For anybody who has played Heroes of the Storm and has been struggling with getting fair and even matches, rage quit no longer. During a “State of the Game” panel at BlizzCon, game director Dustin Browder announced that a new matchmaking system is going to be implemented for Heroes of the Storm by the end of 2015.
Browder explained that Heroes of the Storm took its matchmaking system from StarCraft II. However, the two games are very different. Where StarCraft’s system works great for one-on-one player matches, it doesn’t work as well for a game designed around group play. Blizzard realized they had to change the matchmaking system and had to rebuild it from “the ground up.”
Browder also revealed that the matchmaking system only results in 80 percent of the games even on matchmaking, and 65 percent of the games close on levels. He described the current matchmaking system as being “too stressful” and “not very fun to play in”. Even though it’s only a 20 percent failure rate, the ratio is too high and “there are people who will fall into that 20 percent far too often.”
The old system focused primarily on creating games and matches as quickly as possible and didn’t take into consideration the quality of the match. The initial time to find matches was six minutes, and then increased to 10, but has proven to not work. The system was complicated and would often hit dead-ends, leading to matches that had players with a wide variety of skill levels in the game.
The new system, Browder continued, will focus more on making the match-ups in games good rather than making them speedy. The game will build a queue based off of people with similar skill levels, and the time spent waiting for a match will not affect the match’s quality, in most cases.
“If you’re in Brazil at 4 in the morning, and you’re one of the highest ranked players in the world,” Browder said, “maybe we don’t want to wait 30 minutes to get you the best match.” Browder did promise, however, that situations like these would be an exception, rather than the rule of matchmaking.
Browder said that Blizzard has been running simulations in the new system while using live data, and the games have been much more balanced. The differences in player ranks is a much smaller gap, while the character roles are more balanced than before between the members of groups.
The intent is to launch the new matchmaking system within the next two to three weeks. Browder stated, however, that it’s “an intent”—which means no promises.
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Source: Polygon, Kotaku
Image: Forbes
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