Basically what Tooton is saying is the truth of the matter.
While you CAN queue solo in Ranked you need to ask yourself: “Should I queue solo in Ranked?” and the answer to that is always “No!”. Find some friends to play with (even if they are just friends for that day) and queue as a 5 man group. You will have much more fun that way.
Biggest problem is find four others who roles do not conflict AND have the same free schedule
Not sure how that deals with the current state of ranked.
Most games are stomp or get stomped and its almost entirely clear who will win from the get go. Again may just be gold.
I get the 35 games thing was to make queue’s go down, but i feel like it has cost match quality greatly. The culture in ranked is just way different these days. Most dont care about the win really. Bronze/silver of 2 years ago was more fun than gold of today. At least they cared.
I still have fun in ranked, but as has been said, it is definitely more enjoyable when you queue with others. I am willing to play anything from solo queue all the way through a 5 stack when a bunch of friends are on, and oddly enough, the best luck I have is usually with a 3 stack and 2 solos.
It helps that I prefer to main tank, or play one of the beefier bruisers, but I show “Flex” as my role and I do keep at least 2 heroes for each role practiced so I can fill whatever is needed, especially when I solo queue. If my team mates aren’t interested in counter-picking or filling, I make that my job. The enemy first picked Tychus and we have people showing tank, healer, and off-lane? I will happily play Cassia and throw a W in his face when mini-gun goes off. No one is interested in playing a front line hero? Johanna, Diablo, and Muradin are all tough enough to take the hits for us as a solo front line.
I guess the other reason I still find SL enjoyable is that I look on it as a chance for self-improvement and expanding my comfort zone than flexing my rank at others (good thing, my rank isn’t impressive this season).
As others have mentioned, try to find like minded people to queue with, especially if you aren’t comfortable playing all roles yourself. If you have a good match, ask the better players if they want to group and queue together for more games. In time, you will have a fairly extensive friends list making it easier to find queue buddies.
My experience is way different.
I find that most times when someone starts speaking about picks bans taking camps at specific times and generally communicating (more than just ping which is fine i rly don’t think you need more than pings to communicate), is total damaging and when i get one of these chatting people, my chance of winning is very small. And I don’t want to use my time telling them about their strategies being wrong and what they should do instead of the stupid choices they might chose to go with, because then i would have to use time to chat as well, that’s why i just chose to remain silent nearly every game, specially when people chat a lot.
And for the queueing solo or with people discussion I have way better experience playing solo then with people.
Mynamehere says most don’t care about win, but I think maybe it could also be that people use other ways of winning than what you are used to. Ofc i cannot know without seeing your games, but I found in bronze/silver/gold people often think that soaking a lane getting exp is = “afk” which it rly isn’t it is how you win by getting exp advantage. I might be over interpreting here but that’s what i think might be the case when you write “…mostly just afk laning…”
Ranked is a gigantic mess, and frankly I don’t know why.
The personal influence on your rank per match is fairly low (you are 10%), and if only it was you, but others are flailing around ranks as well. Add smurf and decay on top of it, and it’s borderline random.
I’ve been Gold 1, I’ve been Silver 5, this season I couldn’t get above S3 (bleeding rank with healers), what am I.
I have experienced a very hard wall between S4 and S3. Toying with folks with I was S4, struggling with S3, literal back and forth one match apart.
It’s possibly that PBMMR is very much functional and used to improve match balance at the expense of a good rank/skill correlation.
I have paused SL for a bit (this season my rank ceiling is well below my expectations) and just playing QM, one hero each weekend.
The funny thing.
My SL feels miserable. HP fairly consistently puts me as team MVP. Could be my playstyle but shouldn’t happen. And…
My QMs are rather fair, sometimes I carry, sometimes I get carried but normally I’m in the middle. Same on HP. I’m playing with and against Bronze 5+0 all the way to Master+1000, and the correlation between SL rank and QM skill is fairly low, lots of steady low silvers outplay diamonds like a boss.
Arguably, QM folks barely play SL, you could make a case that there are 10-50x as many QM matches (hunch based on inspections) and hence ranking is better.
As all game modes have some kind of MMR matching, you don’t really need to stick to SL, unless your agenda is to earn points and then showcase it. That aside, the only real difference between SL and QM is team composition, unless of course you play as 3-5 stack ensuring you have a proper draft in QM.
You’re 10% of the match, but you can have much more weight on the end result of the game than just 10% (no need to be a player like Fan who probably affects 80% of the end result when playing in low leagues).
You can make game deciding plays and plays that the enemy can’t recover from (like chunking down 70% of their core alone) even if you are just one player out of ten.
Then your win rate slowly climbs over 50% and you start ranking up.
Needless to say, and it has been said plenty above, this is much easier to do in a party with trusted skilled friends.
The chaos factor when playing with randoms is huge. AZJackson himself went on a 16 loss streak at the start of a season, and he was a senior game designer whose skill level in-game is high Grand Master.
