The Problem Isn't Matchmaking

General Discussion
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I have blamed matchmaking for a while for the absurd number of throwers, trolls, noobs, and plain dumb players I get as teammates while solo queuing in ranked.

Today I had the epiphany that the problem wasn’t actually the matchmaking system. I realized that most of the players left at my rank are throwers, trolls, noobs or plain dumb. I never will get a decent team, because there are not enough decent players playing the game.

People who were good, don’t play HotS, because it is a poorly designed moba that doesn’t reward skill. They left for games where their skill makes a difference.

Now admittedly, last match I got caught out by myself by the other team flanking around on a push while I was trying to lane clear. However, I kind of feel like my 4 teammates should have defended on my ping when we were 5v4 instead of taking 1 merc camp and letting the other team take 2 in the same lane uncontested. And since I had top siege, hero damage, and xp soaked in game/team, I kind of felt I did my job.

Then there was the match before that where I died 11 times as a bruiser…while having 30% more hero damage than anyone else (including the opposing guldan), tanking 25% more damage than anyone else (including jo and diablo), and outhealing my Ana teammate. I probably should have figured out a way to completely devastate the other team every fight, and live, because apparently nobody on my team knew how to follow up on an engage that would bring 3-5 players to under 50% hp.

These last few matches have really underscored that HotS is not the game for me. I shouldn’t be consistently be out maneuvering, and outplaying my opponents, and losing because I get no backup, followup, or support. I am not always the best in every match, but I am practically never the worst, and almost always in the top 3 in game, usually the top player. That includes things like positioning, map awareness, situational awareness, skill shot accuracy, etc. Even games I win feel like crap, because it is me just hoping my terrible teammates aren’t as bad as the terrible players on the other team.

HotS has good map diversity, and the games are short, that is about all it has that is good. I honestly don’t mind bad teammates in DOTA which I played longer than HotS, because I can carry games in DOTA, and if I don’t carry a game, it isn’t because my teammates messed up, it is because I got outplayed. My XP isn’t linked to their inability to play, and there is a lot more room for a skilled player to make game changing plays.

On that note, I deleted HotS, I will not be coming back, because the core design of the game itself is bad game design. I said it in Alpha while testing the game, but Blizzard had a vision they refused to stray from, which is why it is by far the least played MOBA. Thank god they didn’t win the lawsuit to try to keep DOTA out of Valve’s hands. They probably would have gone after LoL next if they had won, since it was designed on the same premise, and then all we would have had was Blizzard’s poorly thought out Moba design.

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I’m sure your assessment of your own skill is completely accurate.

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i can understand going in once or twice and being frustrated when your team doesn’t follow up… but eleven deaths? and you never stopped to think, “maybe my team just isn’t going to follow me, so i should stop engaging”?

at some point you gotta realize that a concrete wall isn’t going to move aside if you bash your head into it enough times

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But that would mean you have a statistical advantage, because your team will always have one good player, and the enemy team will always have 5 throwers, trolls, noobs, and plain dumb players. As the various Bronze to GM streams and videos demonstrate, all it takes is one good player to give one team a decided edge.

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As I said, his assessment of his own skill was completely accurate.

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this isn’t about QuickMatch is it? please jesus tell me it’s not… no pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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yes, exactly.

the concept of basing your rank on the performance or 4 other people was bad from the start, and still is

they really really need to figure out a way to identify good players and match them together. this can only be done effeciently through some sort of individual stat, that ISN"T time played.

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The game ranks how well you do playing with four other people.

They do. The good people are the ones who win despite the four lousy players on their team. If you’re not able to do that, you’re not one of the good players.

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You can still carry your way out of Bronze with a spotless 50-0 win/loss ratio if you are a high MMR player who learned the ropes of the game years ago.

However your odds of organically raising to this tier of skill with the current player pool of HotS is not very promising. You will probably learn nothing from winning/losing against current low ranks in HotS.

Watch some bronze->GM challenges on youtube and emulate people who have done it before. Study the game. It is still doable but you need vast amounts of mechanical skill and tons of game knowledge.


