So…as someone whose favorite mode is now aram, I believe having a ranked mode of this would be great. I believe it really could show case your true ability at this game. Think about it, if you can play well with any random character that is generated and play well enough to win most matches or have a high mmr, then it would show how good you are at any possible character.
While this mode might not be the best for some players, I think it would be good for many different types of players. I play a ton of aram games now and I bring the topic up in game quite often, it seems that most players that I play with anyways, would love to see a ranked version of that game mode.
While I understand this would not determine your overall play in this game, as you wouldn’t have to lane, it would determine how well your overall pvp ability is.
I personally watch some grand masters play on youtube and they discuss the pvp ability of most bronzes (I’m personally not that low ranked, I’m just using that as a reference) and they say that most bronzies are actually really good at pvp, they just don’t know how to play the overall game such as laning. So…many people who are stuck in bronze hell, and I see posts about that in forums quite frequently, this might be an option for them and many other players, to see their true pvp ability. A lot of people I personally see, don’t pay attention to mini map or soak properly, etc, so this ranked aram mode, would be an out for those players. They don’t have to focus on anything but pvp and if they can get good enough to play any random character, their true pvp would show.
while some may not like that other players might not be good at playing any random generated character, the overall however, would show YOUR ability because you would win more than you would lose and would generate a high mmr.
So that said, blizz if you are watching, at least consider what I am saying!!
What you describe as “pvp” sounds just like “microing” (controlling the hero).
I agree that some bronze players are good at “microing” because they might have learned it in other games (LOL/DOTA/SC2). I played LOL and SC2 too before HOTS came out so i already knew how to stutterstep and press buttons.
As you see, the ability to micro well alone will not bring players far up the ladder because there is more to the game. MOBAs origin from RTS games so strategy is very important and in my opinion this has still a lot to do with pvp. The enemy team is also on the same map trying to push their strategy through. You aren’t laneing only vs minions. Making decisions when to fight and where and all these things have still a lot to do with pvp.
In that sense, ARAM doesn’t prove someones “pvp ability” it only proves their micro ability.
Aram is essentially the slot machine mode.
It’s purely for fun and should never be taken seriously.
Bronzies are good at mashing their keys on a single person because they refuse to flex as heroes they’re unfamiliar with and lack the awareness to do it effectively. They will probably get massively outplayed if they try to duel heroes like Fenix, Alarak or Zeratul, and even the better Raynors and Vallas.
Your shadow mmr already has an effect on the mm. For each “good” player on your team the enemy team will get as many players with similar profiles, or at least have individually better quality than the average of the team with like 2 GM players and 3 Silvers.
It’s not very good but tightening the brackets and splitting up the mode into ranked/unranked would drastically impact queue times.
I agree, but I know for a fact that luck plays a lot more than SL.
my que times right now for aram is like literally 1 second, at most 10 seconds. que times are typically faster for aram than any other mode I play. if it did split que times, pretty sure 2 seconds up to 20 seconds, no player would complain about. hell, even if que times in ranked aram were 1 minute, no one would care. more people would play unranked aram anyways.
Iirc I did some math on what would actually probably happen in a post within the last month I’ll try to look it up and post parts of it.
But you’re way off.
and, I found it!
So, you’re starting with a “1 second” baseline. Which simply is untrue on my experience playing on Europe, closer to ~3-7 seconds.
We’ll be generous, and call it 3 seconds currently.
If making it ranked purely cut it in half, call that 9. The time is tripled, because you have to account for scenarios where there are 9 or fewer players in either mode waiting on a last player.
Now, we had MMR restrictions, and we likely multiply that by about, oh, 5x to be generous.
Now we’re at a 45 second queue time.
Add in that I think far under half the ARAM population will want to play ranked ARAM, probably closer to 25%. So now you’re looking at 90 seconds or so.
Add in further player decay from the queue being long, and you’re looking at 2 minutes+.
If you start from the premise of 1 second:
1 → 2 → 5.
5 → 25. 25 → 50 seconds.
50 seconds still will have people not queueing, so you’re probably looking at closer to 75 seconds on the most populated server.
Given brawl in all non-europe serves has times where it matches with bots, the mode wouldn’t be viable in any other region. And that’s assuming it actually would be viable in Europe. Which I doubt based on even my generous queue time estimate.
What if you had a choice of playing ranked or unranked ARAM?
