Is there a problem or something going on ?
20 minutes already in Storm Ligue wait.
Usual;ly it’s around 3-5.
The spread in this game is already turned on full, the devs let it go free swimming, new accounts 0 level, when mmr obviously can’t figure out who to put you with - are playing with level 2222, which means that now the game doesn’t care who you are, it will just put you with those who are online now.
In fact, mmr was almost removed from the game due to extremely low online.
And now imagine what the game online must be like where they removed skill matching, and it’s still looking for 20 minutes. But since there is an expectation, I guess the restrictions are still present, for example, only 3-4 leagues (rofl). I think that at its peak today it is played by a couple thousand people at most, at best.
The only logical conclusion that I can personally draw from this is that it is not worth it.
Either accept the terms of those 2 random people watching the game, with 1 being just a sysadmin or something, and wait as long as you’re told.
Though it’s really hard to imagine anyone playing a game like this in 2024, on those terms, with everything else available…
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I agree with the rest, but gaming has been relatively dead for many years now, though most don’t understand that. As things continue to worsen there’s little hope of improvement in the coming years. So playing a decent older game is going to be best decision in general. Bzzzd can’t really screw this game up anymore, at least for the moment.
That is true especially on lower pop servers (which at this point, is anything other than EU, including US during night hours).
The game basically gave up on matchmaking and will throw together whoever 10 players happen to be queuing at the same time.
Sometimes it can’t even find 10 people during the quiet hours in Storm League so you have to wait & wait for an hour or more.
In ARAM, though, it solves that problem by throwing AI’s into the match instead of human opponents.
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I assume that ai participates in qm as well, cause there is a prohibitive number of accounts from 9 years ago, but with level 30 or 50, playing on one Raynor or Jaina, who only 10 or 20 rolls ago entered the first 9 or 7 years.
It gets to 8 out of 10, and in every match.
there’s 3 simple explanations:
- sometimes the game gets you in a fake queue. I’m not sure why it happens, but it is a thing that comes up every so often in that you’re essentially in a limited queue by yourself, and since there isn’t 10 of you to then match with you, the queue just goes on until you leave and re-queue.
This one is more likely to get someone stuck in SL since people tend to wait out the queue instead of rejoining any time the wait goes past the ‘estimated’ match time for qm or aram. This is were people can wait for ‘hours’ and still not get a game and then act like their server is completely dead.
- Glitched store/profile.
I’m not sure if this one can affect SL, but over the years people will go to tech support when they notice their account level seems wrong, or their QM roster has something wrong with it. I am speculating that this might affect SL and similarly end up with you in a limited queue that ends up not making a game.
- the ‘correct’ number of players are all in a game.
Some people like to doomsay that nobody is online, but more realistically, since it takes 10 to get a game, if the available pool are already in game (regardless of number) then you might have to wait out the duration of a match to get into a game provided they all don’t just re-queue and get matched again the next time around.
It’d probably feel less bad if the game had indicators on matching progress so it can indicate if how many are potentially in your queue to be matched, or if people are leaving the queue and thus extending the wait.
WoW pvp and Diablo Immortal have matching indicators, so it’s not as if HotS couldn’t get that some day, but it doesn’t at present so some players just assume the worst if there’s any deviation past the expected wait time.
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There is a new player queue for accounts under (I think) level 200, but often there aren’t enough of these new players online to match together, so they get placed with veteran accounts. I only know this to be true, as years ago when we had Dev’s, one posted about this issue on the fourms, some new players were waiting up to an hour to find a game, so they relaxed the MM rules to improve queue times.
I’m not going to deny that botting does happen, but it’s more likely that Jaina or Raynor who is playing like AI, is just a new/bad player.
The game clearly shows AI’s as Adept AI in the loading screen.
in ARAM it does add them on both teams if less than 10 people online have queued for ARAM for more than a few minutes.
The clueless players from 9 years ago you see in QM are just random returning players - of whom I see a ton every time I play. They also can’t be bots if not for any other reason, then simply because a lot of them chat and talk to you.
You didn’t read my post carefully. I didn’t say they play badly. At the same time, I mentioned twice that they only have 10-20 recent games - the rest are all from 7-8-9 years ago. And those players are 2 to 8 in every, every game at qm right now, with the same profiles.
I’m leaning more towards it being bots to fill up online, cause I really think the situation with him in this game is close to stalemate.
I don’t think that such a huge number of identical profiles, with one picture literally, are returning players. First of all, there have never been so many returnees in Hots, and secondly, the pictures are too identical.
Minky did fine reading it and taking into consideration what you may have meant apart from what you actually wrote. People aren’t mindreaders here.
First off, you’re convinced that QM is added bots instead of a host of other out comes. Secondly, you’re trying to make a distinction between “I didn’t say they played badly” to “they played bad/bot”… if they didn’t play “badly” then it wouldn’t seem like they played like a bot.
Third, of the post given, you didn’t not “mention twice” what you assert in either this topic, or that post.
So you seem less familiar with your own material than you assert, or rather, it is just easier to blame someone else.
Most people generally don’t have a head for numbers as is, so while you may assert that there can only be so many accounts from 7+ years ago, the game had millions of players back then while also actively encouraging people to create multiple accounts so they can friend-themselves for mounts and heroes.
