But this has always been the case, even when hots was at its peak with hgc alive and all that. Most people play at night because at other times they are at school/working.
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- 5 man premades are matched ONLY versus 5-man premades. At the very least, against 4+1 groups.
- 4 man premades are matched only versus 4-man premades, 3+2 groups, 3+1+1 or (optionally 5-man premades)
- Make distinct âCounterâ and âMirrorâ matchups for each hero.
When Matchmaking, pay special attention to balancing how many counters to each other the team has. (i.e. if team A has N counters for Team B, then Team B should also have no less than N-1 counters for team A.
Possibly, make several tables for each hero from âThese heroes hard-counter himâ to âThese heroes are hard-countered by himâ and balance the match accordingly - Re-work average MMR system, instead pairing MMR of people, within range.
This is to ensure that you donât get a situation where, letâs say Diamond + 4x Bronze is matched against 5x late gold that steamroll the team, while on paper average team strength is the same. If one team has bronze player - the other should also have one. - Re-work MMR value gain to be less spiky (evaluate a longer history of matches)
- Increase queue times, or give the option to ban extended search for yourself if you are prepared to wait longer. Currently the extended search kicks in barely 10 seconds of queue time, which is WAY too fast.
No one wants to find the game quick, if game quality is crap as a result. - Add âBlindâ mode or something else to avoid Matchmaker entirely but at the same time avoid the Draft with bans and timers.
For those who donât know, Blind is a form of draft, where you do not see enemy picks (so you canât counter pick or be counter-picked), and there are no bans. You get into a lobby, quickly decide which role each of you plays and pick a character - and youâre ready to go.
This allows some sort of communication while avoiding the hassle of 3-4 minute draft that sometimes gets interrupted due to people quitting, etc.
Matchmaker unrelated suggestions that would greatly improve HOTS experience:
- Start banning people for griefing and AFK. Not a month later, but almost immediately, like it happens in other mobas.
- Start promoting HOTS again (Possibly something like HOTS 2). Promote it OUTSIDE of Blizzard launcher.
- Re-work monetization to allow slower accumulation of progress, so that getting banned will count for something. Currently, you can create smurf account in 2 minutes and have all your favorite characters and skins unlocked within 2 days.
- stop false-praising people who did HORRIBLE. People get put onto MVP screen after single-handedly losing the game and being the worst player on the team because they âSniffed 3 flowers during teamfightâ or something. For example securing an Altar on Towers of Doom is a TEAM EFFORT. Itâs not an achievement of the character who touches them first.
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That I could agree with - count the past month equally, and let ancient matches steadily reduce in weight for, say, a year or so, then eventually fall off and not be counted at all.
The past several matches counting too much could very well be what leads to the perception of forced win/loss streaks.
I am serious. You werenât there when we laughed our butts off and how the mm worked in the following games and how we checked every player after their match and which heroes they play. It was absolutely predictable at that point.
Ok, so I had 3 losses in a row just now after a 5-game win streak.
- First game - I had Rexxar and Nova who flamed me all game because I said âGo lanesâ in the beginning. They often stood in place just to type something, while the team was fighting. I didnât even respond to them after the first time, they just kept hating on me and pin-pointing everything that I do wrong supposedly. Like not healing that Rexxar that ran away from me and I chased him for 5 seconds. Or having lower heal numbers in general because weâre 4 levels behind.
- Second game - I had Illidan go AFK on 4th minute. I was a healer, and I had a 3-man premade (all warriors) with me aside from him. Warriors who never wanted to peel, and enemy Muradin just jumped right on top of me every fight with Abathur hat and started whacking me completely for free until I died, while my warriors chased someone. Bot Illidan didnât help.
- Last game, I had this:
http://cdn-images.imagevenue.com/f6/ef/3e/ME121V3Y_o.jpg
So yeah, CLEARLY Iâm being the worst player in that game and dragging the entire team down. All 4 deaths happened towards the end when we started getting steamrolled. But otherwise, more damage than Tracer, almost as much as Qhira and Kerrigan both of whom missed pretty much every ability. Almost as much healing as LUCIO. I was ahead of him until the last minutes.
And notice that this Tracer got put onto MVP screen which BOGGLES MY MIND. Such player should NEVER be praised, for ANYTHING. There should be a blocking logic that prevents any titles and âgood Jobâ's if you did really bad. Who cares if thatâs a useless âtouched the most altarsâ title? In her mind, she did well! This is just atrocious.
