Ranked experience is nothing short of shit at the moment.
Shame really, as everything else is pretty good.
EDIT: Should've mentioned - as a solo player!
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Smurfs and Pre-Mades
The biggest problem is smurfs and more needs to be done to put a stop to it. The biggest step they can make at this time is greatly increase MMR/Rank points when the win rate is well above the band for that rank.
I agree 100%. First of all it's to easy to get into ranked, level 50 account is a laughable requirement. Second of all if the game notices that the player is significantly better than the rank they're currently are, they should be boosted up greatly until they reach their appropriate level. Currently You can play against the same smurf 3 times in a row because the rank moves too slowly.
You know those "challenges" where Grand Master players make new accounts and try to go from Bronze to GM and they boast about 70-80% winrates? Yeah, even with that winrate it's like 200 matches where you ruin the game for 9 other people.
I've even seen people buying accounts to use as a smurf. There is no way someone going to convince me some previous season 45%wr silver 3 is all of a sudden tearing through plat at an 80%wr
So last season I was very new to the game and i was cruising along in Silver. Strong mechanically but had no game sense at all. Now that I’m getting better at the game my win rate on a few heroes is 70-80% and I’m about to hit plat.
Sometimes people figure out how to carry and/or meet other good players, then things change for them. It isn’t always a smurf coming to ruin your life.
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When you’re smurfing with a high winrate, it gives you teammates with terrible win rates (>40%) to balance it out.
Do you have any source for that statement?
Seems believable since I think blizzard tries to balance off of MMR which moves slower than your rank
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New players usually have less than 50% win rate, so it is unsurprising that you get matched with such players.
I just checked in my own game now in ~master and despite me having 61% win rate this season, everyone else in my team had a positive win rate as well.
I had a win-streak of about 40 games as Valeera when I first started storm league because I got ranked in Bronze 5 which is lowest possible. And then slowly stopped winning all the time when got divisions up.
I won half the games in first 10 when you get the initial rank, but still got the lowest possible so I ended up smurfing, but it was not intended. Something is really wrong with the ranking system.
Here's the proof of how stupid the matchmaking is. It was not even fun winning all these because there was no challenge. https://imgur.com/a/cigsXnI
Hi, I'm a bot for linking direct images of albums with only 1 image
I think that Season Quests for Rewards is going to curb smurfing somewhat.
Imagine that you get rewards like this (made up numbers to illustrate my point):
-
10 Games: Portrait
-
50 Games: 5.000 Gold
-
100 Games: Mount
-
150 Games: 5.000 Gold
-
200 Games: Epic Mount
If you want all the rewards the season offers, then you're discouraged from spreading your limited playtime on multiple accounts.
Sidenote: With a reward system like this, punishments for draft-dodging or other unacceptable behaviour could come in the form deducted games for your quest instead of decreasing your rank, which is more of a punishment for anyone you then get matched with and against. Imagine losing 5 games for the first draft-dodge, 10 for the next, 15 for the one after that.
I like this idea a lot. I would be playing way more ranked probably :)
Make it in addition to losing rank and also maintain the leaver queue games and we have a deal!
What’s the point of lowering someone’s rank as punishment? Sure it feels bad but since your rank isn’t your reward, lowering it seems like the only choice for lack of better options.
Because there are players with different goals, if you remove the rank penalty then I would bet there would be a significant increase in dodging drafts. And its not that I am saying most players goals are rank oriented, its that it would be a very noticable change since its been this way for so long.
I get that it's the status quo, but that doesn't mean it is sensible.
You don't play ranked to improve your rank (in this case, lowering your rank as punishment would make sense). In a perverse way, the current punishment system actually reinforces this notion in the heads of players. "If I lose rank for dodging draft, rank must be my reward. And since end of season rewards were only attached to rank, this must be the case.".
The opposite should be the true. You play ranked to have competitive matches at your level, your rank should be a reflection of that. It shouldn't be a reward, and therefore it shouldn't be used as punishment. It's difficult enough to get players to their "true rank" as it is.
