Premades ARE a Problem

General Discussion
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Just fought another premade in QM and had 0% chance to win. Seriously am sick of this crap, 2 or even 3 man premades I can do ok against, but once it gets to 4 or 5 it’s not fun or fair at all. The entire game was a beatdown from start to finish. To add insult to injury, the premade wouldn’t finish the match and insisted on camping around the nexus to farm us over and over again for fun.

This team of premades had a 100% win rate for the past ~50 games, if you don’t see that as an issue that needs fixed, then there is truly nothing else I can say. I was so mad after scrolling through his match history that I had to take screen shots and share, because honestly this is ridiculous. I would rather wait an extra 5-10 minutes in que if it meant fairer match making because let me tell you, this was one of the most unfair matches I’ve been in for a long time and I’m just honestly angry because I don’t feel like I had even a remote chance of winning.

1 - Premades are not fair. They aren’t fair because they get to pick their comp ahead of time, this alone is a big problem. They get to co-ordinate and practice playstyles across many, many shared matches. They know how their buddies play and whether they are going to stay and fight or run away. They know how good their friends are and what build they are going to use. Solo QM players don’t know any of that.

2 - Premades are not fun for anyone but the premade. These guys were “shooting the breeze” and having a great time, now watch the game from myside and tell me my team was having a great time. Every single one of us was feeling upset and just wanted it to be over because we pretty much stood no chance. Now go back and watch the past 50 games were Alarak won every single one. I’m sure he had a blast, but I bet the other side did not in the vast majority of those games.

3 - Matchmaking is at fault, not necessarily the players. It simply should not allow this to happen. Matchmaking should not allow premades with 4 or 5 people to fight a team of solo QM’s, especially when they have a winrate so ridiculously high. I think my winrate is barely above 50%, his was over 90% in 5 stack. In fact, if i team up as a solo in QM I don’t want to even be in the same que at all, even if there is a 4 man on each side or a 4 man and solo vs a 5 man, but at the bare minimum matchmaker should realize the odds based on winrate alone and not match me with them.

The Cleveland browns are a terrible NFL team, but they don’t just get to decide tomorrow that they are going to drop out and start playing against college teams because they are tired of losing and want to “have fun as a team of happy go lucky buddies who just want to shoot the breeze and have a great time”. Sure, they would dominate college bracket and probably also have a 100% win rate and I’m sure they would win the rose bowl every single year, but that is not fair and any sane rational person can see and acknowledge that. So why is this any different?

[type or paste code here](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17HooPBwl1rRmyxAbBsIbKGE3MxCvD3_Q?usp=sharing)
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Don’t forget some of them using map hacks…

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I hate that people like this give premades such a bad name. Most of us are just 4-5 noobs coming and losing together because we like hots.

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Here’s the replay in question.

I watched a few games of the Alark player, and from what I saw, it’s not 5 devious players twirling their evil-mustaches while plotting how they can ruin qm. They’re not exclusively on voice/discord to coordinate via chat. They’re cooperative players shooting the breeze that bother to compliment other players for saves and good plays while having fun playing a game.

They even pay you two compliments on their side of the chat, but it’s not like a /whisper, so not really paying them to you. But maybe you have gotten /whisper mocks before /shrug.

In the above replay, they didn’t camp the nexus. Maybe they could have ended it after the first fort, but one backed, the others waited, and there was also a request to hope your side would turn things around and catch back up.

It’s a few players that can hit their skill shots – much like how you can hit W’s pretty well. The rhythm of the game is your side has players mixed on engage/retreat, so it’s easier to get isolated picks once they split to run. TotSP is a easy map for quick rotations and ganks, which doesn’t go so well if someone is hoping to sit alone in a lane and farm quest stacks.

The post here chooses to create a narrative that vilifies them, which is par for the course when people decide that they have “0% chance to win” against grouped players. And that’s part of the polarization is that people create that narrative to fault the group.

Yea, it sucks to have a Q Kerrigan that can’t get 4 stacks on her quest in the solo lane; yea, it’s hard to play against genji with a tracer that doesn’t know how to not shoot his deflect. It’s not fun to build Uther around trying to empower another player when that player isn’t playing their A-game.

