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Fix decay for all ranks - why should it just be fair in higher ranks? All newcomers, retired players (1month - 5 years) aint at their last rank no matter what rank, it’s just logical your experience has decreased and this just hurts the quality of matchmaking hard, if your not a smurf you have lost the game most likely, does that sound fun or fair to anyone?
I bring it up cuz the game needs equality, and for newcomers to enjoy the game or retired players, on their side of this - im sure they wanna play in their rank and not having 10% winrate in wrong ranks.
It ruins the joy for the regular player, the retired, and the new. Being handed these highly risk of loosing games. -
Party in SL - I enjoy being solo and facing 4-5 stacks party, It’s enjoyable to see how they set traps in every corner due to coordination and just slice my team. This will make me enjoy the game and have some fun, right?
I’m not totally sure how this could be solved, but atleast don’t let solo players land in games like this, it is extremely silly and not motivating at all. -
You have won too much! - What’s the deal of being placed with low winrates, new players or returning players as soon as you’ve won a few games requiring full focus?
EXTREMELY demotivating, players believe they improve and can eventually climb - then the matchmakers finds awful games til your around 50% or even less for a while, then your good to have somewhat equal games again.
I’ve always stayed positive about this and thinking there is no way this is actually happening, many people mention this but nah… Let’s stay positive, BUT after the 20th+ time it happens in the exact same circumstance - i’d say SOMETHING is for sure forced here, it is like 0.000001%- chance of this happening without anything having an impact, being forced to some extent.
I tried to play this season and had around 60%-70% winrate with natural variety, what I told myself was “I wonder when the matchmaker is gonna change” - Didn’t take many games til I had like 30+ games IN A ROW with either returning players(decay is not applied so they’re sadly somewhat ruining the game(mentioned above)), new players or low winrate players who are about to downrank quite hardly. This many games in a row? 0.0001% chance of that happening is a good rate, something is forced for some reason no one likes no matter what rank they play.
I have no idea how this can apply, but somehow it does and people dont spit this out for the fun of complaining or “to not wanna realize its their actual rank” etc, others including me mentions this because it actually seems to happen and it is extremely boring and heavily time wasting.
My RL friend had the same experience when he smurfed the lower ranks, he won more then he lost no matter what - BUT those weird matchmaking changes still applied, this was somewhat an experiment from his side and practicing heros he usually don’t play, and as we thought - didn’t take too many wins for the matchmaker to place him with drastically worse mates for MANY games, it wasnt 2-3 games, I’m talking about 10-30 games at times.
You should investigate this because i’m sure many players quit because of this happening.
Heroes of the storm is already harder to have a solo impact on compared to other mobas, we don’t need a system that complicate things further and for some reason wants to challenge our winrate? seems to odd to be true.
Makes sense, but I think they’re afraid people at lower ranks, who usually are less dedicated, might stop playing if they decay. Though you could argue that if they don’t play for that long it’s moot.
If you’ve risen to plat and above, new players cannot be placed there when they do their placement games and start playing ranked, so whichever type of players you got, it couldn’t have been new players.
Matchmaking for sure need change 5solo and duo+3solo to hard reduce to put them vs 5 stack or reduce the possibility how big diffrend between stack and if we leave it for 5stack then punished the diffrend beween ranks hard on points.
I’ve experienced a similar thing last season. had < 30% winrate for the first 30 games or so. Took a break for weeks, maybe a month. Then I played some games, was winning about 6 to 1; quickly rose to 60%+ winrate. Then back to awful games, and I stopped playing ranked for good. Given Activision quite literally patented bad matchmaking in the past decade, I’d say… they’re definitely going to fix it any moment now.
In good faith, I am presenting 1 such patent, and the rest are left as homework for the reader to research. Check out US20200114268A1 .
Among other things: they patented matching people with / against bots, giving bots profiles just like players have, and mmrs.
They patented evaluating how much fun you had in your match (of course, by a metric they value, like play time):
the system may include an analytics and feedback engine that analyzes player and match data to determine whether a given match was good. A match may be deemed “good” when a player is determined to have enjoyed gameplay associated with the match based on one or more quality factors that are used as a proxy for player satisfaction. The quality factors may include, for example, a duration of a gameplay session (e.g., via analysis of player historical data), player expressed psychological state (e.g., frustration level, after-match rating), premature exit from game (i.e. “rage quitting”), and/or other information.
They patented matching payers with non-payers to boost sales and giving payers (paraphrased) a good experience involving the paid content, so they’re more likely to buy more content.
Keywords such as “npcs”, “matchmaking” and “microtransactions” allow you to easily skim the patents; for a selection of such patents, there’s a reddit post on OW2 sub. I am leaving finding them as a learning experience to the reader too.
I’ve played in dia with and without decay; the new/coming back/ boosted/ lucky players have been there then and now. Ranked feels more like a roulette than a climb; you play 50 games to eventually climb to a rank, then you get matched repeatedly with people that play at silver level at best while their game history suggests they’re winning some games, making you wonder how many silver players could possibly get to dia by luck.
