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Not a day goes by without people lamenting the state of the current mapmaking means. It basically boils down to the simple fact that no one except mapmakers seem to play melee maps that aren't on the ladder pool. And for good reason, it's just extremely boring to play versus someone far above or below your level. If you open up a custom game and wait for a random person to join, chances are slim that person is going to be your level of play.
So get a practice partner some say? Great, easier said that done. I know maybe 2-3 people in this game who have a comparable skill level to me. Only one of them is close enough that I actually met him twice on the ladder. (2-0 for me, suck it dude). Then comes the fact that they will have different taste in maps. I really want to play more on Abyssal City, but most of my friends dislike that map.
Getting the current HotS 'unranked ladder' simply replaced by an option to have 1v1 MMR play a role in open custom games would be great. There could even be a slider to indicate how lax you want the matchmaking to be if you don't want to wait long. I feel a lot more people would actually play melee customs instead of the unranked matchmaking in HotS (which I use a lot to calm down myself) if it actually guaranteed someone close to your skill level. Even if you have to wait 7 minutes for an opponent, I'd do that just to be able to play on my favourite custom melee maps which I'm currently only playing like once per month.
I feel we should really push Blizzard for such a system in HotS, discuss?
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Wow, I totally agree with your point of view - but I see a little problem.
Say that all curently made (decently balanced and pretty looking) maps are uploaded and put into a ladder - the sheer amount of maps would still make the wait time to find an opponent quite enormous unless if you both opt not to care for which map is played.
So, although your chances of playing on different maps will be big, the chances of fighting on that one map you like will still be low. Let's not forget how many maps made by the community - who is going to decide whether or not they are worth placing in this matchmaking system?
Although I agree with the sentiment, I think the most practical solution would simply be for Blizzard to make a community-made map selection (of about 10 maps) per season that can be played on non-ladder in addition to the original ('balanced') ladder. However, blizzard is too damn lazy to go through all the community maps to make that kind of list.
The second option, which is slightly less professional but could still work is for the mapmaking community to launch this kind of initiative. A group of people would select 10 maps and put them on a public list and add them to a public channcel. All that is needed then is for someone to build a tracking system in all these maps to help track 'costum-mma' rating. However, the target group will still be significantly smaller than the blizzard mma system would give.
Kind of hopeless probably 
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Really good idea but something Blizz probably wouldn't do because they're shitty.
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I have already thought about this and i "think" i actually have a pretty good and simple solution for this. give me a moment and i'll make a quick mockup of it :D
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alright, so here is an idea:
what if you could filter open lobbies for opponents within your MMR range? or even even the option to have your lobby only visible to people within your MMR when creating a game, to avoid people from joining who are only looking for weaker opponents, etc.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/oEUmV.jpg)
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On December 04 2012 03:46 lefix wrote:alright, so here is an idea: what if you could filter open lobbies for opponents within your MMR range? or even even the option to have your lobby only visible to people within your MMR when creating a game, to avoid people from joining who are only looking for weaker opponents, etc. Yeah, this is absolutely great as well to get it rolling at least in 1v1 melee to just be able to see if it's going to be even or not.
I really feel the reason no one plays custom melee is because you have no idea what you're going to be matched with.
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i actually came up with an even simpler solution. basically just a checkbox to filter game lobbies with suitable opponents.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/IxbIQ.jpg)
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Magnificent, post it on reddit, get an angry mob of upvote trainers behind it and force Dustin to kneel before it.
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I thought that the reason that no one plays custom standard melee is that there is no incentive to play on non-ladder maps.
For the subset of people that play as competitive 1v1 'ladder warriors' going up in rank is the incentive. So there is no incentive to practice on non-ladder maps since that won't help you improve your laddering as directly (MMR and the actual maps you learn on). This point was talked about a lot on State of the Game in the past.
Is there really an appetite for a non-ladder, non-ranked, but semi-competitive 1v1 melee mode?
. . . or am I missing the point and what's being asked for here is something similar to blizzard's proposed unranked ladder, but without the restriction of having a blizzard-controlled map pool that would appeal more to the casual-tryhard?
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On December 04 2012 09:39 The_Frozen_Inferno wrote:
I thought that the reason that no one plays custom standard melee is that there is no incentive to play on non-ladder maps.
For the subset of people that play as competitive 1v1 'ladder warriors' going up in rank is the incentive. So there is no incentive to practice on non-ladder maps since that won't help you improve your laddering as directly (MMR and the actual maps you learn on). This point was talked about a lot on State of the Game in the past.
Is there really an appetite for a non-ladder, non-ranked, but semi-competitive 1v1 melee mode?
. . . or am I missing the point and what's being asked for here is something similar to blizzard's proposed unranked ladder, but without the restriction of having a blizzard-controlled map pool that would appeal more to the casual-tryhard?
well, there are many maps, like gsl maps, that people would love to play on. but with the current system that is simple impossible, unless you bring some friends with you to play against. and then there are also many unknown community maps, that need some playtime to gain popularity.
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Even with a slider bar for rating variance, if no one at your level wants to play that map, you are sitting and waiting forever, or you get someone who is below (or above) your level of play.
I think a better solution would be to have a sort of "wish list" either per account or per map. The purpose would be to have a way to send an invitation to others who are on the list. So if you like a map, you join the list for that map, or add that map to your list. Then when you go to send an invitation for a game on that map, you would see the other people who have joined the list and their online/away and favored statuses (and maybe a "previously played" status as well?). Everyone would be anonymous until they accept the invitation. The reason I think something like this is a better solution is because while you still have the map exposure/incentive to play problem, you at least can see whether you are going to be wasting your time trying to get a game on that map. If you can see there are five people on who want to play that map, and one is at your skill level, you can just send the invite when that person in not in game. And if you just wanted it to be "random matchmaking", you can just add a check box to send a random invitation (you can still have the slider bar here, too). But at least, in this way you don't have to sit in a game lobby and wait. You can pick and choose based on availability. And if you do have to wait, you may have a better idea of how long you might have to wait.
I guess, the two ideas aren't mutually exclusive... having a sort for already existing game lobbies could still be useful, too, I suppose.
Ultimately though, while I think something like this would be a good feature, it would need to be a part of a more comprehensive solution like I suggest here. It would be a great for something like a practice option. The thing is that it is probably going to be pretty tough for a lot of maps to benefit from a feature like this by itself since there is little draw for anyone to even look to see what others might want to play. Maybe GSL or other tournament maps would benefit from it -- and maybe those are the only ones that need it -- but it seems like this feature alone is sort of a stop-gap measure and not something that is a cure-all.
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EPT
