Two weeks ago Blizzard reset the ranks of all players in order to improving matchmaking. The system is supposed to judgeplayers by their skill more accurately. Now, they have responded to feedback of the community on some of the negative effects of this rework.
Today Blizzard took the time to write up a blog post, talking about the recent ranked play rework they implemented in the latest patch. In this rework everybody had their rank reset, and people were required to play 20 placement matches to allow the system the opportunity to accurately judge their skill level.
Shortly after this update, people started voicing their concerns with this new system. Most prominently, higher ranked players and streamers chu8 and ZP_TV got a lot of support in their view that the new system made it impossible for some people to fairly climb the ladder at the higher ranks.
Blizzard has posted this blog post in direct response to voiced concerns like these. They claim that the new system is much more accurate in ranking the majority of players, but also found that there were special situations where this was not the case. The biggest concern of the community was that higher ranked players had to uphold a higher than 50% winrate just to stay at the same rank. This was the result of Blizzard removing bonus point rewards from matches played in the top 5 ranks. This change will be reverted back, and will make it easier for players in these ranks to keep their rank and possibly rise in rank a bit.
Another result of the update to the ranking system was that Blizzard would put players in a lower rank than their placement matches should place them, just to have a built-in margin of error for the system. Blizzard has now stated that they will work on tightening this margin so that players will be given the rank that is as close as possible to their quality of play.
Finally, Blizzard has announced that the concept of the 20 placement matches will not be repeated after every season reset. This is not relevant at this point, since Heroes of the Storm is still in the preseason, but will be nice when we start having monthly or bi-monthly seasons.
If you are interested in seeing what the community’s response is to Blizzard’s blog post, head on over to this reddit post.
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