First of all, that was not a developer but a community manager.
Secondly, it’s funny how you assume that response correct by default, and any criticism of that response (some of which is very well argumened) - stupid by default.
The developers can not be wrong, right? No developers ever make mistakes. Or make flawed systems on purpose because their priorities lie elsewhere from pursuit of fairness and balance.
And you just call a bunch of people “stupid”. No arguments, no justifications.
They argue a blue post = stupid.
I don’t even need to call you names - that position of yours speaks for itself.
While I can see that some of such posts are the result of people having delusions of false grandeur - it is extremely hard to argue that current matchmaker and MMR system is flawless and provides fulfilling and satisfying experience.
Most (over 80%) of my matches are one-sided stomping. Both losses AND wins. And neither is satisfying in the least. It is not satisfying to stomp people whom you can see are trying to struggle but they just can’t win because of an idiot or a flawed team comp. I literally feel like a bully sometimes when I WIN. And I feel helpless most of the time when I lose. And neither is a great feeling.
It is only natural that people will complain about losses more than they do about wins. That doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist. You are assuming that every time it is just whining of a loser, and that assumption is baseless and false.
At the same time, criticizing those who complain lets you elevate yourself in your own eyes, and those of few others who want to jump on your bashing train.
You aren’t “elite” or “skillful” because you (supposedly) never complain.
You want favorite quotes? Here, you can use mine: "I hate 80% of my wins because they feel like a waste of time, spending 20 minutes on an uneaven one-sided match where the enemies can do nothing at all against my team, because the Matchmaker either made our team a perfect counter-comp to theirs, or have given them 1 decent player and weighted him down with 4 trash-league noobs who don’t know what they’re doing at all. I hate those wins, because one-sided sucks either way. And it’s the fault of the matchmaker that prioritizes queue times over having a good game experience."
No, it was a developer. I’m not even sure if HOTS has community managers anymore lol.
When people say this, I know we’re dealing with a drama queen. Everyone gets stomps, they are brutal and unpleasant when they happen. They are not rare. However, they are not the norm.
If it WAS a developer, then clearly not one of those who actually knows how Matchmaking works.
Which can be easily deduced from the way he makes guesses and estimations instead of providing you with facts.
“Taking a crack at this” means he’s clearly not knowledgeable in the subject in any measurable manner.
When I hear this, I know that you merely aren’t skilled enough to know when the win was one-sided or not.
You win games. And you feel that many of those are won through your hard effort, without realizing that you had a huge advantage from the start.
I actually am that kind of crazy person who counted. And I counted how many of my wins are actually good and interesting games.
The result is - about 20-25%. 3 out of 4 wins are stomps. Especially when you exclude throws - when an enemy team is stomping us, then their tank dies 1v5 right before objective and we stagger deaths and win. That’s called a THROW. Doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a one-sided barely playable match.
I had a QM game last night where I was playing Murky on Hanamura vs Butcher, I was top, was going fine, didn’t die to Butcher once early game but my team fed butcher within the first 5 minutes, we lost and it was 100% my fault according to my team
That reminds me of a game i played on my alt (silver 2) as anduin, saved the jaina roughly 8 times that game so she had no deaths, her positioning was so bad that i wish my trait had no cooldown.
So we won, they invited me to party and i joined, the next game i played malf, she had 10 deaths xD
The dude is a developer, not an engineer. He still more than capable to describe the system, and he does so quite well. He just doesn’t get super technical about it like an engineer does.
I know, it’s such a burden being not skilled enough to get masters multiple seasons as a healer main. Forgive me if I feel like your super subjective counting and evaluation of what games are considered stomps to not be the most credible.
AZ isn’t responsible for the MMR system, he said that himself. He also likely don’t want to say more than necessary because knowing the kinks of MMR is a touchy subject. It isn’t our job to find issues in the matchmaking, it’s theirs. If people would have through understanding of the MMR’s details they would have even more means to manipulate it.
I mean, it is really easy to blame the Ana that has less healing than the tank and who picked Purifying Darts when the enemy team has 1 slow, no roots but several heroes with stuns.
Yeah I QM more than ranked actually. QM has the bulk of the screwed up games. The amount of stomps (in my subjective estimation) still doesn’t even get close to 80%. That is just a ridiculous number of someone with the sensibilities of a victim complex control freak.
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.