Interesting. For my playstyle (which is admittedly only tested against bots), Wailing Arrow is actually useless, because if there are enough enemy heroes present to make it worthwhile, it means that I’m neglecting my main role. In my games, team-fights are either 4 on 5 with my team winning anyway due to having a several-level advantage, or 4 on 4 or 3 due to the enemy team having to divert heroes to deal with an advancing army. I guess humans are just better at picking off an opposing solo Sylvanas before she can steamroll an entire lane.
I honestly can’t remember a game where Sylvanas was that effective of a split pusher. Yeah, she’s good early game and she’s amazing when she’s pushing with you. but I she isn’t that great at getting a level advantage (unlike Abathur or TLV).
Plus, Wailing Arrow is so very good in a teamfight. A properly timed silence can change the entire game.
I’m on the vast majority of night. We should play QM together.
Sylvanus isn’t a great split pusher because she has to be in the lane to do her job, even when she has the pushing ult. Azmodan, Abathur, and TLV all have the ability to influence multiple lanes at once, forcing the enemy team to put out multiple fires at one time.
If you’re past level 10 and pushing by yourself, either you’re going to get ganked (because you’re out of position) or your team is going to get into a 4v5 fight and lose (because you’re out of position).
Yeah, I can see how a well-played Vikings could be the ultimate for XP advantage. I just can’t play them well, because it feels like the control scheme just doesn’t work right for them. And it doesn’t feel like they do much besides XP advantage.
And while Wailing Arrow is obviously great if you can get it off in a teamfight, it just feels misplaced on Syl. She’s got almost nothing else for fighting against other heroes, without the damage of an assassin or the durability of a warrior. The talents to slow heroes and to make enemies vulnerable are useful, of course, but don’t come online until levels 13 and 16.
I have done a few successful split pushes as Sylvanas, but mostly on Battlefield of Eternity, and even then only if my team has enough of an advantage that they don’t need me.
My favorite team to play with my friend though is “team push” which is Sylvanas+Azomodan/Gazlowe, which melts lanes. It’s not the most effective team, but it’s fun. (I only play QM, though)
The Lost Vikings actually has the highest consistent win rate of any hero in ranked (I say consistent to exclude imbalanced newly released/rebalanced heroes which generally drop off after a few patches). Higher level ranked players are very good at shutting down split vikings, but they can still get enough of an EXP boost to be worth it. The XP lead is actually huge in this game. Especially since there are no items or last hit mechanics. (Also, don’t underestimate them in a teamfight)
Sylvanas is generally played as an assassin that can kind of push. She’s basically the Tyrande of specialists (where Tyrande is basically an assassin that heals). When I play her it’s not uncommon for me to top both hero and siege unless there’s a hyper-specialized hero with me (like a Kael without a counter or an Azmodan).
Speaking of which, my 4-man premade the other night fought the literal worst 5-man premade. It was a vikings comp and I called out their strat after I got ganked top a few times, as well as a few other ganks in other lanes. The strategy was they only soaked with vikings and went roaming as a 4-man. We actually won, but I think it was largely because we called their strategy and explicitly countered it. For instance, I was using Brightwing’s map presence to soak because I could be all the way across the map on Sky Temple and then in a teamfight as soon as it was starting.
Hm, I’ve often wondered about that strategy. Though Brightwing (and maybe Falstad, Abathur, and a few other highly-mobile heroes) would be especially well-suited to counter it. Zip over to their isolated vikings, and kill them one by one.
There should be a rapid, automatic ban system for the reporting system, otherwise it feels toothless. I started game, and there was a guy in it who was silenced, who just fed. Ran right into the towers and died over and over. 3 games later, I got the same guy on my team, he did the same thing. That means for at least like an hour and a half or two hours, the guy did nothing but wreck other people’s games. Surely a bunch of people reported him for feeding. If 16 independent people report you for feed in the span of 4 games, why wouldn’t it automatically ban you, or at least suspend you for a week?
I managed to actually bottom out in rank 40 in hero league, which is pathetic. I was working my way up, got up to level 36, and then on game 1 I got the feeder guy, on game 4 I got the feeder guy again, and on game 5 I got a guy who was AFK for the first 4 minutes of the match and his bot couldn’t keep up so we lost that one too. 3/5 games where someone on my team intentionally lost. So now I’m in a hole again, through no fault of my own.
That’s never going to be implemented because every toxic player is also toxic when it comes to putting in false reports.
DOTA does have a system where getting a certain number of reports puts you into a low-priority pool for a certain number of matches, which means your wait times go up drastically and you only get matched with other people who are in the “shit queue.”
Each player also has a limited number of reports (limiting false report potential), though I don’t recall how often they refresh. Also, every now and then you log into the game and get a message that says something like, “we have taken action against a player you previously reported, thank you for contributing to the community,” which is really satisfying.
I don’t know if Blizzard feels that they don’t have the playerbase to support a low-priority pool or what, but I agree that they need to do something to automate punishments for behavior other than abusive chat. I know that League of Legends has some kind of ‘player tribunal’ where trusted player volunteers look over game logs to mete out administrative punishment, but I’m not sure I can picture a huge company like Blizzard doing that.
In other news, the new HL draft system is awesome. Sure, it’s pretty much Li Ming and Xul getting banned every time, but the second round of bans are usually a bit more interesting. It’s also lead to more chatting during the draft process, which leads to a more cohesive team overall.
