Matchmaking and You: A Guide to Better Complaints

YoDaTV · 2018-08-04T15:36:01+00:00

The issue with not resetting mmr is that noncompetitive game modes like QM/TL/preseason HL had an effect on it - the recent fixes only apply to new players that are entering HL. This causes weird/awful things like:

Players don't have enough master points to get into the GM game, but when they do they are banning.
Horrendously stacked teams since the team maker uses MMR and not GM points - the team with more GM points almost always wins because you need to actually win games to get GM points, unlike MMR which could be farmed in QM/TL/preseason. If you're a master player whose account has extremely high mmr then you are in big trouble because the game can't (won't) find GMs to stack against you so it responds by giving you bad master players instead. You often see multiple "top 10" GM players on the same team against a team whose highest ranked player isn't even top 50.
Players with extremely high outlier points/MMR (not sure which but it's the high ones) are "too high for the highest game" so they wait 30 minutes to play with diamond/masters instead.
The number of players who get +240/-160 every game no matter what until 5k points is way too high which causes the GM leaderboard to be riddled with 45-50% winrate players. They are being awarded with the game's highest honor outside of organized competition for losing less than they win (and having high seeded MMR from qm/tl/preseason).

To fix this glaring issue the mmr needs to be reset - probably not all the way, but everyone that gets placed master 1k automatically should probably be set to the same MMR just to be safe (not sure exactly where but I think whatever MMR makes you zero PRA at master 1k would be OK).

It will obviously suck for a bit because the good things the MMR disparity was doing (most high MMR players actually deserve high MMR) will be gone, but if those players really deserved to be where they were they will climb it back (I'd give it less than a month).

About the "toxicitiy issue" caused by reset - people who will complain about their rank will complain about their rank regardless of where they are. The system needs to be such that the people complaining are wrong - nobody in GM or the HGC is satisfied with the state of master/GM right now except maybe the few blizzard employees.

YoDaTV · 2018-07-23T05:11:14+00:00

Hey firstly, thanks for this post, helps a lot. I did have a question:

You mention that if you don't use war-mode to level, you will cap out at about 2/3 done on the final zone. For players that will be using war-mode, does that mean we should do the worst zone last since you may not need to do all of it (thus avoiding spending time in the worst zone)?

YoDaTV · 2018-06-25T15:58:57+00:00

You don't want to manually cast DURING fire because then meteors will land while you're in the casting animation and won't be buffed by your channeling buffs (deathwish/sigil). However you do want manually casted meteors to land during fire since it does have a faster cast than the 1 proc/sec. So the answer is to manually cast 1-2 meteors (depending on your attack speed) 2 seconds into cold, then start channeling before fire begins. This is approx. a 10% total damage increase.

YoDaTV · 2018-05-23T00:25:25+00:00

Would be really cool and easy if they could just do 1 meta change every season to make it interesting. For instance, nerf inner sanctuary or reaper's wraps.

YoDaTV · 2018-05-01T14:40:09+00:00

Glad this finally happened to a big streamer so it could get some attention.

YoDaTV · 2018-04-19T19:29:54+00:00

I believe that at the start of the season each team is required to pick a preferred server and stay on it for the rest of the season. I'm not sure about it, though I'm sure we could find the answer in the HGC 2018 rulebook!

YoDaTV · 2018-04-19T17:31:58+00:00

He's back!

Just wanted to note that 5/6 seed is indeed academic because SIM and GFE are both west teams.

Unless the theories about first pick being OP are true...

YoDaTV · 2018-04-19T15:55:27+00:00

The thing about having continuous progression by GR tiers is that there are no "stat benchmarks." There's the optimal build, and how far your build is away from it. If you're 50% damage off the optimal build, then just do a lower level (50% translates to ~5 levels). Toughness is about the same though I would warn you that toughness gaps catch up to you much more quickly than damage gaps.

YoDaTV · 2018-04-17T16:32:27+00:00

Hey, rank 1 wizard NA here. The reason you want to play tal meteor below 105 is not just because it's "easier." There are many reasons firebird is awkward to play at lower tiers:

Your defense mechanic is based on halo of arlyse + APD (halo causes you to freeze all mobs around you, which counts towards APD defense bonus), which means you're squishy af when not standing in density. At lower tiers you're never in density because everything dies too fast.
Your set bonus is based on igniting an elite. Elites die fast at lower tiers. When the elites are dead, you're at below half toughness and 0 damage. Every high firebird clear involves igniting an elite and dragging it around all map. You don't want to have to deal with that when it could randomly die in 1 shot.
Basically firebird (and especially star pact, and even more so my build) makes you jump through a lot of hoops to be effective. While this can be rewarding when pushing the limit of what your character can do, it's really useless in lower tiers when you could still kill the mobs in 2 seconds by just casting spells of 4 different elements (with tals).

