#262 - Into the Nexus: “Face the Placements”
• Garrett • Kyle
#Heroes #of #the #Storm #HotS #Blizzard #Entertainment #Warcraft #Diablo #StarCraft #Overwatch #Hearthstone #WoW #Garrett #Kyle #Weinzierl #Fergusson #Video #Games
http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/
New season, new placements, old problems. A huge wave of players hit the newly christened Storm League and send seasoned participants for a loop. Garrett and Kyle engage in some hearty Heroes therapy for all you left reeling from the update. Placement scandals aside, the gang take a look at the recent datamines and the Official Retrospective posted on the forums. Good luck in your placements!
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Intro: Welcome to Into the Nexus! The Heroes of the Storm podcast!
Looks thicker than it is. There is plenty of room for our own personal reactions and side conversations.
Chromie is kicking my ass.
News
Storm League is Live
Official Note Addition: The starting Matchmaking Rating (MMR) in Storm League will be seeded from the player's last known Hero League or Team League MMR (whichever is greater). The resulting value will then be clamped within a certain range to reel-in outliers.
BlizzDaybringer: The major reason we are okay with taking the highest between both current Leagues is because we plan to 'clamp' the high-end of the player base. The exact clamp position is still subject to change, but we are currently targeting an MMR equivalent of Diamond 5. This means that even players that were previously 'boosted' in TL games, will have to fight their way back into higher rankings. 'Boosted' players that don't actually deserve their current MMR should fall to where they belong over time, and with the incoming decay changes, will not be able to place high and then just quit.
On Solo Queue Button:
BlizzDaybringer: We have talked about this internally and think it's a great idea. We also bounced-around the idea of each player having two visible MMR's as well (solo and group). The chance of it shipping with the first season is very small though, as we still have a huge amount of work to finish the current scope.
Links
Placements: Where Are They Now?
Cris - GM #1 EU with 30k points places Plat 1
Lavova - GM #11 EU with 10k points places Gold 1
Xardas - GM #69 now Gold 2
Ventrue - GM #84 now #84 but battles Silvers and Bronze in placements
Enconhun - GM #170 placed Masters with 834 points
Blizzdaybringer: I responded to a couple of the other threads that have had the same experience, but wanted to make sure that everyone knows that this was due to an error in our EU deploy last night. Accounts that queued in the first hour of the patch (roughly 300) were not seeded correctly in the Storm League Preseason.
We currently have a list of the affected accounts and are planning to deploy a fix to them this afternoon.
Thanks for playing the new ranked experience, and we are sorry to those that were affected by this.
Links
Other Patch Changes
Datamines
Quest are now:
A.I. Issues Continue:
AI continues to be a challenge.
Some of the A.I. improvements we had planned for last patch ended up having an adverse effect on overall quality, and various changes were made to address this.
D’VA Self Destruct and Junkrat Riptire got recoded and now has slightly more damage at edge
Links
Official Gameplay Retrospective
Basically everything is working as intended.
TLDR: Ghostdunk’s post is great, but not enough data. End-of-game level difference isn’t an accurate assessment of the “story of everything”. Reiterated old issues with burst structure XP.
Brett Crawford: In our most recent Reddit AMA, we got some questions about the 2019 Gameplay Updates and wanted to share some insight into our thinking behind them. We’d like to discuss our goals and share some data to show what has been happening since we rolled out these changes.
There was a recent post on Heroeshearth that went through some in-depth analysis of Hotslogs data and plugged it into some machine learning algorithms. The author, Ghostdunk, did an incredible job putting together the data and graphs in an easy to read format - we highly recommend you take a look at it! While Ghostdunk was working with data from Hotslogs, we’ve got the benefit of having access to much more data and wanted to share some additional context. While end-of-game level differences is a useful datapoint, it does not tell the story of everything else that led up to that point; addressing or changing that wasn’t a focus for our 2019 Gameplay Updates. That said, we have been analyzing the data from the last couple patches compared to the past and are excited to share some of that information with you!
Our high-level goal for the 2019 Gameplay Updates was to make matches more competitive, especially in the early-to-mid game. To do this we were expecting the following outcomes:
We spent months working on different designs and number changes to accomplish that goal, and each iteration pulled us closer to the major culprit – burst experience advantages in taking early game structures. Teams that won the first objective would often focus on getting front walls of each town down before ever attempting a Town. At these early levels of the game, there was so much experience in these structures that teams that won the first major objective were often able to put the losing team into a massive disadvantage as they gained a two to three level lead heading into Heroics. At this point, the team with the level advantage could control the map and force uneven fights on future events, effectively putting the enemy team into a chokehold that too often limited choices for the lagging team and often dictated the outcome of the map.
The MOBA genre revolves around these types of power advantages, but in ours, it felt doubly bad to be down since it wasn’t a single Hero or two on a team taking over, but the whole enemy team having both statistical and talent-tier advantages. As most players know, it is extremely difficult to team fight in our game unless you are at least on the same talent-tier as your opponent. This greatly limits the options for the team that is behind. We figured we could combat this disadvantage by taking some of the raw statistical advantages away from teams that were winning early, and give them an instant strategic advantage, plus a long-term experience investment. This led us to our final changes:
Stas, our wonderful technical director has been crunching our data in order to see if our goals were being met or if we fell short, and here is the high-level bulleted findings and some graphs to help players interpret them.
Another interesting thing we learned from this is that the win-percentage of a team with any kind of level gap has slightly increased. While this may seem counter-productive to what we would actually want, it is an expected occurrence; since it is more difficult to gain a level lead now, the performance requirement for gaining that lead is higher. Meaning that teams that can start creating these larger gaps are highly out-performing their opposition. Since the focus of our changes was making sure that early game leads didn’t lead to late game ones, we’re okay with teams that have earned a lead in the later stages of the game winning more often. We think this is a good reflection that the better team is still winning most of the time.
Overall, the most important thing to take away from all of this, is that even when losing, the game should still feel close. You can still compete, fight the enemy team, and not be at too great of a statistical disadvantage. If the enemy team still beats you, it’s because they’re actually the better team, and not because early game mistakes lead to unsurmountable level advantages that don’t feel fun to play against.
Links
Patreon Mention: Patreon.com/ITN
Thanks to our Patreon producers Declan H, CheezyBob, and Pythagos.
Patron Thanks Doc for keeping track
Emails
Two fun questions in a similar vein
Ruben
Been listening for a while and always on Team League trying to climb. Your tips have been helpful and listening to you has improved my game.
I've been playing since alpha and always saw some weird looking traits come into a hero's tool kit. While I'm happy with most, some seem to stand out, such as: Tyrael, Leoric, and Uther. While some of these have been buffed, how do you feel about traits only being useful on death, ie Tyrael. I feel lackluster and while there are one offs for them, I don't think they bring any value to your character abilities or lore.
Thanks again, keep up the great work,
LeoricDidNothingWrong
Not so much a question as a suggestion. A talk about heroes that have visual effects that display power or talents. Like Gazlowe’s Robo Gobo that get new hands/clamps, Uther that gets a holy swirl when dead if he picks the self ress or Leoric who has a glowing mace when his bonus dmg single target attack is next.
Outro
Patreon Shout Out
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Personal Stuff
Garrett
Kyle