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Germany25638 Posts
Following a lot of disscussion and feedback from the community since the merger of TeamLeague and Hero League, Blizzard has decided that, starting with the next patch, you will only be able to queue in hero league solo, or in a party of two. You’ll still be able to queue with a party of five to get a Team rank. If you are in a party of 3 to four members, you’ll need to play Quick Match:
When we look at the data for parties of three and four players in Hero League, we often see large skill gaps among party members. This is fine for players in a party of four, for example, who have agreed to queue together despite any differences in skill that may exist. However, the matchmaker needs to complete the team by pulling in a fifth player who queued up alone, and did not necessarily want to play with teammates of varying skill levels. This can also create situations in which party members will discuss strategy with each other, but don’t end up communicating the game plan to their fifth teammate. On the other end of the spectrum, solo players may disagree with the party’s decisions, or show unwillingness to help the team. This can result in a friction for both sides if communication doesn’t improve. What’s more, parties of three and four players appear in Hero League queues far less often than solo players and parties of two. As such we feel that large parties represent a small enough portion of Ranked games that we’re comfortable removing them from Hero League in order to improve overall match quality.
This change to restrict Hero League to solo and duo queuing players will arrive with our next game update. As always, we’re going to monitor how the new rule affects the Hero League experience, and will make further adjustments as necessary. Play a few Hero League games once the change has gone live, and let us know what you think in the official Heroes forums. Until next time, we’ll see you in the Nexus!
http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/19883523/party-size-changes-for-hero-league-9-2-2015
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wow, that's really stupid. I very rarely can get 5 people together on voicechat, but also rarely have only 2. :\
With these changes, the game needs a non-ranked draft mode or it will just result in me never getting to play the game with friends.
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Mexico2162 Posts
I also usually play in a party of 3. With five players my team gets stomped because we don't like voice chat, with one you leave a lot to tohers. With 3 players you can get the three main roles, Warior, Healer and a Carry-like DPS, and you're good to go.
However I understand it also has it's problems. We'll see how this develops in the future. I'm pretty sure season one will begin after BlizzCon, maybe even next year, so we still have a lot of time to.. "test" stuff.
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Praise the lord - I'm so fed up with the stacks who always have at least one player who can't be trusted with tying his own shoes.
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my guess is this will just force groups of 3 or 4 to do matchmaking themselves outside of bliz's system, asking for random people to join up with them.
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On September 03 2015 03:04 Ghostcom wrote: Praise the lord - I'm so fed up with the stacks who always have at least one player who can't be trusted with tying his own shoes.
this change doesn't really fix that. If an unskilled player is friends with three skilled players and they want to play HL, it's far more likely IMO that they will just split into two groups of 2, still leaving the poison-pill player with an inflated MMR from his friend he pairs with.
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Finally all the stupid shitters will drop from masters/diamond when they can't cookiecutter scrubs with a strong 4-man lineup.
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Hmmmmm, I'm always playing in parties of 2, 3, 4 and 5 depending on the time and day my friends can get on, but this is really a bummer for my group. We all have different times we can play with each other. Like last night, I was consistently doing parties of 3 - 4. But I do understand the skill gap, my team always ends up with players that just don't know their role and it really puts a burden on us to try and carry them in Hero League.
I seriously thought MMR would be a factor, but when I'm ranked 7th and the player matched with us is still doing his placements or just in the lower bracket of 30 - 39, you can seriously see the difference. I don't understand why blizzard still does this, why have MMR if you're still placed with people that just don't understand the game yet.
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On September 03 2015 04:07 MotherFox wrote:Show nested quote +On September 03 2015 03:04 Ghostcom wrote: Praise the lord - I'm so fed up with the stacks who always have at least one player who can't be trusted with tying his own shoes. this change doesn't really fix that. If an unskilled player is friends with three skilled players and they want to play HL, it's far more likely IMO that they will just split into two groups of 2, still leaving the poison-pill player with an inflated MMR from his friend he pairs with.
This does fix it as soon as you get above a certain MMR - the poison-pill is not going get dragged as far up through the ranks - which is already a huge fix.
