I cannot really disagree with this entire topic. You make a few valid points.
1 it is a shame we dont have afk forgiveness for theb4 players stuck with an ai. No real excuse for why blizzard hasn’t come up with something, anything to reduce the pain that comes with that. I agree with you. Also because the people in bronze tend to be alot more toxic this is more common there and can really ruin matches.
2. Yea not a huge fan that its so difficult to rank up. Granted you should need to win more than you lose to do so, but i have friends who smurf and are climbing really slowly even with a 60-70% winrate over hundreds of games. This also makes smurfing worse because they’re under ranked for longer periods of time. Not saying the system needs a total overhaul but itd be nice to see some changes.
Now everything else you said is just wrong and belittles your entire post which reads like an uneducated conspiracy theory. Ive seen your games dude you belong in bronze. You’d get smashed by silver players. I was playing my friends placements the other day so we could que together. He is silver 3. As a diamond 5 player i was able to decisively win all three of those games and we even had an afk. On my eu account which is consistently underranked bc i never play it i can escape gold with 60% winrate. Im no gm streamer. Not that hard to rank up if you’re good.
Didn’t really bother to read OP’s whole text but I went to watch his stream instead. He comes off as extremely fragile if not outright toxic. The basics also aren’t quite there, not weaving autos or autoing much at all in fact when playing Lili. Then there are just some bizarre choices like using DW’s puddle to siege or picking Yrel’s koomba stomp talent and never jumping. So even if we take what OP says at face value it’s plainly obvious that there are like twenty things he himself could do better, which in all likelihood would take him out of bronze.
Blizzard admited in patch notes that bronze hell does exist and are taking steps to fix it.
Also, I wouldn’t take AzJackson’s post for granted. He’s a “business” person, not a technical person, so his explanation of the algorithm is obviously lacking. For example, he said you are matched by MMR (one metric) only when all known blizzard systems use trueskill (look it up) for match making, which uses 2 metrics: MMR and uncertainty.
They also started implementing some features from trueskill 2.0 with the recent patches, so I’d assume what AzJackson is either oversimplification or he truly does not know how match making works in hots.
Just to clear things up: This is even a “silver”-feature. You landing on Plat 3 doesn’t mean anything because you have two different mmr values with the invisible one have being lower than your visible one (the ranks).
You have forgotten the more informal quotes as well:
He never talks about the situation where it happens - and this is what the players document all the time: Win five games and lose suddenly five games with unfavorable conditions (Cho’gall against Malth/Tychus/%-based attack heroes for example to take him completely out).
It has nothing to do with skill when you have an extremely unfavorable game, the game tries to hold you down and rightfully so people call them out for the bad matchmaker.
What you experience is drafting, where it is more limited to “who picks right or has hero x to counter” which also contributes into the matchmaking, paired with talent habits (you can find a bit about it on hotslogs and the winrates for each hero). What people easily forget is that the matchmaker is a very complicated written code which attributes EVERYTHING what can be accounted for (winrates, talents, characters, maps, literally everything what can be calculated).
I’m glad that you made it out but you have to see good players yet.
That happens at every level of the game.
Too many players get their bad habits ingrained and are almost beyond salvation after playing so many games doing that same thing. They don’t even see what they’re doing wrong when they blindly march to the objective and into the enemy team while the rest of their team is still dealing with rotations.
I wouldn’t know the statistics behind Bronze Hell but I’ve seen that level of play before and I’ve equally seen a number of players who can singlehandedly win those games.
The most common tactic is either high skill high dps potential heroes where you can actively outplay the enemy team or you simply macro to victory. Pick Zag or Azmo and just afk lane until you reach core. It works a lot more often than it should.
Cheesy tactics like that don’t even just apply to bronze, they can work all the way through plat and even occasionally diamond+.
I don’t want to flat out say the common phrases like “You are the only constant” and “You are where you belong” but there’s usually a grain of truth in those.
Flexibility and adaptability are key traits to have in a game where the meta is constantly shifting and there’s such a large roster of heroes and different maps. It’s a team game but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of picks you can take that make you largely independent of what your team does.
If you don’t think you deserve your rank but after 50+ games you haven’t been able to climb then instead of yelling about the matchmaker you need to reevaluate your approach to the game.
your answer to why bronze hell exists is too complex. its actually very simple.
Blizzard does match making based on your win loss rating. so if you win too many games in a row, you will get teamd up with progressivly worse and worse teammates while simultaneously puting you against teams with higher and higher win rating.s
It’s a non-answer like people in wow say that the faction balance is a “community problem” while the developers are the reason it exists in the first place.
I have been playing with people who are silver and play like high plat/diamond and the other way around. People always measure skill based upon a rating which only accounts wins and loses but in reality a veteran player can easily tell how good you’re are on the game, similar like people who play DotA2 for years and just know every spec, synergy and the possible outcome based upon it.
I heard this before, but when I looked at those ppl, the Silvers actually play as Silvers and the Diamonds like Diamonds, but ppl who are lower in skill can credit too much/little for different things, because they don’t see can’t really see the differences, since if they’d do, they probably would be more skilled.
Basically laics thinking they see the same things as experts.
Bronze hell is not the game trying to make you lose though. You get to bronze hell when your level is actually lower than bronze 5. Since the game cannot place you any lower than that when you keep losing, it adjusts the amount of points you get when you win or lose. If you won the same amount of points as other players, a few lucky wins would get you to bronze 4, even though you’re not bronze 4. So you get less points.
The problem is if people actually learn and improve. getting out of there is extremely difficult due to the low amount of points gained. But this is an extreme for players who originally were doing very bad.
This is a very case by case type of thing.
In my experience it’s actually pretty common for someone to have the mechanical skill or game knowledge typical of a “better” player but often lack in other departments or trip over themselves and make bad calls during critical endgame moments.
Knowing a hero’s ins and outs doesn’t really take too much memorization or practice, so someone can be very good at landing skillshots but still need a lot of work when it comes to shotcalling and awareness. And there’s the vice versa of whiffing all your abilities but knowing what you should be doing.
I’ve also noticed it’s not too hard to impress lower skill players. I’ve had people applaud me before for doing some very basic things like properly bodyblocking as ETC.
Fanhots or other good players proved many times that this point is wrong. Heck even myself is a proof that it’s wrong, I played myself out of B5 and currently I am between S2 - G5, because sometimes indeed you get players you can’t work together with them, because even in gold people lacks in understanding about good drafting. But I am not surprised, because this game don’t teach you how to draft right.
Here’s my deal, Bronze 5 205 points 795 points to get to bronze 4. Average pts per game are 15 per game win or lose. To get to bronze 4 I would need to play 53 games over .500 (that means +53 wins in a season). There is no way I’m going +53 wins in a season I just don’t play that many games.
I’m right back to 205 points with 700+ points to play. It never gets adjusted up.
So I gain a little, then boom right back to the start. I’ve just come to accept this is where I’m at.
I’ve just come to accept this is where I’m at.