There’s a difference between the game filling matches with its own bots and players that are:
- multiboxing
- running scripts
- selling accounts (ie passive play)
- having their children play
“Logic” isn’t the have all be all, it’s the process to showing one’s work on how they’re thinking things through. If you want to ‘logic’ incentives for people to play now, there are several, but it’s probably going to be stuff more likely to be the case than blizzard deciding to bot their own games in modes that don’t have indications of bots playing.
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I had hoped you weren’t reaching for this conclusion, which is why my reply to you was carefully phrased, I didn’t want to put words in your mouth.
Hots is considered a failure, I’m not going to entertain the very unlikely theory that Blizzard is padding player numbers by adding bots to games. You’re not the first person to suggest this, and unfortunately you won’t be the last.
Why not? Hots finally had its first patch in years that was more than just bug fixes, I’m not surprised that players who haven’t played in years are returning to check it out. I’ve been seeing far more Arthas players in my games, if there really is an increase in Arthas players, it would be people trying out the changes. What it wouldn’t mean, is Blizzard releasing bots to make it seem like more people are playing Arthas.
I can’t see any upside or reason Blizzard would add bots to PVP modes, or any mode for that matter. If Hots reached the point where there were too few players to form games, then Blizzard could shut down the servers and provide a reasonable and noncontroversial reason for doing so.
How long have you been playing Hots? Many people who stack will change to the same portrait while they are playing together, this is a thing that’s been there almost since day one.
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There are currently almost 100 NGS teams that are out on break between seasons, and a lot of them sync portraits (because it is fun!). While on break, a number will play QM to work on new heroes, especially those buffed in the last patch, and they often don’t bother to change out their portrait. I know I saw some the other day in QM working on Yrel, since she had a relatively massive buff.
They weren’t great at her, since they never played her before the buff, but they certainly weren’t a bot!
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I understand what you’re saying, but I’m afraid that’s not the case.
I didn’t mean their portraits, but the identical profile: a clear 8-9 years old account, the last 10-20 games - new - are essentially the same player profiles, and such comes to more than half in qm, on both sides, and they behave like bots. They are in every match, their unreal number, try it yourself, so many players can not be back, we don’t see any of them on the forum or in chat.
I think the guys hooked up ai, that’s my opinion.
For whatever reason they don’t close Hots, it’s probably trivial - the stock will drop even more, the value will drop.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you’re not particularly informed about the stocks of concern. HotS hasn’t been mentioned on quarterly reports for years, and it’s unlikely that it will ever be mentioned again because… activation blizzard stock ceased to be as of October 12, 2023.
If one were to try to source concerns on activision blizzard’s stock, going to investor.activision/com doesn’t take us to the latest quarterly report 
Instead it redirects to Microsoft’s annual reports instead. Ya know, because microsoft bought out activision blizzard and that was resolved in October of 2023.
Meanwhile, looking at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/stock-price-history
the 52-week low for microsoft was before the actiblizz acquisition, and the all time high for microsoft is the day after HotS most recent patch. Clearly * (not actually clearly* the direct cause of microsoft’s stock value going up 124 points (more than that 95 paid on actiblizz) is from HotS 
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There hasn’t been a Blizzard stock for 6 months.
Battlenet, Blizzard and Activision are now Microsoft brands.
Shutting down HotS, a dead legacy game with less daily players than Diablo 2 wouldn’t budge the Microsoft stock price by even one thousandth of a cent.
People somehow still think HotS is an actively maintained game just because it’s on the Battlenet launcher. It isn’t and hasn’t been for years.
They have zero incentive or motive to add bots to fill up human matches, because Microsoft executives have likely never even heard of this game existing any more than Lost Vikings, Blackthorne or other obscure Blizzard titles.
Ps. As a huge Blizz fan, especially due to Blizzard North, I’ve been to every Blizzcon except during Covid.
The last few Blizzcons didn’t even have a stall for HotS. They had one for Starcraft 2 though.
I agree, I was more speaking in general terms, and I’ve never been a fan of Blizzard or games in general by the way.
I’m just saying some obvious things in my opinion, cause it’s hard not to notice it.
In that case I don’t know why Hots is still around. Maybe keeping a couple thousand people on the servers + paying the labor of 2 from the company is still cheaper than reputational costs
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I live in hope that Microsoft’s stock will be hurt enough for them to recall, their new Recall feature, what a terrible idea that is, well at least for most customers.
Your post said everything I was going to say to XXX, this notion (other posters have said the same in other threads) that Blizzard is desperately trying to inflate active player numbers by adding AI to matches is simply weird. There is nothing to gain from MS/Blizz perspective in propping up a game that is seen as a failure and has been out of active development for years now.
I’m confident there is no conspiracy, for the most part, Blizzard has always kept servers running for old titles. As for their reputation, switching off the servers for Hots would be one of the least controversial actions the company has taken over the past 10 years.
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As for their reputation, switching off the servers for Hots would be one of the least controversial actions the company has taken over the past 10 years.
I love the game and have played since early testing in 2014 so a full decade. Still do once or twice a week.
Even I wouldn’t mind at this point if it all shut down.
It had a good run. It’s bled players to the point matchmaking is only viable on the largest servers and even there it’s awful.
Let it retire in dignity. Or allow players to run private servers like those youtube guys who even created new heroes and talents for the game. Which can then be enjoyed by groups of friends even after the main servers fall into their final sleep.
meybe its mean ppl stop play this pathe.tic game. blizard can by paud - they kill the game as they want
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