They’d have the reporting data for everyone, so they could easily compensate for that. I’m not saying “ban everyone after they receive X reports”, but rather a more sophisticated model that weighted reports. If a guy reports all his teammates 75% of the time, you can safely throw away all of his reports. But on the other hand, if you have a guy who only reports less than 1% of his teammates, you could assume his reports - if they correlated with other reports - were pretty meaningful. Since they’d have a large, independent sample size of reports as well as the individual reporting history of both the people doing the reporting and being reported, it would be fairly easy to create a robust system that punished legitimate offenders.
You wouldn’t have to go straight to bans. Maybe a shit tier queue would be okay (although HOTS doesn’t have the numbers LoL/dota do as far as having different queues), or even just 24/72 hour bans to get the attention of offenders. I do like the idea of toxic queues where all the toxic players get matched together, but I’m not sure what the HOTS player base is like. DOTA 2 peaks around a million people and LoL peaks somewhere around 3-4m. What does HOTS do?
Blizzard has been completely opaque about it. I think the only concrete number they ever released was that 11 million players signed up for the beta which, of course, means nothing.
So since bans came out, the player with the highest MMR on your team gets to pick bans.
I’ve played 8 games. In 3 of them, I’ve been the highest rated player. I’m hovering between ranks 36-40 - the lowest you can go in the game. And yet in these 3 games where I’ve been the top MMR, I’ve played with people who were as high as rank 28 (when I was 38), and when I do have the highest MMR I am usually the lowest ranked member on the team.
How does this make sense? Now rank doesn’t tie exactly to MMR. They say their ranks are roughly meant to tell you where you stand amongst ranked players, with each rank representing 2% of the population, but I’m not sure that’s actually true, especially since you can’t fall in rank between 40 and 50. But MMR should roughly correlate with rank - since it should place you in an MMR that gets you a 50% winrate, you should stabilize against other people of a similar MMR/rank once you’ve found your right place.
Obviously ranks can’t be analogous to MMR divisions (like bronze/silver/etc in starcraft), because it doesn’t make sense for the guys who I beat in MMR to be 10 ranks higher than me.
If I’m in freefall, and the game thinks I’m utter shit, and I’m hovering around the lowest rank, why is it putting me into teams where I’m the best player? I have a 41% win rate, and yet it’s giving me 4 teammates who are lower than me. And how are these teammates who are lower than me in MMR significantly better in terms of ranks (and therefore win rates)?
There seems to be some weird systematic bias trying to keep me at a 40% win rate, so that my rank is artificially depressed and I have a higher MMR than people 10 ranks higher than me.
My understanding of the most accepted working theory is that the game tries to push you towards your hidden “true” (not hotslogs) MMR. So if you get placed at rank 35 but your hidden MMR thinks you should be around rank 29, you’ll get more points per win. If the game thinks you’re in the right place, it only awards around 100 points for a win (same as a loss). But a player who is smurfing, or who has had a lucky run, or who is just relatively newly ranked, can have a much higher rank than MMR. Especially around our shitty ranks.
When you get into a HL match with somebody ranked way higher than you, it’s usually because the system is trying to normalize out other factors. For example, I’m currently rank 33. I often queue with a buddy who is ranked 16. That means that when we go in together, we usually end up in matches with three other guys in the mid 20s. The game doesn’t seem to care so much about individual numbers, but about getting the overall rank/MMR of each team even.
Next time you end up in a match with a player ranked significantly higher than you, look to see if he’s grouped with somebody else. That’s often the reason why.
Interesting time to have this conversation, as this article just came out yesterday: Can a video game company tame toxic behaviour?
Played with Rand and a couple of other guys today. We decided to do an all specialist team just for the hell of it. Had Murky, Abathur, Gazlowe and Xul - the other person it paired us with ended up being Lili. We faced Li-Ming, Xul, Valla, Lunara, and Lili.
That composition should’ve beat us easily. And we got the worst map for our novelty comp - towers of doom.
And yet somehow we totally crushed them, up 3 levels most of the game, kills were 33-9, just utter domination. One of the weirdest games I’ve ever seen.
Huh, weird. My favorite characters are all specialists, and I hate Towers of Doom for just that reason. The only way to win by pushing is to control all six towers, which requires you to be much better than the other team (in case you didn’t know, controlling all six gives you one free shot every second or so).
Speaking of which, you know what I’d like to see, now that there are 11 maps in the game? Map vetoes. Every player can choose one map to veto, and the map is chosen from among those that nobody has vetoed (you need 11 maps in the game to make this work, just in case of the unlikely event that everyone chooses a different one). Then, they can track if any one map is getting the lion’s share of the vetoes, and use that to guide development of future maps, and maybe rotate out that one once they release another. If they had this, I would totally veto Towers.
I think I’m done with Hero League. I completed my placement matches matches and was placed into rank 6. I honestly can’t see me getting higher and I don’t want to lose it. Silly, I know. But still…
Well, there’s only really 9 right now, since Lost Cavern (the one-lane map for ARAMs) and Haunted Mines aren’t in rotation.
Obviously, if they implemented the idea, they’d put them back into rotation. Though I didn’t know Lost Cavern wasn’t actually in rotation: That would explain why it hasn’t yet come up for me.
And what are ARAMs?
All Random All Mid. Basically a huge teamfight in mid, all the time.
They should’ve made a separate queue for it so people could play it just as a novelty mode. As it is, you can only use it as a custom game with friends - so you need 9 other people with you to play it, which obviously isn’t terribly easy. It would’ve made a fun blowing off steam mode if they’d let people queue.