Ranked Matchmaking Is Just Wrong

General Discussion
1

I’ve been playing a lot of HOTS lately, and I have problems with the matchmaking system in ranked. I think it might be one of the biggest detriments to this game.

The problem is, the current ranks don’t really mean anything. When you play solo queue, the players are matched according to their ranks, such as Silver 1 or Silver 5. But this doesn’t actually represent their skill level at all. I sometimes see Bronze players who have a good grasp on game mechanics and macros, and sometimes I’m amazed by the inability of silver players to not throw games.

I blame the placement system. 3 games is not nearly enough to determine a player’s skill level. With the current system, somehow, inexperienced and less skilled players are taken and are spread out through Bronze, Silver and Gold. Of course, some of the good players can be smurfs, but that still doesn’t account for the entirety of the inhomogeneity in skill level of players.

It is one thing to not be mechanically good, but not having basic understanding of game principles such as not fighting when outnumbered or when behind in talents are the signs of a bad player. I started at Silver 5 and made it to Silver 1, but bad players are always here. Players like me who want to learn the game fast, and get better at it, need a safer way to climb ranks. I’m sick of trying to explain to people how the game works, and what needs to be done to win the games.

With the current system, it is mostly a gamble. Either you’re stuck with a losing team that doesn’t communicate, fight when they shouldn’t, and doesn’t know how to soak experience, or you end up in the winning team, where everything works flawlessly. The problem is, in other games of luck such as poker (the card game), you can at least fold when you have a bad hand. In this game, you are stuck with your team, and there is no way to prevent losing your hard earned rank points. I would rather try my luck at a casino than to play ranked in this game.

How to fix this? Remove the placements and make everyone start from Bronze 5. If it is a grind let it be a grind for everyone. That means, if I get to high Silver or low Gold, at least I won’t have to deal with bad players. This way you will have the bad players pooled in Bronze, with less and less players reaching higher ranks.

I think the issue of ranked matchmaking and placement is of the highest importance to the longevity of this game. I think, instead of hero reworks, this issue needs to be solved. I am okay with longer queues if it means at least my games are going to be higher in quality.

Please Blizzard. Do something.

4 Likes
2

Rank wasn’t ever intended to be a stand in for “player skill”. Competition doesn’t care if you are good, only if you win.

3

Sometimes Bronze shines brighter than Silver, but that doesn’t mean that the Bronze is as good or better than the Silver.
Skill can differ from matches, but consistency what defines one’s rank.

2 Likes
4

Maybe a smurf.

If not it’s just one game, where he maybe performs well, but on the next match he maybe can not keep up on this level.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. One guy is maybe good on mechanics but bad at macro, the other one is good at macro, but has bad mechanics. The lover the elo, the bigger this gab is.

Placements are just normal games with a “special” name. Every new account starts at silver 5.

U rly think, the difference between low gold and low silver is that big?
I bet you would not notice any difference between one player from gold and one from silver, if u couldn’t see their ranks.

What u are discribing is just the system as it is right now. Just that players start in S5 instead of B5.

So what’s your point?

5

I would quit ranked forever if I had to start each season at B5. I am probably not the only one either.

4 Likes
6

Smurf accounts are the main reason it has nothing to do with the ability to determine skills, it has to do with players gaming the system and low player pools.

3 Likes
7

The rank system doesn’t really work in HOTS. Sure, if you’re exceptionally good, you can climb, but for the average player, it’s very difficult and can take a very long time.

The rank system determines how well you can carry or how well you can support whoever is carrying. Because carrying in HOTS is much more subtle than it is with other typical mobas, it can become much more difficult to rank up, especially since the player with the lowest skill bracket will have the most influence over the game than the most talented player because of the shared exp.

When you take that in to account and the fact that the player base is dwindling away, it’s very difficult for the game to pair you properly.

At this point, fixing MM in ranked games would serve little purpose for Blizzard. Your best option is just to git gud and enjoy the game.

