Bluetracker
Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.
AMA with Heroes Developers – April 13, 2018
Greetings, Heroes!
As mentioned yesterday, we’re hosting an AMA here on r/heroesofthestorm today, April 13! The Heroes devs will begin answering questions from 10:00 a.m. PDT (19:00 CEST) until 12:00 p.m. PDT (21:00 CEST). We posted this thread a couple of hours early to give you more time to post your questions and upvote others.
We recently released a blog to share our thoughts on several hot topics in the Heroes community. We also wanted to do this AMA to give you more opportunity to ask members of the dev team about any additional questions you might have. A few specific areas we’d like to focus on today include: matchmaking, ranked play, Hero balance, and player behavior.
Attending will be:
- /u/BlizzAlan – Alan Dabiri (Game Director)
- /u/BlizzTravis – Travis McGeathy (Lead Game Designer)
- /u/BlizzCooper – Matt Cooper (Lead Content Designer)
- /u/Blizz_Joe – Joe Piepiora (Lead Systems Designer)
Please note: We’ll also be asking players from non-English speaking communities to partake in the AMA by submitting their questions to the Community Managers representing their regions. As such, you might see a few Blizzard Community Managers posting questions (in English) on behalf of their communities during the Q&A. Feel free to upvote any questions you’d like to see answered.
BlizzTravis
We’ve been discussing adding third bans since around the middle of last year. The idea to place the third ban in the mid-ban phase came from feedback from both the community and the pros. The initial requests for the third ban started coming up because there were now enough heroes in the pool that could fill similar roles that a counter-ban in the mid-ban phase was losing effectiveness. Adding an additional ban at that point would bring teeth back to mid-draft bans.
Taking a step back, the core idea is that the mid-ban is a strategic ban based on how the draft is unfolding, while the first ban is primarily a meta ban. At the highest levels of play, some strategy comes into play during the first ban phase, as HGC teams have done significant research into their opponents, but for most players, the first ban gets used to remove whatever hero tends to be on top of the meta at that moment. In higher ranks, it gets a bit more variety as it will sometimes be the hero that is on top of the meta for that battleground, but that’s not the typical situation.
That being said, sentiment shifts over time, and we’re open to revisiting this and adding the third ban as a first-ban instead. The feeling is that doing so would be mainly addressing a more short-term concern, the release of overpowered heroes, where an additional mid-ban is more interesting long-term. We’ve been watching the community response and are interested to see if folks still feel strongly about adding it as a first-ban after seeing the reasoning behind the mid-ban.
BlizzTravis
Breaking this question up a bit.
Just for completeness sake: Did you ever consider a full MMR reset with all the issues and effects coming with that?
We tend to consider everything when looking at solutions and, yes, we’ve considered what an MMR reset would mean. Man…it’s UGLY. The utopian view is that a reset would be a short period of utter chaos where everyone starts out equal and is essentially tossed into a giant thunderdome where the weak are slaughtered by the strong until everyone is sorted properly.
More realistically, it would be an extended period of utter chaos long after placements as those placement games would be almost completely arbitrary. With no starting MMR to use to match players up, it would be entirely luck-of-the-draw for team comps and where you end up after placements would come down to chance more than anything.
From there, the ranks would have to slowly sort themselves out as the GMs who ended up in silver/gold due to being matched repeatedly with teams full of bronze/silver players dominate those games where the bronze players who found themselves in platinum due to being in games filled with masters end up throwing most of their games as they slowly work their way back down the ranks. In the process, the GMs are inflating the win rate of the low rank players they’re playing with and the bronze players are tanking the win rate of the ones they’re playing with making it more difficult for everyone to end up at their deserved rank.
In short, it would be expected to be an awful experience for everyone.
BlizzTravis
Hero Swaps and it's alternatives
Unlike a lot of the things we’re discussing here today, hero swaps aren’t a clear win for the majority of the community so while it is something we’re investigating, it’s a lower priority item.
To be effective, swaps would need their own phase, extending the time it takes for drafts to complete. They also open the door to additional toxicity and, although the core of the feature is available in custom games, it’s reliant on the teams trusting each other. For it to come to other draft modes, there’s a significant development effort involved to add a lot of validation between players. You wouldn’t want someone grabbing your first-pick treasure without your permission, for example, which you can do with the implementation in custom games.
On top of that, for swaps to be effective, they require significant upfront communication by the players. That’s certainly something we want to encourage, but that also means the feature wouldn’t be used by a lot of players beyond the top end of ranked play.
So, right now, we’d rather focus our development efforts on features that will more clearly be beneficial to all players.
For the alternatives, such as trying out first-come first-served (FCFS) drafting which provides a similar benefit, we can do that relatively quickly. There’s some skepticism about whether FCFS can work outside of a team environment, though. We had the same concerns when we allowed 2s and 3s in team league and were pleasantly surprised by the results. It’s an area where we want to gauge community interest and if the feeling is that players would prefer FCFS over nothing, we’d try it out in Unranked Draft first.
