Plus new maps every so often. Since I’ve started playing HotS, they’ve released four times as many maps as DotA2 has in its entire existence.
What more is there to develop in a game like this, beyond heroes and maps?
So I assume that everyone else has noticed that there’s an XP buff for the next week and a half.
That being the case, do any of you guys still have a Gall who needs leveling up? I still need to finish leveling Cho, but I really don’t like him, so I’d been waiting for an XP buff (plus the friend XP buff, of course), so as to do it in as few games as possible.
Something is going on this week. I don’t know if it’s the end of the hero league season and people are trying to play it for some rewards, or what. But I’ve had the worst gameplay experience I’ve ever had in HOTS today and I’ve had some horrifically bad ones in the past. I’ve worked my way up to about 1500mmr and rank 29 - not great, but out of the terrible depths of where I was. But this weekend it’s like everyone around me is suddenly 1000mmr lower.
Of the 5 games in which my team had first pick, we got 2 butchers, a nova, and a chromie. Let me let you in on a little secret - whenever someone insta-locks a bad hero as first pick, and says “don’t worry guys I’m super good” they will be utterly terrible. I saw that nova miss at least 10 snipes on stationary or near-stationary targets on her first attack from stealth. The butchers did less hero damage than our healers.
The worst of it was the last one, the first pick chromie. The team ended up being chromie, li-ming, brightwing, hammer… I had last pick and so I picked muradin. It was infernal shrines and I figured the only chance we had was to protect hammer during the objectives.
And amazingly enough, it was working. I said to the team “guys, hammer is going to sit in a corner, we need to protect him, it’s our only chance”… and 4 people on the team actually listened. Chromie ran into the objective repeatedly. It was actually a pretty good situation for Chromie, we were focusing on long range sniping and protecting hammer, so he could’ve sat in the corner and lived, but instead YOLO LOLOL.
But me and that hammer actually almost carried the team. I kept everyone off him and we won the first 4 objectives despite li-ming not coming to objectives and chromie face tanking them. It was actually kind of amazing. We had the shittiest team ever and that hammer and I were going to carry the game.
After we won the 4th objective, chromie went afk. Shit. Well, the chromie bots are awful, but that chromie was bad too so not too big a loss. We were managing the bot well enough that we actually won the 6th objective (we lost the 5th one due to chromie being idle and 4v5) and it looked like we were turning it around again.
Except… a minute later, he reconnects. To AFK again. So he gets booted, and then comes back 2 minutes later to AFK again. We were winning. Our team wasn’t even being toxic at that point despite the utter failure of several of the players. But he just decided he had to keep coming back to afk. What the fuck? I looked him up in HOTSlogs, he’s 1-16 with Chromie.
The game before that - we had a terrible team comp but we were actually slightly ahead in the early game. Our rehgar said “guys, this team sucks, we’re gonna lose, just sit out and let them win” and we actually won the first 2 objectives. And rehgar was like GUYS JUST STOP YOU’RE JUST PROLONGING THIS and then played badly on purpose. Then when we started losing because our healer was deliberately sabotaging us, he basically said SEE I TOLD YOU, WHY DID YOU WASTE OUR TIME?
I don’t know what’s going on, but I had 8 games in a row that were as bad, or worse, than any stretch of games I had when I was at utterly useless scrub tier mmr. I’ve been too busy to play this game much lately and now I’m thinking maybe I should just stay away.
Isn’t there some limit on how many times you can reconnect after getting booted for inactivity? I mean, I would have thought that the limit would be either 0 or 1, but apparently not…
Tonight I had planned to try to win a few games to get my rank back into the 20s for the rest of the season. But the trend of throwing me into unwinnable games continued. I finished the season off with a 10 game losing streak. All that effort to get better and try to carry my teams and get up into a sane rank gone in two sessions by giving me 10 games we had no chance of ever winning.
My favorite, of course, is when I was vikings on garden of terror. “Okay guys, let me get the terror, it only takes me 1 out of my 3 vikings to operate, that’s one of the big advantages vikings has on this map”
So our healer was afk for the first 80 seconds or so. “LOL GUYS HAD TO RIP A BONG”
He was then useless for the next minute or so, because he typed very slowly but had to convey to us “WTF BONG IS A BANNED WORD?” “BONG” “B ONG” “WTF WHY IS BONG BANNED”
So then we get enough seeds. Of course our butcher (and every butcher in the 30s ranks are fucking terrible - every single one) hearths to steal the terror away from me. I was standing right there, too, but he clicked about a quarter second faster than me to yank it.