My MVP title isnât much better. â3 clutch healsâ happens completely on random even for bad healers.
This false-praising is ruining the game. âGood job! You gathered 20% XP than similar players!â the game tells me, when this XP contribution is objectively BAD, so I donât know what players gathered even less?!
And now you are telling me that Iâm being âThe worst player who is dragging my team down?â
No.
It looks more like Iâm being the best player who gets dragged down by several people who got their MMR too high because of the system flaw.
OR
That my high MMR after winning several games gets âBalanced outâ by lower MMR teammates, while the enemy team is relatively equal.
Before that, however, I had 5 games in a row that were exactly the opposite. Total domination of the enemy by my team.
So I donât know. Ideally, MMR works exactly like you present it. But thatâs clearly NOT how it works in HOTS.
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The alternative matchmaking theories just blow my mind, especially after the MM was just explained! Why would blizzard have all of these extra rules just to keep you at your rank instead of the straight forward MMR they just explained? How would that help their business model or encourage people to come back? It sounds like a lot of extra work to apply all the forced 50% rules people are bringing up.
Anecdotal evidence from all these small sample sizes as proof that blizzard is wrong about their game is crazy too. Yeah there was a feeder on your team, but that doesnât mean they are a bad player, if you looked at their w/l history they probably just had a bad game.
Your 10 game win streak that led to 5 loss streak is exactly the coin flip he was talking about. It is over 100+ (estimate) games that youâll get a good idea where you belong.
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Yep, this. Mystery solved, as explained by AZJackson.
Ideally, MMR works exactly as presented. In reality, it works exactly as presented. The problem is, quite simply, low population â with a decided skew towards low-end players. How often in these very forums have people opined, âDiamond today was Silver yesteryear!â
There is nothing at all going on beyond MMR averaging and statistics.
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I know that.
I just donât think that Blizzard should keep it that way, so Iâm whining.
I think that at the very least there should be a BUTTON, that lets you limit MMR range of your teammates and enemies to your own.
Let this option come with a warning of long queues. I donât really care. And Iâm sure many people would rather stand in a long queue than get matched up in an unfair way.
The problem is - Blizzard would never do that. While you stand in this longer queue - you are not standing in a normal one. That means longer queues for those who donât want to select that option.
Basically, Blizzard would rather have their players get an abhorrent frustrating and unfulfilling experience - than have longer queues.
Which is COMPLETELY moronic, in my opinion.
Yes, you heard it here. Whoever made this decision is an idiot, and should not be in control of any gaming project.
Also Blizzard should implement a âGive upâ button that appears 10 minutes into the match (requires all 5 to vote yes). And after 20 minutes requires 3 to vote yes.
Also if one of the people is AFK or disconnected - the majority can vote to give up, even if it hasnât been 10 minutes yet. Reason - in HOTS 1 leaver means 95% youâre gonna lose.
The community begged for that feature since Alpha. But Blizzard doesnât think that robbing the winning team of the cathartic experience of stomping you for another 10 minutes is fair. Another idiotic decision.
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I understand your argument; Because HotS is soooo much more complicated than other games, it NEEDS to simplify EVERYTHING down to ether 1 or 0.
GOD FORBID a 0.7 should show up! The game would NEVER be able to handle that! 
You mean the thousands of years of human history doesnât suffice as data to indicate that coordinated efforts generally trump uncoordinated ones? Iâm sorry, but youâre flat out wrong-- Unless one side is VASTLY superior (which would be a failure of the current mmr system anyway), I do not see any evidence to suggest you are even remotely correct in this regard.
To quote Sun-Tzu: âManeuvering with an army is advantageous; with an undisciplined multitude, most dangerous.â
Yes, the right move is to make everyone have 30min+ queue times, so no one even plays the game at all, which would mean in people just leaving to play other games, which would lead to the game shutting down the servers.
Wow, glad you are not in charge of this game.
You are way overshotting with this, and you know it.
The queue times will be 1-2 minutes tops.
Also, thatâs why I suggest to put in an OPTION for those who would rather stay in queue.
So, idk about your experience, but I am a player who-- prior to recently-- spent ALL of his time solo in ranked. I had the fortune last season of running into a really good Malfurion who seemed stuck in mid-low gold. So, we group up, and we end up winning 90% of our games over the next 6 hours straight (I think we lost 2).
