Let’s block the automatic forum troll response right off the bat shall we.
I’m a bronze player, and don’t claim to be anything else. I’m a casual player. I play hard when I do play but I don’t try to create new, innovative builds and combos. I work on mechanics, know the meta basics, run with the team, and help win the best I can. Nothing more, nothing less. Bronze[beard] to the core.
TL;DR - Bronze 5 is horrible. It’s draining all the joy out of playing HotS. It needs to be fixed.
If Blizzard’s goal is to get people to stop playing HotS, then congrats. Job well done. Bronze 5 makes me hate playing HotS.
Problem 1:
RP - I mostly play with my friends, who rank from bronze to gold. It pisses me off when I hear them get 150-400+ RP for a hard fought win and I get… 37. Playing with friends in a full team is when I should be getting good points, but you can’t when you’re in the black hole league (Bronze 5).
Problem 2:
Solo trolls - So I decided to try and rank up playing solo ranked for the first time as a bronze 5. This is where I discovered the troll problem I hear people talk about.
Some days you don’t get trolls and you win more games than lose. Other days you get all the trolls and you lose most of them. By troll I mean someone who plays bad on purpose (not talking inexperienced), fights with the team, is AFK for parts or most of the game, constantly disconnecting and you get stuck with an AI, or AFK during draft and you miss all/most of your bans. It’s epidemic in B5.
Problem 3
Escape velocity - I honestly don’t see a reasonable way to escape Bronze 5. I’ve had runs of 6 wins wiped out by runs of 6 losses. Now you might say “well then, that’s where you belong.” Not entirely true. I do belong in Bronze, but when you play 5 out of 6 games with at least one AFK/disconnected player it gets really hard to win. With active teammates I can win more often than I lose. Without… good luck.
But that’s only part of the escape problem. At 500 RP left to rank up I need to win 15 games in a row. 15 games… in … a … row. That mean no trolls, no AFK/disconnected players, good teammate. 15 times. In a row. It’s just not feasible without getting 4 friends to create 4 smurf account to bust you out. It feels like escaping a black hole once you pass the event horizon to get out bronze 5.
The end result: It’s stupid hard to escape Bronze 5.
Which puts Bronze 5 players is a nasty predicament: you need to get out of Bronze 5 to rank properly, but you can’t get out.
My response to “Storm League Bronze 5 Update” is that you don’t understand the frustration nor the negative impact. And you probably don’t care either or you would have fixed it by now.
Here’s my suggestion. Get rid of point pools and bell curves. This isn’t a high school math class. Bell curves don’t solve real world problems. It is a mathematical phenomenon that can occur, not something you should use to enforce scale unless you run a high school math class.
Each player should have an RP slider. A humble int will do. Add RP properly to all players based on the difficulty of the match (other team’s MMR or whatever). Subtract RP, move the slider towards 0, for a loss. Easy.
Add a cap so when I play with my bronze/silver/gold team I don’t end up with a stupid amount of points. Let people who try to win actually rank, no matter where they are.
Statistically, everyone will end up exactly where they belong. And players, as they improve, can actually rank. And if I still end up in B5, then so be it. Just fix the damn RP points.
You may even end up with a pretty bell curve in the end, but not because it was forced. But because it’s a mathematical phenomenon.
How does rank work? Exactly how it does now. Players with 1-1000 RP go to B5, 1001-2000 in B4, and so on. This will even work for masters because the RP slider would need to be over 25000 points to enter Masters league. That’s a lot of work and a lot of wins.
GMs stays the same. The top X number of masters player (highest RP + MMR) get into GM.
Those are my thoughts. They’ll probably be ignored, but I feel better having said something. So whatever. Back to the troll lottery for me.