If it helps you feel better:

This one is the alarak with a group getting curbstomped by a pug. The other teams’ bw was feeding at the start of that game, due to “zomg 5 stack” but that side apparently convinced bw to play it out and they ending up winning due to competent Qhira going to work.

That one is a loss against a duo, but I didn’t put in the time to watch it.

Of what I did watch, these aren’t the boogieman stories people tell from low pop asia/ocean server. It’s people that group for xp bonus that play together enough to raz someone, or game while while they’re sitting on a toilet with a laptop.

One of the biggest gaps that form in casual play is some players hardline retreat and leave an ally to get picked off. These are players that are aggressive, will turn around to fight with an ally, and that makes a ‘snowball’ difference when they win fights that could have swung the other way.

Doesn’t take a 5-stack to have the “spam my spells and run away” players lose games, but it’s a lot easier to blame the stack and think you don’t ‘have a chance’ for it.

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Ive played against and even with these kind of people before. They are cocky as hell and get away with just the most brazenly aggressive plays. They often hunt kills rather then play the map and it works because thats the language 90% of QM players speak but the these guys just do it much better.

They also constantly get banned and make new accounts are some of them get REALLY salty on the occasions they lose.

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Well I’m glad Mr. Internet detective could verify that I was indeed telling the truth. Yes I was mad. You may have watched the replay and felt I was exaggerating, but that entire game at no point did I believe we had a chance, I personally felt that if they wanted to they could have beaten us earlier so that’s why I said they were walking around the nexus farming kills instead of ending. Clearly when they felt like going in they could grab and kill anyone they wanted to. I purposely took out their player profile names because I didn’t know what the rules on the forums were. Anyway, I love how you didn’t even address the fact that this guy had 100% win rate for his entire match history, which granted only went back the last 2 days so maybe if you go back further than his last ~50 games he has some losses. Do you really not see that as a problem? do you really think people find it fair to fight at massive disadvantage of high level players doing premades and stomping actual QM players?

Also, he didn’t pay me a compliment, he very sarcastically said “we gonna lose this one, I know that uther” knowing full well that he has only won for the past at least 50 games. Later Genji clearly says “please don’t win, I want to 1v5 them at level 20”. He then again mentions how he needs to finish his reflect quest for level 20 basically stating again he wants them to pad the game out. I just love how mr internet detective had to sleuth up the game to make me look like an a hole but as I watched the reply from their side it once again showed me that this is only fun for one side. the side doing the stomping in every single game.

I am not saying to ban these players, I don’t think there is anything wrong with grouping. All i’m stating is that i don’t want to fight them if I que up solo because I don’t think it’s fair and I don’t think it’s fun to get stomped for 15 minutes straight. I honestly don’t see how this is a hard concept to grasp, please tell me how I’m wrong Mr. Internet detective.

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It never fails to amuse me that on the occasions I’ve beaten a toxic 5 stack, they almost instantly disband and go offline, sometimes faster than I can press the end screen stats tab.

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More than once not did only the b steppers and nexus farmers insta-disband if they fell victim to a sudden comeback loss, but one or two of them also whispered a few death threats since you can /w enemies during score screen.

Just confirms the belief many of these trolls are mentally unwell and need help irl. They are not playing for fun, they only play to antagonize others and if that fails, they go full rage mode.

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I played with them in an aram once and one of them left the game because someone went nova.

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Genji was pointing out that he had already completed the quest requirement for it. It takes 6500, and he had 16500 at that time.

You are interpreting the situation in a way to fuel the complaint, not read for what was actually written.

Yea, I’m not here to complain about the situation of a dead game, I’m here to provide pragmatic options for people that persist in their sunk-cost fallacy. People have had years of repeating themselves with boogie-man stories and it hasn’t made the game any better for themselves. I’ve found my own experience is slightly better when I watch my replays and realize when I’m making boogie-man stories about games I lost to write myself a ‘reality check’ and drop the gripe I imposed with the fabrication. Turns out that secret tip there magically applies to all the other games I play too.

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Yea i dont know how many times i have watched a premade disband after I won against them.

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You wanna dance, let’s dance Mr. Internet detective.