It s too hard for their tiny shrinking brain, they can t handle it, not their fault, it s how they are made. ARAM is for these kind of people…
Only reason to play ARAM is to test heroes and discover the game. After level 500, people shouldn t go at ARAM at all, it s just a braindead mode to make you zombies.
ya i’m not lying, n.a. servers are 1 second, up to 10 seconds, like i said.
and your entire basis for not having a ranked aram mode is “que times long, lets not do it.” lmfao. which, you have no clue if their will be long times or not. the only way to know is to implement that mode. if people don’t like it and aren’t playing it, here’s a thought, remove the mode then.
ya i disagree with you strongly. some times people just want to play pvp and don’t want to stress about ya know, laning or soaking, so if all you want to do is just pvp, then aram is the mode for you. in some senses, its harder than normal matches because the entire focus the entire game, is pvp. so unless you are really good at pvp and can do it on any random character, you won’t be good at it.
you are lying, or only play during some super peak hours, or are super-ultra lucky with queue times every time.
I said my experience on Europe because I don’t typically play on Europe. And because Europe has the lowest queue times of any region, as it has the highest population.
I live in California, and have played the game on NA since early open/late closed beta.
I’ve never seen brawl times at that level of 1 second. Not even when I played the game during peak hours before I worked overnight.
I’ve had cases off-peak hours in NA, where during weekdays, sometimes not enough people are online at 4 or 5 am PST to get a full 5v5 brawl game.
The most generous estimate I can give for giving the game MMR, nevermind a ranked mode, but giving it MMR, is over a minute.
The queue times in QM were to long with call of the nexus so they shortened them… And these “long queue times” were in my experience <1 minute.
Players stopped playing because of longer queue times before, so yeah. I’m going to assume adding longer queue times to a mode would make fewer people play.
Splitting any mode into two or more new separate modes is currently an unviable idea except for Europe.
If anything, more mergers might be needed to shorten the que times on less populated servers.
Unranked for example is a complete desolate wasteland on nearly every region.
Maybe Blizzard can figure out a way to incorporate Unranked and Aram together somehow.
ya literally not lying. i said between 1 second and 10 seconds. so on average, in between those times. i’ve had it literally instant que. the moment i pushed the button it goes straight to the match. i’m guessing you don’t play aram much at all so you have no clue how fast the que system is.
further, again, you are speculating que times. you have no clue if there will be long times or not. again, the only way to know is to implement the mode. again, if people don’t want to play a ranked aram mode and no one is queing for it, then they can just as easily remove it.
my que times here in n.a. is extremely fast for aram. i’m guessing that there is a ton of players playing it. if they implemented a ranked version of it, i’d guess that there would be a spike in players playing aram as they would try it out and see if they like it.
as far as unranked, idk, i personally never play it. i don’t really see the point of it. if i want to play a match, i’ll just qm or play ranked if i want a draft. ranked que times are fast for me as well. qm is a matter of seconds most of the time. ranked is roughly 20 to 30 seconds for most matches for me. since i don’t play unranked, i don’t know the que times. i’d guess they probably could remove unranked though as its not popular.
i’d guess a ranked aram would be more popular than unranked because you could determine your aram skill that way. so…normal aram is kinda like qm, as its not ranked and is just for fun, whereas ranked would be like normal ranked mode and would be played to determine skill. i’d put money that a ranked aram mode would be far more popular than unranked currently is.
Thus the queue for ranked would be proportionally larger since most players aren’t even using it.
Then factor in the skill difference in those players and you’ll have things like the awkward 5 minute SL queues where you end up with 2 Masters, 1 Diamond-Plat and 2 gold on each team because it doesn’t have the appropriate players to draw from.
You’re just blogging at this point.
It’s an idea, sure. But do you really want them to put what limited resources they’re willing to spare into this game for something that’s based purely on your conjecture?
Ranked ARAM would maybe see a spike in popularity before the people who already weren’t playing ARAM go back to other modes because they remember why they’re not playing ARAM.
All you’re doing is dividing the pool of players it already has for a very slight QoL improvement on a mode that’s fundamentally based around a literal slot machine mechanic.
If you want to have actual competitive ARAM games just look for custom lobbies and join 9 other players who are actually dedicated to the mode.
Sure you’ll lose xp but hey you’re having fun with skilled players, right?
ya i do. because any mode that can get more players playing is good. second, if its a popular mode, it helps the game out. the only way to know for sure is to implement it.
so you don’t know at all if it will have long que times or if it will split any player base. i know for a fact after they changed brawl to aram, they had and continue to have, a huge spike in people playing aram over brawl. aram is FAR more popular than brawl ever was. so…in other words, creating a ranked mode could EASILY make aram even more popular. further, they used your precious devs to change aram from brawl in the first place. if they could do that, i’m sure making a ranked version wouldn’t be that hard.
all that people commenting are that are against the idea is “long que times” that they have no idea if their will be or not.
