So I have been playing HotS since beta and I have noticed something that differs from other MOBA games and that is matchmaking. I love this game so much, it is filled with some unique things that make this game so rich and beautiful, I think this is probably the best game of all MOBA genre games (I have played DOTA/DOTA2 for over 10 years now and yes… HoTS is way better and more fun), howver, there is one thing that does ruin the experience and it keeps getting worse. I have noticed since day 1 that when you stack up good KDA stats on many heroes, got a decent winrate and overall have around 30-40% mvp rate on your standard matches (qm/unranked/ranked) somehow the matchmaking system pairs you up with 2-3 players that are completely useless, no gamesense, no map awarness, no understanding of the maps’ mechanics and objectives or even how roles work. I have 3 accounts and it doesn’t matter if you have a 1000 or more levels, the game consistently pairs you up with “these” types of players. And to worsen things, the other team has 5 decent players who communicate well and have an understanding of how the games’ mechanics work. I would totally understand that you would get people like this bad from time to time, but after getting stomped in about 15 games in a row due to some random kid being afk most of the game or someone who constantly disconnects or someone having no idea that the altars in Towers of Doom are a must to win the game is quite bugging. I have played DotA, HoN, LoL, DotA2, Smite and HotS, the latter being the only who can pair you up over and over again with these useless players. It seems like the match making system tries to pair up good players with awfully bad players to “balance” things out, however, this hurts a lot since this game is so team oriented. So having 5 regular players vs 2 good and 3 bad would seem fair, but it is NOT. 2 players cannot beat 5 or even 4 semi coordinated players. Although I love this game I think it is declining and a lot has to do with this match making system. Hope BLIZZARD can address this and explain exactly how this works or even better, CHANGE the match making system. I would also like to say that when I was ranking one of my accounts I was Gold at the time and got paired against GM2 in NA. I know that cannot happen in the latest patch, but honestly… how does that even happen? Also got paired against other GMs (99, 74 and 56 if I remember correctly), how does a Gold ranked player who just started ranking get to go against GMs?
This is know since years. Just pick anyone’s match history and you will see losing streaks of 10-15 matches easily. It’s Blizzard’s MMR algorythm. I compare it to a rubber band:
The MMR defines where you have to be. And then the MMR tries to keep you there. You can move up and down a bit without problems, but the further you move away from where the MMR thinks you should be the harder it will pull you back. And then suddenly you have really bad team mates or or in QM team comps that just doesn’t make sense while the enemy has perfect synergies and every hero is just so much better. The MMR pulls you harder towards where you should be - according to the algorythm.
The longer you stay in a certain region, the harder it will be to move up or down - even if your skill improved. People showed that by using smurf accounts. While their main account was stuck in silver, their smurf account easily went to diamond. So the same player but one account doesn’t let that player rank up? On the old accounts, where the MMR is basically set, you would have to win hundreds and hundreds of matches to tell the MMR algorythm to finally change. You hardly are able to play so many matches especially when Blizzard sabotages you with bad team mates.
Blizzard’s MMR algorythm forces people to smurf.
Ex. You have 2500 MMR
Your allies all have 1800-2000 mmr, it will average around 2100.
Your opponent is all 2100 mmr, overall a stronger team but same average.
You are expected to “mentor” the 1800’s. The match is considered fair because you bump up the team average MMR to 2100 with your presence vs. a full team of 2100’s.
But as it turns out, many people have complained about the system over the years already.
https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/77xi52/qm_rant_mmr_differences_are_out_of_control/
My team= 2850, 2500, 2100, and 1750… Oh and im only *3800+ so you know what this is a fantastic match.
Their team = 2950, 2800, 2600, 2650, 2100…
The 1750 mmr player called me out all game long about how I was misplaying.
Even if the numbers aren’t exact to a T, you can still spot “that” player because they died 8 times already, before you hit level 10 and got heroics. And they have something interesting like 39% win rate in QM.
Note that this has happened even in Ranked over the years on less popular servers with player population problems - see the GM number going over 100, proving the issue is ancient.
