ranged heroes despite the insistence that people have a ‘mage’. You have the waveclear and tools to win the game provided people don’t give up because they’re against a stack with minor notes of consideration depending on which map was played (2 vs 3 laned for tlv) and if people are intentionally feeding or afk because they expect to lose and want to ‘go next’.