The first thing you did was leave a comment so you could sleuth through my history and prove me wrong. You say I’m painting a narrative to vilify and exaggerate when I’m just telling and showing my side of the story and how I felt actually playing the match while the very first thing you did was to set your own narrative, which is a form of propaganda by the way. You tried to gaslight me and the rest of the forum into believing that premades aren’t an issue and that premades don’t ruin QM and that premades are just everyday normal folks trying to have a good time and that there really isn’t an issue here at all (even though I have screen shots and the smoking gun of their match history to prove it.) You state how they aren’t “A devious group of 5 mustache twirling villains plotting how they can ruin QM” (and yet that’s exactly what they are doing) but most likely just four friends who want to team up and have fun and “shoot the breeze” talking with each other in voice chat. Wow, they are just such nice people, they even “paid you two compliments” when in reality it was sarcasm. Then you try to set the narrative that this is actually my team’s fault for just being bad as kerrigan couldn’t get her Q 4 stacks in the solo lane and the people I empower don’t do anything, whomp whomp. While we could have played better, I’m not going after my team mates like you want me to. We were an actual group of solo QM’s doing our best and we probably would have won against another team of solo QM’s.

Then you had to show that indeed the premade CAN lose if you go back far enough in alarak’s match history, that surely proves me wrong! You then insinuate that I’m probably just a loser who can’t make friends to run my own premade like they can, because they are just normal everyday people with rizz. “it’s people that group for xp bonus that play together enough to raz someone”.

Let me make it simple, I have three key points.

1 - Premades are not fair. They aren’t fair because they get to pick their comp ahead of time, they get to co-ordinate and practice playstyles across many, many shared matches. They know how their buddies play and how good they are. solo QM players don’t know any of that.

2 - Premades are not fun for anyone but the premade. Yes, these guys were indeed “shooting the breeze” and having a great time, now watch the game from myside and tell me my team was having a great time. Now go back and watch the past 50 games were he won every single one. I’m sure he had a blast, but I bet the other side did not in the vast majority of those games.

3 - Matchmaking is at fault, not necessarily the players. It simply should not allow this to happen. Matchmaking should not allow premades with 4 or 5 people to fight a team of solo QM’s. In fact, if i team up as a solo QM I don’t want them to even be in my que at all, even if there is a 4 man on each side or a 4 man and solo vs a 5 man.

The Cleveland browns are a terrible NFL team, but they don’t just get to decide tomorrow that they are going to drop out and start playing against college teams. Sure, they would dominate college bracket and probably also have a 100% win rate and I’m sure they would win the rose bowl every single year, but that is not fair and any sane rational person can see and acknowledge that. So why is this any different?

In summary, premades are scummy and you know it. Stop gaslighting me, stop trying to steal and frame the narrative. You know what you are doing is scummy and so did this premade. Honestly, you are the exact type of person who would create a bunch of fake accounts to heart/upvote your own comments so it looks like your opinions and takes are more popular than they really are.

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good for you… im not even playing from 3 months since i only get trolls feeders and suckers and even when i was almost 60% winrate 5 years ago… as solo player now im close to below 50% 7 of 10 matches are a losss full of garbage players and being stomped by premades obviously not fun…so not playing anymore with trash ppl

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They usually have between 5-10 min queue.
If it would be more from a MM bottleneck, they’d jump on smurfs accounts and crush the lower player base that alt+F4 after the first death.
They aren’t a good inspiration to the community at all.

The only way to fix this is to sanction smurfs and have longer queue time accordingly.

Anyway, fairer games are in SL, stat wise.

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All I see is a 73.3% QM wr alarak (83.66% on alarak over 673 games), with a 91% wr in 5-stacks.

I’d say it was very much winnable, you just needed to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. It’s absolutely irrelevant that on a decent sample of soloq and 5-stack games, his winrate goes from 57.51% to 91.03%.

+they were already merciful to be a 4-stack in the game you played. Basically, it was your team who had the advantage. And did you know they still lose games? To beat them, just join the other 9% of games.

If you check their recent games, they’re also using no tank + imperius + alarak, so enemy team can have more dps instead of a tank. How thoughtful of them. You should have whispered them some good wishes when it was over.

