Quick Match is unplayable

General Discussion
1

It’s just shocking how awful the players you get matched up with in this mode. Healers who do no healing, lane specialists who don’t clear lanes, dps that don’t do any dps whatsoever, and my favorite people afk at camps the entire game while you lose forts, keeps, and the core.

The craziest part is when you go to inspect them only to find out that they have over 10,000 games played on one hero that they only play. It blows my mind how you can play that many games and have 0 understanding of how to play the character or how the game works at all.

I’ve seen people double nuke a boss at full hp not understanding that it immediately tells the enemy team where you are on the map.

This is just completely unacceptable and maybe Quick Match should just be removed from the game since it is completely unplayable.

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2

For players that refuse to do otherwise, QM filters them out from the rest of the game.

I generally prefer custom-game lobbies or discord communities for organizing pick-ups instead of relying on the matchmaking to magically make games above the lowest common denominators

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QM is a slot machine and it’s gotten way worse over time from my experience. Stick to ARAM if you want random matches, it’s way way more balanced.

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This is not QM being unplayable. This is more a problem with players that has a low understanding about the game. Those people with 10.000 games on one hero who still has 1.2 kda i have seen before. They mostly only join to afk one lane and ignore everything els. Either they are very bad and dont want to learn the game or they are bots.

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5

You will mostly experience this at low MMR.

You should find your strong side - micro, macro, guidance - and capitalize on it, win a little more than lose, raise your MMR, stop getting bad matches, stop getting miserable.

You’ll always encounter random bad apples, like those trying difficult heroes. That should be symmetric however and have no effect on you.

One typical risk is going on an internal baby rage which results in a temporary skill loss and consequent reduction of MMR. I’d use the term soft throwing.

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While I don’t agree with your premise, I do have a good example. Playing over in Korea, Boss spawns, everyone leaves what they are doing and straight to boss.

It was an eye opener, as the first time I played, I got ping spammed for continuing my double soak which actually would give us a lead and a boss only a few seconds delayed. But in their HOTS culture Boss is the #1 thing (It was Cursed Hollow).

Now I find most here recognise the importance of boss on Hanamura, it’s still not taken on cooldown nearly enough in most leagues.
BTW, I was only playing QM in Korea and while I didn’t play a tonne, it was really awesome vibe.

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Im sure Korean players have other prios then Western players. You saw the same in HGC. Korean teams always picked heroes that Western teams never played or very rarely played. Ban prios was also whole lot different.

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QM has always been rough around the edges. At least your team will be assigned a healer, if the enemy also has a healer, this wasn’t the case for the first two or so years of QM, the same went for tanks.

Right now, QM is very bad, as the whole roster is F2P and many people are trying out heroes they have never played, or haven’t played often. Frequently in my recent matches, I’ve seen multiple players stand still for up to 30 seconds each talent level. I suspect they are reading their talents, as they didn’t bother to do so before the game started!

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9

That sounds like from a ranked player… you can’t expect players doing something correctly especially during this event (all heroes unlocked). Players will want to try new heroes or play low level ones to get lootboxes.

Remember this is a game, not a job. There’re players who focus on chilling, others on strategies, others on getting better, others on doing crazy stuff.

This game is really complex, knowing every single hero (abiltities, playstyle, builds, role, impact, etc), knowing every comp (1 tank, 1 bruiser, 1 healer, 2 dps; 1 tank, 2 bruisers, 2 healers; 3 dps, 1 tank, 1 healer; etc etc), hero tier list (witch ones are S tier, A tier, F tier), knowing when to fight (3v2, 3v4, 5v5, 2v2, etc), knowing when to capture mercenaries, paying attention to the minimap to know where are your allies and enemies, knowing where to position… and the list go on…

If you know more than the rest, try to help your teamates by telling them on what to focus or what to try. Be kind and they might listen to you, if not, play around on what you can do and help them. Being selfish will not help to win matches at any cost, it will make noise and distract, making the experience worse for everyone including you. Blame the enemy team or the match, not your teamates.

I remember one match that there was a player afking because from the start we were losing, but after doing a comeback, even 4v5, we ending up dominating the match and the afk player changed his mind and decided to play the game with us. This of course will not be 100% of the cases with an AFK player, because it also depends a lot of the comp and the rest of your teamates. The thing is, it doesnt matter having an AFK player, a troll or a noob player, the game is made for be played, that’s all, you’ll get the victories between the matches at the end of the day.

There’s a ton of players not knowing that, I always see that in every single match. I don’t care because I know it will never change. So as long as I can, I try to save my abilities for the enemy team.

I prefer QM than any other mode, I can play the hero I want without any ban or a random list of 3 heroes. I disagree at all with this.

QM can be rough and unfair sometimes because the comps (e.g. heroes with good hp and DPS, vs heroes with low hp and high DPS) or players (toxic ones in your team), but if you want to increase your MMR in QM, I recommend you to play meta heroes (S and A tier) and do as much as you can. Help your team if your objective is only to win.

