You should be closest to the gate as possible as Abba so you aren’t wasting your locust.
I rarely hat Heroes.
I just had the most ridiculous game on dragon shire. Last week I had a game where the first dragon didn’t come out until 12 minutes in, which seemed crazy long. I just had one where the first dragon wasn’t picked up until 23 minutes in. We were damaging the enemy team’s inner fortresses by the time we finally got him. It was the longest objective anyone in this game has ever seen.
What’s frustrating is that there were 2 or 3 times my team had a narrow opportunity to get the dragon and just fucked up stupidly. Falstead wasted his Z a couple of times to go nowhere important where he could’ve used it to go to the middle, and once when we killed most of the enemy team, the other people on my team half-capped bottom and then just started moving on and laning without fully capping it. We had someone left in position to take it, and the enemy team was on the run - they just decided DERP IT’S HALF CAPPED GOOD ENOUGH LATERS.
We won, so it goes down as silly rather than frustrating.
OK, I appreciate the advice on playing Abby (though it won’t be of much use to me long-term, since I’d already decided I’m not too fond of him), but that still doesn’t answer the question: Why am I getting warned for inactivity at a stage of the game when everyone is inactive?
If several people on your team report you AFK, that will start a timer that will force you to take action. I don’t know why they would be doing so, or if that’s the reason, but that seems like the most likely cause.
AFK just means not moving or using actions. If you’re sitting in one place and looking around the map, you’re going to get AFK warnings. Even as Abathur.
So, again, keep dropping mines until it’s time to hat somebody. 
AI probably has different rules.
Obviously the bots weren’t reporting me AFK. I guess just not moving does it, because I was dropping mines. Ah, well, it’s not like I actually got kicked, and what’s one more weird edge case when you’re playing Abathur?
That’s weird. My abathur is level 9 and I’ve never gotten an AFK warning.
I tried all heroes I haven’t played yet over the weekend and got all but cho and butcher up to level 5, and I can finish those guys this week. Big gold injection, now I’m sitting on 30k.
Biggest surprise of the weekend - I seem pretty good at abathur, murky, and lost vikings right off the bat. And I think I may actually buy all 3. I’ve only played 2 rounds of lost vikings, but in one game we were 220 average MMR behind the other team, and in the other 110 - so both times we were the worse team - and yet I had 2-3 the xp of the next highest player on the team, top siege damage by 2x, and comparable hero damage to my teammates and basically carried the teams by ensuring they were always 2-3 levels ahead. Two is a small sample size, but considering the vikings are the hardest heroes to play, and we were at a deficit against the other team, that’s a good start.
I’m actually enjoying all three more than any of the stronger heroes I was considering (thrall, xul, zagara) - those are all good, but they don’t fundamentally change the way the game is played, whereas the whacky heroes do.
I tried out Dehaka and enjoyed him way more than I thought I would. His kit seemed kind of boring, but I had a ton of fun with him. I will definitely be buying him when they drop his price to 10k.
I fucking hate quickmatch. Over the weekend I’ve seen people intentionally feed (15+ deaths) and when I asked them not to, they said LOL IT’S QUICKMATCH THIS IS WHAT IT’S FOR. I had several people afk in various matches, when I asked my team to report them (so we’d get a bot) one of the guys says LOL IT’S QM WHO CARES. I’ve had people AFK for at least 1 minute in 7 different games in the last 24 hours alone.
I was just playing my third match as lost vikings. We were doing really well. We killed 2 of hteir forts, they killed one of ours. We were up level 12 to 10. Kills were even between the teams. We split objectives. We were solidly ahead. No one was talking any shit or anything. Suddenly one guy says “man u guys are dipshits, I’m gonna afk” and then proceeds to do so. We quickly lose a game where we were going to win. For no reason at all. No one even did anything wrong, we were playing fine and winning.
Two games before that, I had a li ming who moved to the outer fortress at the beginning of the game and AFKed for 6 minutes. He took one action every minute or so, just to move briefly, so they didn’t get autokicked. We kept reporting and they did get auto-kicked at 6 minutes in, and then came back 5 minutes later (we were actually doing amazingly well considering we were down a player, and we were going to come back and win with the bot) and they came back and AFKed again, tanking our shot at winning.
What the fuck is wrong with people? You don’t have to be super competitive, but that’s not that. That’s deliberately sabotaging your team for no fucking reason.
Dehaka certainly isn’t how I pictured him. His drag is much harder to use effectively than Stitches’ hook, which I thought would be the closest comparison, mostly due to the shorter range (you can’t really use it once an enemy has started retreating). On the other hand, his self-healing is really good, and his z ability is great for getting where you need to be quickly. Only emerging in bushes isn’t much of a limitation, when most of the interesting spots on a map have bushes near them anyway.
I didn’t have as much time to play this weekend, so I only got Abathur to 5 and Dehaka to 4, but most of mine were already 5 before this weekend, so it won’t be long until I’ve finished the rest of them (except for ChoGall; don’t know when I’ll get around to finishing them).
And I, too, fail to understand the notion that “that’s what QM is for”: If you don’t want to play, then why play?