“WTF, why did you take that? let vikings take it”
Butcher, of course, can’t respond because he’s silenced. But someone else on the team speaks up for him:
“STFU vikings you’re not supposed to get it”
“what? the reason vikings have such a high win rate on this map is because they can use the terror with 1 guy and still use the other 2”
“no you fucking idiot, the terror power scales from the hero power, vikings would ruin it …
lol no you didn’t know that did you? look at you silent. haha. stfu idiot noob”
So when we get the next terror, I have to fucking send one of my vikings to the point ahead of time so I can steal the damn thing from my idiot teammate, who predictably also hearths back for it. I was about to click it when skype, which I have not opened for probably 2 years, suddenly decided that for some reason it needed to be open, dropped me to desktop for a moment, and by the time I got back the butcher had stolen the terror again. Because it’s not enough that blizzard has to try to give me the shittiest time possible in this game, random shitty programs I haven’t touched in 2 years have to join in on the fun at literally the worst possible time.
I think I’m done with the game. All that effort I put into grinding my way up and getting better and I’m still losing games because of people deliberately throwing games or long streaks of having the 3 worst players on my team and having no chance. Maybe the new season will make things better, but the “soft reset” nature of it makes me think I’m fucking stuck forever where I’m at.
Wait to see what the new ranked play system has to offer. Hopefully they’ll start fresh once that’s in place.
I don’t know who is and isn’t still playing, but I learned the other day that the reward structure for Team League is different than Hero League. All you have to do in Team League is finish your placement games and you earn the mount for the season - you’d have to rank up to platinum to get that in HL.
If you join the TryHeroLeague chat channel during peak hours, there are lots of folks looking to team up for placement matches.
I’m still playing nearly daily. I really want to do team league because I want that epic mount. But that’s a ton of effort.
Well I took a couple of months off the game after I got fed up with all of the nonsense it was giving me.
So they did the soft reset and reset the confidence values on people’s MMRs, which gave them a chance to actually move them by winning. So it turns out I was right - I was being artificially kept down by a rating system basically couldn’t be budged. It took me about 300 games at a 60% win rate to take my MMR from 1100 to 1400, but once I started playing again after the soft reset I very quickly moved up past 2000 MMR. Which is where I belonged all along, but you couldn’t convince the game you belonged where you belonged. It just decided “you’re a 1200 MMR player, you’re there forever, no matter how much you improve” - their system is deeply flawed.
It’s a different game now that I’ve managed to lift myself above all the people who would do the most inexplicable things to lose constantly resulting in total frustration. Before the soft reset you basically had to start a new account if you wanted to dig yourself out of MMR hell, but at least this way I’m able to start enjoying the game again. My opponents are better, which is great - I’ve never been upset about being beaten by good players. What frustrates me is constantly losing because I was placed constantly with the horrific ones. You still get them from time to time, and you wonder how the hell they’re in the same tier as you, but it’s not 2 or 3 every game like it used to be.
I should add that it’s not like I suddenly became good. And in fact the 2-3 months I stopped playing made me rusty and a worse player. I was better when I was playing almost every day months ago. So at my skill peak I was stuck down around 1300 mmr, but now with the reset, even though I"m a little less skilled, I shot up past 2000+ mmr.
A few SDMB players completely destroyed the game last night and racked up a 9 game win streak, to be added on to the 3 games we won the day before for a 12 game total winstreak. We’ve apparently reached the point where it won’t fill our game with absolutely terrible pubs if we play as a group, and we’ve become really good without that sabotage.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was <1300 mmr, and now I’m >2300 mmr (low bronze to mid diamond), all thanks to having their matchmaking system work in brief bursts at the end of the seasons due to the soft resets.
It sounds paradoxical, but I actually think the game has become easier as I’ve gone up in MMR. In theory, if someone in in shit-tier MMR, their teammates will be terrible but so will the enemy team, so in theory a non-terrible player should make the difference and you’re at an advantage. But it seems like it figures out you’re a not terrible player at a terrible MMR and loads up you up with even more terrible teammates to balance the game and seek a 50% winrate. So the lower you are than you’re supposed to be then the more you get disproportionately bad teammates. Which then leads to losses that keeps you at that rating that’s lower than you should be.