How do you know that’s not the way the game was intended to be played?

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Thank you for the kind words. Happy memorial day to you too.

It’s a general occurence with forums, there’s players (often not ‘pros’ by any usual metric) that think calling every complaint “skill issue” is a sign of being good at the game.

Having unwisely wasted a decent chunk of time arguing in another thread on this forum that 5-stacks with high wr are a problem (as far as I remember, that discussion has 200+ messages), I can say it’s very unlikely that you’ll convince anyone of anything. Some of these people refuse even to accept that it’s not a “solos vs parties” discussion, despite the huge pile of evidence on heroes profile showing duos + 3 solos get matched vs these abusive 5-stacks a lot.

It’s probably a good thing for a discussion on the topic to be on first page most of the time, so bliz/micro doesn’t forget there’s a problem, but anything more is largely useless. Bliz seems to be running their games for the past decade+ on the principle “only fix things if they’re a) reason to be sued, b) game-breaking bugs, or c) causing enough people to stop playing”. Player feedback is pretty low on the list (considering varian being matched as a bruiser and destroyable fountains, among other things, took plenty years to fix, despite likely being less than a day’s work).

As some advice, if you want to have a good time on the forum, you’ll have to ignore some of the replies you get. However tempting it might be to debunk ‘arguments’ like “if your 4 solo queue teammates communicated and played better, you’d have won vs the 70% wr 4-stack, so it was your fault you lost” and “I’ve once played vs a 5-stack of silvers and we beat them easily”, you’ll see them saying the same things in a few days, and you’d have wasted your time for no good reason.

PS: As you have a low post count, you’ll probably get a lot of your posts spam-reported and deleted (afaik, the amount of reports needed to get your stuff removed is directly linked to post count). Also, there’s a good chance you’ll be called my alt :rofl:. Wish you luck!

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regardless of those games its 1% that the stackers are bad. The point is stackers should face stackers not randoms regardless of the result of the game.

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Get over yourself. You painted your own narrative too, should people call you a propagandist as well? These are forums, things are up for discussion. If you can’t handle that, get off. Or did you just want people to blindly accept your recollection (because hey, those are never wrong, right) without seeing if there is another side? Your feelings are your feelings, but they aren’t necessarily based on fact. Watching a replay to get the reality of things is hardly gaslighting.

Premades CAN be a problem. This can be more of an issue in QM because of comp issues. And there is also an issue if the whole team is composed of great players, the matchmaker can’t find solo players that are good enough to offset the other team’s skill and coordination. But the reality is the majority of players and teams aren’t good. You’ve probably beaten many teams. I know I have, and those game can be very fun and rewarding. Sometimes, maybe, even more often, you lose, but the match is still close. You just faced off against a particularly nasty one and want to hold it as a common case that justifies a blanket rule.

The truth is facing against that kind of team just doesn’t happen very often. And though some tweaks can be made to try to make the experience better, there’s really no perfect solution, much less a blunt rule some like imposing premade vs only premade. That has real consequences for the matchmaker and also punishes those who like to play together. And I don’t think the game should further incentivize people to play solo in what inherently is a team game.

There’s just a limitation of finding an opposing team that is good enough to face against. And that will be true even if it was limited to premades vs premades. But now all the mediocre premades are going to be facing against those good premades and crushed at a much higher rate than if you had mixed queues.

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You focus way too much on the minority stacks that smurf. 5 solos teaming up wont suddenly give them 80% winrate out of nowhere. And those premades can still be dealt with with your own team. Its just a matter of playing the game as they do and stop playing victim.

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you know, i was going to reply with anger, but honestly it’s not worth it. I have come to the conclusion that this game will never change because there are too many people like the internet detective and all these other folks who just can’t wait to sprint to the keyboard to defend every last flaw with this game.

So instead I’m going to save all those screen shots as well as all these screen shots of the internet detective gaslighting me and keep them handy. I already uninstalled the game and every time I get the itch to re-install and play, I’m going to open the screen shot folder and remind myself why I quit. Hopefully I can kick the habit for good, the community is toxic and all they really seem to want to do is argue instead of advocate for positive changes to the game.

Peace out HOTS, had a good run, it wasn’t you it was the community just like league.

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