People queuing into ranked without a role.
Roles are required for ranked. You need a Tank and a Healer required. Add roles for ranked queue, please!
We’re losing games because people who do not play those roles are being forced into it. It will make melee/ranged/bruiser queue a little longer maybe, BUT Healer and Tank queues will have almost insta Queues. This is good for Tank and Healer players, and will remove the awkwardness of no one selecting those roles and someone being forced into it.
The role icons are just preferences. Or in the case of some people, just a pretty badge that means absolutely nothing. Many players have no icon at all or claim a role they don’t even play.
You need a Tank and a Healer required.
I would rather have a tank and healer on my team, but not having one is not an instant loss.
Usually, it’s an unnecessary uphill battle without one of them. But they are not required, I have still won plenty of games without both, even against enemies who had a higher average rank than us.
I’m not against queueing for role in theory but I think it would make queue times horrendous for any dd player lol.
It would become just like 5 man ques in WoW where tanks and healers had near instant ques and dmg dealers waiting 30-50 min for a game. I would prefer people would just use draft chat some more instead of alt tapping out until its his turn to pick. Then ranked would become much better. The social aspect of ranked is non-existing just like its non-existing in 5 man instance since Wrath.
What is your rank? Who do you play? How often do you play as Tanks and Healers?
If your team is having trouble, you’re going to have to be the one to fill the missing role. SL is not the format to pick what hero you like, and by extension role.
I understand it’s a good incentive for healer and tank players to have their queues shorter, but you know what else is a good incentive that already exists? Winning because youre occupying a role nobody else in the match is good at.
My usual suggestion for that is to score people based on their recent match history for matchmaking. The short version, if you play one match as tank, you get a pass for an assassin game. (Further explanation below)
Ever since my main mode is QM, I even stopped calling it Slave League for forcing me to play tank or healer too much.
I suspect that many people are like me actually, perfectly fine playing some games filling all roles, just not long streaks of it.
I don’t know specifics but Grubby mentioned a role queue in DotA2 which is similar, you can queue for a specific role every other match or so.
I see a lot of people enjoying just a subset of heroes (but way fewer OTPs these days, possibly because I gained rank or I’m flexing myself), arguably ranked isn’t for them, yet they might play with a friend or simply enjoy the ranking process. (Same for me, but Heroes Profile does it.)
The explanation. I don’t know how simple SL matchmaking happens to be, but I suppose it does the same things as QM, with some parameters not active of course. It certainly uses rating and waiting time, plus rating mirroring (when parties bring bronze + gold, both teams tend to have this, ideally party sizes as well).
I think what it does, it tries to score match candidates somehow, starting the best match or combination of matches.
So the trick is exceptionally simple, with some deep details. In generic version, if your role pick cooperates with the team, you automatically carry some MM score with you, meaning you are likelier to be included in a match sooner. A fairly transparent version is to automatically bump wait time value by 5-10 minutes, so you wait that much less.
I mentioned cooperation because the real annoyance is “first pick Ming”. Sometimes I do get teammates showing tank-bruiser-healer from the get go. In this scenario, picking Tassadar / Ming is filling, even as first pick if the others did show.
Anyway, that was just a bit of a brainstorm about how I’d tackle this. Just in case, or for my own fun. Also feel free to attack it, I’d benefit from it professionally.
Think that’s a rather silly rule. It’s also not really the case if you look at leaderboards. Most people by far have a particular few roles they’re comfortable with and almost completely ignore the others.
So many of the people I ranked up when I played couldn’t play healer worth a damn unless they were playing Rehgar, and that was just fine with me because I gladly took that role. The worst games in masters were the ones where people were picking the flavor of the month heroes they weren’t good at or flexing into a role they weren’t good at. At that point, I’d rather just play a weird comp with something you’re good at.
Silly or not, this is my personal take, that ranked is the most team-effort-required gamemode, which then means to me, that you shouldn’t force everyone to build around you, but be willing and able to fill from time to time. Sure, communicate, and be a “team”, so you should be able to expect another ally to fill your weakest role for you if they’re better at that. But if you won’t or cannot even fill, then at least don’t complain if your allies didn’t pick the roles “you” didn’t. As I said, HotS has no mandatory roles. I just despise complainers and ppl who think only about themselves in ranked with no team gestures.
You are right that it’s team oriented.
But would you build a, say, software development team by (literally) randomly picking 8 professionals? We should have a team lead, a product owner, a testing guy, 4 coders, and a UI expert/dev.
All good, unless you managed to bring 8 business analysts.
I mean, they’ll do it in Excel, like it happens anyway.
