Interesting article on how Blizzard manages imbalanced teams in Heroes of the Storm.
Over the past couple of weeks, quite a few discussions have sprung up surrounding recent changes we made to the in-game bonus trickle experience system. In that time, we’ve seen a lot of positive feedback from players who like this system, but we’ve also read through quite a few comments from players who would like to see this mechanic implemented a little differently. While we felt that bonus trickle XP satisfied our goals for allowing teams to bridge level gaps, and make comebacks through the use of focused teamwork, we also think there are alternate solutions that are worth exploring. That said, we’d like to place bonus trickle XP on the backburner while we try out an “Underdog Bonus” in the next patch.
Because DB is going to make use of a similar ranked public match-play it’s really word anticipating the problems that arise with uneven teams. The matchmaking system can mitigate some of it but is wholly dependent on the active playerbase. On top of that, there’s the premade teams/clans that are able to upset this balance again (as happens a lot in WoT).
Blizzard tries to find new ways to compensate the underdogs in such scenarios. I believe DB is going to run into the same issues many F2P games find themselves in. Blizzard is often way ahead of the curve when it comes to finding solutions for it and both their discarded trickle system as well as the post-match reward are interesting options to consider.
