4/04/2015

No Surrender Option in Heroes of the Storm? OK Let's FEED!

Today I read an office blog from blizzard at http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/18543837 since they "believe the game is never officially over until the core is destroyed", and linked a match video to back it up. For those who don't have to time to watch it, I'll explain what happened:

  1. This match is between blue team "Tempo Storm" and red team "BarrelBoys" on the graveyard map, which are 2 professional teams that every member of them knows how to cooperate with the other members, while in the normal match making we usually face players who don't even know how to play the game properly and refuse to take advice.
  2. In the beginning of the game, Red dominates the game, got a couple of kills without being killed, and got a 60+ skulls. However, until level 10 Red was just one level ahead, while in match making you always find yourself 2 levels behind when you're in a really bad team.
  3. Red made the first mistake by not entering mine for the 2nd golem in time, which resulted them in a position with a 30+ skulls golem. And then they made the 2nd mistake by pushing with the weak golem while all 5 Blue members were there. So they failed and the levels were even.
  4. Red made the 3rd mistake by entering mine in the 3rd time too early - at 00:30 seconds mark and spread which was bullshit. Blue easily came in with a better team formation and got a 100 golem. This kind of mistakes can only happen in professional matches because all members have to blindly follow the leader, which is not the case in match making, and it's pretty rare to make 3 big mistakes in a row TBH.
  5. Here's the real turn around. Red made the only right and final decision: a final push. They ended up killed the whole blue team and ignored the 100 golem, and won the game with only 2% health in its own core. I admit it WAS a turn around, but it's still only 1 level difference between the 2 professional teams, while in match making it's easily seen 3 or even more level difference between a good team and a really bad team.  

So this match just proved the contrast: there are not that many come backs in match making. Of course I played a lot of matches with come backs but firstly it has to be the case that everyone seems to know how to play the game, and secondly, it's not too behind. For noob vs noob it would be fine for me because I can deal with 2 or even 3 noobs in a match. For average vs good it's hard but we still have chance because I'm good myself. For noob vs good it's really painful, especially noobs always ask for strange things and dont' take any advice. In this case a surrender option is not going to help too much because noobs would like to continue anyway, but it'd still be good to have it there because sometimes there are noobs with good attitude. And finally there are cases that we are in a good team but the enemy team is elite. They may be a good team themselves with cooperation etc. and everyone in our team would surrender due to the shitty match making system.

So you see, the core of the problem is match making. Since they can't make it even for now (it has to be hard and I wouldn't expect it) they should admit it and add the surrender option. This is the problem of Blizzard: they thought they were better than the players to make decisions, but in the fact they are just some awful designers sometimes. There are a lot of mistakes made by Blizzard. For example, in Diablo 3 it's not hard to calculate the in-theory max output of a build, since the set items are already there. But they still make some numbers really off and adjust them quite randomly, e.g. they nerfed the Immortal King set from 500% damage enhance to 100%. For a game designer you should at least do some calculation and found how off it would be to put a 500% damage enhance there in the first place, but they simply didn't. And as technicals and businessman they made some awful decisions too, my favorite one was that they thought Healthstone was going to be a small game and had chosen Unity as the engine of Hearthstone, while looks like shit and produced countless graphic problems later. Even now in the early-mid 2015, the newest patch still introduces ridiculous bug like showing "ghost" cards in deck making, and even I wouldn't make this sort of stupid bugs there if I've done it with my own engine, needless to say for Blizzard because they are really good at game engines. So back to the topic, they can introduce some punishment in surrender etc. but they just simply refused to admit that they FAILED to make the game even. It's perfect fine no one would expect 100% even matches in match making, but at least you should add surrender there so that I'm not going to do something I don't want to do, but I'll have to do when I feel it's all Blizzard's fault, which is simple: feeding.

Blizzard is able to know whether I'm playing the game or not, but it can never know if I play it in a good or bad way because there are so many shit players there. So I would just attack click enemy core every 3 to 5 minutes or so and write some blogs at the same time. Anyway, what's so hard to feed? It would be even better if I just wrote complain letters to their customer service and use their human resource but that would be too harsh. It would be more effective though if that can make them realized how silly they are, but anyway I don't care.

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