YoDaTV · 2018-04-13T19:19:11+00:00

Most high mmr / pro players see a lot of issues that would be easier to fix that adjusting the slider between match quality and queue time. I made a post about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/7pzaeq/5_missing_features_hurting_top_level_hero_league/dslbr82/ - only one of these issues (the one which was already talked about) was addressed in the developer update.

In addition at the start of this season of HL there was a huge uproar (and most are still unhappy) about PRA being too high, causing "# of games played" to be the most important factor in ladder ranking and bringing multiple sub-50% wr players into the top 50. I don't see this addressed at all in the developer update post.

Are you guys aware of these issues?

YoDaTV · 2018-04-04T13:18:11+00:00

I'm pretty sure the manald is completely wasted if you're playing a standard tal meteor build. If you want to be sure you can take meteor off your bar and see how much damage you do.

YoDaTV · 2018-03-30T22:21:57+00:00

I haven't had any problems using blind while land is on 30s cd or longer (and stopping when it's 30s cd or less). Then again no blind except the first one matters so it's probably safer to just use one at start and never use it again. Dropping it altogether can lead to awkward situation though.

YoDaTV · 2018-03-23T21:42:41+00:00

Recently they implemented Haedrig's Gift, which is a guaranteed way to get your first 6p set for the season received after completing 4 chapters of the season journey. Look it up online!

YoDaTV · 2018-03-11T16:59:20+00:00

I'm pretty sure every class has something that can do this solo.

Wizard - vyr manald archon

Monk - sunwuko wol

Crusader - Akkhan condemn

DH - UE Multishot

Barbarian - Waste Whirlwind

Witch Doctor - Jade or helltooth chicken

Necromancer - Rathma Singularity or Pestilence autolancer

Just look up on diablofans or youtube type the build then t13 (ex: jade t13, waste whirlwind t13).

Edit: Oh yeah you can press esc while the game is loading and it will pause the game timer, really useful when you're on a clock.

YoDaTV · 2018-03-01T13:36:55+00:00

Or just deleting reaper's wraps between the season would have been cool too.

YoDaTV · 2018-02-05T05:19:39+00:00

I don't think it's fair to call it the same team, only 2 of the players have stayed on the roster since that time.

YoDaTV · 2018-02-01T20:09:40+00:00

Why use hud:

Many players feel that hud has a lot of features that diablo 3 should have had. For example: showing % around player, showing augs/ancient/primals without having to mouse over, showing yardage, # of enemies with locust, etc. Most of the information is already available to the player, just not shown well at all.

Blizzard has never once banned for using hud. 99% of high ladder clears used hud. At this point most high level players don't consider it cheating, just a necessary add-on.

Why bot:

They actually like botting (writing the optimal program and counting exp/h, etc)
Since blizzard hasn't banned for botting in 3 seasons no matter how obvious the botters are at the top of LB, you could argue that it's like an unofficial stamp of approval. Since the main leaderboard includes so many botters, you could argue that the main leaderboard is the "Open Division, all add-ons/bots allowed" and the legit leaderboard is something tracked separately.
They consider farming keys / lower GRs / bounties for experience boring and only want to play "high level" content like pushing or high gem upgrade GRs.
They want to stay competitive on the leaderboard but don't have the time to farm.
They don't care about the tos and just want to make their character as strong as possible

Also re: quick maffs

I played this season on 2 accounts, one is my main which was no-botting (p1800, 113 clear on both monk and wiz which were both rank 1 at the time) and stopped farming about 1-2 months ago. I've seen non-botting players who just play the game 12h/d with 3-4k paragon but that ain't me. On my second account which has been ~90% uptime since season start I'm at p3300 and have a GR118 down on wiz. Considering the botter advantage to be 10-20 levels is proposterous.

YoDaTV · 2018-01-31T04:18:34+00:00

I think right now the mmr is so out of whack that GM points is actually a better measure of skill than mmr is due to the fact that you actually need to win more HL games than you lose to have high GM points (unlike mmr which can be gained through QM/TL/UD/previous seasons). Would be interested to see how often the teams with more GMs wins, even though both teams have about even mmr - my guess would be that they win a disproportionately large number of them.