A single high MMR player can and will be used to balance team average MMR to something like 1800 or 2000 and start a match. The problem is hidden in QM, but people do notice.
yeah that’s the issue. they want high mmr player to mentor noobs because clearly the high mmr player is looking for noobs to get in his team what a sad system
Im always wondering how the noobs get high in the first place. So instead of doing good you only need to be in fights 
yeah crazy isn’t it? and people be like “it’s always your team’s fault not yours” in a sarcastic way despite them knowing about the garbage mentor system. my QM MMR is master and i get in team of bronze / silver “totally balanced”
Matches on my smurf were far easyer even at high diamond. Stupid system, let people who suck suck
a game that “forces you” to play in 5 stack or you won’t have any good experience in solo unless RNG gods are with you!
They get carried by that single high rank in their team.
Which then complains about being in MMR hell.
Your team mates were always bad, if you get better you start seeing more of their mistakes.
So basicly , those carried noobs are the ones who complain they should get higher?
Reminds me of this video about someone bragging how good his Jaina was, just watch the timestamp and look at his scoreboard . His stats compared to the rest of his team and then acting how he carried xD
I play a lot of solo q qm at high mmr, and I also play fairly often with friends who are at low mmr (for a good reason).
And my experience is, that the higher I am, the less bad my “bad” teammates are. Since if I compare my solo worst [teammate] to the low mmr party best, the former are still better overall.
But true, that the higher you are, the harder it is to get a fair match (all high mmr), and thus you’ll get low mmr teammates to try to compensate the enemy for putting them against you (who has higher mmr than any of them).
The communities behind LoL, dota 2, and so on all have people claiming they also get worse allies as they try to climb, large sets of loss streaks that break their win streaks, that that game has the worst match maker ever, and so on for years on end.
Perhaps you’re only suggesting its so bad for Hots, but for the large chunk of not-paragraphs you slapped on here, that seems less inclined to have noticed the plethora of complaints that abound in these games posted almost verbatim from one community to another.
It’d almost beg the question how much experience you’d have with those other games (or at least their communities) if you
a) hadn’t noticed
b) felt that a large chunk of unformatted text is magically going to fix an issue plaguing these sorts of games for years
or
c) just didn’t bother to copy/paste other posts that say the same thing, but better 
Though in Dota 2, 6k MMR player will solo a team of 2k newbies.
Or in cs global offensive, a player ranked GE (global elite) will easily win 5 silver newbies wielding a pistol or knife 1v5 without taking a scratch of damage, while the silvers get to use strongest weapons in the game. And there’s plenty of videos of them doing that for sport.
HotS is too team dependent to allow that, here even the number one Grand Master can lose games during their bronze to GM climb in bronze/silver if really unlucky with teammates.
Agreed its a beautiful and very fun game but the mm is the worst part of it. There needs to be a way to either tighten the mmrs to maintain quality whilst keeping queue times, or acknowledge and reward players who played well in a team which played poorly.
Also I dont know if they still do this but if a team of 5 randoms matches against a group the team of randoms should be of higher mmr than the group
they should but they don’t. every single game i played in my 5 stack it’s a stomp to the enemy team and they’re all solos so imagine how badly this system is? 5 stack with communications vs 5 solos > none of my team has low MMR either we’re all masters and above and yet we get to play vs potatoes…
I wonder if that’s hero-specific or account-specific. They would pair me with bad teammates even when I am trying new heros?
Well, that would explain why when I queue up with 3 other players who I know are good. Our 5th player is always horrible.
I thought it was just bad luck.
As someone with a doctoral level education in applied machine learning (focusing on sparse datasets), I’d suggest that if Blizzard wants their matchmaking algorithm to learn quickly, it needs to stop “balancing” teams. Simply pick pools of people who have close MMR and assign them randomly to teams. It’s much better experiment design that facilitates learning faster, especially if smurfs are a problem.
please go back and use paragraphs.
but i assume you’re talking about that thing that people have been complaining about. I don’t think it’s plausible, though. For the game to put a good player on a team of bad players, on purpose, the game would first have to know how to tell the difference. And I don’t think the game can do that reliably.