As the title says.
A week ago, I had a 3 stack absolutely tear me to shreds in VC and TC. What did I do to deserve this? I politely asked us to communicate in VC as I knew the other team was a 5 stack who would roll us. What did I get in return?
“F*****”
“I want to bash your skull in”
“Fa*s should be set on fire”
“I cant wait to come to your house and gutter stomp you”
Lovely. I reported them, the other team reported them, and I got the notification that my reports were successful about 5 days later. Great!
Until almost the exact same thing happened to me today (In quickplay, of all things). I went to avoid those teammates before being met with a “You must remove teammates from your avoid list before you can do that again bitch”. So now I’m faced with a choice. Avoid the homophobes and get stuck with these team members again. Or avoid the new people and end up with the same team as last week. How is that fair for me? How is that fair for anyone?
Now you might ask, what are the chances youll be in a team with them again? Well… high. I’m in Australia, and once you play this game for a few weeks you very quickly realize that our servers are minuscule. You start to recognize the same names, especially if you’re playing at the same time of day, or the same days each week. So its an inevitability that I will end up with these people on my team again eventually. I wanna be the type of person who is able to have VC and TC turned off, however, I really think it takes away from the fun I have in the game, and is a huge deciding factor in whether I win or lose my matches (Not to mention all the friends Ive made through OW too). I’m not asking for an infinite list of avoided team mates. I’m not asking fore a 50 max list of avoid teammates. But THREE??? Come on. We can do better than that.
The lower the player count is, and consequently the higher the chances of you being grouped with the same people again, the more problematic it becomes to increase the avoid count.
In the instances where the avoid as teammate would not be much help due to the incredibly low chance of running into the same people again is when the avoid count could be increased without impacting queue times too much.
In your case, being in Australia would mean that increasing the avoid count even by a couple of spots would make the matchmaker basically unable to create a lobby.
People often underestimate how much of an impact such specific restrictions have on a matchmaker. Think of it like this, it’s basically like trying to split a hundred children into classes of 20 each but where each child can freely choose which other child they don’t want to be in the same class with. It makes the creation of the classes impossible.
A specific restriction such as “i don’t want to be grouped with x player”, when allowed for everyone, pose a much bigger strain than global restrictions such as “teammates and enemies must be within a y range of skill”.
Lastly, I think your title might be a bit offensive given that you don’t know who worked on the system (women will almost certainly have been involved given the sheer amount of people needed to create such a system) and given that the source of the problem is in the end of the day a mathematical problem, which makes solving it a matter beyond sentiment.