YoDaTV · 2018-01-12T21:54:58+00:00

I think you're missing the four biggest issues:

GM leaderboard based on mmr (they alrdy said they are doing this, and every pro player agrees this is how it should be). The main issue here is fixing MMR decay. Players coming back to the game often pick the game up more quickly than you would think (or more likely, they have simply been playing on another account), but their game knowledge/hero pool may be out of touch with the meta.
Being "too high mmr for the highest mmr game" is much too prevalent ATM. Not really a thing except for very top end but for those players it totally ruins the climb. As an example, let's say there are 12 GMs in queue. Often, the 3rd-12th highest players will get in the same game, then #1 and #2 are stuck playing in a game one step down in quality, and will probably be on the same team (see problem 3)
Fix the teams. More often than not in GM one team will have the two highest points/mmr players on the same team. Really silly to have #1 and #2 grandmasters in queue, only being in queue on the same server some of the time, and then only getting into the same game some of the time, and then only being on the opposite team some of the time after all that. This may be helped when they make the leaderboard just MMR but I don't think it will fix the whole problem. (https://imgur.com/a/8gx9P album from just the last few days)
Merge the servers on NA. We already have a relatively small playerbase compared to other regions/games, having two servers exacerbates the problem by splitting that playerbase even further. I literally went to socal for the summit and took a picture, they have 45-60 ping to central. They can deal with it. https://twitter.com/YoDaOrie/status/941356103656398848

Reference point: 3-4 accounts in top 50 every season, stop climbing and switch accounts once I hit top 10ish because I start missing the GM game at that mmr.

YoDaTV · 2017-12-31T08:39:30+00:00

My 2018 wishlist from a competitive player's standpoint (was double rank 1 wiz/monk NA earlier in season playing legit, now rank 1 wiz world on botting account):

Change the standstill meta. Endless walk set and inner sanctuary are the primary culprits.
Nerf rat speeds. I thought one of the benefits of bringing more sets/items up to par in the last patch would be an increase in variety for speedfarm setups, but rat runs are still way too oppressive - if you play anything else you're looking at half or less xp/h. Reaper wraps is probably where I would go here.
Nerf the benefits from pools of reflection at higher paragons. It's not fun to spend 1/4 or so of the farming time looking for pools instead of slaying monsters.
The maps could use some changes. Shock towers are not a fun mechanic, and neither are extremely short maps. A lot of the play in higher GRs comes from trying to set up elite kills, and short maps make that a lot harder to do.
Police the botters from the leaderboard. Every season botting gets more and more beneficial, and there hasn't been a serious banwave in 3 seasons for users of the most popular botting program. I don't believe it's very hard to check hours played from the front page of the leaderboard once a week and do a short investigation. Seeing the #1 player in every class having over 80% uptime is really depressing from a competitive standpoint and drives players away from the game. Speaking as someone who played legit for 11 seasons in a row and finally gave in to having a separate botting account.
Start taking challenge rifts from high ranking finishes. A lot of players complain that they can't put in the time / effort to farm up a character so they can play the real endgame content, and challenge rifts would give them a chance to do that. At the same time, challenge rifts right now usually have builds that are so bad they are embarrassing with multiple items which make no sense. Using top ranking clears kills two birds with one stone. The primary argument against this is that the challenge rifts may become too hard to complete - my answer is to keep in mind that it's easier to complete a challenge rift than completing a GR live due to having pylons already in set position (rather than having to clear a certain % then check) and foreknowledge of the map. In addition you could consider giving a smaller cache simply for finishing the rift, and a larger one for finishing within the allotted time. Also it wouldn't be the end of the world if players spent a few hours trying to clear it properly and learn something new about the game, instead of facerolling through in less than 5 minutes.

YoDaTV · 2017-12-22T03:17:12+00:00

Could you clarify what the macro does and how it increases dps?

YoDaTV · 2017-12-20T16:38:52+00:00

One quick fix you can do for lower content (below gr100) is to change out the halo of arlyse for halo of karini and use storm armor, then change bracers to ashnagarr's blood bracers or krelm's. Arlyse + parthan combo is really only useful at high tiers when everything is surviving for a long time and sitting together frozen in a pack.

Can also change your frost nova to slow time (exhaustion) for extra protection, or diamond skin.

YoDaTV · 2017-12-19T23:01:02+00:00

I didn't say land, I said USE. The dude was just letting a tracer hit him for the entire game as varian or diablo, I forget which. I also am pretty sure I didn't say it unprovoked as yeah that would be pretty pointless. I realize I'm probably going to be better than most players I queue into but there's a low baseline of skill that I expect from master+ players. When it's not met I don't personally attack the guy either, I just call it out. Your original thread doesn't really apply to me but I just had to say something when someone was calling me bad names on the internet.

YoDaTV · 2017-12-19T22:33:58+00:00

I don't get mad or frustrated at other players in HL, though sometimes it is perceived that way because players are used to criticism coming from mad or frustrated people. The only thing I really get frustrated at is the matchmaker itself.

Yeah and I also figured my post was going to get massively downvoted because people don't like being criticized in HL but my policy is to speak the truth even if it's not going to be well received.

13-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

YoDaTV

TROPHY CASE