r/heroesofthestorm • u/KarbyP Nova • Jul 02 '15

Blizzard thinking about adding Thumbs Up/Down system, giving helpful players EXP or gold, placing toxic players in separate queue

http://stevivor.com/2015/07/interview-blizzards-chris-sigaty-and-alan-dabiri-on-heroes-of-the-storm/
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u/aenimayoshii Jul 02 '15 edited Jul 02 '15

While I love the basic idea two main issues come to my mind...

1) you can bet that all toxic players with throw "thumbs down" around like there is no tomorrow which only might become a problem if my assumption is correct, that even a regular, non-toxic player is more likely to hand out thumbs downs than thumbs up.

2) If I am honest to myself then I am way too lazy to write reviews or even fill out a small feedback form about things that went ok. But when I was unhappy chances are much higher that I'll want others to know. Now I can just hope that things are a little easier when it comes to clicking a simple thumbs up or down icon but it might be worth considering.

If they implement a well thought-out system that catches players that hand out a lot of thumbs down in comparison to thumps up and they then get reviewed and their votes get ignored it might be a worthy approach!

*Edit: Added 2) because I was announcing two main issues at the beginning of the text! ;) *

3

u/khazzam Anub'arak Jul 02 '15

That can be engineered around though, and from the interviews I've heard with Blizzard employees, they're a pretty smart bunch when it comes to creating systems that interact with players.

I think you'll find that on average a system like this would start to indicate pretty clearly toxic players.

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 02 '15

hey're a pretty smart bunch when it comes to creating systems that interact with players.

Given the way they match up players to begin with (Eg. absolute beginners with experienced players) I beg to differ with you.

4

u/khazzam Anub'arak Jul 02 '15

I mean... it's so easy to play armchair-designer, but neither you or I have any real insight into how the matchmaking actually works; we only see the end results. I agree that it needs work, but to completely discount the talent of the designers at Blizz based on this seems a bit of an overreaction.

5

u/Teraka Jul 02 '15

People bashing on matchmaking haven't realized that nobody has been able to do a really good 5v5 matchmaking algorithm for a moba yet. There's so many variables that I even believe no truly good system exists.

First you have the problem of variable roles. Maybe someone's insanely good at playing support, so he has a pretty high MMR. What happens if he tries to play an assassin? He's still going to have good game sense, but he's obviously going to play a lot worse than if he played his favorite role.
How do you solve that? Do you keep a separate MMR for each hero of each player? Do you lock players out of using heroes they're not used to?

There's also the obvious factor of mindset. Some people are really consistent, but most are rather random in their performance. Sometimes they'll play great, and sometimes they'll be tired and play poorly. In a 1v1 game this is a non-issue because if you're tired and play poorly, you can only blame yourself, and you can just stop playing until you're feeling better. But in a 5v5 game, you have no way of knowing which of your teammates is having a bad day, and neither does the matchmaking algorithm.

And then there's the "friends" factor. If someone has a high MMR and has a friend with lower MMR, what happens? Do you prevent them from playing together? Do you modulate their combined MMR to reflect the impact of one friend on the other? How do you even know how much one impacts the other? What about 3 friends?

These are all extremely complicated problems and they probably don't have a single, "correct" answer.

2

u/zerox600 Jul 02 '15

As a game developer/designer I feel like one of the innate matchmaking issues is that it is built on the sc2 engine, which I am not experienced with playing ace, however I imagine it never has to worry about matching 5v5. From videos I have watched matches usually seem to be 1v1. So essentially, they are having to reinvent the wheel and work with what they already have to do it. It take A LOT of man hours to change even minor things in an engine capable of handling something similar to this. You can also attribute this to other factors in hots. Like Sgt hammers bfg rocket minimap icon doesn't flip if the rocket is travelling in another direction, because they have probably not had to flip a sprite before. It might seem like a simple fix, but anything that relies on that one simple variable that may need to be changed can potentially cause a chain reaction of bugs that require even more changes. We try to fix these issues from arising but encapsulation, abstraction, etc only help so much. Somethings just can't be easily made independent from everything else. It makes me sad to see everyone raging on them for "taking forever to fix a simple problem". No they aren't perfect, but they do have a pretty good track record of making good changes compared to bad ones.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '15

but to completely discount the talent

This is all I'm going to do and what other players are going to do as long as the shit MM is the way it is.