Account lvl neveer had any value other then high playtime. Like me with my account lvl 2000+ and account is 8 years old and only got plat 2 as my highest rank when I was most serious about this game.
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Account levels are an extremely poor means of judging a player’s skill, especially in HotS where there are so many heroes that a player can get a relatively high account level by getting each one to level 15 and/or do as much as possible to maximize experience gained.
Same for hero levels. They just mean that someone really likes to play that particular hero. It does not mean they are GOOD at that hero. It is quite possible they are horrible with whichever hero they are highest with.
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I’ve run into a 999 Azmo, Hammer and Murky several times and they were some of the worst players ever. These people have by now become so numb that they keep repeating the same gameplay loop each time rather than adapting as situation requires. They know how to 1v1 but will understand little about team play or decisions made by their teammates on a macro level. Same could be said for medium level one trickers or those who exclusively play a single role (sadly always DD).
There’s 90 heroes x 5 (previous entry level for HL) = 450. That’s the bare minimum where I would draw the line about how competent someone is at the game, just barely enough time to allow some experimentation with different talent builds so they can acquire basic understanding of what works and what the niche choices are. Sure, not everyone owns every hero, but they have free access through aram or weekly rotations.
The player base is much smaller nowadays and I am always disappointed to see low-end three digit level players in my games. They very rarely measure up to the regulars who are also much less toxic and more open to suggestions or feedback.
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This is true even in vs A.I where I have come across players–do not think I have encountered a 999 player–where their performance is less than ideal despite having so much time invested in a hero. Granted, it is vs A.I, which is a laid game game mode, but I have encountered high level hero oriented players that insist on playing on Elite only to then get bodied by the very difficulty setting they picked. Recently I watched a level 342 Tracer YOLO dive three Elite A.I consisting of Garrosh, Nova, and Malfurion. They got deleted rather quickly.
Personally, I find it frustrating when I see Sylvanas players spam Haunting Wave only to witness them getting clapped by a CC they could have negated using Haunting Wave’s invulnerability but either did not use it or it was on cooldown because they insisted on using it without investing in Festering Wounds to nuke minion waves, which in vs A.I I find to be a waste of a talent. The A.I are usually predictable/easily baited into using their CC, so for someone to have so many levels under a hero–especially one I also have a lot of levels in–leaves me just a bit tilted, but that is probably me being an elitist jerk when it comes to Sylvanas.
For the longest time I had kept spamming tab key every talent tier to see who picked what to try to familiarize myself with common builds or to summarize the extent of their tools. There is so much text in the game I just couldn’t force myself to read through all the talent descriptions, impossible to remember all of it without practical experience.
Nowadays I am much more comfortable in knowing what works so I don’t bother at all except when playing at level deficit or just to make sure my choice of an ultimate skill does not get countered instantly. When someone on the enemy team makes a poor or very suboptimal choice it is almost like hearing a feeding call. Make him suffer the most.
In my last game with Xul, the common logical and safe choice is always go for Red shield. Blue isn’t as good in helping kill players as much it helps you to prevent being surrounded and allows escape. Finally there’s Green; I see Maiev on the other team so I pick this.
I am literally running across the map while two people are chasing in my footsteps trying to keep up. I’m never around a teamfight but when I do come, these two are always 10s behind me. This guy has a level 100 Maiev and is still trying to ensnare me with his Umbral Bind but I keep evading it every time and I simply move on. This happens at least 10 times and I do not understand why he keeps wasting the cooldown.
After the match I get some whisper about how bad his team was that we only won through split merc pressure and that we are cowards for not teamfighting. I answer that I don’t remember his name and he gets mad.
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It still amazes (and annoys me) that players with 3k level accounts don’t even know how to ping the AI bot, when there is a leaver. There are only a handful of games where it seems I’m not the only one to know how to do this.
I’ve seen profiles where a player will have 1000s of games on Nova or Abathur in Ranked, and have a 42% or lower lifetime WR, yet they keep first locking those heroes. Play whatever you want for fun in QM or ARAM, but I’ll never understand why people keep picking heroes where there is enough data to confirm that, well, they suck with that hero.
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To be fair, there are times when it is actually safer to not ping the bot. I had an ARAM last night where someone picked Murky, then promptly DC’d or left. I am pretty sure they just did that to troll, but hey, why not give them the benefit of the doubt?
Regardless, our Sylvanas kept pinging the Murky to follow her, and of course the enemy team had an Alarak. It probably would have been a better idea to just play out a 4v5 than feed that Alarak so hard!
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I agree, but most of the time this wasn’t the reason, they simply didn’t know how to do it. I guess the old AI that would go off and do its own thing, probably means fewer people knew you could ping it. Still, it does give a message when someone leaves saying you can ping it to follow you and people will still ask me “how.”
I’ll admit, some heroes are better not pinged to follow you at all and that’s the other thing, because the leash range is different for each hero, it can mean the AI will function better if a melee hero pings it, over a ranged one, as one example.
Oh well, the AI is pretty terrible, and I shouldn’t complain as I’ve played with a couple of nasty people who would AFK in base and keep taking control of the AI away from the team, because they were a miserable so-and-so.
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To continue my rant, as if she didn’t notice 5 identical orc portraits on the loading screen. By the time anyone else on our team had died she was already at 10.
https://i.imgur.com/UVhq0nq.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/IQCnMEL.jpeg
She was the only one who didn’t notice 5 identical orc portraits on the loading screen. By the time anyone else on our team had died she was already at 10.
Looking at Abathur felt like watching a rocket scientist in comparison because he kept two other clowns busy in a long corridor of BoE map for so long and they could never get him, so that’s probably why it took us half an hour to lose, the game would have been over in 10 min otherwise.
I peeked at the game history, same identical talent build each time. 10 pages later I got bored of looking because there is not a single game I could find where she had deviated from the standard choice. It feels like a bot playing more than anything. Totally devoid of all logic and learns nothing from the exact same mistake made ten times.
Well, it is possible they are from my neck of the woods where pings, objectives, and health bars are sometimes not taken into consideration.
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