The issue of people’s T shape not being square is there. You know my regular complaints about certain roles, but I observe it with others, too. I’m regularly playing with Diamonds now, including today - when they play their best, it’s not funny, when they don’t, they get beaten by that Bronze 4 Tracer main.
This translates into equally majestic match quality.
And so flexism was born, and that’s great, but not everyone gets there.
(At least my Li-Ming doesn’t work in SL or I’d be the absolute horror of it. Solo carry on 2-3 heroes lifting myself to Plat+ but also epic trash on anything else, feeding and throwing like a boss all the way to low bronze. But my rating gap between QM and SL is getting funny.)
I think the problem is that, youre not always going to get 5 players who can flex. Most of the time im queueing with 4 players who mostly are some combination of Ranged / melee /bruiser. I’ve only have very few games where I’ve seen Healer and tank main players. At the end of the day, those roles are being left to people who dont play those roles and the quality of the game is greatly diminished.
Roles are required for Solo queuing imo.
It’s ridiculous when no one is picking tank / healer and someone who doesnt play those roles gets forced into it. The reality is players who don’t play all roles queue for ranked. A lot of the time there isn’t enough time to talk in the chat to figure out who can play Tank / Healer. A lot of the time no one responds and theyre going to pick whatever hero it is theyre going to pick. They dont care about filling. A lot queueing into ranked are selfish when choosing hero. Having roles in ranked should be required.
If I must. And in ranked, you’re must. You all can communicate on the roles tho.
No one is actually forced. Do your best to win, even if it means you cannot fill. But after years, everyone should at least a few heroes from their unusual roles to be able to play as. Some even have overlapping playstyles.
You really don’t, that’s the thing lol. You might lose a game here and there from a weird comp, but you’ll probably lose just as many if not more by playing heroes you’re not good at. Being “flex” in a game like this or even in life, is more a fictional idea than reality.
But I don’t really subscribe to the OP’s suggestions. I say just play whatever you want and are good at, but also, yes if someone doesn’t pick what you want, you can’t really complain either.
When you queue with all roles selected, you get 4 points of role queue. If you are in a party of 2, you get 2 points. In a party of 3, 1 point. You can spend 1 point to queue as the role you want and you will get that role.
It’s a nice system, but the problem is it’s impossible to do the same for hots. Why? Because roles in Dota2 (or league) are not the same roles in hots. Roles in league and dota are the lanes people go during lane phase, and not what type of character you play. For example, you could queue as support but support means you are supporting the team. You could be a healer, a mage, a tank, a shielder, support, buffer, debuffer, engager etc.
We can’t do the same in hots because we don’t have lanes here except solo lane. If we do role queue, the game would be forcing certain a standard type of comp and that’s just boring, since you can have and draft very unique and different comps each game.
It works in dota and league because you are just selecting what your champion is supposed to do on the map and how you play with the team, but you can still draft basically any champion for that role.
How much do comps really differ truly? Most comps are gonna have a tank or bruisers, healer and a mix of melee/ranged assassin. Sometimes what used to be specialist characters.
In HotS we are given 2 roles right? A main and secondary role? I have mine as main melee assassin and secondary as Bruiser. Queuing based off the two roles can allow for better match making. The secondary role allows for comp diversity but ensuring you have someone who mains a tank and someone who mains a healer.
Could have:
Tank, healer, bruiser, ranged, ranged.
Tank, healer, healer, ranged, bruiser.
Tank, healer, support, ranged, bruiser.
Tank, healer, ranged, bruiser, melee.
Tank, healer, ranged, bruiser, bruiser.
Tank, tank, healer, ranged, bruiser.
Tank, tank, tank, ranged, healer.
And we can keep going forever and we didn’t even start with tankless comps or healerless comps.
Exactly right? At a minimum a tank and healer are going to make up a majority of comps. Secondary role selections can aid in comp diversity but there should be a prio queue for tank and healer roles.
To be fair, not even the roles in HotS are the roles in HotS. Tanking is something you do, not always the hero you are on. I have seen and played main tank Xul, Uther, Maiev, Artanis, Leoric, Dehaka, Kerrigan, and so on. In general, you have a melee hero as the main tank, but even that isn’t always the case (hello Blaze and Mei!). Not to mention fun things such as CSmash Varian tank, melee assassin Kharazim, bruiser Rehgar, healer Yrel, and so forth.
I think people in general shouldn’t worry so much about the specific heroes/roles drafted, but how a team can work together to take advantage of the heroes they do have. While it certainly won’t guarantee a win, it will give you much more of a chance than either filling poorly, or ragequitting over comps.
Personally I’m a big fan of double bruiser comps, or main tank Uther comps, I’ve had some fun and successful games with drafts like that.