(I know Danatan is a high Grand Master but I am just using this video series as proof that it is physically possible to carry 5 bronzes alone no matter how much they disconnect, feed or play bad, I have never gone past low-mid Master personally)
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“HotS is a poorly designed moba that doesn’t reward skill”

Overrated opinion by people who don’t played other mobas much, I played Smite for few months lately, the last hiting is nonexistent, getting picked before tf = lose, tf against boss buffed team = lose, is not really very different, one noob can pretty much throw the game for everyone. Maxed levels and items and people are still hitting mobs instead of push in 40 minutes game. Carrying games happnes very occasionally (as well you can say i carried game with Li-ming cd resets etc), and if someone is snowballing is because hes playing noob stomping hero like HotS Vallera/Butcher and his opponents are potatoes.
Also HotS is much more dark, like classic DotA, so the element of suprise is more relevant.
In Smite you can buy wards everytime you return to base, these have no buying cd but you can carry/plant only two at the same time but so can everyone and they are cheap so if you play with competent people always whole map is revealed especially in late game when tfs matter because hero respawns are longer.

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it claims to, but it really doesn’t, and can’t

to the contrary, the devs have pretty much stated they are no longer even trying to match based on skill.

consider this, each player has roughly 20 pecent control over their fate. you claim that if you are really good, then you will carry 80 pecent dead weight, and risk in rank.

I suggest, rather than use this crazy group metric in an attempt to feret out something obscured by 4 other people . . . the devs just create direct metrics to determine the same thing.

it seems pretty obvious to me which system will more accuratly determine individual skill, but hey, a lot of things seem pretty obvious to me and don’t to others

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This was questioned before, and was completely ignored en liue of continued blame of MM.

I dare anyone to ask the OP about his Rank and Mode played to blame MM and get a straight answer.

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You claim other people dont play mobas much then you type 2 paragraphs about smite. SMITE.
Hots doesnt reward skill. If that is bad or good design it is anyones opinion, but it is a fact of hots design that it doesnt reward players who are performing good with power. And this leads to matches being determined by which team has the worst player in it (or a couple worst players) rather than the opposite.
If you want an example like the one you tried to say about smite. In dota, dota 1 and dota 2 an equivalent master player would easilly 1v3 against equivalent bronze/gold at midhame and maybe 1v4 late game. I am not talking about outliers here, a few times he would even 1v5 while he is pushing another lane. But I am talking about what you will almost always see.

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That’s fascinating. And where exactly did they state this?

Don’t be silly. You have roughly 10% control of a match’s outcome if all sides are equally skilled.

If you’re significantly superior to your opponents, you can annihilate their contributions, and it won’t matter that your allies are bringing similarly small contributions.

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And it proves nothing. If you think it’s only due to solo player skill, then you are completely wrong. The other four players are here to create environment for him and are playing around him, give me Medusa and babysit me for a hour, stack ancients etc i’ll get rampage np. You will also have to help me to get these kills by pushing me towards opponents with forcestaff or to help me escape, as a support lol. But try to pick Medusa without competent players, not even skill will save you. DotA is also probably the only Moba where you can win a game -1 or with one terrible player, if you are good enough. But when you compare HotS to Smite or LoL then is not that bad, is more likely you will win four vs five because atleast the bot is playing and you have some control over him, if you play smart around him, do camps, there is still a chance and hes soaking by default, while in other games outside of DotA it’s certain lose.
Another reason why you can’t solo win even against noobs and even when you get feed in HotS is because you can’t really solo push as assassin and in DotA snowballing (you gain gold buy items they lose gold got empty inventory), power spike, items that makes wave clearing easier are a thing, so you can solo rush their base, it’s the only reason but i wouldnt call it some higher skill, although some mechanical aspects of DotA are generally harder, especially the map. In Smite and LoL at certain point everyone will have full build, so it ends pretty much like in HotS but with stronger early game snowballing potential.

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Metrics like deaths?