2 Likes
8

My perscriptions (you might not agree w/ all):

  • Allow MMR to move more than +/- 200, especially after repeat wins/losses. Better yet, just use something like Trueskill.
  • Separate leagues by percentile (19% in bronze, 19% silver, …, 19% diamond, 5% GM)
  • Add a “new player” MMR that can float (new players start here). Better yet, add a new “likely smurf” MMR and assign it to new players that are likely to be smurfs (same device). This helps put new players and smurfs into an MMR closer to their skill.
  • Remove groups from Storm League (keep in Unranked). MMR is supposed to measure skill, not your friends.
  • Only penalize the party a d/cer is in (as well as the d/cer). This reduces variance, saving us time to get to our true rank.
1 Like
9

Ranked will remain broken in this game. Blizzard has failed to address any issues with it for the past 4 seasons. Premade or lose. that is all

1 Like
10

Yeah, rank is absurdly bad now. I saw a new account in gold, on valla doing 11k hero damage at matche’s end. Then I got stuck with that player in like half my ranked games after that across two days. During that time that same player had decent stats in a ranked game against me, only for me to realize post game that he was grouped with friends.

Thing is he had about a 60% wr. So I came to the conclusion he was either a really bad player being carried in most of his matches by 3-4 friends in a premade, or he was the one carrying and was using solo queue games to derank so he could keep boosting other people. Personally I think it was the later of the two. The guy won most of his game when grouped with solid play, but having him on my team in solo queue a few times I saw him doing dumb stuff like soaking the far lane during an objective in the mid game while the whole team was up and we had a level advantage.

Not only that but having tested it a few times it seems the matchmaking system likes to stick people on the same team together repeatedly, rather then swapping teams. I got stuck with a 3 man premade of people trolling (insta-locking teammates prepicks, banning teammates prepicks, picking things they clearly had no clue how to play), and just to test it I kept queing and got stuck with them 4 out of 5 matches. Statistically, as the odd man out I should have had a comparable MMR to their average, and there was a 5 in 7 chance I should ahve been on the opposite team just from the number of slots available. Even if the game was matching against other 3 man premades, I still should have had an even chance of being on the other team, but nope, 4 out of 5 games, same teammates.

Same held true other times I checked it with around 2/3 of my games getting stuck with the same bad player(s) that is either clueless or throwing. Which is a big reason I rarely play ranked HotS anymore.

Lastly, the ranking system, other then for a brief time, has never measured player skill. It has measured team skill. It doesn’t matter how good a player is individually if he is paired with a bad teammate that throws, but his rank is still effected. I really liked it when they measured actual player skill by comparing a bunch of stats with the average of the same rank. The ranking system placed me in bronze (which they later admitted it placed nearly everyone far too low in rank), but after a few matches I did not care. I played so much better than bronze players that I was gaining 2-3 times what I was losing in rank every win vs every loss. That was good ranking design…which is why it will never be seen in this game again.

2 Likes
11

What’s wrong? Is it tedious and totally sucks to have to do?

Yeah - wish you had to earn it like the rest of us. Do you have any idea how many people could maintain Plat+ if they started there???

1 Like
12

There’s a few issues with ranked that don’t have so much to do with blizzard:

  1. The playerbase is better evaluated as how ‘bad’ they are at the game rather than they are ‘good’ they are at it.
  2. The goal of an mmr/ELO system is to try to appraise the probability a player/team will win against another one. That system is intended for the probably to be above 0, but players can intentionally lose, and effectively throw negatives at a system that isn’t prepared to calculate that.
  3. Player “skill” is not consistent. At the core, there’s a difference between leading or being lead; filling or breaking the mold and that extends to each hero, magnified by the combinations with other heroes, against other heroes, on various maps, in different capacities.

While mmr is mostly an average projection in relation to other averages, the deviation players can have (and neglect) on their range of “skill” is deceptively wide. However, the more likely response a player will give of their ability is to emphasize how good or masterful they are regardless of actual performance.

While I could go on and on about this, part of the bottom line is that many players think of “rank” (or the climb) they same way they view levels and gear in WoW or Diablo: playing enough should allow them to go up the ranks.