I mention this because it is the casual sort of group up you are talking about (we werenât on coms, I didnât know him, etc). It is absurd though-- the fact is, the match maker is SO BAD that even the most minor form of coordination is able to bring about a MASSIVE shift in your W/L ratio.
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Definitely not. You canât even estimate that. The last time Blizzard tried to make everything perfect, QM queue times went from 30 sec - 1 min to 10-15 minutes.
Of course 50% winrate isnât a thing
if it was Zeratul would be evenly split among both sides when in sub levle 100 games.
cus you know heâs the Honourary Smurf hero apparently
There is no doubt that some balance needs to be had.
But right now, the Matchmaker is âExpanding searchâ (Read: discarding all common sense) barely 10 seconds after the queue starts. This is WAY too soon.
I remember times when it was 1.5 minutes until it started doing that. And you saw it mostly if you were a 5-man premade and the Matchmaker actually cared to search for another PREMADE for you, and not just some 5 unlucky randoms to be your stomping fodder.
These days it finds games for me almost instantaneously. And that as an overused Tracer. But the quality of these games is awful. Way worse than before, when queue took 2-3 minutes on average but actually found you good teammates and enemies MOST of the time.
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It expands after 30 seconds usually, but that is just duo to population. You are also talking about QM, which has a whole lot of other factors going into it, like compositions, population/people queueing at that time and it has to be quick (quick matchâŚ). It is not mmr only.
That happened because we had a higher population. There were just much more people queueing at the same time, which would result in better matches.
This is, again, duo to playerbase. The playerbase is mostly awful nowadays, most good players left. You can even wait 30 minutes for a game, it will still be the same awful game.
LoL, youâre trying to straw man subjective interpretations of a vague ideology void of context to reconfirm your viewpoint rather than you know, the actual data that is in this game. Then quoting meaningless Chinese war philosophers as if he was tabulating the worth of a player in a complex MOBA, itâs utterly asinine.
IDK, man. There are people that literally only fixates on their ânumbersâ and donât care if they throw the game by doing that. Yet, they celebrate they had âso much siege or whateverâ (by still lanning alone at lvl 22) or âhad no deathsâ (by literally avoiding all team-fighting and not going help obj or whatever). I wouldnât consider such people as good player at all, but their (false) numbers would look pretty indeed.
Having said that, thatâs a phenomenon that may only occur in QM (itâs been a while since the last time I played ranked, but you can never know 
).
Either way I believe you and I feel you.
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Having a good team is half the requirement for winning. I donât mind MMR where it matches me against âbetterâ players, but it sometimes pisses me off that you end up playing with several people that are literally lost in the game in your team, like either absolute trolling or first day playing the game ever or something like that. (Perhaps they think you can help them win or something? IDK.) The point is, how on Earth did they end up in such match?
Making players do an effort to win by their own skill against considered âbetter playersâ (only having the support from their own, similar skilled, team) is perfectly fine (and fun!), but that is not the same as making players suffer by making a lose more probable by circumstances they canât control (like their teammatesâ noticeable disparate skill). Why and how does that people even end up in your game at all? (on either side). Isnât the MMR supposed to fix this kind of problems?
Granted, it can go both ways, where the opposing team were the ones with the ânew guyâ, so to speak. One canât help but to always wonder if the other team was suffering from the ârandom MMR punishmentâ (is not a real punishment, is a metaphor, but it feels like one ⌠âAre you having fun and playing with equally leveled players in both sides of the match very often? Then take this!.. We donât like happiness around hereâ)
And is not even the ânew guyâsâ fault. He was put in there, unprepared, against his will, just because someone else was performing well in the game, making their combined MMR ââ"âsuitableâ""" for a match. Let that sink in for a minute and realize how much that âgaming philosophyâ actually sucks.
Furthermore, sometimes is so noticeable someone is either trolling or feeding, that I always encourage my own team to report that player and people will always mostly agree, since is very noticeable, as I said. I can only feel pity for the other team, best can do is finish them quickly, but that is not fun, neither for us, neither for them, neither for anyone. Why and how does that people ended up in their team??
Having said all that, if at least 4 members of the team are actually good and can coordinate well, they may still be able to carry against a team of proper 5 (it has happened to me so many times). But thatâs not the point.
Edit: Did some changes to make my reply more clear and in line with what the official reply said (I havenât read it before).
Because your rank is literally your MMR. Why show you the same thing just in other numbers? And if you believe in some conspiracy theories, than they could just fake it as well, so why you in even ask for it.