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Lead Developer Reddit Q&A Recap

by - 6 years ago

Several Leads from the Heroes team took to Reddit earlier today to answer questions from the community.

The team has been up front recently about the fact that they haven’t been as communicative as they should have been about hot-button issues. This Reddit Q&A is just another example of how they intend to correct that. If you missed yesterday’s Developer Blog dealing with topics like toxicity, 3rd bans, and MMR decay you can find it here.

Conducting today’s Q&A were Alan Dabiri (Game Director), Travis McGeathy (Lead Game Designer), Matt Cooper (Lead Content Designer), and Joe Piepiora (Lead Systems designer). Here are some of the more interesting takeaways from the Q&A.

Quick Match

  • QM is still the most popular game mode.
  • The first improvement they are going to make is to strictly enforce role compositions for the matchmaker. A team will not be constructed without a balanced team comp. This means that Assassins or Specialists may have longer queue times, while tanks and healers may have shorter ones.
  • Their current thinking is that a ‘balanced team comp’ would involve 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 assassin, leaving two spots open for flex picks.
  • There will also be incentives for players to queue as roles that are currently underrepresented in the matchmaking queue.

Ranked Play

  • They do not feel like hero swaps are a clear win for the community. They are investigating them but it is a lower priority item.
  • They are open to considering first-come first-serve drafting in Hero League. If there is enough interest in that from the community they would test it first in Unranked Draft.
  • A third ban is being added to the mid-ban phase.
  • They chose to add the third ban to the mid-ban phase so that it can be more strategic based on how the draft is unfolding. They feel like the first ban just gets used to remove whatever is on top of the meta at the moment. They think adding it to the mid-ban is more interesting long-term, whereas including it to the first ban would be addressing more of a short-term concern.
  • They feel like part of the reason the population for Team League is lower than other modes is because of how difficult it is to organize a team. They feel like TL needs some of the social features like clans and group finder to flourish, but those changes are still a ways out.
  • They have discussed changing season length and considered everything from once a month to a whole year. They are open to discussing the idea of changing the season length but they feel like the current system is a good balance between the options.
  • There are no plans to include a surrender option as they feel it would ultimately yield a net negative social experience for the players. Instead they plan to improve actioning against AFK or inactive players. They are also working on a loss forgiveness feature for players who are affected by leavers during a ranked match.

MMR

  • They feel like a full MMR reset would lead to an extended period of utter chaos, which would last long after placements and be an awful experience for players.
  • Visible MMR is coming.

Travis McGeathy (Lead Game Designer) had this to say on MMR and Rank.

Originally Posted by Travis McGeathy (Official Post)

Yep, its coming. Over the years, there’s been a lot of back and forth about whether showing MMR is more valuable than harmful. In the end, we’ve come to feel it’ll be more helpful.

To go a bit more in-depth, it’s good to understand the purpose of both MMR and rank. You touch on this, but I want to use this post to also make sure it’s clear to everyone reading this.

Matchmaking Rating (MMR) is purely a measurement. It’s an indication of your skill as a player which is then used by the matchmaker to put together games. The more accurate MMR, the better the matches that can be made. Gaining, or losing, skill is a slow process that happens over the course of many games, so MMR does not change quickly. It purposefully doesn’t react strongly to short streaks of wins or losses as they’re not necessarily an indication of a skill change so much as a streak of good, or bad, luck. This is where issues come up with showing MMR. Once it’s visible, it draws a lot of attention and gets treated like a reward system. Players tend to focus on figuring out how to make it go up by any means necessary, looking for ways to push it higher as quickly as possible. That’s not a healthy outlook and leads to frustration when it doesn’t happen.

On the other side of the coin, Rank is a reward system. It represents how well you’ve done over the course of a season. If you go on a win streak, your rank spikes accordingly.

The issue we run into is that Rank is currently the only visible indication of skill in the game, so it can’t diverge too much from MMR. When players are put together in a match with players of disparate rank, the assumption is that they are also disparate skill, and that feels bad.

This had led to the need for Rank and MMR to stay relatively close, which is why Personal Rank Adjustment exists. That blunts the ability for rank to be a true reward system. It also means that matchmaking must consider rank, in addition to MMR, when putting together teams. Visible MMR would allow us to get rid of both of those, which we feel is more beneficial than the downsides that are likely to come about with visible MMR.

We’re working out the details currently, but the plan right now is to add it as part of the updates we’re doing for Performance-based Matchmaking, where we’re already working on new ways to provide you with more—and more clear—types of information on how you performed in a game.