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that sounds stupid as hell o.o; . On the other hand with 3 or 4 people can easily do QM and have decent compositions. They should do a 3/4 player hero league that pulls unsuspecting QM players into it. Draft 3 heroes . And then you have to select which roll should be pulled into your game.
Sounds weird though, we got tons of complains of this happening, but not enough are doing it so we remove it.
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Dunno why its not allowed to queue as 3 or 4. Just make those people play on team league, aware that they might face full teams and getting no points for team league. This way team league is still team league, hero league is better and while 3/4 queues will have a hard time they can choose to play quick match. At least they are not forced into it. Other problem is a bunch of quick match solo queuers facing 4 stacks. Even if matchmaking was good it will be an easy way to stomp (or be stomped).
Or just leave it as it is right now.
For me its actually better since i usually play solo or duo Q, bit it still sounds like a bad decision from blizz.
Anyway, its not hard to get some random guy to join the group to queue as 5.
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Well, they can't allow queue's of 4 unless they also pair them with a solo queue'r. That's why putting teams of 4 into team league wouldn't work.
As far as I can tell, this is trying to address an issue stemming from a problem of hero league being used both as a competitive leaderboard and as the only way to play the game using a draft mode. I don't think QM is really much of a game at all: you pick a team that best counters the free rotation and plays relatively well on all the maps. Currently this means a very narrow selection of teams, since Infernal Shrines requires certain things out of a team.
Draft mode is the only way to make heroes really be an interesting game IMO. But, not everyone who wants to play an interesting game cares about competitive ranked play.
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I can understand removing a 4 players group, but removing queue of 3 players group doesn't make much sense.
Well, this will probably going to make me play less. We are usually 3 or 4 in a group, playing HL solo or with just 1 friend is atrocious with how many idiots you are getting these days in HL, and playing team league is close to impossible since my mates don't want to commit to this game as much as you need for team league and we are usually getting teams that are quite coordinated and just wipe the floor with us. Hopefully they will rethink about 3 players group at least.
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I might just quit. I'm not invested in this game and this is making the game a lot less interesting to me.
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I'd much rather them actually fix the MMR matching system than get rid of half the possible HL teams. There have been plenty of times that my friends and I have decided to play HL *because* we have a party of 3 or 4 (and so we could count on more people on our team to play cooperatively), and to restrict that is a stupid idea.
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Well, this kills half my interest in the game. Only way I played competitively was with 2 others. Strange thing, but I don't like soloing in a team game. And now when all 3 of us are online, 1 can't join? Bullshit. Quickies can be fun for dicking around with builds and characters but they're usually horribly balanced and mostly not as good.
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4713 Posts
This is one of the more dumb changes from Blizzard in ages, its anti-friends, anti-competitive and anti-fun all in one. Basically parties of 5 who want to test new strategies/compositions are now fucked because they can't safely do so in hero league they must risk doing so in team league, which kills most of the incentive to practice new builds/comps in the first place. Also just out of principle I want to fucking play hero league with 4 other dudes if I feel like, this just kills that for no good reason.
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They really shouldn't have done this before making an unranked drafting league for groups of 3/4 to play in. That would eliminate the problem of harvesting MMR/hero league levels through the massive advantage grouping gives you (and yes, it does give a massive advantage, that's why a lot of people do it) without killing non-QM games for a lot of people.
Though I guess unranked drafting queues would be absurdly long, so that's probably why they aren't doing it.
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This is a ridiculous change and I can't see it sticking... people (like me) have more than one friend they want to play HL with, being denied that opportunity is just preposterous!
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The obvious solution would be to create a "chaos league" (or "don't come whining about matchmaking if you play this league" league) where there are no restrictions (4 or less maybe). I'm like everyone else with real friends and a family life. We always end up being 3 or 4 and we want to play ranked drafts. TBH we lose a lot thanks to bad matchmaking but we still love the game and still want to play. But I'd be more than happy to play more competitively in HL when solo / duo queing because I've had like 10 defeats in a row where I was playing with people really bad and who insult you as soon as you start trying to give instructions.
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