Bisse posted:

After playing this, Dota2, and SF6 quite a bit recently, i'm honestly stunned how bad the ranked online experience in HOTS is. I love HOTS, it can be so much fun, but man with some perspective I can finally see how shockingly bad the online experience is. It's grueling, slow, frustrating, forces you to play unwinnable matches, and feels way too obsessed with assigning people a correct rank than with having fun.

SF6 is an example of fantastic near-perfect online play. Ignoring if lag is good or not, the flow is incredible: You start any single player mode, training arcade storymode whatever you want to do, and turn on matchmaking. Then you just play or practice while the game matchmakes in the background. After around 30 seconds, you'll have a match. A match is 2-3 minutes, and you can rematch until someone has won a best of three matches. And done, and you're right back where you're left off. On top of that, the rank system is A M A Z I N G. There is an MMR based system - but only once you've reached Master rank. Before that, there is a much simple easy-to-understand ranking system. You gain rank every around 1000 points, you gain 50 points per win, and lose 40 points per loss. Also winstreaks grant bonuses. This means people on average are climbing until they lose 60% of matches, climbing goes really really fast if you win, etc. The only improvements I can point out are the menus can be a bit more fiddly than i'd like and the custom room UI is overcomplex, but they still only take 30-60secs of your time. So I am always having fun, always doing something, and always feel like me climbing is due to me training harder and winning more matches, and bad laggy trolly etc matches are rare and just 2mins long and then I can quit. My fate is always 100% in my hands, it feels like. But sure, it's not a team game. Right?

Aaaaand now let's get back into HOTS.

I lost my three ranking matches this season due to trolls and leavers and the game catapulted me from Silver 5 to Bronze 4. Due to some hidden MMR value being low, I am currently gaining 25 points per win, and losing 250 points per loss. This means i'm stuck in Bronze 5 trying to boost some hidden loving value until the game is allowing me to climb ranks again. Do I need to win 1 match? 10? 100? 1000? I have no loving clue!
Once I get a match after 3-5 mins of waiting staring at menus and the shop because thats all I am allowed to do while queueing, we get into draft which takes forever. In DOTA2, everyone bans at the same time and it takes 10 secs. In HOTS there are 6 ban rounds in total where each can take up to 30s, meaning 3mins sitting around waiting for people to pick a ban. Each hero pick is also alternating turns, which also takes forever, while in Dota2 hero picks are simultaneous and you just get to redo it if two teams pick the same char.
Ok so now we in match and someone is raging and decides to rage quit and troll. Because the game hard punishes leaving, many people stay in match and just gently caress around instead, wasting everyones time. But if they decide to leave, well, my next 30 mins of my lives are in the trash bin! Because there is no system that allows anyone to leave the match! What?? In DOTA2 5mins of a player disconnect makes the match safe to leave. While here, i'm just stuck! If I don't stay around clicking around to move my character, I get disconnected and punished! This means 30% of matches are a complete loving waste of my time!

Which brings me to the XP system and gameplay in general. In Dota 2, the above match would actually be at least winnable! Because one lane would allow one hero to get twice the XP with your ally gone, you could at least hope for that hero to get fed and start ganking and winning the game. It's happened a few times! So there is no reason for me to give up. Also, Dota2 premieres individual player decisions and skill much more than 5v5 team glomps, meaning even as a bad player I can win a game with a few good decisions and not loving up.
In HOTS though, XP is shared, so a member leaving means we're just hosed. We're getting a harder time picking XP balls, they contribute to team XP so we are not gaining a level advantage anywhere. Also, the game is designed to force team fights early and often, and solo ganking is a lot harder for a multitude of reasons including the lower damage and abundance of heals all throughout the game including a full heal every 90s that is just a 8 seconds walk away. This means my individual decisions matter a lot less, and my ability to turn around a losing game boils down to almost nothing other than landing a perfectly executed big ult combo or hoping the opposing team has dumb players that expose themselves one at a time. While a skilled player can easier turn around a losing game, your ability to do so is an order of magnitude smaller than DOTA2.

All this means, in Dota2 I feel like I am always having fun and fighting for a win, and even in 4v5 near unwinnable matches than can stretch to 45+ mins I can still always identify "man if I had just did that or that instead I could have actually won" while in HOTS I feel like I repeatedly get stuck in games I can't win or games I literally can't lose, leaving about 1/3rd of games boiling down to games where my skill matters and the rest to just letting the numbers machine torment the 10 (or 9) of us until it decides we can move on with our lives.

It suddenly feels a lot easier to understand why this game died and I am a lot more content with it.