I get what you are saying and I agree. But there are too many players out there that already do unethical things to increase thier rank, if they change it the way you are suggesting then all of those unethical players will abuse the shit out dodging drafts, and trust me when I say, nothing will kill this game faster than going through the queue process, winning a draft, having someone dodge, rinse and repeat, after an hour of this happening the desire to play the game will disintegrate rapidly.
I would like to see this too. Should be wins rather than games though
Smurf = bad.
Premade = good.
Change my mind!
(Basically, play with friends / team and get the most out of what HotS is: a team based game to its core.
Smurfing is ruining things though, as it allows boosting and messes up the ladder for no reason.)
I don't mind premades but I do think that if you're going against a 5 stack, it should have a bigger impact on your mmr results. Being in a 5-stack premade is a huge advantage, if not simply because you would have played with these people before and be able to communicate via discord. So, if you win against a 5-stack, you should be given bigger rewards. If you lose against a 5-stack, the penalty should be lesser.
I wish they didn't hide whether the enemy team is in a party or not. 5-stacks react so much faster to rotations and camp invades and I know have to play differently to compensate for their communication so having that information hidden from me can be really frustrating.
Once they show us mmr we can start talking about if they need to increase the mmr penalty. Otherwise we are just speculating.
Premade = good.
Premades are fine as long as rank restrictions exist. 5 man stacks can currently bypass that with smurfs.
While you may enjoy playing with your friends who are much lower ranked than you, the matchmaking will force a mirror for the opposing team that isn't necessary in a stack. I don't think a solo queue GM player would want to play with a solo queue silver one, and it certainly wouldn't be fun for either party.
Basically, play with friends / team and get the most out of what HotS is: a team based game to its core.
Team game or not, if I'm allowed to queue alone, then I should get a fair game while doing so because solo players shouldn't be just meat for team players.
I'm not saying playing alone is a disadvantage or not, but just that I don't like the team game argument.
Yes, Solo queue is fine, but playing as a team is more rewarding... The real issue is solo players no willing to communicate and play as a team I suppose :(
You are getting a fair game, solo’s average MMR is higher then the pre-made. You may feel losing more, betting I don’t think solos are.
What it really comes down is not enough players.
Am I getting what?!
Link to my statistics for this Preseason in Storm League:
http://prntscr.com/nvflsk
Solo is a nightmare, 2 Stack and 3 Stack is strong, 4 Stack and 5 Stack is good only if you can coordinate (and we didn't).
So this shitty human being downvote the op due to opinion differences? Its obviously common sense that if you queue with 5 man premade you will have a better team. Ok, so you want to solo queue and still het a good team? Thats doable, except sometimes its lower population and you will get a tiny bit unbalance rank. So whats your new solution? While blizzard is trying to fix the problem of some players quitting the game forever, you can go ahead and keep your job as being a little whiny pussy and do nothing about it. Ohhhh i demand balance immediately, and i wil ldo nothing about it. I dont like random human being when i am one myself so i will solo queue and be anti social and continue to blame the system. Not everyone experients the same situation as you, in fact you might be one of the loud mouth minority. Its totally fine, but do something about it because blizzard has heard of this same line a thousand or potentially a million times before and they are for sure working on it. Lower game pop doesn’t help and we all know it. Some people are social while some little pussy are not and it’s totally fine.
You would be surprised how much common sense if rife with misconceptions, the only 5 stacks that have any kind of advantage are the one that are actual teams, and have been playing together for a long time. And its obvious that those players dont just get a free ride to GM or else there would be no GM players that play outside of 5stacks... Blizzard showed us the stats and it was clear that on average 5stacks dont win any more than solo q players.
Premade against premade, good!
Agreed. I don't believe in premade giving advantage in most cases. I know for sure it hasn't benefited me. Majority of the time when premades are getting imbalanced stats, it's because someone in their team is already at too low MMR. That can be caused by this new season; a lot of master+ players are still stuck in plat-dia due to not playing enough. It could also be due to using smurfs which is too common still. Smurfing is definitely bigger issue than premades in general.
