Character designer, then. Not systems designer and clearly not who designed Matchmaking.
Look, he even states this openly and points it out multiple times that he doesn’t know how the real thing works, but he can “hazard a guess” how it probably works.
And everything he says is true. In an ideal world, with unicorns. But it has flaws and oversights that he doesn’t go over, and THOSE are making the result less than ideal.
Again, stop committing a logical fallacy. It DOES NOT MATTER if he’s a designer or a CM. He is a person who doesn’t know for sure how the system works. And so his words should be
Taken with a grain of salt
Do not really go in conflict with the arguments against MMR flaws.
The only thing he says is that there’s no “forced 50%”. Which is OBVIOUSLY true.
But you guys, for some reason, take his words as “There’s nothing wrong with Matchmaking”, which there definitely demonstrably ARE a lot of things wrong with.
In reality, not on paper.
HOTS Matchmaker results in a lot of very unfulfilling, very one-sided games. That’s a FACT.
And it does put you on a roller-coaster of winstreaks and loss streaks. If you look at your match history - what you see is NOT a random distribution of numbers. There’s a clear pattern that losses and wins tend to group up into unbroken sequences.
And that’s a clear indication that there’s something very wrong.
But he is the Balance Designer for Heroes of the Storm according to the Hots Wiki, for more than 4 years. Why do you want to dispute someone who designs the game over a random forum user who can’t accept they are not destined for Grand Master?
Because the fact that he designs PART of the game doesn’t mean that he automatically knows how the ENTIRE game works.
And he speaks out of his field in that post.
It also doesn’t mean that criticisms of the MMR system have no grounds or no value.
And he also didn’t address most of the Matchmaking concerns. He merely explained how ideally Matchmaking and MMR system would work and how it will make your performance converge, gradually, to 50% winrate.
He DID NOT address the issues that Matchmaking may be having. Only the claim that there’s a hidden logic to give you crap teammates.
The fact that such logic doesn’t exist - doesn’t mean that other flaws may not result in exactly the same. Which DOES happen in reality.
No, I do not know the game better than him.
But I claim that he’s just as clueless about the real process as I am - because he’s not the one who is responsible for it.
This does not explain why I mostly have 4-5 wins in a row, then 4-5 losses in a row, and that pattern continues.
Sure, there may be streaks in a random distribution. It’s random, so 10 in a row is a perfectly valid random outcome. But such streaks should not happen more often than the absence of streaks. This is a wave PATTERN.
And a pattern in what is supposed to be aiming for 50/50 coin toss distribution - means that something went very wrong.
But you know why that happens? It’s because of how Blizzard designed quickmatch: “you select a hero first and then have the system try to match everyone in a balanced match considering mmr, team mmr, hero level, parties, composition, mirrored roles, population, etc etc etc, and it has to be quick because that’s the main purpose of QUICKmatch”.
Quickmatch itself IS the problem it is unbalanced and infair, not the matchmaking system. There is no way you can create a balanced match when the system has to take into account all these condition, especially when we have less people playing now. Quickmatch should have never existed. It should have worked like in other mobas, where their “quickmatches” are just normal draft where people are matched by mmr.
But the playerbase is already too spoiled that if you suggest that they will come with forks and knives towards you, because they just want to play their beloved heroes and that’s it, they don’t want to draft, they don’t want to learn other heroes/roles, they just want the same heroes over and over again, but they also want the system to be perfect and make perfect matches where they have perfect comps and no counters against their heroes. Even if turning QM into a quick draft or something benefits the gamemode and makes the game much more balanced and fun for everyone, that’s just hated because they won’t be able to queue with what they want.
So, basically people want to play what they want (even though there is no system in the world that can make a balanced match with that), so the perfect and balanced matches have to be sacrificed. In the end, instead of the players just accepting all this, they rather blame the devs.
When you get someone that think you are a pocket healer.
Or flames you for not hitting a single moonfire on the enemy when they go in 1v4 and die 2sec later. Not like any healer can out heal that.
It is the Matchmaking system of QUickmatch that is the problem. The sytem that pairs your champion against some other champion taking MMR into account.
This system can be BETTER. It will never be perfect - it’s next to impossible to get to that stage. But it can be BETTER.
Even a simple expample of not matching 5-man premades against 5 randoms. It is entirely under Blizzard’s control - and in fact that never happened before. But today, queue times are much more important for Blizz than fair matchup, so they match whoever with whoever, even if that means that one of the teams has massive advantage and is 90% likely to win.
Quickmatch is a mode that will never be completely fair - that’s true. But there are SO MANY THINGS where the matchmaking for QM can be improved tremendoustly.
This.
Is exactly.
What I wrote in my post.
If you cared to read it.
However in a random distribution - streaks are not more likely to occur than non-streak sequences.
In HOTS, the entire match history consists of alternating win and loss streaks. Which is NOT RANDOM and instead is a wave.
Sure you can see an odd singular win or loss here and there, or places where the pattern breaks. It’s not enforced by anything after all - it’s just a result of error in the MMR/Matchmaking calculation.
Whitemane can.
I recently tanked the entire enemy team for 5+ seconds, standing in my own ultimate and damaging them while I had mark on myself.
Unless they stun me - they can’t outheal.
Depends but even if they do survive it is unlikely they contribute much aside from dying a bit later. At absolute most they also waste some resources on the enemy healer. That was his point. You’re kind of on the edge right now.
People who complain their team comp doesn’t have waveclear after last-picking a hero that doesn’t have good waveclear.
Bonus points if they don’t even show/say what Hero they want to pick during the draft.
Oh god i can relate to this so much. Doing QM as Murkey and my Team decided to feed like crazy. Then they all pinging me for not doing the Objectiv. Okay we are 2 vs 5, what am I supposed to do as Murkey? At least 2 of my gifted Members reported me, its so frustrating.
“Stop being a coward and stay near me”-Enemy arthas
“???”-Me
How bout when someone just AFKs in lane and blames the rest of the team for losing?
How bout people that engage 4v5 and blame you for not coming even though you were in rotation to that lane. Or when you’re dead and just respawned.
Some of my favorite responses to those are “where was I when you started fighting?”. Either they say that you were in lane soaking (which is almost never the case) or something along the lines of “Oh well I didn’t check the mini” and I’m like “YA DON’T SAY.”
Exactly. Because it has to take into account the heroes and levels and everything instead of just mmr, it is the problem. The most fair system a game can have is just using mmr, but people don’t want that for QM, so whatever, let it be clown fiesta.
Unpopular opinion, the system is already the best it can be. Because of the low playerbase and all the things the playerbase keep demanding for it to do, it just won’t ever work
Queue times in QM were ALWAYS important and that was always the objective of QM, otherwise they would just delete QM and leave people with just AI/UR/SL. QM is meant to be FAST queue. I know, shocking right, QUICK match supposed to be QUICK? How knew
Like I said before, it is just the best it can be, but the lack of players (and now forced perfect comp) just breaks everything. Or why do you think it was good before when we had only mmr + mirrored roles + higher playerbase?
Just think about this:
Let’s say you have the best and perfect MM in the whole world. Now, let’s say you have only 10 players playing your game. Will it be fair? No. MM’s fault? No. Now start adding players, you got 100 players. Will it be fair? Still no. MM’s fault? Still no.
Basically you need a HUGE amount of players to have fair matches. A system can be perfect and all that, but it will never work if there isn’t enough players queueing.
