Blizzard fixing excessive negative rating adjustments in Heroes
@AlexZiebart
The 2018 Gameplay Update released for Heroes of the Storm in mid-December introduced changes to matchmaking — notably, it introduced peformance-based matchmaking. With performance-based matchmaking, rating changes wouldn’t simply be determined by a win or a loss. If you played well, you’d earn higher rating on a win — or lose less rating on a loss. If you played poorly, you’d gain less from a win, and lose more on a loss.
Over the past few weeks, however, players began to notice the system was being unusually aggressive. Higher-end players were receiving negative personal adjustments so consistently the community began to believe it was a bug. Yesterday, Heroes of the Storm Lead Designer Travis McGeathy finally shared an explanation on the official forums:
We’ve been seeing a number of reports of high-end players consistently receiving negative personal adjustment points at the end of games and wanted to give some visibility into why it was occurring. With the changes to matchmaking that were rolled out this season, the curve which determines how many players can be in each rank ended up a bit flatter than normal, pushing more players into the extremes, making more players than usual Bronze or Master tier. The system has been self-correcting, providing positive points for players in the Bronze tier and negative points for players in the Master tier, to normalize the distribution.
While this behavior was returning things to normal, we agree that consistently receiving negative personal rank adjustments feels bad so we have disabled the self-correct behavior. Instead, we’ll allow the system to correct the distribution at the start of the next season roll with the standard normalization done every season. At that time, the extra players currently in Bronze will place into Silver and the extra players currently in Master will place into Diamond. Thank you to the players who helped us identify the cause of these adjustments. We apologize for the confusion and frustration that these adjustments have caused.
Ultimately, the system placed players where they shouldn’t have been to begin with, and was attempting to return to normalcy. While the consistent negative adjustments did feel bad, I’m not sure it was necessary to disable it for the duration of the season; transparency on what was happening might have been sufficient. Believing it was a bug isn’t out of the question considering this season has been plagued with issues which required a full season reset. At this point, the developers may just be washing their hands of this season and waiting it out so they can begin the next with a clean slate.
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