Because aiming for a 50% winrate isn’t the same thing as ensuring a 50% win rate.
I assure you it doesn’t look at your win rate whatsoever.
It looks at your MMR, which is determined by your APM (performance variables it looks at) compared to your SR. MMR above SR? Good teammates and bad opponents. MMR below SR? Bad teammates and good opponents.
Incorrect.
From Jeff Kaplan:
“In Overwatch, whether your MMR goes up or down is contingent on winning or losing. But there are a number of factors that determine how much that rating goes up or down. For example, what map you’re playing on and whether you were attacking or defending is factored in. We know the win rates on attack/defend on all of the maps and we normalize accordingly. Not all wins and losses are equal.”
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I mean it doesn’t look at your win rate and say “oh no, you’re at 51%, you’re going to get some losses now!”
What Jeff said there means that attacking or defending first has a win rate other than 50% so that is factored in to your MMR adjustment. For example, if you are put in a situation where your expected outcome is 60% win and you manage to lose that’s going to hurt your MMR more than losing something where you had a 40% chance of winning.
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This is a strawmanned exaggeration, so of course it wouldn’t say this. It would however balance teams based on collective MMR, so looking at the recent performances of you and your teammates would be required.
Why would one need your (what I consider to be flawed) explanation/rephrasing of a firsthand statement that speaks for itself?
The handicapping system you are referring (Match Making Rating) to does not really affect and individual’s odds of having a winning or losing streak. But it does try to create 50/50 odds for every match. More details in my thread on the subject:
Show your work
Yo-yoing is common.
I been doing a new thing this season. Even play time across all tanks. Surprisingly enough I was able to touch Low Diamond which is around my normal SR but to do it with tanks I’m so so on caught me off guard.
Of course that means from then on I was getting almost entire Diamond player games and predictably I started to get stomped hard. All the way to 2699. Now the game realizes I wasn’t ready for that rank (at least the way I’m playing atm lol) and I don’t get those Diamond player full games anymore.
Thats what happens. You do really well, rank up, then you hit a wall of skill beyond your own and take a beating for a while until your SR balances out to meet your skill level. Sometimes you overshoot your normal SR and then have a winning streak as you climb back out of the ditch.
It happens a lot less if you play very consistently but few people can sustain a honest level of consistency due to bad choices (feel like playing this today) or just general mood.
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“Smurfs and alt accounts climb just fine.” Are you serious?
If only this were the case.
Have you studied chance? Five in a tow is incredibly common. To test flip a quarter heads or tails say 100 times recording each flip. The odds of going h-t-h-t or t-h-t-h-t are incredibly low actually. Streaks are very common despite assumptions on the contrary,
Secondly this isn’t a coin flip. Players stay around 50/50 short of outside influence like working to improve because the system works. Assuming Sr losses/gains are roughly equal, they hover around where they win/lose 50/50. Win more? Climb. Lose more? Drop. It’d not a forced 50/50; it’s the matchmaker working as intended.
Thirdly 12 people behind keyboards introduce way too many variables for a system to ever account for. Exhaustion, tilt, hunger, distractions, etc all can worsen performance for starters. Have you been playing through/with one or more of these?
Yeah that’s enough to make most people not bother. Try to win and you’ll just have a harder time winning. “Skill rating” lmao please make sure they never work in AAA ever again.
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Exactly! This is the thesis of my thread
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Exactly. I want to know why they think a 50% win rate is forced when I can go up 4 full ranks without a single loss. My point is that 50% win rate isn’t forced, it’s just a byproduct of being where you belong. It’s the effect, not the cause.
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That’s not how statistics works…
for example…
shodor
.org/interactivate/activities/Coin/
First try I did 100 coin flips, the first eight were tails… steaks in 50/50 percent odds are very common.
If you have a 50% chance to win a match, then you still have a 50% chance to win the next match and the next match and so on and so forth.
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It does. Just because it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t to many others. 5 times now where I am on a whopping 4 game win streak, I go from 24 SR gain on my 3rd win to 4th win I gain like 5 and then guess what happens EVERYTIME the next match. A loss. Not just a loss but a stomp. And no I shouldn’t be only gaining 5 SR when I am carrying those matches and not only that my season high is way higher.
If you are losing you want team mates who are performing well and winning. If you are performing well and winning you do not want team mates on losing streaks. Do you see the cognitive dissonance in your argument?