A typical lay person doesn’t have a clue about patents, game design, or a myriad of other things to have an informed opinion outside of effectual xenophobic ignorance because someone biased their limited perspective with buzzwords.
So the typical rants against patents are made with disconnected tangents that pretend it all makes sense because they did “homework” by skimming, and then encouraging other people to feel empowered for their own ignorance. I’m not an expert on these things myself, but I do dislike the loops people rant about when they look for ‘patents’.
US20200114268A1 is a “patent”. Being a “patent” does not mean that any of that has been coded at all, and in that particular one, it looks like its trying to ‘grandfather’ itself from a previous patent to be less specific, and significantly more ‘useful’ for defensive patent law. It’s very vague, highlights example implementation, and doesn’t actually indicate how to create any of the hypotheticals it presents. Which is somewhat of a no-brainer because actual code isn’t protected by patents.
The claim asserts that its meant for a variety modes, to adapt to player feedback on adjusting to quantifying how it’s rating player preferences, and it isn’t limited to one particular genre.
Oh no, a patent that describes that it can be used for pve modes will create npc’s for the player, and try to refine the npc profiles for pve modes 
Oh no, the patent describes that players may not actually want to have “skilled based matching” when the breadth of playerbase aren’t actually all that skilled
Oh no, it describes that it’ll allow players that want to wait longer having a stricter matching preference compared to players that want matches as fast a possible
Outside of people demonizing the sale of items as a potential matchmaking factor, it sounds like someone actually bothered to read player complaints about matchmaking, and wanted to at least act like it was considering that complainers aren’t actually very honest about their feedback.
It’s also really easy to claim a bunch of stuff in a hypothetical since they aren’t the ones who have to figure out how to make any of that stuff; similarly, they don’t actually need any sort of patent to make whatever matching system they want.
Frankly, I think this was made for patent trolls rather than evil-mustache-twisting suits.
That sentence is one which low IQ fanboys wish wasn’t real, yet they continue paying money to big companies that hate them. Glad you mentioned it, I recall seeing it years ago
I’m a returning player. Back in the day when I was active I was playing master league (original account). With this new account I was placed silver 5. Honestly in all my time playing HotS I haven’t experienced what you describe at all. It feels more like a myth frustrated people come up to justify their inability to climb. You tend to focus a lot more on negatives and ignore the positives when you’re not improving or stay in standstill.
Coming back I breezed through ranks to currently in Plat. Still don’t see that happening. There are times when I’m in like a 10+ win streak that I get a few absolute trash that cannot be redeemed or carried, I admit that. But that happens extremely rare and usually when I’m tearing through ranks which doesn’t happen all the time, and the higher I’m getting those streaks are getting shorter. But I’m still winning a comfortable 68% of games after nearly 200 games
I see, but this is somewhat my point, I have a friend that is diamond-high master too, he can still win sort of solid like you do due to the fact that he is so much better then for example silver 5. But he can also see the drastic change in the matchmaker that im mentioning, but like you say he could still win since there was a drastic difference in skill, again my point is that this matchmaking is anyway happening for some reason, for you and my friend it wont bother too much due to the above mentioned. Those who are lets say silver, gold, on the other hand - will they appreciate this weird matchmaking change? I bet not, it is just a weird happening that no one likes and i bet its not ment to actually happen? it may even be a bug after X amount of games or whatever?
I also agree some people may mention this part due to inability to climb, but could that inability partly be because of this? and thats why these players feel furious?
I did not create this part of the thread because im sad I can’t climb out of whatever rank, I purely did it because i’ve noticed it several times as many others, and when my friend even tho he could still climb noticed the same matchmaking pattern I felt like this could be a very discouraging thing generally for a player that wants to improve while having fun.
Yea it was brought up regarding Call of Duty and Overwatch 2 matchmaking too, and similarly, there were people finding excuses for these patents, ranging from trying to convince others it’s things that have always been happening in every game, or that they were never used.
I’d say patenting matching people with bots and giving the bots profiles is pretty self-explanatory (why would pve bots have profiles that look like players’ profiles?), but it looks like certain individuals think being contrarian makes them intellectuals. Ultimately, everyone can deny whatever, but each of us can start the game and see the reality for what it is. As an avid ARAM hater, all other game modes are so awful currently, I am playing about 4 ARAMs a week with a buddy. I see no reason why I wouldn’t support people noticing the same problems.
If people were actually using valid proofs and connective evidence for demonstrating logical claims, then they might see ‘reality’ for ‘what it is’.
However, after a small hurdle of easy information, people would just as soon as loop what they already want to think and take the easy way out. They aren’t seeing “reality” just want they want to see.
The awful games is because there is something the carrying player needs to learn in order to progress. Personally this has been my experience when doing solo in QM. I stopped doing what I’ve been accustomed to do and instead working in other aspects, this has worked relatively well for me. If you get more of this type of games, make sure to watch a replay and see what you could have done better, it does certainly take a lot of effort in order to notice this. Sometimes is being an anchor to the team, other times is shotcalling, other times is trying to carry the team harder (Up to a certain point), other times is just the time or the day you are playing if there is a low pool of players that hour and day.
Try to notice this since It’s important in order to get better games.