Hero Design

  • They have made a conscious design decision to make new Heroes less specialized. In the past, they wanted to make sure that each Hero had a really sharp role but they felt like this led to more hard-counters that could win or lose a draft.
  • They want every healer to be viable in at least some situations as a solo healer.
  • They consider the Medivh rework a success. He is much more popular now.
  • Chromie and Genji are both being looked at internally because they are frustrating to play against. Genji has some small changes that will be coming soon (similar to Tracer). They have tried reducing the range of Chromie’s Q & W abilities as well as showing where her W will land. They still feel like they need to do more to succeed so her changes will be farther off.
  • They acknowledge that many of the new Heroes have strong AOE. They may need to tone down the wave clear of some of the new Heroes as well as bring up the wave clear of some of the older Heroes.
  • The Ana rework was intended to address the idea that she couldn’t solo heal since she had no easy way to heal herself back up. Her win rate is still a little low and they hope to address this via tuning or potentially some slight mechanic tweaks. They love her because of how much skill there goes into doing her healing well.
  • They are looking to do something to make Guldan‘s Rain of Destruction feel less RNG and more competitive with Horrify.
  • They feel like Zarya is in an okay spot right now. The balance team might make some small tuning changes but there are no plans to rework her.
  • Artanis is similar to Zarya, no current plans to rework.
  • They are more likely to remove MULE from the game than they are to give it to more Heroes. They think it works decently on Abathur since he needs those safe forward positions so there is a decent chance something like that remains on his kit.
  • An ability that is really high impact (and is frustrating) at lower levels of play but is not useful for higher tiers of play is a bit of a red flag for them.
  • Raynor is getting a rework, but it won’t be in the next set of reworks that comes out. They want to keep his feel and playstyle, but they have made a number of changes to modernize his base abilities and introduce new talents.
  • There are no current plans for Sgt. Hammer.

Hero Roles

  • They are leaning towards using six terms to describe the role of a Hero (Tank, Bruiser, Healer, Support, Melee and Ranged Assassins).
  • They are also working on a tag system to provide more context and information in addition to the role category.
  • Specialists would be redefined into whichever category that particular Hero fits best in. Examples include Assassin for Nazeebo and Zagara and Support for the Lost Vikings.
  • Most Specialists tend to have high win rates.
  • They continue to work to reduce the frustration of playing against certain Heroes and there are several Specialists on that list. Usually, this is related to split pushing.

Battlegrounds

  • They would like to revise a number of the existing maps. The big focuses right now include large updates for Hanamura and Garden of Terror.
  • They are planning some small changes to Braxis Holdout to address how snowbally the map is.
  • They would like to make large changes to Haunted Mines and Blackheart’s Bay, but those are farther off.
  • While they say some sort of map preference system could be interesting, it isn’t something that is on their radar at this time. Instead, they are working to improve existing battlegrounds to make them more enjoyable to play rather than giving players the option to opt out.

System

  • Heroes of the Storm uses a peer-to-peer network architecture, which is part of what makes reconnecting so difficult. Since working on it would take engineers away from matchmaking and ranked improvements they have chosen to focus on those other items first based on how many fewer players are affected by the reconnect system.
  • They want to release a public API but the team members involved are the same ones that are needed to work on matchmaking and ranked play improvements.
  • They have plans to update the party finder and add a clan feature but like most other things it is a prioritization issue and matchmaking and ranked play improvements are a higher priority at this time.
  • They plan to better unify the in-game UI and observer UI.
  • They would like to add the ability to observer friends playing but it is difficult to implement given the peer-t0-peer nature of the system and is therefore a low priority on the list.

Educating Players

  • On the topic of educating players and preparing them for ranked play, they feel like there is a lot they can do.
  • They are working a revised Hero Selection system that will provide more detail on a Hero’s playstyle and main mechanics (this is something that is still a little ways out).
  • They are looking for more ways to provide players feedback through the end of the match. Things like an XP Missed stat to reinforce the importance of laning.
  • Each time a new Hero is released an HGC player will write a first impressions build guide, which will be posted on the HGC website.

As you can see, they have a lot of changes they would like to make but they have to prioritize how they use the resources available to them. Here is a response from Game Director Alan Dabiri regarding communication and the order in which they plan to roll out some of the changes that have been discussed.

Originally Posted by Alan Dabiri (Official Post)

So we definitely want to communicate with you more about what we’re currently working on, and what our view of upcoming priorities are. The blog post and this AMA are some steps in that direction. We’re also discussing lots of ideas about how best to communicate with the community going forward.

That being said, here’s some info for you in terms of timing/order of stuff:

  • New toxicity report validation system: We should be turning this on within the next couple weeks. This will increase the amount of reports we action by a significant amount. We’re going to put out a dedicated post on this soon.
  • Matchmaking improvements: Since the majority of these are on the server side, we’re going to be rolling these out independently of our normal client patches. Some will come quicker than others. For example, we’re going to try and get the hardening of rules to favor match quality more over queue time in the near term.
  • Loss Forgiveness / Improved Leaver Punishments: This is deep into implementation and is currently lined up to come out in a patch in the next couple months.
  • Ranked improvements: Several of these improvements make the most sense to release with a new season roll. So, we’re trying to get some of these changes into the next season roll (~June). 3rd Ban is high on the list.
  • Performance Based Matchmaking: We’re wrapping up the improvements we discussed in the blog post, and are planning to re-introduce this system also with the next season roll. We may initially introduce this as a purely informational system, and then turn on the actual point adjustments after the community has had time to provide feedback. If we do that, it technically doesn’t need to align exactly with a season roll.

If you would like to check out the Reddit Q&A for yourself you can find all 1500 and counting comments here.


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


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