It’s a complicated issue. If you want it to be more fair in this way, you would put 3 players on a losing streak and 3 players on a winning streak on both teams. The problem with this is that the winning players might only be able to carry with a few heroes, and when hard countered fail miserably.
Which means that the winning players on the Team B are a higher skill than the losing players on Team A, and Team A’s winning players don’t boost them at all. This is what punishes people who are “expected to carry” due to high MMR, and forces players who are 500 SR to 2000 SR below their true rank.
Why? Because if you are expected to carry you can lose upto 100 SR in a single match (yes this has happened to me before). So you win 25-30 SR 3 games, your MMR goes up, you are hard countered and you lose 35 SR for three games. You can’t climb because you don’t deserve to be punished so heavily for these losses.
It’s extremely difficult for a Gold / Plat player to climb out of Bronze / Silver. Everyone says “Oh but a master can do it in a few hours or days, so the problem’s aren’t as bad as they say.”
The biggest problem in low ranks is the inability for teams to counter players dominating on (mostly) doom, pharah, tracer, genji, etc due to players not knowing a wide enough range of characters, or not understanding characters they haven’t played abilities / ults to even begin to conceive how to counter them.
So you say “to be gold / plat, you need to learn more characters” yes, but you can’t counter everything on your own. Especially when you are locked into a role. You can help other players counter, which requires good communication and coaching skills, but a lot of people in lower ranks don’t enter the voice channel at all.
The only solution I can see is to stop matchmaking based on MMR and letting it truly be random. I don’t know if this would work. It’s a complicated issue but you don’t just have to “git gud” if you are climbing out of low ranks. It’s very difficult to do, but I’m not sure if the matchmaker can fix the problem.
I think the other potential solution is a full reset on SR 1-4 times a year. I don’t think people realize the amount of chaos a full reset could cause though. Again it’s something they should experiment with, which is why I am disappointed that they don’t. At least to get players like me to stop whining about it, if it proves that it does not solve the problems.
The truth is that plat players forced into bronze / silver help bronze / silver players get better. We are sacrificed for the greater good. Be proud lol.
If a Gold/Plat player cannot climb out of Bronze/Silver, they’re not Gold/Plat. The defining characteristic of a player’s rank is they are better than every rank below them. Sure, a GM would escape easier/faster than a Gold but if the supposed Gold cannot earn Gold, they’re not Gold quality.
I’m saying this as a barely Plat player atm who escaped from 800 SR. It’s entirely doable without GM skills if one puts in the time and effort.
As for countering big bads in low ranks from each role
Reaper: McCree, Torbiorn, Widow, Hanzo, DVa, Roadhog, Ana, Zen
Pharah: McCree, Ashe, Widow, Solder 76, DVa, Roadhog(if they fly low so conditional), Winston(can aid with his jump+Melee combo), Ana, Zen, Mercy(last two aren’t so much the damage they output as Discord/Damage boost your hitscan so they can take her down.)
Genji: Pharah, Symmetra, Torbiorn, Winston, Roadhog, Brigitte, Moira, Lucio
Am I missing any? Every role has at least 1 hero who can deal with the big bads that are ripping your team apart.
But why should anyone get “stomped hard” after a successful streak? If you were playing great and winning a lot, you should gradually face increasing levels of difficulty until you can’t win anymore. You should not experience what we’ve all experienced and often complain about: doing well up until a point where you are immediately put into games that are virtually unwinnable in which you get obliterated until you’re essentially back to where you started before you started playing well. Your win rate should gradually work itself back down to 50% from your 90 or 100% or however well you were doing.
This is why I consider the ladder to be intentionally grindy. And it is a game design choice, it’s not the way matchmaking has to work inevitably. Why people are so against the idea that Blizzard optimizes the matchmaker for engagement time rather than fairness is beyond me. It’s almost like people forget that developers regularly institute grind in their games as a matter of profitability and self-interest.
I’m about to quit. Five losses in a row. Four cards. My last game, no card for me, but had gold elim as Brig with a 48% inspire rate.
As someone who’s all but quit the game, I cannot tell you how much sense it makes for people to stop playing if they’re not enjoying it. That’s not me being snarky. I’m being sincere. There are just too many cool and interesting things to be enjoying and getting good at to waste that time and energy on Overwatch.
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