Quick Match is, in it’s entirety, anti-thetical to the core of this game. It goes against every single design principle which sets this game apart from the other MOBAs, and makes it, in my view, inherently better.
Heroes of the Storm is a game about Team Coordination, about working with your allies and overcoming the enemy team through it. To this end, there are 2 primary methods by which teams of people do this
Compositions: Teams of people can coordinate which heroes they pick, to support certain strategies or counter ones their enemies might use. They can also pick heroes which might perform better on certain maps, since each map is fairly dramatically different and can radically alter how a certain hero might play: Often to the point of several maps quite literally hard countering the entirety of a specific hero, or relegating them to a very niche/specific strategy with no other options.
Communications: Teams of people can communicate- through pings, text, or the built in VOIP (though this is rare, since it requires at least some knowledge of how options menus and microphones work; surprisingly a tall order for the vast majority of people). With this communication, they can enable the ability to strategize and cooperate mid-match to ensure that they act together in concert.
Quick match more or less prevents both of these things.
Compositions- This one is straightforward. Quick Match does not allow teams, at all, to coordinate their compositions in an ycapacity unless they are a pre-formed party; and even then they have no way of taking into account what map they might be playing on, or what heroes they might have to play against. In a game where it’s possible for an entire, well-balanced team-comp to be countered completely by a single hero, this is utterly unacceptable. This is the source of all complaints regarding quick match’s algorithm being bad: It just is, and it has no way to balance teams correctly. It would require that the algorithm take into account hero counters AND map counters, to ensure that no hero on either team is hard-countered by the enemy because it’s blatantly unfair to queue into a game and spend 30 minutes watching yourself lose with no chance whatsoever to fight back- just because you got hard countered by the matchmaking.
This doesn’t even begin to consider the fact that most teams don’t even get to coordinate their composition, and that most randomly-assorted teams consist of heroes that are blatantly anti-synergistic, or heavily top-sides compositions that lack the basic fundamental tools to deal with certain map mechanics or enemy compositions. Teams often lack healers or tanks entirely, with the vast majority of the comps being assassins who all hard-counter or are hard-countered by someone on the enemy team. Each match is little more than a roll of the dice to see which team got unlucky and matched into their counters.
Quick match is also fast, by design, giving these randomly assorted teams of players no opportunity whatsoever to actually establish any kind of communications or formulate strategies before the match begins. They have to fly by the seat of their pants and hope their teammates know what they are doii-- oh god why is the kharazim just RUNNING IN and now you’ve lost the entire match because of one player.
Quick Match is the worst possible type of game mode for a MOBA that centers EVERYTHING around team coordination, with a massive web of hard-counters that ensures that no matter who you pick, QM gives you at least 1 hard-counter guaranteed: or it gives you a team that you yourself hard counter. No game is won by skill, or team coordination or cooperation, in quick match. They are won by the hands of the matchmaking god that decides it’s OK to put a team of 5 right-click assassins into a standard Tank-Healer-Bruiser-Mage-Clicker composition because the player count was particularly low at that moment and they were the only 5-stack in the queue.
However, HOTS already has a game-mode that perfectly allows for all of the hallmarks of it’s design philosophy to take place: even between teams of complete strangers. The draft pick game mode found in the Unranked and Ranked queues. It puts the players together first in a lobby, gives them a chance to communicate with one another and establish a strategy and roles- even has the players indicate their favored roles and ensures that there is almost always a good chance to form a solid composition.
it tells the players what map they are on, so they don’t have to deal with playing fountain abathur, or cho’gal on warfield’s junction, or TLV on Braxis. It also further narrows down what strategies will be good for that game, and allows the truly skilled teams to coordinate their compositions around it: unlike in QM were you might have a team that is really good at death-balling and instantly lose at load screen because the enemy is a split-pushing team on cursed hollow.
But most importantly, it provides a point of interaction with the enemy team: Teams can ban certain heroes that are either broken Op cuz of a recent patch cough rehgar cough, or because they would single-handedly dismantle whatever strategy they want to use cough lunara cough. It lets teams see what the other team is going to have, and alter their composition if necessary to deal with potential counters. Even in a scenario where one team picks their tank, and the enemy team counters with an unbanned Tychus, they can then respond by picking a valeera or a zeratul.
But nobody plays Unranked, ever. Because Quick Match exists, it’s the default option, and people don’t want to have their champ banned or picked from them. But people are stupid, and people don’t realize that it’s always worth it to take a couple more minutes to enter a match if it means that the quality of the match will be dozens of times better. If it means never having the deal with another QM nightmare.
Remove Quick Match. There will be outcry, but people will realize that it’s better this way. That this is truly the only way HOTS stays a fun game. That Quick Match is Absolutely, Positively, Completely, and Totally anti-thetical to the concept of fun. That HOTS is, at it’s very core, not league of legends.
DOTA 2 did it. Their most basic “all pick” mode still has a ban phase, still allows teams to see what the other team is picking, still has a lengthy pre-game lobby so teammates can talk. Did DOTA 2 die? No. It’s still going strong.
If HOTS is to ever recover, and rise to actually legitimately compete with the other MOBA titans, it MUST remove QM and make “Unranked” the default mode.
