You can always tell the people that only ever played HOTS

General Discussion
1

They think every game can be won by the power of wishful thinking. They don’t think team composition and synergy matters at all.

Weird how these people never have a positive WR.

They’ll see a team with Alexstrasza and 4 diving mage-killers vs a team of 4 mages with no escapes and Murkly on Foundry and think that it’s a fair and balanced matchup. Their excuse? “What if we get a pick and win?”. Weird how they simultaneously don’t believe that games are pre-determined, yet their primary win condition is the enemy throwing the game like a bunch of goobers.

Why rely on gambling if the game is fair and balanced?

Denial and cognitive dissonance is a staple of people who have only ever played HOTS, when it comes to MOBAs. Really weird how you can predict with 100% accuracy the outcome of every QM game within the first 60 seconds, since it’s all down to end-game luck. They think that you can win at a MOBA without every winning a single team fight, weird that they believe that getting a lucky end-game pick matters then, if you can win with a pacifist run.

2

QM was never going to be a balanced game mode i can tell you. You get your fast ques but team comps are either fine or hot trash depending on MM.

Strong auto attackers gets paired against mages like Nova and squicy melees like Murky and your frontline is Leo that dies to everything cause he gets melted faster then you can heal him. And then you got Aba that makes enemy team even stronger.

Butcher is same story. Only played in QM cause his design either give him the oppertunity to delete entire teams when the team comp is just right or never gets a single stack cause your team can actually defend yourself against him.

Again depends on team comps. Either your team is build to fight back or you end up in a 20 min match where you basically cant do a thing cause your team comp dont allow you to win.

1 Like
3

You make great points, but I disagree with one thing you said: that QM is not balanced.

I am consistently against hard counters, both on an individual level and on a team level. The thing about MOBAs is that they’re strategy games. Some heroes synergize well with other heroes or with certain maps. And yet, it’s clear that one team will often synergize very well, while another won’t. And it’s clear that there is a rock-paper-scissors aspect to team composition. So, despite the complexity of the game, the fact that teams are almost always rock, paper or scissors can’t be pure chance.

If you are good enough at the game, like I am, you will consistently be put on maps where your hero is at a disadvantage, against heroes that counter you, and without proper team composition. It’s clearly not just randomly splitting 8 players in 2 teams to make a perfect even MMR, that wouldn’t even make sense. It tries to split in terms of roles, so that both teams have the same number of tanks/healer/etc.

But even then, it’s not completely fair. So how would it determine which team to put to bruiser character on? Well, the team that’s favored to win, of course. You can’t tell me that one team is never favored to win, because them both teams would need the exact same average MMR to be allowed to play, and that’s impossible.

So we’ve established that MMR isn’t enough to balance a match. We’ve established that team roles can’t be perfect every time. So how does the algorith them generate team compositions that are “fair and balanced”? It looks at global matchmaking data to become better at doing this, it would be irresponsible not to do this. Except doing that doesn’t account for consistently good players who can beat the odds (like me).

So with all that said, the MM algorithm is perfectly capable of stacking teams, and it, in fact, is always doing that. You can tell with 100% accuracy whether or not you will win the game. For one, if you don’t play carries, you’re likely to lose. If you do play carries, like I do, then you can tell immediately just how hard you will or won’t carry.

I play Butcher, so it’s extremely obvious to tell when I have or when I don’t have what I need to be effective, or when I’ll be a vegan. I am consistently up against terrible odds, but I can tell when the odds are insurmountable.

I was wrong only once on my prediction: I was matched against a bunch of goobers and knew, within 60 seconds, that we were going to win the game (I had 100 meat in the first 60 seconds with a very strong Imperius player who had the “attitude of a winner” is what I’d call it). I was coming off a loss spree with toxic teammates who blamed me for losing the game (because of course, it’s Butcher’s fault, and if I respond, I’m the one who gets mass reported for being abusive).