They had to combine NA servers for Storm League due to lack of players. In AMA’s they devs had said the popularity of modes go as such: VS AI/QM/Ranked/ARAM/Unranked Draft.
Putting aside for me a “ranked ARAM” is antithetical in the first place, outside of the EU there aren’t enough people to support the modes we already have, despite your anecdotal evidence.
You claim a ranked mode would be successful and this a claim nobody can disprove with out rolling it out. Have you considered though the qualities that attract many people to ARAM, is the fact it isn’t a ranked mode or in any way serious?
There is a reasonable chance you will lose many players who enjoy ARAM as it is now, if you made it a ranked mode.
so your’s and everyone else’s argument to not have a ranked mode is “que times, not enough players.” that it. you can’t come up with a logical argument other than that.
so the people that are against it, would seem to only be against it, because they are worried that they might have longer que times for the mode they prefer to play and it would seem every single person against it, doesn’t actually play aram (or at least, doesn’t do it often).
then your last sentence you claim that we’d lose many players who play aram if there was a ranked mode (hence why there would be 2 different modes. 1 normal such as qm for normal play. a non ranked aram. and 2 a ranked mode for people who want to play and see how they actually stack up in that mode). the vast majority of people who play this game play qm. most people do not play ranked. that said, doesn’t mean that their isn’t people who don’t prefer ranked or won’t que for ranked. just because there is a ranked mode of any game doesn’t mean that their won’t be players playing that method.
all i am saying is unranked seems to be completely unpopular so why not get rid of that and create a ranked aram mode in its place.
…No.
I guess you skimmed my post. The other reason I gave was the appeal of ARAM for many is the fact that it’s a causal goof ball, chaos mode. Exactly the people who don’t want a structured ranked format that you’re proposing.
Simply the game can’t support the modes it has now. You may not like, I sure don’t like it. I’d like to have brawls and ARAM and I hate Storm League and would love to have Hero League and Team League back. The thing is though, I have to realistic, if the devs say there aren’t enough people to support it, they would know better than we do.
I would like to remind you (as an example) in late 2018 they brought in slightly stricter role matching for QM. Keep in mind QM is the second most popular mode and ARAM is the fourth most popular. This simple change caused queue times to expand to an average of 3 minutes and there was a flood of complaints about it here and on Reddit. They had to roll back this change.
I appreciate your idea and what you want, but if there isn’t a population to serve you idea, then it’s just not feasible.
Wrong. The devs said in an AMA that the majority of players play VS AI. Then it’s QM/Ranked/ARAM/URD.
the only “structured format” would be it que’s as ranked instead of normal. so you still would get 3 characters to choose from for every match. the only thing that would be different is you’d accumulate a rank and see how you match up in an aram setting. anyone who would actually be good in a ranked aram is people who can play nearly all the characters well. those people would obviously win more than they would lose and their skill level would show. right now, as ranked normal play, people can be level 1000 of a character and still not progress in ranked normal mode. doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be good at pvp with that character. so having a ranked aram mode, would show your true pvp ability with any off character. if you are good with most characters you’d progress, if you aren’t, you would stay in a lower tier. which, is exactly why a ranked aram would be interesting in and of itself. in ranked normal, there is tier lists as far as characters are concerned, you have to depend on other players you que with being able to get a character they are good with and whether or not they can play the game in a normal setting. most people stuck in bronze aren’t very good at map awareness nor when to get mercs or soak or when to do many other things. all a ranked aram mode would do is get rid of all the other things that people do that aren’t very good at the normal game. it would show how you actually stack up. in some ways, it would show your true skill level because if you can play any character well, then you’d be able to select from any of the 3. in ranked draft, there is a lot of variables to you not being able to progress. the play of your teamates is far more detrimental or helpful because if they aren’t doing the things on the map they need to do, there’s a good chance you will lose no matter how well you play. in a ranked aram mode that all they have to do is pvp, then its less likely that their skill would determine a match or not. most players are super good at pvp in this game, they just aren’t good at doing the other stuff.
wanna show me a single dev that said that there isn’t enough players to have a ranked aram mode? why do we have an unranked normal mode that is extremely unpopular? further, if there was a ranked aram mode, all that might happen, is divide the aram community. right now, que times are extremely short for aram. shorter typically for me, than qm.