I know that heores who are good at cleaning lanes can make a huge difference in a match. Getting experience to get level 10 as soon as you can it will make a huge difference in power between your team and your enemy team. It doesnt matter if they get 1 or 2 towers, if your team is kinda coordinated and has a higher level, you will win most of the matches.

If the enemy does a comeback, stay calm and keep the coordination with your teamates, it’s only temporary (unless the match is like +20-25 minutes and between structures the core is the only one remaining).

It’s impossible to not have terrible matches or a big streak of defeats, so you also have to expect that (I had like 11 defeat streaks with hogger, until I started to win more than ~5 matches).

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Though the sad part is, unless you play on EU which still has quite a few players, the game has no problem throwing a 400 MMR boss nuker together with Chu8 or Grubby at 4000 QM MMR.

Meaning no amount of wins or skill can make you fully escape those matches (the mode likes to balance team average MMR’s with awful tricks like putting a really high rated or really low rated player on one side).

There really is no escape except my favorite answer in the thread which was to join custom lobbies and play with/against competent people as agreed upon in advance.

The population of the game will never again be in a state where you can log in, press play and consistently get a good QM experience. Consistent, good matchmaking requires a large population.

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This is a situation that you can’t even avoid in ranked, due to smurfs and allowing players to group two ranks apart. Gone are the days of “If you improve and climb, you will play with people of the same rank/skill.”

Ranked is still more balanced MM wise over QM, but it’s not what it used to be when rainbow matches were very uncommon.

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12

There’s issues with Quick Match but OP is only addressing half of the issue.

People have bellyached about the imbalances of Quick Match since this game was in beta; they’re still prevalent today, because you can have a team of all mages versus backline assassins, a team of bruisers with no burst damage against an actually “balanced” team, and so on.

But it’s always what you sign up for when you’re playing Quick Match; it’s like playing All Random on DOTA 2.

No, the issue with Quick Match right now is that this game actively encourages people to grief and play like garbage, because there is zero incentive for Blizzard to actually care.

Mastery rings for characters are not a barometer for how good the player is; it just shows how much time and gold the player is willing to waste on something that is completely superfluous. To what OP said, you will have players with literal thousands of games played on a character but they have no idea what they’re doing because they never bothered to learn the actual nuances and principles of how the game works (overextending, map control, camp control, counter-talents, etc). And they’re so far up their own backsides that they will actively blame everyone else for their foibles.

Everyone has played with at least one “PvE Raynor” main who has thousands of games played, but they only manage to achieve 18k hero damage at level 24 because they spend the entire time laning, dying, and then justifying their poor teamplay because they picked the level 20 talent that reduces their death timer drastically. They don’t care that they feed kills. They don’t care that they force their own team into a perpetual 4v5; in their eyes, they’re doing everything right.

Ronald Reagan once said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” and that quote definitely applies to HOTS. You can try to educate your teammates on what they’re doing wrong - and even if you are objectively in the right, they will just blow you off and report you or they will actively grief by afking in lane or just by quitting. And you know what? More often than not, they get away with it.

There are people I have played with whose names I recognize because they were actively griefing but nothing happened because Blizzard does absolutely nothing to curtail these people. Why would they? This game is a lost venture to them.

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you will have players with literal thousands of games played on a character but they have no idea what they’re doing because they never bothered to learn the actual nuances and principles of how the game works (overextending, map control, camp control, counter-talents, etc).

This is why hero level should always be taken with a huge grain of salt (and never as a measure of skill).

Some of the top Greymane, Genji, Illidan, Abathur mains in HGC (who were pushing the capabilities of these heroes to the absolute maximum allowed by the game engine) were barely hero level 50!

Unfortunately, when I see a level 999 hero on a player, more often than not it’s an AI mode grinder who is not very good on that hero.

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15

Yes it’s disgusting and the development team should be ashamed

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16

it’s not on them that people continue to play poorly for years on end.

However, it makes for an easy scapegoat for those just looking for something to blame.

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No, I think we should applaud bliz’s commitment to social change. They believed so strongly in equality, they realized there’s no such thing as good players and bad players; you can just match anyone vs anyone, and they’ll just play accordingly.

It didn’t quite work out in my experience (rarely, the terrible players would have played their placement games, and to my utmost shock, they’d be bronze 3-5, in games with mostly gold-diamond players), but it’s still very noble. I think if they keep matching bronze players against plats for a few more years, every bronze player will be plat.

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This is definitely the case.

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I think the issue is the lack of pool of players, the matchmaking needs to be updated in order to match games better in terms of quality, if they did that a lot of players would return even if the search time was a bit more like 1-5 minutes which is ineligible considering matches last generally around 20 minutes more or less.

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Yes because all the plat players uninstalled until then…

Also I don’t believe it works as intended. The QM matchmaker was never adjusted to the new numbers of people in queue at average. We get low waiting times but ultra low match quality in return.

1 Like