Friday, May 15, 2015

Is Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm's matchmaking still broken?

Anyone care to guess who won this game?

I didn't have a teammate above level 24. And I had at least 5 times as many games played as all my teammates.

Uh, yeah. We lost. Hard.


I had been on quite the losing streak lately due to the old 0 healers vs. 1 healer team comp issue. So I thought I'd switch over to LiLi.

Wins are in green. Losses are ... not in green.

Suddenly I was on the 1-healer team. And there were no healers on the other team. Huzzah!

And then I saw my teammates spend the first 10 minutes of the game all grouping in one lane while I scrambled to rotate to empty lanes to keep pace with the opposing team's XP. Gaining XP early is generally regarded as a good strategy.

And then we got to level 10. And my teammates inexplicably split up. Everyone was running around on their own grabbing watch towers, trying to do solo coin turn ins and other terrible ideas.

And the opposing team stayed together as a rolling 5-person death ball ... easily picking off all my solo teammates.

I think I typed "group up" into the allied chat 10 times during the game. I even started forecasting teammate deaths as they ran off on their own. No one seemed to care.

Blowout loss. Morale low.

I couldn't help but do some investigating. Here's what I found ...

My team:




Me:

See any big differences there in terms of Player Level and games played?

And now let's have a look at the opposing team:






Not exactly mind-blowing that they understood the fundamentals of laning early and then grouping late.

In case you missed it, all of the above adds up this:


Is this what I should continue to expect from Quick Match matchmaking?

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Turns out the Apple Watch battery is great

I take back everything I said in my previous post. Seems that my first day with the Apple Watch was not at all like a normal day. Probably too much fussing with the settings.

In the last week, I've commonly woken up at 7am, done an hour long outdoor activity with GPS and heart rate and all that and gone to bed around 11pm. I've had the normal amount of updates received and texts sent from the phone. 
And with all that activity, my watch is usually around 30% when I go to bed. 
And my phone easily lasts all day too. No mid day charge required. Seems an iPhone 6 (regular) can easily handle an all day blue tooth connection. 
Thumbs up all around for the Apple Watch. Excelsior!

Power reading from early evening on a normal day.