PC Europe
Over 50% of matches were of poor quality.
The only criterion for poor quality was: Did the match either have a bot or an afk player for more than 1 minute.
Total numbers:
65 matches with at least 1 bot or an afk for over 1 minute
52 matches did NOT have a bot or an afk for MORE than 1 minute
Nothing else was considered. Matches that were not played till the end (due to crashing) were NOT counted.
Influencing factors:
All of these were played during the last 1 1/2 weeks between 16:00 to 0:00. Weekend queues were statistically about the same as week queues.
I always left the match lobby when i was matched against players that were very obviously 4 man premade. That means matches against known streamers who run 4stacks (like DaddyLaw and BaneOfBetas). And matches where all 4 enemies had the exact same name tag.
I did not go out of my way to leave other lobbies. Id say on average i would rematch 50% of all lobbies that i was in. Some of the lobbies that i left were 7 player lobbies (including me).
Overall that is a really atrocious result. There is no other online multiplayer game that forces such an exorbitant number of poor quality games on players. Quite frankly playing dominion solo is a sure way to go insane.
SOLUTIONS:
Bots are not acceptable. Lobbies always start with 4 players on both teams. Timed queues help with that - that means - after a match EVERYONE gets booted to lobby and the game queue is on a constant timer (depending on how many people are playing). When the timer hits 0 all players are distributed into games. A few players are left over - those players are guaranteed to get a lobby next queue.
Leaver Penalty! (AFK report system has to function as well - it quite frankly doesnt look like it does). I know you guys want to make the game "inclusive for busy people because its just a game lulz". That doesnt work. It. makes. the. game. ****. You cant have random people on the internet do anything together without rules that involve punishment.
The system is NOT used by people who have to do other things. It is used 95% of the time to leave losing matches. That also ruins matchmaking. Any form of MMR manipulation regarding leavers will NOT solve this because MMR has no ingame value - no motivation to keep MMR high. Might even lead to intentional MMR dumping.
Punishing leavers ALWAYS is the only solution that will make the game less ****.
Other subjective things i noticed:
Lobbies get stuck in the loading screen more often than they should - id say around 5 to 10% of times i had to wait several minutes for a map to load. Very bad.
Several crashes for no apparent reason. Rarely ever happens in other multiplayer online games. Here quite a lot.
When bots get replaced it deletes the bot off the map making the overall situation even worse.
Premades are a huge problem. Playing this game solo is an abyssmal experience. This is mostly because the game doesnt prioritize matching solos with other solos and teams with teams.
Coordinated play is the difference between killing someone 2v1 in 10 seconds or losing the same 2v1 in 60 seconds.
MMR manipulation is rampant. I said this before but because there is no penalty for leaving matches it is very easy to screw with your individual MMR (and as i said this is true regardless of making people lose mmr for leaving games or not doing that. The fact that you CAN leave games en masse is the problem).
Some MMR manipulation is built into the game: When you join a game that has already started (which happens A LOT! see above! over 50% of games have either bots or afks - most of these are bots) you can ONLY gain mmr. This means if you play solo and you get thrown into games that already started 50% of the time then your mmr is going to be way higher than it should be.
Almost all of the games i played (regardless of bots/afks) were extremely 1 sided and the issues with premades and MMR manipulation explained above are probably a major reason why.
.
Please consider not doing the same ****e over again when designing the online multiplayer for FH2.