A few days ago, I was playing some Hero League on Heroes of the Storm when my Internet became unstable and I lost connection to the Battle.net servers. This happened while my team was in hero select.

Leaving during character selection is generally called “dodging” because you dodge the game that’s about to come up. It’s a strategy in League of Legends to avoid games you are sure you’re going to lose (such as having an illegitimate team composition or a player who claims they are going to intentionally feed in-game).

In League of Legends, dodging gives you a small penalty of losing a few league points (which is nothing compared to how much you would actually lose if you were to go on to play that game and be defeated). Regardless, I’m not really much of a dodger, as I like experiencing the game in different ways, and love to take on challenges.

I have a similar mindset in Heroes of the Storm, and never dodge during character selection. I was sure there was some sort of penalty for dodging, but I didn’t really care too much about it and didn’t look into it much because I never really planned on ever dodging.

Unfortunately, getting disconnected from Heroes of the Storm means you have a guaranteed forced dodge.

I signed back in after my Internet connection was restored … and saw that I was down to Rank 2.

Apparently, the penalty for dodging a game during hero select is around 300-400 points. Of course, I hadn’t played enough games in Rank 1 to collect up a lot of points, so that penalty was enough to send me right back to Rank 2.

The worst part is that, in Rank 1, your point gains get severely stunted. Up until Rank 2, you gain a base of 100 points per game, plus an additional skill bonus if your matchmaking rating is high, so the dodge penalty is about one or two games’ worth of losses.

But it’s a completely different story in Rank 1.

In Rank 1, each game means you gain or earn around 12 points, based on my experiences. So, by losing a couple hundred points, it was basically the same as getting defeated for about 30 games straight.

Now of course, I’m sure that your true hidden matchmaking rating is unaffected by the dodge penalty (and I know it wasn’t, because after I started playing games again at Rank 2, they weren’t any easier than my regular games).

But this brings me to my main point of not really liking these rating systems (Ranks in Heroes of the Storm and leagues/divisions in League of Legends).

League of Legends used to go off a pure elo system, where you had a four-digit number (or three digits if you were really bad) that represented your position on the ladder, with higher elo values indicating higher levels of skill.

I don’t fully agree with the fact that this was changed into a system where the ranking system listed on your profile rarely accurately reflects your true skill.

It’s almost like receiving “Excellent,” “Good,” “Satisfactory,” and “Poor” in school, rather than your exact percentage as a grade.

Imagine if a kid got a 98% on his exam and was told he received an “Excellent, Tier II.”

On the other hand, another student received an 82% on his exam, but because his past exam scores were 20%, 59%, and 70%, he was told he received an “Excellent, Tier III” because the fast improvement put little confidence in the rating system and it needed to adjust.

I don’t see that as being much different than people getting +300 point skill bonuses in Heroes of the Storm (which I got), or people skipping tons of divisions in League of Legends (which I did).

Now, with that conversation done and put aside, something like that obviously didn’t discourage me from playing more Heroes of the Storm. I quickly and easily made it right back to Rank 1, and I’ve been continuing to play since then.

And finally, a preview of my next gaming project – Blizzard has offered me seven more free days of game time in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor to try out the changes introduced with Patch 6.2. I didn’t manage to finish leveling the last time they gave me this gift, so I’ll definitely make sure to finish it this time. Those stream VODs will be coming up in the next few days.