I’ve been virtually the same rank for the last 3 seasons. I’m now losing additional MMR against obvious smurfs in teams.
The last group of4 stacks (Of roughly the same rank overall as me) kept winning and I kept getting matched against the same team (3 matches in a row against them Welcome to low POP).
Now what would be the issue here? Getting only 150 for a win and 250 for a loss against an obvious smurf team really does suck. I’m honestly being driven out of this game by this.
NOTE: I just realized at the 50/50 W/L ratio. So this is definitely why I’m losing but the points is frustrating me lol.
Both. Smurfing is a huge problem in this game and refuses to get addressed and the MMR is terrible. Low ranking players are getting higher ranks than they deserve and good players are being ranked lower for some reason.
The only way to play is premades otherwise you will get matched against the premades and with trolls and keep losing.
They did try, making it so people can’t rank higher than Gold 5 was an attempt at discouraging it. I think maybe they should have set it to Silver 5 instead.
That’s how I got most of my friends when I started this game just before launch. In the first couple of years making new friends was easy. Now people either have their friends, or are simply unfriendly! The game needs a Guild system now they have a ranked mode that has no solo queue only option.
The longer you are at a given rank, the harder it is to move out. It’s because of the MMR system. It basically is set in stone the longer you are stuck somewhere. The MMR then thinks you belong there and even if you have some wins, the systems will do everything to pull you back - the next matches you will have much better enemies and much worse team mates.
The MMR is basically like a rubber band. You can stretch it a little but once you stretch it too much, it pulls you even harder back. Once your MMR is set you could basically play thousand matches until you climb and the MMR changes.
That’s why old accounts that are stuck in silver or gold are basically useless. You won’t move out there soon anyway. That’s why people start to smurf. With a fresh account that is not ruined by the MMR you can play the very same (in the end you are the same person anyway) but suddenly you are able to climb and win matches.
I still think they should start everyone at bronze 5. Lets face it the master and grandmasters are making smurfs to play at that elo anyway so this give them what they want. All they gotta do is ad a consecutive win bonus for let say 5+ wins in a row allowing you to climb ranks faster and more quickly.
I like this idea. Just as long as they adjust the points system in Bronze 5 for truly new players. I don’t think it would be a fun experience gaining only 5 points for a win just because you’re new. Make it so it’s 100 points in Bronze five for new players who are unlikely to go on a 5 win streak, if we place every new account in Bronze.
We need to encourage the very few new players to stay.
I agree, that 5 points a win system is broken, Someone tried explaining it saying its cause there MMR is lower than bronze 5. Sorry bronze 5 is the bottom, you shouldnt create a system that will trap you there forever cause no one will bother to even try it out.
Smurfing is a problem in a lot of games but part of the reason it can be so frustrating in HOTS is because MMR calculation and general MMR matching itself is very bad. It can often take quite a grind for the average person to get to where they belong, even if they have some great games, largely because of the aforementioned problems and because a lot higher % of games are won/lost because of afk/feeding players.
Occasionally you get people like Fan, who is a consistent GM player, former pro player AND one of the best people currently playing the game period and he is able to blaze straight from Bronze 5 all the way to GM pretty fast during his Bronze to GM Challenges. Even so, it can still take a bit because the MMR calculation and MMR matching is so bad that it takes forever to start matching people against proper opponents in games that are actually properly balanced.
Even if I clapped my hands and magically vaporized all smurf accounts and stopped new ones from being created, matchmaking would still have enormous problems imo.
That is how Hero League initially worked, you had to grind up from Rank 50 to Rank 1 no matter who you were.
I don’t remember many complaints over that system. The only negative was it was too easy to get to Rank 1 so it had like a fifth of the player base. That would no longer be an issue now that we have exclusive leagues above ordinary ranks (master and GM).
I’m not a fan of the idea, although I’m already affected.
Starting at B5 has two consequences.
Whenever Fan starts at 0 rank points and climbs to 30000 (GM), he takes these points away from other, properly placed players, pushing them down a little. Compressing the ladder. The effect for the average player is that his rank is a little lower. For a bronze 5, he cannot get lower, hence he is randomly playing against bronze 3-4 appearing as bronze 5. So his winrate is by design below 50%.
Normally, in every 0 vs 0 match, the winner gains points and this is added to the grand sum of rank points, and it helps spreading out the players.
The second effect is that low ranked matches get decided not just by your draft and current skill level (mood, freshness), but by which team has a smurf. I do feel that in G4 even. I don’t really encounter terrible players, but I get hard carried and then hard dominated every now and then. Sometimes 10 in a row, sometimes not for a long time.
As for terrible players, people get upset all the time, but many of those supposedly misplaced players are (a) drunk (b) trying to fill and failing miserably. At the end of last season I was alternating between being called the worst player ever on the planet, and hard carrying matches. Which is the truth? The average of it. At least in QM it’s possible to have hero-based MMR, but not in draft.
If creating a smurf is a free win streak (well, 80%), everyone will create smurfs whenever they lose 3 matches in a row. And then these two effects just work together too well, it creates a mindset (in a true Bronze) that Nothing Really Matters. And it really doesn’t. And then smurfing stops working, too, because you end up with Silver matches where there are 8 masters battling it out with 2 innocent bystanders.
Another ugly and inadequate reporting system which any can to abuse, and it’s cause are fewer people in the game (one of the reasons), and as a result, MM is getting worse.
The report system is probably the worst feature of this game. Premades can and will report you if you do not do what they say so majority is already against you and the very few people blizzard decides to ban are often ban for the wrong reasons. Feeding is worst than toxic chat.
