Quick Match is one of the most popular game modes of Heroes of the Storm. It’s designed to let you pick the hero you want and get you into a match as soon as possible. This mode has gathered a lot of negative attention, with many calling it the source of the lack of game knowledge within the heroes community. But is Quick Match really responsible for this?

The lack of basic game knowledge is a well known issue across all skill levels. Many players don’t know what makes a good team composition or how to use objectives effectively, and Quick Match is often cited as the reason. The mode is infamous for its unconventional team compositions, supposedly teaching new players that a good draft isn’t important or that any hero is good in every map. In defense of Quick Match though, it doesn’t need to teach any of that.

Understanding the role of Quick Match and the Draft modes

Quick Match is designed to get you into a game fast, get you acquainted with the maps and to teach you how to play with different heroes. It is often used to improve mechanical hero skills, since it allows consistent practice with whichever hero you wish. Drafting is very important for the competitive aspect of the game, but I would argue that teaching good drafting practices is the responsibility of Unranked Draft. Quick Match could improve by having stricter hero composition rules to avoid frustrating games, but if a player wants to learn what makes a team composition good, Unranked Draft should be the place to go.

Another common complaint is that Quick Match doesn’t teach you that certain heroes are better in some maps and worse in others. This is completely true, but again, it is not the role of Quick Match to teach you that. Some of this could be explained in the loading screen of the maps, or even as a small advice blurb in the drafting screen. Preferably, there would be more advanced tutorials players were forced to take. Some heroes do excel in certain conditions, for example, Dehaka and Brightwing have global movement abilities that make them stand out in big maps, but for most heroes, in most skill levels, mechanical skill and team composition have a bigger impact. Unranked draft alongside better tutorials should be teaching the player base which heroes are good in which situation, and which heroes aren’t, but the game has failed to do that.

Unranked Draft is meant to be the stepping stone between casual play and ranked, but right now it’s not fulfilling its role. When Blizzard removed the account level requirement for Hero League, Unranked Draft was left in the middle of nowhere. Most casual players prefer Quick Match and when they finally want a more competitive experience, many go straight to Hero League. There, they will bring with them some bad practices, but this doesn’t mean the game mode is bad for the game, what it means is that not enough players are interested in playing Unranked and learning how to draft before playing in Hero League. Even then, there are more factors at play here.

The main argument in defense of Quick Match is that if it was the source of the issues surrounding game knowledge, then the problem would be isolated to Quick Match. When players eventually transition to Hero League they would rapidly become more educated and the problem would be solved after a few games. But that’s not what is happening. Hero League, Team League and Unranked Draft are not teaching players either. It’s true that the player base is uneducated, but placing the blame on Quick Match would only be distracting us from the real source of the problem: the game itself.

The Hero Brawler

A big factor in the knowledge gap amongst players is the target audience of the game. Heroes of the Storm was initially presented as a casual alternative to traditional MOBAs. In fact, Blizzard was not willing to even use the term, instead referring to the game as a Hero Brawler. Heroes of the Storm was marketed to be a friendlier, faster paced genre that shared a lot of similitudes with League of Legends and DOTA 2, but wasn’t quite the same thing. While this was done to secure its own niche in an already crowded genre, it had some unintended consequences. Most of the player base is composed of casual players. This means that, no matter the mechanical skill they have, they aren’t familiar with the pro-scene and don’t read guides. When they play Hero League, they won’t care about team compositions or meta strategies, not because they learned bad habits from Quick Match, but simply because they were never interested in learning at all.




Some design decisions to make the game more friendly are directly related to this issue. Heroes of the Storm is an amazing game, but it does a terrible job of explaining itself to the average player. Early game mistakes aren’t punished enough, while late game deaths have a very big impact. Comeback mechanics are non-intuitive. The hard focus on objectives fools the playerbase into believing every objective has the same importance, when in reality it varies depending on the map and game time. The game gives the impression that dying while fighting one versus five isn’t that bad because when an enemy died 2 times in the first two minutes they didn’t appear to fall behind. It is impossible to know how much experience your team needs to level up; the amount of experience a minion gives appears when it’s killed, but in this context that number is not useful. The game has gotten better in displaying meaningful information, such as implementing the ability to click on heroes and see their statistics, as well as armor indicators, but it still has a long way to go. Most of these issues are a product of game mechanics and UI, rather than being solely the fault of Quick Match.

I don’t believe any player is in the wrong here: everyone approaches the game their own way. What I do believe is that Blizzard made a mistake in how it initially handled Heroes of the Storm, and how little information they decided to show has hurt the game. Casual players exist in every game, but even if they are casual they know more about strategy than the average Heroes of the Storm player, as their game supplies more information organically.

Conclusions

The reason Quick Match is so popular is because it simply fills the needs of most of the player base. You can play with your favorite character, you won’t need to pick a role you don't enjoy, you won’t be forced to fill and pick a hero you find boring. It’s perfect to play with friends or practice a hero to try new builds, and above all it’s ideal if you just want to have fun. When players say Quick Match isn’t a good mode, I say no, it’s a great one.




The core idea this game was founded on was to be able to play with the Blizzard characters you have always loved. Quick Match realises this idea. If you want to play with Thrall, you can do it for the first time since 2003. If you want to send Diablo riding into battle on a rainbow colored unicorn, you can do that too. The idea Quick Match represents, simply put, is Heroes of the Storm.

It is true many players take some wrong lessons into ranked play. However this is not due to Quick Match being a problematic game mode, but rather the fact that drafting modes (and the game itself) do a bad job of explaining core concepts to the average player.
Quick Match is a big part of what makes the game special. It doesn’t teach a new player everything they need before ranked, but that’s not its purpose. The responsibility of teaching players the different competitive team compositions should fall upon the shoulders of the more competitive ranked modes, and the game should do a better job of explaining itself to the player base. Quick Match is not stopping players from learning about the game, it is just teaching different lessons.