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Comment by rbancroft | Hacker News Reader

I got sucked into this with Heroes of the Storm, where I mistakenly bought into the belief that win rate was reflective of my skill.

I hate the games I lose because there is usually (9 times out of 10) nothing I can do to affect the outcome.

I hate the games I win because the win mostly comes down to how bad the other team is, or a superstar on my team, and I was mostly a spectator.

The games I enjoy are where it is a hard fought battle with decent teamwork that pushes me to my limits and beyond, and in those cases I don't care if I win or lose.

I've had 20 game winning streaks, 20 game losing streaks. Between the match making, smurf accounts, and weird balancing issues, it's very hard to know what is dictating the outcome. The psychology is so destructive if you place any value on the outcome.

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I played HoTs for several years up to a bit after Blizzard stopped developing the game (2-3 years ago?). The match maker in that game has always been a hot mess. It was never fun to be given a team of F class heroes while the enemy team had the meta group composition. Even better where the matches were your team would be decent if not for the map you were given. At times it felt like the match maker was intentionally just screwing with you. After blizzard stopped working on the game the player pool shrunk noticeably which amplified the terrible MM problems. I ended up rage quitting the game after playing on average 4 games a night and losing every single one of them for a week straight. Most of the matches were lost at the loading screen due to a variety of reasons. No sense playing a game that just makes you angry.

When playing quickmatch there were certain heroes that you could play and force a win (assuming the map didn't fck you over). For me those heroes were murky and the lost vikings (and usually abathur). My TLV winrate was over 70% because I could just soak and PVE my team to a 2+ level advantage fairly quickly. Murky was a similar experience but I could also assassinate enemy heroes fairly easily.

Sadly those were the only heroes I played that consistently made me feel like I was effecting the outcome of the match. Getting +30 kills as valeera with no deaths and still losing cause you can't get your team to do any objectives is just infuriating..

I don't play HOTS, but generally, over time, skill does impact win rates.

In the hots casual 'lobby' aka quick match, you often don't have enough players of similar skill level, so the match maker tries to create balanced teams with quite a large mmr spread. There are many ways this goes wrong, but the end result is your winrate tends towards 50% because that's what the match maker is trying to do. It performs very badly at this and so you can have big streaks and bad quality matches for an extended period of time.

Also, I don't mean to come across more negatively than I actually feel. The game can be frustrating at times, and there could be improvements made to reduce those frustrations.

But overall, it's still possible to have a lot of fun and great matches enough of the time that it is still worth playing.

I'm around low diamond, which is definitely my skill ceiling. It relatively easy for me to assess higher diamonds and masters. It's also easy to asses plat players. Anything below plat looks very similar to me.

I had a week straight of terrible matches that were almost always lost at the loading screen. There's only so much you can do if the map is bad for the heroes on your team or your team has a terrible composition while the enemy team has a literal meta S grade composition. It didn't help that the match maker for whatever reason decided that I was good enough to take on two or more diamonds with the rest gold vs my team of me and silver/bronzes. One of those losses was a master with two diamonds and the rest silver vs me and some gold/silver players. It's hard to get people to play well when the loading screen shows a massive disparity in game skill.

Nearly every one of those matches I ended the game with the best stats and still lost horribly.

My favorite though were the team mates that threw at the start of the match or when my team would decide they would rather argue than play the game. Such a toxic experience of a game. Having one amazing match of great fun and teamplay just wasn't worth the 2-5 matches of absolute toxicity.

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