It seems like the general consensus is people wanting to play their specified hero.
So my question then is:
Would you play UD if there were no bans or pick order? Effectively you could play anything you want. Assume it could promise a consistently better game experience — don’t cloud your judgment with crazy hyperbole about people being toxic etc
Or…
Since you are just playing for kicks and giggles, would you rather play vs AI if the AI was better? Especially not as bad as it is in the latest patch…
Well yes if it was a better game experience then of course I would choose this mode. I just don’t see any tangible steps that could be taken to accomplish this. The reason people like myself don’t enjoy Unranked is because most players have different expectations of the mode: Some want to just casually draft, some will only play one specific hero of each role regardless of comp, some want to specifically practice one hero no matter what, some are try-hard and want to craft the perfect team, some are just learning the game and want more experience.
Additionally, I have found most players have widely different skill levels. Because UR MMR and HL rank are completely different, you could have a master HL player that earned his/her rank with a gold UR MMR. And you could also have a silver HL player that earned his/her rank with a gold UR MMR in that same game. So basically every UR game (at least for me) is a rainbow experience.
Ultimately, if I could be assured that all players in the game were equal to my skill level then I would choose whatever game mode accomplishes this, even if I have to sacrifice team comp and role parity.
If there was like an “insane” mode for the AI where they played at a level of master / GM, then I might be interested in playing this mode. Otherwise no.
First off, you still can’t play your hero if a teammate wants to. You might think this is a trivial thing with how many heroes we have, but it’d probably be an issue with new releases/popular heroes.
This is my second point. The entire point of QM is playing what you want. The entire point of a draft is you can customize your team. These two aspects are mutually exclusive. Another thing to consider is the other team. If my team chooses to go full clown-fiesta mode, I don’t want to be put vs a god-tier comp. If I wanted that garbage, I’d be playing OW.
HL and Unranked it’s randomly decided I think who gets to pick first. In team league it’s a race to whoever locks in their pick first but even before that there’s 4 bans so you could be SOL before anyone can pick and racing your teammates so you can get who you want and make them adjust to you is kinda a jerk move. In QM by contrast everyone functionally gets the first pick which is as fair as you can ask for.
No. Because the draft puts premise on there being meta rules to follow. Have a support, have a tank. X hero good to lock early, etc.
It does not solve the issue.
No. I enjoy playing against players because of the cool things you can see.
Bots have very specific things that make them difficult to play against in some cases. And these are in-human things.
Now, for some players versus AI is enough. As i’ve Said before I have a friend who has over 20K games total, probably 16-18K of those are versus Elite AI. And they enjoy it.
If I am unlucky and keep getting last pick for 10 HL games straight, I won’t be able to play Artanis in those 10 games…while in QM, I am 100% able to play Artanis for 10 games straight without praying to RnGoddess.
Most of the time, player who is at last pick will force to choose support unless you decide to screw the entire team, then yes, you can continue picking the hero you want to play. Hence, I put the word “unlucky” in my previous post.
I play QM because I don’t have to sit through a 10min queue just to be forced into playing a healer or tank, or even better, they just don’t communicate at all and we end up with a team straight from Party City (this is assuming our draft banner didn’t AFK and feed the other team heroes). This paired with the inability of some players to realize who counters who… no thanks
QM I can play whatever I would like, even if it’s a healer, and KNOW I’m going into an uncoordinated match. Keeps my expectations low and I’m in a game in less than 2 minutes.
The problem is not pick order or bans. As long as multiple people can not play the same hero in a draft mode, it is possible to not be able to play the hero they wanted. It is entirely possible for you to get 10 players together in draft that all want to play the exact same hero and refuse to play anything else, which would lead to 9 people not getting what they want. In quick match, the MM separates out these 10 people so they do not end up on the same team.
Ai will never have the same game play as real people.
I play QM mostly because i have no patience to deal with how players are in rank and unrank , draft dodging , giving up game because " we’re going to lose because you picked tassadar/medivh/probius/ or other low wi. Rate heroes on hots log.
People somehow care so much about win rate and the meta its absolutely insane . and more then half the players ive played with seen to have so oversized ego problem because they play “ranked” and “know better” .
