Just wanted to say as a catch-all - thanks for the support in this thread.
For what it's worth, (and some perspective) on some of the Reddit hate in general. I generally do my best on stream not to really flame people/get into chat wars/whatever. But for whatever reason, talking about things that lose games (ie: horrible draft picks) is apparently a mortal sin in the eyes of many. For reference on why the above is frustrating - I play Heroes over 12 hours a day most days. When you've played that many games, you tend to internalize a lot of statistics based on your game experience. In general, you don't need to look at competition or look at exact win rates to get the feeling that someone's first pick Sonya is going to lead to a miserable 25 minutes coming up. Especially when a higher internal MMR guarantees that the deck is likely stacked against you to begin with in most games as well.
The Heroes matchmaker has gotten progressively worse and worse as time has gone on. Heroes went from being one of the most entertaining and fun solo Q experiences ever (pre-July 1st) of last year, to something that resembles a form of illegal CIA torture in the most recent patch. Blizzard has seemingly had a drive to reduce queue times to make quicker games, but the players suffer more and more every time they lax the requirements. It's absolutely terrible, and sucks a lot of the fun out of the game. The aforementioned pre-july1st 2014 matchmaking would make you wait as long as 20 minutes for a game - but the games were GOOD. The current matchmaking often times doesn't wait more than 30 seconds at times, and the results speak for themselves.
So I guess a comment stream wise, all of the above gets pretty trying. I'm definitely not a saint, and the part of me that's still extremely competitive (and thus wants to look good) absolutely gets frustrated at both the matchmaker and when people yolo picks that torpedo your chances to win. You feel it more when streaming since Heroes simply isn't a game you get to look very good in when your team is bad. If your team is getting crushed, there's not a whole lot you can do on an individual level to still look good during the game. It sucks, but it's how the game is.
Unless things change dramatically for the better (and soon), I'm almost certainly going to be shifting all of my stream time to Overwatch when it comes out. An FPS game is way less stressful and frustrating to stream, because if nothing else it's possible to still look good and make great plays even if you get a bad team. That's not possible in Heroes right now, and the matchmaker screwing you over with increasingly high levels of consistency just drains the fun out of the game.
Kind of unfortunate really. Heroes is a great game when everyone is serious and on the same page, but the pub environment feels almost unsalvagable at this point.
u wot m8. ZPs on GAF? Milly79 texted me to give the bat signal. He then had to change his pants. I'm sorry for that.
While clearly most of us here are not at your level MMR/skill wise, the argument you put forth made sense. I've yet to see any rank ones and the ones I saw posted in your reddit thread and otherwise have all been from an MMR that a lot of us are already at. While watching Dread, chu8, yourself and others, however, the minuscule point gains against huge losses is kind of puzzling.
RE: a bad game in HOTS makes pretty much everyone appear bad, I agree. That is a downside on so many levels in this game. One bad player can torpedo a game even if the other 4 on his team are more skilled and cohesive than the entire other team far more easily than one good player can influence a win. For streaming, going on the runs or rubberbanding that seems common at times in this game - 3-5 game winning or losing streaks - has to be pretty infuriating when Twitch chat is spamming constantly about you being a shitter when you weren't the one who fed 4 times before level 10.
I think you did the best you could do. You took and are taking some hits for the reddit post and on stream comments, but frankly someone had to be that guy. It would have helped if some of the other more prominent figures had piped in with the same, IMO, but at least it's front page and we know they saw it.
As for you streaming, hopefully it turns around. If not, I'm sure a good portion of us will catch you sometimes in Overwatch too as the one constant about Blizzard games is a lot of overlap in the audience. I'm certainly looking forward to it.
guys pls, act like you've been there before
I'm pretty sure it's tongue in cheek, lol. At least from Milly79 it is, though he does actually watch ZPs regularly.
I can't help but wonder if ZPs' problem is something only the extremely high MMR players deal with. I'm around 3400 MMR in QM playing entirely solo queueing. I started playing November 2014 (so, after the pre-July 2014 glory days of matchh-making) and have never really felt like match-making is a problem. It seems like I win the majority of games and rarely have allies that are completely senseless. If I get stuck with someone that seems to not know what they're doing, it seems like I can consistently guide them to be more effective by simply communicating a strategy in team chat..
It is mainly a problem of those with absurdly high MMR or a low MMR (or what would actually be the "average" MMR). Those of us in the middle - probably high Platinum to low Master - have a far better experience on the average when it comes to encountering AFKing, trolling, and braindead play versus what we would actually see if we played only people in our MMR range. Higher MMR players end up playing with folks like us due to the 6 minute rule, which sucks for them because we appear braindead and react much slower in comparison. Lower level players are in an endless cycle with each other and it feels like you're trying to throw a beach ball into a coke can when you attempt to make headway.
I feel like part of that is due to us establishing our MMR before the influx of new players in each expansion of the playerbase from beta to launch.
When I look at Dice on hotdogs for example I see his MMR and if it's even halfway accurate can clearly see why he posts the things he does. I have an alt account firmly in the middle of that as well. It's a cesspool. Undoubtedly he's probably right that he does deserve better and higher MMR, but the game is not designed to carry so once you get 100-200 games in it takes a hell of a lot of persistence and patience (unless you can latch onto a group) to climb your way out.
When I play my games on my other accounts though I rarely experience any of that. Even when we get the outlier silver league or bronze player and it costs us a game it's not as huge a deal because it's rare instead of common.
The game definitely penalizes you hard in both modes for doing poorly early and now apparently penalizes you hard for doing too well as well.
