Friends at a LAN party were hitting Heroes of the Storm hard, so I joined them. Quick version: it is still a weak LoL clone that replaces the toxic community with one that is silent. It is hard to tell whether the skill ceiling is that low or players are just that casual and disengaged. When you play support frequently, you really get a sense of how random folks can be.
I assume it still has a significant playerbase? I have found multi-minute wait times for quick play, which to me would imply “dying,” but maybe my account is at a weird point in the population density.
Overwatch feels similar, a shiny but somewhat clumsy TF2. Again the silent community and surprisingly long wait times. I assume the latter are not caused by my account level; I assume there is no matchmaking at all, given that I will end up in games with level 100+ pre-made groups, despite being relatively new.
Blizzard codified the trope of “soloing together,” and this is what it looks like in a team game. On the other hand, if you can get a few people working together, that will wipe the map. Fish, barrel.
: Zubon
Overwatch does have matchmaking for quickplay, but it’s based on a separate (hidden) ranking from your xp level, which is mostly just a way for them to reward people for time played.
Mind you, quickplay is mostly for people just messing around, at this point. The competitive mode has a decent amount of communication usually, and has a much more explicit matchmaking system.
No seriously. I just played a bit, and I was set against a level 700-something and a group of level 200-somethings. My account is level 20, playing solo. Either I am the best player in the world, they are the worst despite time played, or the matchmaking system is not even trying.
I recall exactly two matches where the level range was within 10-40, rather than 5-250.
In both of these games you will find that games against ai have much quicker queues. I’m not sure exactly what this means. If I had to guess I would say the casual masses prefer to just rough up some ai stress free and have fun than get frustrated with competitive play. I admit I am guilty of this even though I have the skills to do decent in competitive games. After a long day of work I don’t really feel like dealing with the ups and downs of pvp, smoking a couple bowls and smashing some ai sounds much better.
In both games they *try* to section off new players to some degree away from others. Also, in both games they try to match like-sized parties against each other, so if you’re playing with friends and in a party size of 3+ then unless you play at prime time your queue times will increase, regardless of account age.