To keep my sanity among bad players, toxic players, and a gag order (I’m not muted, but I have been a few years back), I HAVE to make a call about whether or not I will be invested in any given match I’m part of. And I’m extremely good at making that call, after all these years.

The system is extremely consistent at what it does: keep everyone as close to 50% WR as possible. Which means, once you understand what it’s doing {from seeing it over and over again}, you can just right away immediately move on mentality from the match, or chose to actually invest yourself. I’ve been told that I have a loser mentality from doing this, but winners know now to invest in bad ventures. Part of being a winner is knowing when to cut your losses, and knowing what your odds are.

Keeping in mind, in all this, that I am just playing QM to relax and have fun. Blizzard, do you understand, after all these years, why your game is dead?

4

Alexstraza can build to support a dive comp. I imagine yours just didnt.

But ignoring that tho, i think playing alot of butcher is definatly not helping how QM feels for you. The whole point of the hero is to sink or swim. Your either a god or your completly worthless to your team.
Don’t get me wrong play as much butcher as you’d like but making the game feel like either an easy win or an impossible win are literally the feelings he was designed to invoke.
It also doesn’t help that butcher is not hard to play against.

2 Likes
5

any actual test based on valid information and experience is not going to be “100% accurate”

Blowing extremes is just another person trying to act like they know more than they really do and looking to blame anything else they can instead of looking to improve something within their reach.

“oh I can always tell who wins”
“oh, the people that disagree are always lower winrates”

Maybe that crap works out on the ~lvl 50 chronic smurfs that reroll a new account every-other day and brag how they play soooo much.

1 Like
6

The Alexstraza was on the enemy team and did a fantastic job supporting her team of assassin diver destroy our team of slow-walking mages and holding the Foundry control points. It’s just shocking to me that my teammates didn’t realize that it was never winnable at all. I was KT at the time.

Yeah, I think the fact I play Butcher is why I’m a lot more conscious about the importance of team composition, it just multiplies the impact of it. But he’s only been 25% of my QM games this season and I can definitely tell when a game is unwinnable.

  • any actual test based on valid information and experience is not going to be “100% accurate”

Except I haven’t been wrong a single time in all my games. Yes, technically, I don’t have hard evidence that if I put a pot of water on my oven, it’s going to boil. Technically, my oven could be the one that got past the QC checks at the factory and is totally broken. Or maybe it broke overnight and thus, past results are irrelevant to the current cooking session.

I don’t know why, but only when discussing MM in MOBAs and d20 rolls in BG3 are players so dismissive of people’s individual experiences as just a gambler’s fallacy. It’s the go-to response of any bad faith debater, because the engine data and player statistic will never be made public to be verified.

Also, blaming one player’s skill is always a low hanging fruit for bad faith debaters. I can turn your argument against you: you simply don’t have data about my skill level and are making it up. Weird how you’re allowed to completely imagine that I’m a bad player based on nothing but wanting to dismiss my points entirely without debating them, for whatever reason, but when I make a perfectly reasonable extrapolation based on my own testing, which you can reproduce at will on your own end to confirm (that is the essence of the scientific method), that is somehow a logical fallacy.

Please try to actually present evidence, even if it is merely your own experience. It’s literally all we have to go on, each other’s experience, so if that’s not good enough for you, leave the forums because the entire forums is just that; our personal experiences. Why don’t you share yours?

Answer this: if I presented screenshots of my match compositions to you, would you be able to tell which team won and who lost?

7

you first.

Anyone can roll an alt-account claim whatever they want. The forums are less for “arguments” and “debates” – things people don’t ‘win’ on the internet – and instead push toward something useful like discussion, venting/sympathy, or a myriad of remotely more useful things that another badtake for faulting others for what they themselves are doing.

Those that assert absolutes are more wrong than they’re willing to admit and either neglect game experience, or they tend to be the cause of why their ‘prediction’ is “correct.”

One can accurately predict a game is going to be lost by throwing said game. You should try to be an example of what you demand of others instead of being yet-another belly-aching troll account that’s happens to be bored enough to write more than 2 sentences.