The very fee time i play in there is just for the placement matches and im back to QM , once thats done i get my reward at the end of the season.
I like QM. Outplaying a hero that you’d rarely come up against in a draft mode because who the hell would pick your hero into theirs. Picking the talent you never take because you know it’s the only way you’re going to get out of this with a W. Finally figuring out how to deal with that insta-ban hero. Smug satisfaction for a game won handily by a team that 'gg’d as they loaded in.
It’s not all great, of course, but neither is any other mode.
Yeah are there are AI systems that are very good at Starcraft 2…
In one map, in one matchup… in a old patch…
Learned 1/9th of the matchups on a single map… only took 2-3 years.
The DotA bot has limited hero selection (15-20 or so iirc) to play against and as… despite like 6 years of work.
And part of it’s performance is probably due to it’s “cheating” like SC2 bot does. It does not have a “view” of a single part of the map, instead seeing the whole map as it’s viewpoint.
Even if you did have view, in a 1v1 match up it’s fairly easy to tell what the enemy is doing because leaving the lane for more than runes is asking to lose.
Regardless, you’re ignoring the fact that after 2 weeks of data collection it had enough to even learn how to bait out professional players and then give them almost no chance of winning.
Considering the fact that, as time progresses, the limitations of AI will be removed bit by bit and it won’t be too long before we get to the point where it is nigh unbeatable if given the opportunity.
with only 18 heroes. Instead of 100+. And with couriers being invulnerable.
this doesn’t make the level of the AI less impressivebut it does reveal that the AI isn’t close to ready to play a real game. And as such it’s indicator for Deep Learned AI being useful for Player versus AI content is worthless.
Nevermind in HotS, where you have lots of maps.
Every hero you add it takes longer and long.
Like every race for Starcraft 2. You either need completely seperate models for each race (where you start from scratch each time) or you build on the one you have, and make it adapt to another race. Both cases it takes a lot of extra time. Because you have to unlearn some things for the inital race. So it will recall not to do X, Y or Z that it does against Protoss when training against Zerg.
THAN after it is trained in Zerg, you have to make sure none of those behaviors bleed over back into the PvP play.
This has to do with how it’s learning model works. It learns to play each hero a certain way, against certain heroes. So learning how to play against Viper isn’t he same as learning to play against Phoenix.
Playing as Tidehunter is very different from playing as Wisp (Io?).
That is why you see AI being very focused on a core group of heroes.
For HotS? On top of all that, you have all the maps. Each map the AI will need to be trained again.
Deep Learning and AI is very useful tools, but people overestimate exactly what it can do. When they can play with every hero in DotA 2, and without any special rules, and win consistently over 55% of the time… I’ll agree that the AI has made it. I don’t expect to see it until the mid 2020s. If not later.
So you don’t play ranked or Unranked, but you have massive conjecture about how people treat each other in that mode?
As someone who plays a ton of ranked on multiple servers (Asia and NA) you are just wrong. You can run into angry and bitter people who throw, but it is a very small portion of the player base… we are talking about making macro dicisions for HotS as a whole, not coming up with the rare “what if” scenario.
People will throw, people will drop, people will suck at heroes they pick. And all of this will happen both in your favor or against you. But TL (in its current form) tends to average decent match quality for about 75-80% of my games.
I’m basing this on several hundred games grinding from being placed Silver 5 on Asia and currently at Gold 3. Also, I’ve done Gold 1 to Diamond 5 on NA not that long ago.
So what experience do you have playing hundreds of games across various skill thresholds to back up your opinion that everyone is “try hard” and will “throw” at the exact instant you draft something you want to play?
People who really want to play a specific hero usually show it early, and often pick it in slots 1-2 so the rest of the team can draft around it. Since I usually “carry”, I draft slot 3-4 to maximize team potential. I generally can maintain a 70% win rate or even higher doing this and have good match quality. Sometimes we even get games with no healers — and often times we have one “non-meta” hero on our team. Those games are still easily winnable.
![:raised_hand:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/raised_hand.png?v=6" ":raised_hand:")
no thanks