BlizzTravis
As a followup to Team League, do you have plans about social features like a Clan System, a Party Finder or similar?
Lots of plans. As you’ll likely hear a lot today, it’s a matter of priorities and how we spend our resources. The plan is to start with an updated party finder which significantly improves that system. The major changes would be to decouple the party finder from chat channels, which would significantly expand the pool of available players, and allow players to look for others based on the game mode and role they want to play.
We feel that’s the important first step. From there, we can build upon that with clans, which would be a great addition to the game as well.
But, again, you can see the list of things we’re working on currently and we feel those items are higher priority than the social features right now. So, while we’d love to get to them, and they’re coming, they’re further out.
BlizzTravis
Yep, its coming. Over the years, there’s been a lot of back and forth about whether showing MMR is more valuable than harmful. In the end, we’ve come to feel it’ll be more helpful.
To go a bit more in-depth, it’s good to understand the purpose of both MMR and rank. You touch on this, but I want to use this post to also make sure it’s clear to everyone reading this.
Matchmaking Rating (MMR) is purely a measurement. It’s an indication of your skill as a player which is then used by the matchmaker to put together games. The more accurate MMR, the better the matches that can be made. Gaining, or losing, skill is a slow process that happens over the course of many games, so MMR does not change quickly. It purposefully doesn’t react strongly to short streaks of wins or losses as they’re not necessarily an indication of a skill change so much as a streak of good, or bad, luck. This is where issues come up with showing MMR. Once it’s visible, it draws a lot of attention and gets treated like a reward system. Players tend to focus on figuring out how to make it go up by any means necessary, looking for ways to push it higher as quickly as possible. That’s not a healthy outlook and leads to frustration when it doesn’t happen.
On the other side of the coin, Rank is a reward system. It represents how well you’ve done over the course of a season. If you go on a win streak, your rank spikes accordingly.
The issue we run into is that Rank is currently the only visible indication of skill in the game, so it can’t diverge too much from MMR. When players are put together in a match with players of disparate rank, the assumption is that they are also disparate skill, and that feels bad.
This had led to the need for Rank and MMR to stay relatively close, which is why Personal Rank Adjustment exists. That blunts the ability for rank to be a true reward system. It also means that matchmaking must consider rank, in addition to MMR, when putting together teams. Visible MMR would allow us to get rid of both of those, which we feel is more beneficial than the downsides that are likely to come about with visible MMR.
We’re working out the details currently, but the plan right now is to add it as part of the updates we’re doing for Performance-based Matchmaking, where we’re already working on new ways to provide you with more—and more clear—types of information on how you performed in a game. Joe went into more detail on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/8bzsup/ama_with_heroes_developers_april_13_2018/dxb7gm7/
BlizzTravis
Yes, that's exactly the kind of validation that has to be put in place before swaps could go to the main ranked modes. It's just a non-trivial amount of development time that we need to put towards higher priority issues right now, which is why we're looking at alternatives, like trying out FCFS, that could be done quickly.
BlizzTravis
The knowledge question was answered elsewhere, but I wanted to use your question as a jumping off point to talk about the seeding into ranked as it comes up pretty frequently.
Basically, some knowledge of a player is better than no knowledge of a player when setting their initial seed into a new mode. While the intricacies of Hero League might not be there for someone coming over from Unranked Draft or Quick Match, a lot of other things, such as mechanic ability, do apply.
With that in mind, a highly skilled QM player can be expected to do comparably well in HL up to a certain point. They would not be expected to be able to hold up as well at the highest ranks, but at lower ranks, they can hold their own. That's where the seed and placement caps come in.
The change we're making is to lower the MMR seed cap from Unranked Draft and Quick Match to Gold 5. A good QM player should easily be able to hold their own at Gold 5. From there, the cap on movement during placements means that even the best players coming in for the first time are limited to Plat 5 and need to work their way up from there.
BlizzTravis
I want to jump in here to clarify. What you're talking about isn't caused by either MMR or the feeling that some players' MMRs aren't set correctly.
When you're matched with people of different ranks, that's because the matchmaking system has to find a balance between queue time and match quality and, in that case, it failed to make a match quickly enough. When that happens, it expands the search range of viable players in order to get a match started. It doesn't happen frequently and you'll usually see this come up in particular circumstances that don't have a lot of other players to make matches with: GM tier, smaller regions during off hours, etc.
As Joe noted earlier, one of the changes we're making is shifting that balance point so the system will allow longer before it expands the search criteria so it happens even less frequently.
BlizzTravis
We aren't looking to make dramatic changes to the draft. This is just adding the addition ban to one of the existing phases. So, it'd still be a single player banning per phase.