1 Like
8

My my my, so many accusations, so little meaningful contribution to the conversation.

By any means, again, please present your own evidence. I have provided plenty of evidence. But it’s easier for you to try to derail by insulting my skill or accusing me of throwing games. What a bad faith wall of pure crap your post was.

Or continue to just attempt to derail/deflect by insinuating that I’m bad at the game or throwing all my games. For someone who demands hard evidence, you sure make a lot of bad faith assumptions about other.

Where did I accuse you of doing something that I myself am doing? What did I demand of anyone that I did not do myself? And then you go on to call me a troll when you’re the one who’s done nothing but insult me to try to derail the thread.

9

It wasn’t my intention to question your skill and if thats what it came across as, thats not what I was getting at.
What i was trying to say is Butcher just gets rekt for free sometimes. Thats straight up how he plays. God could be playing butcher and even his fate would be decided by the loading screen.

Butchers kit is extremely telegraphed and one dimensional, additionally hes needs to be able to pick a target and blow them up. If he fails to do that he instantly starts to struggle. Not only that but if a team is simply careful about not fighting you, you aren’t getting the stacks you need to blow ppl up in the first place.
Butcher just doesn’t have very much agency or flexibility. That is a failure if the charecter, not you or the match maker.

I am not questioning your skill or saying you are a jerk or something. That being said, things would not feel nearly as rough for a more balanced charecter like nazeebo.
Also all the above is not really arguing about the match maker either.

If you really want my thoughts on the match maker, of course it could be better but also it really doesn’t help when the player base keeps playing heroes that make it unhealthy.

I also assumed the alex was on your team, mb.

1 Like
10

You’re good, the second half of my post was directed to Xenterex, whose post are super rude, dismissive and unconstructive.

And yeah, I like that about Butcher, it’s either super easy or super rough.

But I don’t know why, exclusively in the HOTS community, raising the notion that there are just certain compositions that will rock your scissors or paper your rock is like committing a great crime.

The idea that if you question at all the winnability of a specific match up, you are a toxic game throwing or just a bad player. In what other MOBA could you say this and not be laughed off as a newbie/noob? It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so… sad. These people have been brainwashed into thinking that friendship is magic. And yet, they are some of the most passive-aggressive, toxic & rude people ever.

And yeah, the idea that the MM is matching people solely based on MMR is laughable. It’s literally impossible to balance 8 players this way. The MM has to be splitting by role (it clearly does), but sometimes, there’s clearly an uneven amount of roles. So one team will get an extra bruiser, the other an extra assassin.

That’s fine, but how does it determine that? Chance, or data? Either answers are worrying. How much data is it using? I know it’s not pure chance, because teams are almost always very rock, paper or scissor when it comes to QM. As a good player, it’s often obvious that the odds are stacked against me, which makes it difficult to just relax and enjoy a low-stakes game, unless I literally make suboptimal plays which is difficult, because that’s kind of like deliberately throwing. But to constantly have to sweat because I just happen to be better is unfun and is contrary to what I think QM is supposed to be; quick, unbalanced games. Instead, it’s games that very deliberately favor one team over another, to the point that the outcomes are easily predictable, even to an allegedly bad player like me.

11

Your right that come people on the forums have just become passive aggressive over time but its party because weve lost our patience with how many people do just post in bad faith to start arguments.
I wish people would be more patient because the way they act is part of the problem but I dont really want to go more in to that here.

Ive played hots sense beta. Ive also played even more league then hots and Ive played about as much starcraft as hots and ive played many different multiplayer games beyond those. Im afraid this stuff isnt exclusive to hots.
PvP is inherently difficult and difficult things are frustrating to some people and the lesser of those people will take their frustrations out on everyone else.

With hots, the smaller player base affects its dramatically. There was a time back when the game was fairly popular when the match maker felt totally fine. This is my favorite game so I pay a lot of attention to it and the match maker really hasn’t changed all that much. There was a time when it didn’t match roles and that sucked but that was a looong time ago.

