What is wrong with your matchmaking?

Think about it. The MM is bound to make bad lobbies when the player base is very diverse. Finding ten players of completely equal skill is difficult. When the MM sees a player out performing within their skill range it can either handicap them or place them in a match where they are handicapping others. It’s a frustrating situation with no right answer.

There’s a lot more than just individual skill going on in a match tho. ELO hell is a thing because this game depends a lot on how well your team performs in addition to yourself. There are tons of variables that go unaccounted for when only judging the individual.

I rarely see smurfs but I play in low plat so maybe that changes things. Mostly I see people boosted really high up where they shouldn’t be. I saw a Diamond 5 the other day in QM that I honestly thought was bronze or silver before looking at his profile. He was even playing one of him most played heroes…

2 Likes

Yeah…defunitely they must add this system.
For an axample …player has 2 win streak games search or match 4 player with GM skill or who has 45,10,45/% ratio KDA.
3,4,5 streak win games search 3,2,1 GM game.skilled.players. If system cant find them…to warn you ad ask you is it ,you want or not contiue search.
Or 5 % XP gain buff valid only for 1 game.
Or if player has 5 lose streak games = 10 % XP gain buff valid for 2 games.

But huge problem in plans and decions and astimation of HoTS team devs. ,is it.want or not.

I play Blizzard games for years and I really love them all!
But the matchmaking on Heroes of the storm has not not changed over the 4 years I played this game.

It’s a shame but I am going to delete this game. It’s no fun at all.

7 Likes

What’s going on are two things.

First, the matchmaker cares about “Average” MMR of both teams. So if you have an MMR of, let’s say, 200 - you could be given 4 teammates with MMR of about 75 each, and face off against 5 players that are at 100. What happens then is that you’re playing better than your enemies - but they still get to stomp your incompetent team, and you can’t win alone.

Second - is how the Matchmaker searches for pairs. It can either select a mirror to your champion or a counter. But it doesn’t check how many counters each of the team has. Furthermore, someone else’s counter or mirror can also be your counter as well.
So what ends up happening is that sometimes one team will get super-countered by the other.

1 Like

This response clearly doesn’t match the reality when you get potatoes on your team vs a team that does everything correctly and covers each other’s backs.

On the very base level - I’m sure that what they’re saying is 100% true. And I’m sure that the INTENT of Matchmaker is just as they say it is.

But clearly something is going on a deeper level that results in extremely unfair matchups. And my bet is - that they average out MMR during extended search, basically giving you players much lover than yourself and putting you up against a team that is in the middle.

I don’t know a single MOBA where so many players notice the same thing - specifically being matched up with completely braindead teammates versus a better team.
This always happens after you get a win streak. And sometimes - yes, sometimes the enemies are just playing better than you.
But most of the times you can SEE the mistakes of enemies, but you can see your teammates just standing in a pool of their drool and doing nothing, just dying over and over.

6 Likes

here is the most current blizz response just for clarity

im not saying there ‘isnt’ something else that may be going on. just that forced 50 isnt the reason which is what ppl keep trying to point to.

I have noticed this pattern of the MM since the first season.

1 Like

That response is from a person who does not know the internal workings of a matchmaker.

Again, he speaks about the target design philosophy of mmr. But that doesn’t mean that the actual system reflects that design idea perfectly.

And it doesn’t.

1 Like

Here’s a little secret. Anytime you see “extending match making” quit immediately because it’s relaxing the MMR bracket to find you a game faster.

That’s how you end up with weird, trash panda teams that make Blizzard look incompetent.

2 Likes

It’s not incompetence: it’s not enough players across all roles and skill levels. Can’t make bricks without clay.

1 Like

they could easily design it differently to prioritize good match making over short queue times, but today’s instant gratification generation has no patience i guess.

3 Likes

And why did HotS have a lesser player base, despite having enough time to launch with Dota2?