I really love Lost Vikings. I’m now 6-1 if you discount the game where we were winning and one of the guys deliberately AFKed to make us lose. Since vikings are a tough hero, that’s a really good start. Not only am I holding my own, but I’m usually carrying my team. I sometimes have more siege damage than everyone else combined, and almost as much experience as everyone else combined. Maybe I’ve found what I’m good at.
Unfortunately Li-Ming’s trait is completely broken in regards to the vikings (and murky too) - killing one shouldn’t reset all the abilities. Since those deaths only count for 1/4, it should only take 1/4 the cooldown off her abilities. Otherwise I have to just steer clear of her otherwise I’m a free way for her to reset her cooldowns. It’s okay, though, she’s only in about 75% of QM games.
I’m pretty good at split focus and managing multiple things at once, I’ve always been pretty decent at RTS games for that reason. I not only managed to rack up massive push/siege and XP, but they can be really useful for getting objectives done too. I had match on dragon shire where I was able to solo cap the dragon knight twice - having one of my guys at each shrine and the third one pick up the dragon knight in the middle - while my team distracted them by fighting elsewhere on the map. On Garden of Terror I was able to control the terror using only 1/3rd of my characters, getting full use out of the terror while still doing useful stuff with the other two.
I love that they get their theme song when you use the viking longship, but the other ult is just too good to pass up on. Talent wise I mostly buff up baelog because he’s a pushing machine.
You need to get a buddy who’s rank 20-25 or so and just queue with him until you get yourself back into the high 30s and out of whatever hellpit MMR you’ve gotten yourself into.
While SenorBeef has certainly got himself into a hellpit, I’m not convinced it’s due to his MMR. While people who play like he describes will necessarily have a low MMR (because intentional feeding and the like will decrease MMR), the reverse is not true: There are probably plenty of people with similarly-bad MMRs, even honestly-earned ones, who are polite and just plain bad at the game. The polite-but-just-plain-bad people should produce enough reports of the toxic players to make a pattern evident, and hence lead to the toxic players getting weeded out.
What I think more likely is that SenorBeef has instead somehow gotten himself onto a Blizzard list of toxic players. How, though, I do not know.
No, it doesn’t work that way. HotS does not have a toxic player pool, though I badly wish it did.
He’s near rank 40, and players can’t drop below 40 no matter how hard they suck. If his rank is low enough, he’s going to be stuck queuing into matches with toxic players who don’t care about winning games. All that matters is that they’re throwing games and he’s suffering for it. It’s like trying to climb out of the river Styx when all the undead dudes are clawing at your ankles.
So he needs to queue with a friend whose ranking is high enough that he’ll get placed into matches in a higher tier. If Beef is ranked at 38 and he queues with somebody at 22, he’ll get into a match with a bunch of players around 30, which is plenty high enough to be out of the pool of toxic shit he’s in. The players there still kind of suck (I speak from experience because that’s where I am), but they’re not nearly as bad as what he’s been describing.
In the recent giant balance patch, they reworked the AFK system to be more aggressive, they may have overtuned it a bit.
You’re right, in response to the stuff I was posting a few weeks ago about the terrible teammates. In this case I was talking about quickmatch and the “lol it’s quickmatch, who cares if I take a 10 minute afk in the middle of the game” attitude I’ve seen a lot. That probably gets better with better MMR of course.
I’ve actually dug myself out of the hole a little bit. I got as low as a 950 MMR and I’m back up to 1250. Got my overall winrate in QM from 45% to 48%. In HL, I got from level 40 to 33.
Unfortunately I do have a friend who’s just like you said - rank 25 or so and plays with me a lot - but I have the opposite issue with him. He won’t play HL because he thinks people take it too seriously. I hate playing QM because people won’t take it seriusly enough “lol it’s qm why try to win”. It’s unfortunate because when I do play with him I feel like I’m placed much closer to my skill level than when I play alone.
I think you’re kinda right. But the people who do have the attitude of “lol it’s qm, time to take an afk” are obviously going to be in the lower MMR in general, so I can probably escape the frequency of them by getting a higher MMR. But it’s not like I’ve got awful shit tier MMR - 1250 is below average but no totally awful.
As far as I know, HOTS doesn’t have a seperate toxic queue - you can be globally silenced, but not placed with groups of bad players. All of these “lol it’s qm” players are just normal players, as far as I can tell.
Oh, it’s definitely not too aggressive. I’ve never gotten an AFK warning except for afk-like behavior, like not issuing any commands at all for 45 seconds. And then it’s really obvious it’s giving you the warning and giving you plenty of time. I actually wish it was a lot more aggressive because I get people who hit “ready” for a QM and then AFK a LOT, missing the first minute or two of the match without getting picked.
QM really needs a thing where it asks everyone “are you here and ready?” when it pops up, because lately 30-40% of the games involve someone who’s afk at the start for at least a minute.
Yeah sorry, I’m conflating HL ranks with QM MMR, but the principal is the same. If you play with somebody who has a higher QM MMR, you’ll still get into matches with a higher average ranking and be with higher overall players, which will improve your quality of life.
For a while I was up in the platinum league, and I never saw shit like that. I’ve since fallen towards the top of the gold rankings, which is a bit worse but still okay.