As far as I can tell, the problem is 2 fold.

First, its just plain harder to build games that are fair skill wise when the player base is small. Paladins, another game I play that’s in a similar situation as hots has the same problem. Same with Quake, yet another similar thing.
The game may still have thousands of players world wide but not all of those players are similar ranks or are even queueing up at the same time.

Second, and I think this is more of a problem as my first point. Take a look at this
https://www.heroesprofile.com/Global/Hero?timeframe_type=major&timeframe=2.55&game_type=qm&statfilter=win_rate&build_type=Popular&mirror=0
(if its not sorting by popularity, sort it by popularity)

These are stats for what is currently playing in quick match.

People straight up just play mostly volatile heroes with huge glaring weaknesses aaaaaall the time!

Nazeebo; weak early game and easy to gank
Valla; made of wet paper, dies if anyone looks at her
Nova; same issue as valla but also has no good pve
Abathur; 4v5
Ming; valla 2.0
Azmo; like naz but even worse early game
Butcher; the definition of volatile hero
Artanis; a bit more well rounded but still has some awful matchups
Genji; gets rekt by virtually any amount of reliable CC
Jaina, KT, Anduin; Finally some heroes I’d consider to be well rounded.

Its not until brightwing, the second to last hero above 15% popularity do even start to you see the kinda CC that can keep most of the above heroes in check. Everyone having Such crazy strengths and weaknesses leads to games feeling the way that they do.

If you switch “Game Type” located above the list to STROM LEAGUE and then resort by popularity, you see the complete opposite. Heroes with glaring weaknesses are picked way less and games are significantly less predetermined.
Now if you don’t want to play ranked, I totally get it. I generally dont rank unless Im with my MGS team either.

But this is why qm is the way it is.

1 Like
12

I would play SL if the queues weren’t 20 minutes. Also, I just want to have a chill experience, not actually sweat and try hard.

As for the picks, it doesn’t actually matter. It’s not why QM is the way it is. It’s the way it is because it’s designed to put rock against paper. I literally never win games against Nova, but almost always lose against them. Why? Because on my team, they are always paper, on the enemy team, they are always scissors. That’s all it is.

Literally the team comps I consistently get are Jaina, KT, Nova, and other trash that can’t escape once any half-decent diver with support gets on them. And it’s always what happens. As someone who’s actually good, I guarantee you that my experience is the complete opposite of what you’re describing. Nazeebo counters butcher, so they’re always on the enemy team and we have no split push:

Alex, Genji, Li-ming, me (Butcher), Medivh
vs
Valla, Khara, Greymane, Tass, Aba

Literally we have ZERO wave clear hero vs. 5 pushers. They were 4v5ing us ALL GAME while Valla split-pushed and camped with Aba all over the map. We were completely helpless, by minute 12 they were hitting our core with 3 merc camps. Edit: + Aba on a small map means I couldn’t rotate, he had mines everywhere all game. We got like 3 kills the whole game.

You talk about how easy it is to kill Tracer with some hard CC. Okay, here is my team: Lucio, Nazeebo, Genji, KT (me), Illidan. Where is our hard CC? We literally have none. I’m pretty good at landing my stun, and I get her a couple of time, but by the time it takes for my 2nd bomb to go off, she just teleports and boom, she’s out of there.

It’s a strategy game. That’s why a smart draft is important, and the MM algorithm KNOWS this. See this post:

I Learned Something About the AI Last Night - General Discussion - Heroes of the Storm Forums (blizzard.com)

The algorithm CAN give you a decent draft, it just doesn’t.

As an experiment, how many of your last 10 games were a scenario where you got totally curb stomped, couldn’t get any of the objectives, and you lost the game with some of the first keeps still full HP? Considering I just lost 7 of my past 10 games, that’s 7 games for me where it was completely unwinnable. Oh wait, we actually did really good with the Genji/Illidan game, but at level 20, we just couldn’t do anything because we had no hard CC. Illidan didn’t get “On the Hunt” so we have a grand total of 1 skillshot stun: Gravity Lapse. Which is useless when they’re pushing with a huge wave of creep + boss + objective spiders.