the reason there was long que’s in 2018 is because they changed the que requirements for qm. they were trying to force every match to have a tank and a healer and have every role filled. since queing as a tank or healer is less popular in qm that is why it caused long que times. i personally switched from qm to unranked for a short period back then because it was faster to que for unranked than it was for qm at the time. so that example you gave has nothing to do at all with a ranked aram mode. the que times for qm back then wasn’t due to player shortages but because of how they forced rolls to be qued at the same time.
you don’t actually know that. first off, when they had brawls, people que’d maybe 3 times for a brawl just to get the reward and then didn’t play it anymore because the rewards for playing it were terrible. now that they gave better incentives and you get all the same quests as playing any other mode, i’ve personally seen the que times for aram go way shorter. aram has definitely spiked in popularity since they got rid of brawl. so that said, at most like i said, it would divide the players who prefer aram. at worst, it would get a spike in popularity as people would try out a ranked mode to see how they stack up. there is an awful lot of posts about people posting about the hardness of getting out of “bronze hell” that i see in forums. so…this would be a way to appease some of those people. this would be a simpler mode that people who aren’t as good in normal mode, would be able to progress. having another ranked mode, at worst, would help the game as it would help players who hate being stuck in bronze. less map awareness, less things to focus on, basically nothing to focus on other than pvp. i’m sure a lot of players stuck in bronze would love to do this because they are actually good at pvp (i’ve seen a lot of grand masters who’ve said this. i personally watch fan on youtube and twitch and he’s made that comment a few times. bronzies are bad at the over all game, just really good at pvp). so this would offer some relief to those who can’t get out of bronze.
Ranked is a ladder system, IE a structure by design.
There is no correlation between hero level and skill level with said hero. Many people climb to Masters/GM’s with a pool of heroes they are good with. You just made this argument:
This contradicts your argument about having a hero at level 1000 and in so, limit your chances to rank up in SL. Being one trick will help you in neither mode, your argument is muddled in this regard. I acknowledge you did say:
This would be true. However, nobody is able to climb in ranked by being good at only one hero. Hero bans are a thing, and many strong picks are highly contested by the enemy team in draft.
The game is about both micro and macro knowledge, most of those “stuck” in bronze lack both micro and macro understanding. I don’t think your suggestion is a magic bullet to help these people.
You’re forgetting there are 9 other players in the game. Even in ARAM you still have to play as a team, it’s not a magical way to carry on a hero you’re good at. Nobody can be equally skilled with every hero in the roster and you’re still suggesting a random selection of three heroes to choose from.
If you’ve played as much of ARAM as you claim, then you would know many heroes have better synergy together than others. In the random selection your team can simply draw a weaker selection of heroes where the enemy may have the potential for devastating wombos as just one example.
You should also keep in mind. At present ARAM has no matchmaking rules at all. Unlike every other mode, there is no MMR, it can match Bronze vs a team of GM’s. If you have a “ranked” mode of ARAM, you will then also have to have MMR applied to it. You may find that although you feel you can play all heroes well, you lack the skill of players who are currently Master/GM, etc…
I’ve been patient with you, this is a straw man argument. No dev has said such a thing, as you’re the only person asking for this. Only last year they had to remove a server in NA as the queue times for ranked were too high. Keep in mind ranked is played by more people than ARAM. They had to merge Hero League and Team League into the one mode, due to lack of players. They had promised a “solo only” button for the new SL, but it didn’t happen because there isn’t enough people playing to support it.
Again, this is your anecdotal evidence and you are not even bothering to factor in decisions made in the past and comments from the devs about why they had to merge modes in the first place.
I know the reasons. If the second most popular mode can’t find players to fill the necessary roles, then do you really think ARAM the fourth most popular mode will be able to make a ranked ladder? Remember, queues are faster in ARAM as there is zero matchmaking. Right now it can just put together any ten players in queue. If you have a ranked system you then have to match just like they do now in SL, so much longer queue times.
They stated they removed brawls because of the cost of maintaining them, simple. It’s unlikely they would use resources to make a major change and set up a separate ladder system for ARAM. You’re right, I don’t know anything definitively, I’m not a dev, but I can make some logical conclusions based on the information they have shared and the actions they have taken.
This is simply conjecture and your personal opinion. I have friends who are Master players, who would scoff at the notion of Bronze players being “stuck” only because they lack game knowledge. Have you seen a Bronze player and a GM player face each other 1v1 with an even talent advantage? Nine times out of 10 the GM player will win that fight.
As I said before, I actually think your idea is interesting. At this point of the game though I honestly can’t see it ever happening. When they declare that they can’t even support brawls as they are too costly, I can’t see them adding a whole new mode.