Well, I guess we all have very different experiences about this matter, then. For example I was having a freefall while playing solo: got demoted to fuckin plat3 (started in D5 after placements, used to be masters in hl prior shitstorm league every season), I wasn't more than a random nobody to stomp on for them premades. Couldn't fuckin win games. Felt impossible.
Since then I have found 3 dudes to play with, and I'm back to D2 already, and we can't stop winning games. It feels extremely easy, too. Premade gives one huge advantage over randoms which seems to be underestimated here heavily: you party up with reliable people means that you gonna have at least a decent teamcomp every single game, in fact godcomp most of the time.
While the random monkeys gonna pick totally random heroes with zero synergy on top of doing random shit all game long.
IMO, premade=easy mode of hots, playing solo=asking for a beating/offering up points for charity
Variance is a bitch too. I soloQ'd it all, started dia2 (6-4, 2-0 start yay placements), was at plat2 after 240 games. Started to think that maybe there's something to it about soloQ being hard now, as I hadn't fallen to plat2 before. Then remembered that Malthael works for me and made it to master after 330 games. For comparison, last season 250 games played I hovered in dia1-4 range for those games. I may have dropped lower but I did also reach slightly higher, so I still can't feel that it's unfair. You just have to play so many games to really tell what your average MMR is like.
Thats funny, because whenever I play with my friends, I immediately plummet down ranks because they're not quite on the same level of play as I am/am normally matched with. Maybe you're experiencing the opposite?
In my opinion it really matters on the premade. I have had 2 groups I play with alot. My first one was before death of HGC and we played together for years and we got to know how each person played and followed up on things without and talking. The group I play now with now have probably play less then a 100 games with them and i keep doing things and getting no follow up because they dont expect it and it leads to a worse performance.
we get unfair matches with premades too, the game cant guess if im a good or bad master player or if my friends are actual golds/silvers so its impossible to get 5 "fair" enemies to get matched against, sometimes we get matched against the juicy pirates/wombo comps, sometimes we get matched against casuals
if you think smurfing is bad, why you think that boosting friends is ok?
I'm not saying boosting friends is okay, but playing as 5 is good, and that's not really boosting IMO.
Boosting is more like, you smurf and play with friends so you can boost them by getting easier matches overall.
I know the line might seem shallow, but trust me, silver player playing with a master is still silver-ish... Unless he is smurfing, and with the new matchmaking rules where lower ranks are ignored in 5 stacks, you don't get easier matches and you can't simply boost as hard as before.
you dont need to smurf to play with low level friends now and i played with golds and plat last week on my main, and i dont need to trust you, their micro game or awareness is still strash but you can win without it if you draft better or have better macro than you enemies, hell even a shotcaller is the only thing you need to win in hots, being able to kill out position players, call mias, prep camps are thing that most players dont do in ranked when they play randoms and your 5 man can do to win, my score was 7-1 and 6 of them were easy wins because teammwork
new matchmaking rules are good on paper but most of the times "the higher mmr players" dont exist or they are offline or they are playing with their own stack too so when it goes to fill a team the system does what it can
in the end it doesnt matter too much because we find a lot of self boosteds before the SL changes, but it bothers me that now i may be facing a 4/5 stacked team alone with a know feeder/1 trick/boosted player because they game couldnt find better players
Playing against a premade team can often be unfair and it feels frustrating, but at the same time HotS is a team based game. Me and my friends have mostly come to the conclusion that ranked doesn't make much sense if you play solo. Playing in a premade team is just such a huge advantage that we all just wait till we have a premade team and queue only then.
What I feel should be done though is adjust the skill difference between premade VS non premade teams. IIRC Blizzard mentioned that if a 5 premade faces 5 solo players, those solo players on average will be better than individual players from premade team which should help mitigate the skill difference. I just feel like this offset isn't currently enough, because teamwork truly wins games and right now a 5 premade team has the advantage most of the time.
Smurfs are the main problem IMO. It's incredibly frustrating to play against a player that obviously is way higher than your rank and quite simply outplays you. It can really ruin the climbing experience to the point where I started to feel like it doesn't matter what I do and whether I win or lose the next game depends on a coin toss: will my team get the smurf, or will the smurf be on the enemy team. It's really frustrating.