13

you are dramatically misinterpreting what I am saying.
which is frustrating because I’m partially agreeing with you and your still telling me in wrong. :\

I feel like even if I were to tell you how that matchup should be played it would all go right over your head.

1 Like
14

Ehh, I think far more people are more likely to unfairly blame team comps than how they play. And even if the matchup is unfair, why not try anyways? What’s the worst that can happen? You lose?

The other day I was in a game where we were winning for most of the game, and then a couple people started throwing by going off alone/grouping. One of them responded, he didn’t care, we were going to lose anyways because of the comp. You mean, other than we weren’t for the whole game before we started making these mistakes?

There’s strategy in the game, but it’s not really the main component of HOTS. MOBAs like HOTS whole design is for the strategy to be heavily scaled down because you can only control your hero. So much of this game is how you play, not just a preordained strategy.

So believing you can predict an outcome of a game on just comp without knowing the skill levels of each player on their individual heroes is pretty farcical. The fact you also think the matchmaker can stack teams to only make their players more frustrated is just conspiracy territory.

1 Like
15

Um, none? One of the two losses I had was a very competitive game that could have gone either way, but our Valla started feeding late game. The other was a bit more of a stomp, although we did get one of their forts down. That one was more a credit to the enemy Alarak who clearly knew the hero well, and too many of the people on my team weren’t respecting his W range and would get pulled to their doom.

It is possible that part of it is due to the fact that I play mostly bruisers or tanks, so can often fix the mistakes my team mates make.

2 Likes
16

IDK about OP but I have noticed that the biggest feeders are also the biggest complainers.

0 kills 12 deaths afk pushing and never joining team for the obj, but if you say “forfeit” they ping you like crazy and ask others to report you.

Basically “why aren’t you carrying me? i’m reporting you!” mindset.

2 Likes
17

Sounds just right about the two feeders I had. Imp ignoring his healer and keep stats padding and Illidan who flame all day while trying to kill Ana 1vs3. But again bad players have no clue how to play anyways.

18
  • Basically “why aren’t you carrying me? i’m reporting you!” mindset.

You couldn’t have phrased it better. These people just expect everybody else to carry them, and when I tell them the game is unwinnable, they just act like a fake nice “we can do it!” or “let’s try anyways”. So they’re having fun doing whatever they want while we have all the stress of carrying them on our shoulder or receive reports and “fake nice” rudeness.

Odd coincidence that both you and I noticed that the people who can’t see when a is game unwinnable are almost always not very good players.

  • you are dramatically misinterpreting what I am saying.

I see what’s happening now. You’re just acting like I’m bad at the game and don’t know how the heroes I play work on. You’re doing the “fake nice” thing that this community is so good at, where they don’t say what they mean. Passive rudeness. Great, you told me how to counter heroes with hard CC. I’m telling you that my team had a grand total of ZERO hard CC.

Oh man if only you had been there to win the game for us with the power of your wishful thinking. Too bad I don’t have every god gamer on this forum who never lose a game on my team, and when they do, it’s because someone else on their team just sucks!

Yeah let me rephrase the entire topic then: Don’t you hate when everybody else but you really sucks at the game!?! AMIRITE??

It’s funny, because the other guy is saying the strategy is watered down due to the fact you can only control your own hero. But sure, I was supposed to control every other 4 hero to win the game lol!

So, in other words, the game wasn’t winnable because my teammates sucked?

  • The fact you also think the matchmaker can stack teams to only make their players more frustrated is just conspiracy territory.

The fact you think it doesn’t when I clearly explained exactly how it does this is what’s willful blindness. But you’re saying that, instead, it’s matching me deliberately with players that aren’t good at the game, and there’s nothing I can do about it because I’m just one person out of 5? Or are you saying the MM is completely random and inept at matching players of even skill levels (this is simply false).