When you finally get a chance to break free of that through mmr resets, and you’re suddenly where you should be, then you start getting competant teammates that don’t seem to be disproportionately bad, and you play an appropriate game for your skill level. So even though my competition has become tougher, it has felt easier to win. Or at least that I’ve been handed fewer games that were always going to be losses no matter what I did.
… Which is a really stupid system that kept me frustrated and unfairly placed for months.
I think that it might just be that the bottom tiers are wider than the upper ones. If you’re a brand new player with poor hand-eye coordination, but who’s trying to win, then of course you’re going to be in the bottom tier… but then, so is the guy who knows the game but who is actively trying to grief, and a team with the former will beat a team with the latter every time. You probably did win some games due to opponents actively throwing the game, too, but those aren’t nearly as noticeable from your point of view (both because of selective memory, and because you can’t see the idiocy of the game-thrower as it’s happening).
Added 3 games to our winstreak today. I’m 33-6 over my last 39 games.
We were matched up against the best team I’ve ever played against. I was hammer and they had zeratul, li ming, and chromie - and they were just simultaneously landing sand blast/orb/missiles on me while zeratul was waiting behind me to strike. Just mercilessly harassing me. I was forced to run around without siege mode most of the time just using the basic autoattack just to stay alive, trying to sneak off to a corner to split push and siege bases. Undoubedly the best team I ever played against, just super coordinated. And yet we managed to pull it out. So I feel pretty good about where we’re at. We actually beat the best team I’ve ever seen.
I’m now diamond on QM according to hotslogs. From being stuck in bronze for hundreds of games, then a fair chance at establishing a MMR, then I shoot straight up to diamond. 2350 MMR. And obviously I can hang here, on account of the 33-6 record against diamond/platinum opponents.
So does anyone know if the quest system tries to give you quests to go with the heroes you’ve been playing? I’ve been on an all-Abathur-all-the-time kick and it seems like all of my quests are either generic (play 8/win 3), Starcraft, or Specialist quests.
I don’t think so, but I’ve been getting a ton of “play 8” quests. I am not complaining even a little.
I’m almost certain that the quests are just random. Most of my favorite heroes are specialists, but my amount played for the other three roles is about what you’d expect for playing them whenever their quest comes up. And despite over half the heroes in the game being Warcraft, the three franchises seem to come up about equally often.
So two more weeks and still nothing but play 8, win 3, starcraft, and specialist. I think they must key it toward your favorite heroes.
Having thought about it, this is a really bad idea. The reward structure. They’re floating this to test to see if a high priced arena format like this could be viable in the future. But they chose a reward structure that’s going to leave about 95% of players unsatisfied. Just inherently. For anyone to make 8+ win runs, that means that a whole lot of other people have to have 0-2 win runs. But even if average players can manage to hit 3-4 wins (unlikely), they’re not even coming close to breaking even on their investment. Only a few percentage of players will actually get rewards worth what they put in.
But the thing is… the rewards aren’t cash or physical merchandise. Blizzard is giving them virtual rewards that cost nothing. So why be so incredibly stingy with them? They could double or triple all the rewards and lose nothing, and make people happy with their result.
Or, to put it another way, if someone spends $10 in cash and buys $10 worth of card packs, Blizzard wins, right? I mean, that’s their whole business model. So why not give the average result (3 wins), which by definition is what the average player will hit, $10 worth of rewards? That way no one feels ripped off, and Blizzard is basically giving everyone an alternate route to give them $10 for $10 worth of in game rewards.
Woops, that was meant for the hearthstone thread.
OK, thanks, I was getting really confused there.
Samuro has broken the game as much or possibly more than any other hero. Xul technically had a higher winrate after a few days when he was first released, but he wasn’t quite as annoying to fight against.
It seemed pretty obvious to me and pretty much everyone that his combination of abilities was going to be overpowered.
I don’t understand how Blizzard can’t nail hero balanace. They can test them all they want (and they apparently don’t), they can’t recruit the community to help test them via the PTR (which they explicitly say they will not gather any balance data for), and they release about 90% of their new heroes either drastically underpowered or overpowered. The last time they got it about right on launch was Dehaka.