The 1 thing I'd like to add to the issues are placements. I quite often feel like I'm playing with people who don't belong in their rank, that they're either too high or too low. I'm mid plat and have friends in all ranks basically. One match I play with a diamond friend and we win, next match I play with a silver friend and we lose badly. In the match with dia friend we had a "master" player on the enemy team who played very badly (if I didn't know his rank I'd say he played like silver, max gold), and in the match with silver friend where we were facing mid gold players there's suddenly a Li-Ming with 77% winrate on the enemy team and we get rekt and she just does whatever she wants.
I feel like there's an argument against what I'm saying about smurfs and bad placements and that argument is "people will eventually land in their true rank" and while this is true it takes way too much time IMO and these people will ruin thousands of games of thousands of people.
I still play the game quite a lot and I play Storm League almost exclusively, but the game can be at times very, very frustrating. I just wish Blizzard could make that experience better.
Premade: Win
Solo: Lose
Great reasoning. I'm pretty sure this is what causes global warming too. Just ruin the world while you enjoy it, right?
I made this comment on a similar thread a couple months ago:
"World of Warcraft had a great system for their 10man RBG (rated battle grounds) mmr allocations, I don't think I can completely explain it, but the jist of it was that mmr went from 0-~2800 (there was hardly ever anyone over 2400 [essentially GM level] though and it is because of this system) so if you had 9 players that had an mmr of 2200 and they picked up a 10th player that was say 800mmr... the only person on the team that would get any significant amount of reward for the win would be the lowbie player, this person would get the max amount possible (i think like 100-200 can't really remember) but the other 9 players would get either 1 point or 0 points for a win..... but here is where it gets good... if for what ever reason that team lost... the 9 2200mmr players would LOSE 100-200 points and the lowbie dude would lose 1 point maybe even 0 points.
I know this wasn't the most coherent comment I am just going off of memory from 2011-2013 but I think the overall message is solid and accurate enough."
Basically they need to make it so that who ever is playing with the Smurf gets hit really hard if they lose, and I think the psychology of this will embolden the regular player playing straight up while making the people abusing the system play under much more pressure.
nothing changed TL still a joke
They need to do this for teams:
- WIN: Take some achieved points from the higher ranked in the group and give it to the lower ranked.
- LOSS: Remove less Points from the lower ranked in the Group, but remove more from the higher ranked.
This way boosting with smurfs will get way more unattractive and risky, because you lose more points than you win. It's like the typical XP thing you have in RPGs: Beating weaker enemies shouldn't give you same XP!
(additionaly teams that play together for a long time, will get closer to each other in the long run, which is fine.)
Got Q’d w #1gm the other night that was partied with a plat. Lol
QM is even more disgusting
You can write all the paragraphs of analysis you like.
It's common sense.
Premades do not belong in a ranked game mode. Play unranked with your friends. Quit making up fake reasons to continually ruin the matchmaker's efforts.
Have you even played hots in a 5 stack with friends on comms? Personally, it is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I have ever had.
I have, and I've never felt more hollow about stomping a bunch of solo players. I've never felt so disgusted about myself, and never felt so disgusted about anyone who thinks this is anything that belongs in a proper ranked mode.
Good attempt, though.
I had a reply for you but I'm just going to report you and block you. You are just a toxic premade abuser who doesn't want to lose his free wins.
Wow now who is salty...
I have been on all sides of this discussion, I have played in five stacks where I have stomped non-5stacks, and I have played in five stacks that have been stomped by non-5stacks.
I have ALSO played solo and been queued WITH solo players and stomped known 5 stack (of diamond-GM players btw) and of course lastly I have been that solo player that gets stomped by 5 stacks... And guess what, the most important factor at play is .... OVERALL SKILL.... omg WHAT A SURPRISE!!!! Furthermore, to a lesser extent when the mmrs of each team were fairly balance it ussually came down to who played that particular game better, which is the way it should be, the only problem with 5 stacks is your own rediculous misconception.
Removing premades will save this game from dying.
Anyone who says otherwise is a selfish abuser of the system.
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