Which metric is going to prove your skill? Most of the hero damage numbers are inconsequential, as it only really matters if it resulted in a kill (i.e. wasn’t healed). Damage taken doesn’t really matter unless you survived. The most relevant metric we have is Kills + Assists/Deaths.

That still isn’t enough though, because Macro decisions are at least just as important as Micro skills(if not much more). There isn’t a good way to quantify those other than who won the game.

I’ve said it before, the organized team beats the disorganized team. If your team(including you) can’t figure out how to work together, but your enemy can, you deserve to lose that match.

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I totally read all of your post

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I just don’t understand why the majority of players I see want to make the game more difficult than it has to be.

I will admit, I am mostly an assassin/bruiser player with a really aggro play style. I do play passively when necessary, but I am more often than not playing as aggressively as I possibly can.

Most players REFUSE to push their advantage in this game.

We’ll have 16 talent advantage, we just finished the objective and have them staggered, but instead of invading their camps to continue steamrolling them, my teammates will hearth or go split push when it’s not necessary.

This allows the enemy team plenty of time to regroup, plus they still have access to their camps.

This makes a potential 12 minute stomping into a 20-25 minute question mark.

I just don’t get why players don’t want to just win the game. Literally just PRESS YOUR ADVANTAGE.

Win more doesn’t seem to apply to a lot of these players game plans, and it’s really frustrating at times because it completely contradicts my play style.

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As someone with 6 thousand games in Heroes of the Storm, and someone who loves the game. Been playing since Beta, I have to say that I agree with some of what you said, however i want to bring up my biggest issue, to copy something I have posted elsewhere

"My biggest issue is how bad majority of the player base is, now hear me out. It’s mostly not their fault. There are simple things that majority of players do not understand, there are many misunderstandings with most players, and if you play solo, or even duo chances are you will fall into these misunderstandings as well.

When I play with a full team of friends, my winrate will jump above 80% easily. However we barely communicate or coordinate, we just know other ways to play the game, and the enemy team can never deal with it, until we are vsing another full team of masters/grandmasters.
However when I play alone or duo with someone. We can not play the way we do with a team, in fact it would be bad to play that way. If we push lanes, ignore an objective, and suddenly our team fights over objective and dies, it can throw the lead we just made,making what we actually did bad.
The shared xp system, and how it works in my opinion is flawed. Sharing xp with your team and your team having a level is fine and interesting. However the problem arises because when you are ahead on xp you give much more xp to the enemy team for deaths, anyone on your team dying. So if you get a massive lead all by yourself, a single person on your team can completely throw that lead.
Why is this a problem? It forces you to play the way that your teammates are playing, and support them, so the lower ranked you are the more you have to dumb down your macro and strategy.
“This is a team game, playing around your team is the point” Is a response you could say to the point I just made, and I agree with that to an extent.
However this is a major problem because it reinforces bad play as good play, and stagnates the meta in how to play. If you try to do anything different you hurt your team.
The quote “it’s better for everyone to do the bad plan together, then one person to do a better one, and 4 do the bad one” Is the reality here, and while a nice quote. I believe it is unhealthy for the game.

Bad habits and tactics, have been so strongly reinforced, I have had people wanting to argue with me and my duo for killing two forts while giving up a tribute on the curse map. Sadly there are countless other similar experiences I have had at any rank.
I enjoy playing heroes mostly casually, and to finish this off. It is not that fun for me to either play solo and forced to play poorly, or to play with a team, and win every game easily.

Even though Hots if my favorite moba, whenever I’m in the mood for a moba, I tend to be playing league of legends recently, because it doesn’t have this problem.

tl;dr: I believe the playerbase/community is bad because of how the game is designed, killing my fun for the game."

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Valid points about a stagnating meta, and generally being more productive to stick with your team.

However, you could communicate your alternative strategy to the randoms? Something like “Delay the objective, while I get this fort for free” or “Let them get this tribute while we get boss.”

It’s true that it’s much easier/more efficient to do this with friends. I would be ok with a longer time before the gates open to discuss strategy.

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