I would like to say that I agree with you…
… but my personal coping mechanism says no. Take it as that (only) 
Sure, it can go to 11-12%, but don’t discount enemies either. That’s my usual issue, my teammates being inferior to the enemies, as if I would be expected to ultra carry (by doing or leading).
Maybe a relaxed player is more performant than a focused, serious one. For me, there is a significant correlation with this statement.
To the point that my winrate in matches where I start by hard feeding 3 times is above 50%. (Usually I notice that we’re still not behind in XP and apparently I got a good team, so I don’t need to drop MMR further. This whole thing is a hard attempt to fix all I said above. Ensure that my MMR is well below my skill so that I can ultra carry. But it doesn’t work anyway.) Fun fact, I was a receiving side of such a match this weekend (Imperius teammate running into enemy towers twice, logging off for 2 minutes, then coming back and playing fine).
So I just take everything as random and try to enjoy myself in the game.
Of course seeing that I’m Wood 9 feels bad man, more importantly having a score of 0:10 with my lifetime best hero feels bad because my teammates will think I’m trolling picking it. (Also, the absolute hopelessness of trying. There is no trying, there is no doing, there is just happening.)
In any event, my main point on-topic was that quite possibly there are many people where rank and skill doesn’t correlate very well, and then these cause a ripple effect. I mean, if I say that a Bronze 5+0 with 30:70 seasonal score can play as skillful as a Diamond 1, I guess you’d raise an eyebrow, what did I put in my rooibos tea.
(And, now emphasized, caring about rank can be destructive.)
Streamers already proved those games can be carried solo (it’s impossible that only your team is always inferior to the enemy team), with very high win rates like 95-99% until they hit around platinum, where they start running into a bit stiffer competition and they drop down to 60-70%.
Normal players can’t do it though, that I can agree with.
But there are always people with highly advanced brains and intelligence who can grind effortlessly out of these ranks. Mentioning Fan is a gut reaction, as he is the most known figure doing these bronze5->gm streams on his Twitch channel.
I don’t think an ordinary person will be or can be at his level even if they practiced 10 years, or a lifetime.
99 wr bro … that would mean 100 games 99 win 1 lose. that would put you grandmaster probably no matter what. but otherwise i agree with shapeshifter. maybe 70-90%
11%? Put grand masters into some silver games or low bronze games, and their impact on that game is more like 80%.
They might be the only person in the game getting any kills at all or soaking experience, doing objectives.
1 good smurf or Grand Master can completely break a low level game. Their impact is not 11%. They have so much impact they are practically deciding the result themselves.
They can end those games with 30+ kills and top everything, while the 9 other players have 0-1 kills, low stats and spent much of the time doing nothing or being dead.
Hey, welcome to Heroes 2015-2020. Have fun in Heroes 2021!
It was much worse when it was “Play X matches” because players didn’t even have to win. Not going back to that.
My experience is that everyone is trying to counter pick, which is why no one picks anything. (I mean, their “counter picks” don’t make sense but that’s the reasoning anyway)
Bronze is much , much, much, MUCH worse.
No, it definitely doesn’t because there are a lot of players there that you can’t see how they got there, Or were placed there 3 years ago and came back at the same rank. It’s often worse.
It will never be playable until they lower all MMR and deal with the trolls.
If you premade you will win, otherwise give up on solo que.
I highly dislike the drafting in ranked. Besides the point of it being a 10 minute wait to play a 20 minute game… There no real strategy play going on. Here’s the traits of a typical draft.
Im just happy if none of those things go wrong… let alone brilliant teamplay and strategic picks.
That leaves me with QM where the team comp in unbalanced 90% of the time.
I think I know why. Do you remember how people always said Team League Rank was a joke? It was, as so often people could be lifetime Masters in TL, but never higher than Silver or Gold in Hero League.
Storm League is essentially Team League, with the option to queue solo and as any party size. It also allows a 2 rank spread in groupings, so you can get people boosting players who are more or less skilled than their current rank. You get rainbow matches by design and far more MMR averaging than you had with solo queue Hero League.
When SL was announced I made all these same criticisms and many dismissed them. Over the past year people have been complaining of “uneven” and “poor quality” matches in SL. I don’t know why people would expect anything different with a system such as it is.
All game modes are in a terrible state and unplayable, but yes, Ranked is in the worst state.
I’m not sure if I’d completely agree. The thing is though, ranked is held to a higher standard than any other mode, the matchmaking is supposed to be more even and consistent. Considering that fact, yes it’s in a bad state.
I agree except ARAM.
And mostly because ARAM is a meme mode where you dont take it seriously and just play what this game can only be with blizzard. A light hearted fun game.
Blizzard can’t do competitive gaming because their culture isnt even competitive. I mean ffs you get banned from their games if you even tell someone they suck.
Blizzard caters to a different kind of crowd that likes to be coddled.
It wont get any better in plat and that is were i belong when i played ranked.
Always had one who first picked Nova then enemy team counter draft with a high mobile hero or Aba to take her out of stealh with mines.
Or you get the typical 0% winrate russian dude on your team that flames in cyrill letters.
And basis gameplay like taking camps or defend a lane people dont even have a clue about either.