Incompetence (specifically incompetence with the development cycle followed by balance incompetence which resulted in a re-launch a few years back). No matter how you slice it, Blizzard screwed up badly and that’s why match making is bad.

I have only been playing for a year, but – so I understand – previous attempts to do just that met with strenuous protest.

I agree, but focusing on the match maker itself is therefore disingenuous. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with it: no match maker can consistently deliver ideal results without a healthy population. :man_shrugging:

There are ways they could make the match making better but it would mean longer wait times.

Essentially all you need is for the team to have a total MMR bracket, for the example, lets say it’s 3200 MMR.

Now that’s 3200 MMR that can be divided up between 5 people, which is equal to 640. Obviously you need an individual MMR flexibility but the issue is where “Extending match making” loosens that bracket, allowing one player to take up a much higher percentage of that 3200 team MMR, resulting in significantly worse allies.

Often times, one good player cannot offset several bad ones, this game isn’t Dota2, it isn’t LoL, there’s no way for 1 really good player so carry the entire team unless the team is so bad you’re better off having bots.

That is the issue.
Remove this dumb “extending match making” crap, put a hard cap on a 5% MMR difference per player, this way, for example if match making takes too long, the game will say “Okay, we can pull 4 players with 608 MMR and a final one with 768 MMR or any combination reaching up to 5% MMR subtracted from other players to add a higher MMR player onto the team”.

This way you still retain a somewhat similar skill level across the entire team instead of having 1 or 2 good players combined with a bunch of players who should probably keep to vsing easy AI.

2 Likes

It kicks in LITERALLY after 5-10 seconds for me.
I will likely never find a match if I keep resetting.

2 Likes

Matching up 5 randoms vs a 5-man premade with voice comms IS kinda incompetent though.

It doesn’t really matter how long this premade has to queue. Completely ruining the game for 5 people and making them waste 20 minutes of their time on a pointless game (because 90% time the premade wins) - is an IDIOTIC, incompetent and repugnant decision.

Also I find games in 20-30 seconds on average. But the search gets extended immediately, 5-10 seconds in.

What this tells me is that there are enough players to start a match at least every 30 seconds, and likely more. In other words, every 30 seconds at least 10 people join the queue. And realistically - much more than that, because you still get some sort of matchmaking happening.

If we went back to how MM used to work before - balanced search for 90 seconds and only then it gets extended - we would probably get MUCH better matchmaking results.

But we don’t. Because some executive decided that matching players immediately is more important than matching them fairly or competently.

And WHY that happened? Because instead of making game design decisions themselves, Blizzard nowadays are super-scared of criticism and look at what people are whining about on reddit.
Clueless scrubs whined then queues are too long - now we get an idiotic algorythm that results in 80% games being one-sided.

4 Likes

Yep, sometimes that’ll just happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The have never discussed any changes that involve the root algorithm. Every thing they have changed rests on top of it. They just get more people that never worked on it to talk about things they haven’t even bothered to do the math on. They speak from a podium of ignorance about what the matchmaker actually does, was designed to do, and has been statistically shown by at least 3 different threads showing cases of 100s of games, with reasonable statistical analysis. (And yes, I am actually qualified to discuss it in that way).

1 Like

Extending mm after 10 sec is way to fast. Its like it does not even try to find people.
Like i already had extending mm twice today this afternoon at 5 pm.

2 Likes

It actually starts the extended MM way earlier, which why you can cancel at 25 seconds in (5 seconds before ex MM is “supposed to” kicks in) and be locked into a game that pops at 30.

ALSO

Pretty sure if someone (or some people, individuals, groups etc) waits in que long enough, it will snatch up people still in their 30 (actually 25 or less) second window and slam them into an ex MM match for them, but you’re still in your normal que time. Can’t prove this though without either extensive testing or looking at the code.

I always dread the insta-pop que after hitting the ready button because in all likelyhood it will be just as bad or worse than an ex MM pop

1 Like