Earlier I was part of the strangest draft phase I have ever seen. I was banning on my team and the draft had literally just started. Before banning anyone, a player on my team said “Ban Butcher XXXXXX on the other team is really good with him.” I figured he had probably played against him recently and remembered the name. I ended up banning Gazlowe and D. Va because Butcher is pretty easy to counter and, quite frankly, I don’t like banning heroes because someone on my team has inside information because that feels like poor sportsmanship.
Anyhow, after the ban phase we draft KT, and the same player says “They’re going to take Butcher and Ming.” Next thing you know, they take Li Ming and Butcher. We get to the next ban phase and the player says “Ban Diablo because XXXXXX wants to take him.” In this case, I actually did ban Diablo because I had planned to anyhow. So our psychic then says “Good, he’ll take Muradin now and probably Malf.”
Lo and behold, Muradin and Malf are drafted next on their team. And finally right before their last pick, he just says “Thrall” and then 3 seconds later they draft Thrall.
What in the world could have made this possible? Luck? Maybe the enemy team was a 5 stack? How did he know that banning Diablo would make a certain player pick Muradin? Regardless, the whole thing felt like cheating to me and I’m wondering if I should have reported him.
The easierst solution is that he is a stream sniper, because someone of the enemy team were streaming and he knows him.
But I wouldn’t say that he is a cheater just because of some extremely draft luck, but it would be more interesting how well was your match going, did this guy lead you to victory with good calls and predictions?
It doesn’t even need to be a stream sniper; If a player has played against the opposing team multiple times in a row and knows their favored heroes (not to mention, if the player is very experienced with thousands of HotS games under his/her belt)
they can predict the full enemy draft in advance or very close to it.
I can remember plenty of usernames and their favored picks. If I see multiple of these players in the same lobby on enemy team, I can predict 2-3 early picks with ~90% accuracy.
We won, but it wasn’t because the player on our team was making any callouts or predictions. All that player really talked about the whole match was how I should have banned Butcher and every time Butcher got a kill he said “GG Butcher.” Their Butcher was decent, but wasn’t anything special either, so I’m not sure why my teammate was so salty. I’m guessing he probably lost to him/her in a game earlier.
I thought at one point during drafts the names of the opposing team members were hidden? Maybe I’m remembering incorrectly though. Either way, why don’t they hide enemy player names until after the draft? It seems unfair to know what heroes enemies favor.
It is not unfair at all, because everyone can use this technique as Shapeshifter described. If you as a player are easy to predict than it’s your fault, not from the system. Players should be able to play more than one hero anyway in ranked otherwise they are doomed, when their picks are banned or picked.
Sounds like a kind of map hack. It is revealing information that is not meant to be visible to the players but is in their computer memory so that they remain in sync with other players.
Either that or as people suggested, sniping the stream of an opponent who was too stupid to add a multiple minute latency buffer during the draft so is actually broadcasting relevant information.
Uh, Map Hack doesn’t refer to that. Map hack means you remove the fog of war. It is possible in the SC2 client because the fog is only seen on your client, and other clients don’t verify whether it’s active or not (plus Blizzard patched it 5 years ago).
Seeing enemy hovers would require you to hack the server itself. That’s a bit far fetched.
A billion times more likely, the player knows those opponents from games he already played against them.
There is a name for it, target banning. It’s not cheating… Most good players target ban enemy heroes.
It is a kind of maphack as it is revealing data that would otherwise not be visible to the client. Map hacks existed for games like Warcraft III long ago that did not remove fog of war but instead printed an overlay or generated a minimap with the details.
Would they? Or are they just hidden locally on the client like the fog of war? HotS is based on SC2 after all.
This reminds me of a gold butchcer ive played against multiple times when i que with a silver friend. Hes a onetrick wirh a 60% butcher winrate. Played with him twice and learned his pattern. Banned butcher and he went from a typical gold player to bronze level. 400 free rank points
