Community Manager Spyrian hit up the Heroes of the Storm forums today to fill everyone in on some changes to the Quick Match matchmaking system. Now, the matchmaker will take not only MMR (matchmaking rating) but also games played into account.
The goal behind these changes is to reduce the chance that a veteran player ends up matched with someone that just finished the tutorial. On the face of it, this seems like a positive change, but time will tell. Here’s the original post:
Originally posted by Spyrian (Original forum post here)
Since our previous blog on matchmaking was released, we’ve seen an increase in the amount of feedback stating that veteran and new players are being matched together. This can result in friction within the team as new players struggle to keep up with their more experienced teammates and opponents. While we’re excited to see so many new players entering the Nexus, we also want to reduce the likelihood that players with widely differing levels of experience will be matched in the same game.
To help address this, we’ve created an additional rule for matchmaking in Quick Match that will take each player’s total number of Quick Match games played into account when creating teams. This rule has already been implemented, and we expect that you, your allies, and even your opponents, will now be matched more closely in terms of Quick Match experience.
The new rule will not prevent all instances in which new players can be matched with veterans. As an example, this can still occur when a party’s members have mixed levels of Heroes of the Storm experience. Additionally, this change may result in increased Quick Match queue times as the matchmaker searches for players with a similar number of games played to your own.
While this change for Quick Match does not address all of the Heroes community’s concerns about matchmaking, we are still listening to your feedback, monitoring internal data, and continuing to work on further improvements. For now, we’d like to encourage you to play a few Quick Match games, and then head back here to the forums to let us know how it went.
Thank you very much!
Personally, I have noticed the increased queue times that were mentioned in the post. I went from 1 minute searching for a game being unusual to almost 3 minutes to find a game. Spyrian does go on later in the post to clarify that MMR is still the primary factor in match ups, and this makes me wonder why the extra rule is even needed. If someone has played 1,000 quick match games and has the same MMR as someone that has played 20 games, they are either there on purpose, or they just aren’t as good as they think they are. Let me know what you think @AGRitterific.
