by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

In an interview at gamescom with ingame.de, Producer Kaeo Milker talked about the long-awaited Ranked Play options that will be coming up in Heroes… though he was also quick to mention that ranked play doesn’t make sense with a small pool of players, and the number of players in the technical alpha is still too small for these mechanics to work fairly.

Milker first discussed the Draft Mode, where opposing (and pre-made) teams of players will be able to ban each other from selecting up to three certain heroes, and then take turns picking heroes in order to fill out the team. Players can’t select a random hero in this mode.

Looking at this from an e-sports angle, I like the idea from a competitive standpoint: if you’re well-schooled enough with the game to predict what kind of strategies your opposition will use from their character selection, and tailor your team to counter it while also impacting THEIR choices, it certainly lends itself to creating a more fair engagement, instead of everyone just bringing their most well-practiced heroes to bear.

I also like the angle where the draft ITSELF could be an object for commentators to go over in their coverage, since it allows them to make predictions about how the match is going to go. During the match itself, it then enables commentators to remark more about how a team either plays into or defies those predictions. So all told, Draft Mode sounds like something that’s a boon for the community both in and out of gameplay.

Milker also went on to discuss the mechanics of Heroes’ MMR (Matchmaking Ranking) and how it’s already being used to govern matchmaking in the technical alpha. In short, the system takes win-loss ratios for the player, that player’s selected hero, and then combines that with the MMR of the rest of the team in order to locate both an opposing team and fill in players for the player’s team. And the rules get looser as the queue time gets longer, so that getting matched up takes less time. Again, though, with as small a set of players as is in the tech alpha at the moment, these rules are already being applied very loosely just so you can actually get in to play in a reasonable amount of time.

You can check out ingame.de’s coverage of the interview, and as soon as the full video interview shows up, we’ll let you know.