The issue is that simply going through the motions does not reward players like their phone idle games would. Since the game does not have, or enforce, specific mechanical proficiency for the ranks, many players simply don’t know what being ‘good’ at the game really entails. That’s part of why its a running gag that basic stuff like Stutter Stepping and Soaking exp are consider ‘cheating’ at most levels of gameplay.

Player perception thinks they out to be the highest rank they’ve ever attained, only see themselves in the best of light, and expect to be able to ‘grind’ ranks like they would levels and/or loot.

In effect, what players (as an overgeneralization) “want” is a ladder that does not reduce the points they have. The game ladder could be remade so players only move up the ladder, only get points on wins, and then have the spread of mmr expand infinitely upward (with rank inflation) instead of having a point sink toward the bottom of bronze.

While that system would ‘feel’ better in the short term (and demand rank resets each season) until rank-proficiency tests are made and more aspects of the game demonstrate “how to be good at this”, then most adjustments are going to be band-aid fixes that still hurt when pulled off.

13

uh…what? at what rank do people consider basics like that “cheating”?

Also, there are ways to fix ranked. W/L does not measure individual skill in a team game. That is how the whole system is set up right now. It is the same in SC2, and let me be the first to say, that it beyond broken. In SC2 my MMR put me in diamond 3 for 1v1 matches, and silver 3 in 2v2 matches during the same period of time, with about the same number of games in both. I was winning more than 60% of my 1v1’s against high plat/low diamond players, but only winning 40% of my 2v2’s against silver players.

The reason, simply put, is that I could not control my teammates in 2v2’s and they did not understand my playstyle. I would say I lost at least 10% of my games because my teammate would leave WHILE WE WERE WINNING, presumably because I had low resources and almost no combat units, during the first assault by the other team. This happened again and again and again.

That is the overwhelming issue with Blizzard’s ranking system. Trying to apply team W/L to individual rank/skill. It just doesn’t work.

14

the most prevalent cases are probably bronze to master streamers like Fan, or casted games from Khaldor. It’s not that players say “hey, you shouldn’t do that it’s cheating” it’s that upper tier players have noticed that so many players do don’t stuff like that that it may as well be cheating for how effective it is at influencing the capacity for someone to win a game.

1 Like
15

I also can’t see any difference between any of these ranks.

It seems until you get to like higher diamond, you’re just as likely to find a random bad player in silver or platinum or bronze 4 or whatever.

These days you can’t say for sure if a silver 3 would be a worse ally than a platinum 3. Total gambling.

D2 or higher: Usually soaks, usually doesn’t feed that much, usually helps at objective and teamfights
Bronze 5 to D3: Totally random teammate performance.

16

I like these options except maybe the no tEams in ranked.
Though a solo only button would be fine IMO, provided queue times didn’t increase severely

100% there is an issue here but at the moment the only way to fix it for your self is group up. Find people of equal/less skill but they play well and friend them to group with them again.
Also find people higher than you but lower ranks that are decent but stuck in bronze are the great to help you and them climb.

17

But we had that already. HL and TL. One for solos only, the other for parties. Didn’t work out very well queue time-wise, even when we had more players then than we do now :thinking:

18

They were 2 seperate systems. I want want joint system but with the ability to solo queue without ALSO worrying about stacks( just :potato:s)

If it worked out well (in theory) when you were solo and not have it selected you’d probably get quicker times

19

Remove solo queue. HotS is a Team game. Re-insteate Team Rosters, require players form teams before allowing them to queue up for ranked play. Rate and Rank TEAMs not individuals.

If you want to solo queue, whether it’s just for some casual fun, practice, trying out heroes, etc, it should only happen in Quick Match and Un-ranked.

That’s how the game should be “fixed”.

20

Anyway, doesn’t matter to me anymore guys. Thank you for your responses. There was a Varian in one of my last games, whom we all told not to do camps during objectives. He did that twice. During the game I called him a “moron” and an “idiot”. After the game, I whispered him to explain why what he did was wrong.

He reported me, and I am silenced for a week. Deleted the game and it feels good. I can’t deal with this game, or the ranked mode.