Like, picking a group who’s SR is not too far from each other, and then putting them up against another group who’s SR is not too far from each other, where you pick the groups so they have the lower distance between average SR?
Favoring people who have been waiting a long time?
That sounds like a good idea.
If only it was the basis for all modern matchmaking?
That would be great.
But it would have problems. It would tend to 50/50 wins for games.
And since there is a psychological bias to seeing games with a 70% win average as fair, it wouldn’t feed fair.
Then people would assume it was rigging matches…
Which would be terrible.
Because people who write matchmakers would be dragged into threads like this one.
The fact that it lies there as a possibility is concerning enough, given just how greedy ActivisionBlizzard is.
Sr doesn’t even matter most of the time. Nowadays you can get people with 500 sr difference in comp matches.
Yes. That happens when the queue are unbalanced enough that queue time swamps everything else.
The pity timers basically becoming the only thing it can care about makes for bad games.
Why make a competitive game if your going to pull the competition out of if i wanted something sugar coated id go suck a lolly pop
What makes you think fair matches takes the competitiveness out?
Surely that puts the competitiveness in.
Not really.
A billion worse things are technically possible.
And they are no more “greedy” than any large business. They are here to serve their shareholders.
They aren’t interested in the internal mechanics, so why would they force a small dev team to do it… The answer is, they wouldn’t.
More so, it would likely make them less money, as longer queue times, make for a worse experience.
So every time you try to distort the matchmaker you end up having to give up so much to make it do what you want.
Exactly.
It isn’t smart business. Also, most of the money people in the company won’t understand the systems involved.
So they don’t.
They are extremely greedy and quite predatory as well (something Diablo Immortal showed). And ActivisionBlizzard are the ones running Overwatch, not the developers at Blizzard. That’s how it has been for years now. Blizzard isn’t an independent studio at all.
In practice matchmakers also take into account things like ping times etc.
Their jobs are not easy ones 
Putting a bunch of extra business stuff on them is just going to be too hard for the payoff.
I mean, you know this, you have obviously taken a swipe at this yourself.
Fair by there standard is this. 90% chance to win game 1 then 80% then 70% can you figure out how yo will balance that out to 50%. So you can call it fair???
Whilst I agree, I don’t like diablo Immortals monetisation, that’s why I’ll never play it.
Others thought differently, and it’s made a load of money, so clearly it’s a popular way of rolling a mobile game out. 100s of games do it.
If their is a market, a business will find a way to offer something. That’s not greed, that a successful business.
As you spend more time playing against teams of your own SR, you will tend to 50%.
Central Limit Theorem basically comes in and kicks your booty towards 50%
Lets take an example.
Say you had won 10 games in a row, and reached your actual SR.
So you are batting 100%, over 10 games.
The next 10 games you come in at 50%.
So, now you are at 15 wins from 20 games, or 75% win rate.
So you play more, another 10 games, winning 50% of the time because you are at your correct SR.
So, now you are at 20 wins from 30 games, or 66% win rate.
Do you see how it is moving towards 50%? Yeah, that is how it works. You tend towards 50% win rate, if you are at your correct SR.
But they said they didn’t use it, and don’t intend to either, honest!
Yes that explains the streaks up and down. But is having a tightly dictated multi player really fair. It just mean the players have no control over the outcome.
There are many ways of making money for a business, but not all practises are good practises. Some are illegal while some are legal but immoral.
Manipulating customers through deliberate means just to entice them to purchase, is quite immoral. Planetside 2 is one example of that, the resource gain to purchase vehicles and equipment is so gimped when you play for free, that you’re constantly at a disadvantage against paying players. The only way to bridge that gap, is to pay. Then your resource gain is normalised and you can purchase vehicles and equipment at a much faster rate. Good business practise perhaps, quite immoral against your players.
So if Blizzard makes use of a separate engine to deliberately put players at a disadvantage to entice purchases, that’s highly immoral.
That isn’t true at all. You swap a Bronze and a GM, and see how much influence their choices are having in their respective games.
Yes, in a way since you are playing against people at your level, you DO have to work for even staying where you are, but that is the nature of fair games.
If you want easy games, don’t play against people, there is a world of AI’s you can clown on who won’t care.
The issue is this, you are wanting games which are fun and slightly on the easy side for you, and SO IS EVERYONE ELSE.
The matchmaker CAN’T do this in a PvP game with the same number of people on each side.
You can’t get there.