Friend in party queue ALWAYS gets the character we both want.

[Calavontis]

Hi,

A friend and I both like to play Lash and we both queue with Lash as our highest priority hero (and with 2 other heroes as gray). I would be fine if we alternated lash games but out of the 10-15 games we queued together he ALWAYS gets Lash every game. At first I am willing to let the RNG sort things out but it's approaching highly unlikely odds at which point I feel matchmaking is not functioning as intended, or whatever algorithm its using is not sufficient these sort of situations. Neither of us are party hosts in these games. I tried different hero roasters (still with Lash as highest prio but de-prio everyone else) but nothing I do changed the outcome.

Thanks.

 

[joeinky]

Without actually being able to look at the games code we can't say definitively one way or the other, but 10-15 games isn't exactly a large enough sample size for this sort of thing, if we're assuming it's just random chance (it isn't but we'll get to that in a sec).

You can flip a coin 10-15 times and gets heads everytime without it being a weight coin.

The real consideration here is that there is a per-hero MMR system in this game, so if your friend's Lash MMR is in a state where it's quicker for the matchmaker to put you into a game that it thinks is skill appropriate where they are Lash, than one where your Lash MMR creates the most skill appropriate game, it's going to give it to your friend way more often.

The best way to get the most out of the priority system is to have multiple characters that you enjoy playing and just mark them all as yellow, secondaries in white, and then only mark 1 purple when that's definitely the hero you want to play. (You can mark more than 3 heroes if you didn't already know)

Partying up with another person where their only purple character is the same one as yours does throw a massive spanner in the works though, if you were solo and the game tried to match you up with someone else who had Lash as their only purple, then it might move on and look for another game, but it's impossible for it to do that when you're in a party with that person.

 

[n1caboose]

Which are the heroes that you each have selected as low-priority?

It's possible your friend has high-pick rate heroes like Haze or Seven as their low-priority slots, which will almost guarantee they get Lash.

Based on some comments I've seen in the subreddit, some people intentionally do this to basically guarantee their main pick.