Noticing that every third game or so, there will be three healers with… let’s say 12k in heals and a single one with like 3k. While I’ve seen the random DPS or Tank be out of their league (and have been that guy before, no doubt), it is really odd that this one role keeps sticking out as having healers that appear to be way out of place. Unlike others in these games, I don’t start trashing them cause I mean… Blizzard made the match; WTF is the healer supposed to do about it? They play the rounds they are dealt. It does seem very odd, though, that this keeps happening and when it does, it essentially ruins the match for whichever team happens to be stuck with the out of place healer. Am I the only one noticing this?
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Horribly outclassed everything. I’ll get a tank who runs off alone or tries to play flankers the entire match. I’ll get a Sombra who just fights on the Frontline. I’ll get a Baptiste who only shoots the enemies and only uses his area heal on himself. It’s all roles dude.
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The issue is players that dont want to switch. If your pharah is popping off… freaking switch to Mercy! But no, rather complain about how dps gets no kills and keeps dying
The stats don’t really tell the whole story man. Frankly, it doesn’t say much. For instance alot of team will become totally tilted and blame their healers for having less heals when the only difference is that the enemy team is playing safer and living, so they are alive to heal, or the enemy healers are just pumping the tank the entire match which adds up.
For all you know the person with 3k healing could be using all their heals on your other support or dps and the other support can be just spamming heals into your tank non stop. What usually sets most supports apart isn’t distinctly how much healing they are doing but if their utility or damage is winning fights or if your team is even living long enough to effectively heal.
Definitely don’t place the blame at the feet of your support. Likely if every third game you are getting a bad support its probably not actually the support that are bad. FWIW.
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the only thing i see horribly outclassed is their HR department. how you can have such NPCs on the payroll when Riot styles on you for 1/2 the staffing budget is beyond me.
wtf is even installed over there at Irvine, SoCal ?
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It’s the role that’s the most stretched thin so I can see how they’re being thrown into weird games that need to be filled. Plus I think objectively the matchmaker is a little looser in OW2 (if anyone replies with the words “rigged” i will be under your bed tonight). Ik I’ve been on the other side of the coin where I watch teammates make plays that wouldnt work in like silver.
Still in the end it’ll balance out. In a season or two if the game is still alive there’ll much higher quality games.
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I definitely don’t place the blame on the supports. I am a support main and appreciate how difficult it can be to stay alive when your team is choosing difficult positioning or when you have a comp that isn’t ideal against the enemy.
I guess I just always assumed that, like me, they would heal the appropriate target in the moment and switch if they need to so that if the enemy is playing dive or something, they aren’t on a less mobile character that is sure to get jumped first and repeatedly throughout the entire game. As a result (by the end of a game) while you might be 1/4 less than the other healers because it took you time to adjust to the playstyle of your team or to adjust to an enemy strat, you likely shouldn’t be 2/3 or even 3/4 less than the other 3 healers with way more deaths to boot.
While some others in this thread appear to be generally speaking about the quality of the competitors in current comp, my question is more specific in that I’m asking if it seems like Blizzard is dumping healers into the wrong rank still after all this time and/or if they have just given up on making sure that matches are appropriately balanced. Again, I don’t think it is these people’s fault for ending up way out of their league; Blizzard makes the matches. Just wondering if it seems to anyone else like the matches Blizzard is making are either a little more… “loose” than in OW1? Or if maybe the MMR system isn’t properly calculating skill as well as it used to.
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dps and heals are really to climb up to mid plat. most support lack knowledge of how other classes work and who is being targeted.
I responded to someone else before getting to this comment and your thoughts echo mine in the language you chose (loose). It feels like there are more oddball matches coming up and I’m not sure if the MMR system is still getting a feel for some of these players or if the matchmaker has less stringent requirements so it can speed up queue times because they are trying to maximize engagement from a business standpoint to establish the player base.
And don’t worry, I don’t think it is “rigged”. I understand the purpose of the MMR system vs the SR system and I appreciate what it is designed to do. Just doesn’t feel like it is creating good test scenarios for itself and so I question the ability of the MMR algorithm to learn properly from matches when the skill levels are regularly so disparate.
If the goal is to create what it calculates to be as close to a 50/50 chance of winning as possible so that everyone can prove the difference they can make compared to previous games but games are more frequently unbalanced (by a larger skill gap than it would have previously tolerated and with a smaller number of players per team), it would appear to be setting itself up for failure.
To put it another way - if the model has a decreased number of variables AND those variables are managed more poorly THEN they should be assuming that the level of certainty they can have in the outcome should go down, and if they haven’t changed the model to reflect this, I wonder at what point bad outcomes beget bad outcomes.
Now I realize I’ve just suggested exactly what you’ve asked me not to… I guess the difference is, I don’t think it is intentional. I don’t think they are trying to screw anyone over and so I don’t think it is “rigged” by the definition as I know it. Also, if lower-skill players are being put into games equally, then everyone has to deal with it, and so it isn’t going to necessarily negatively impact one player over another. It just makes for a bad game experience, which believe it or not, is something I value over my rank 
.
Also, I’m certain that if someone was skilled enough, they could overcome that significant healing deficit and rise more quickly if it is appropriate. It might result in a little more chaos in any given “range of skill” but overall it would still do its job.
Just wondering how much wider the margin of error would settle at on the current model vs the old in terms of the average distance between the MMRs assessment of a player and where they truly sit. It could never, of course, be perfect before. Just wondering if now it is x% further from “the truth” than before due to the bad experiments it is setting up for itself and if this will result in increasingly unbalanced matches.
If the model used to be +/- 3% from “the truth” and this could result in (at worst) games where you had six players who were all 3% worse than it thought and six players who were 3% better than it thought, then you’d likely have a blowout and people would complain (like they always have). This ignoring the natural gap that would have to exist due to a limited player base and the need to not wait forever for “the perfect match”.
If now, though, it has been tweaked for the sake of search times to accept an additional +/- 10% skill level for the healer role and this has an outsized impact on match outcomes resulting in an increase of 1-2% uncertainty in any given player’s MMR, you could theoretically have matches that look more like -
-15 vs +15 (healer)
-15 vs +15 (healer)
-5 vs +5 (dps)
-5 vs +5 (dps)
-5 vs +5 (tank)
as a worst-case matchup.
A 10-30% difference in skill per any two players is significantly more than a 6% difference in skill. Assuming every player has an equal impact on outcome, which… I have no idea, honestly, but… assuming they do -
A five-man team results in each player contributing 20% towards their team’s performance whereas a six-man team results in each player contributing 16%. So now, the potentially larger difference in the skill between a player and their counterpart on the other team compounds with the larger percentage of their team’s total performance they make up. I wonder if the result could be a system that sets you on wider and wider swings of stats as you try to compensate for the very different play styles you might encounter which would make it harder and harder for the MMR system to learn.
At what point does an algorithm go from “a little inaccurate but helpful” to “wildly inaccurate and counterproductive”?
I would say, when matches too often feel especially unfair and so feel unfun.
I’d like to point out that this is very different from “I don’t like winning/losing 50/50 but I don’t want to acknowledge that I’m the only one who can pull myself out of it”.
In the broken system I describe above, you would likely still end up with a roughly 50/50 record unless you were on a path of constant improvement. The difference is, there would be generally more blowouts where one team completely decimates the other. Technically, the matchmaker would still be doing its job of creating what it thinks are even matches to learn from and then (albeit based on worse data) it would adjust your skill level to reflect the outcome. It would just be a more painful process to the players who would have to accept that the games are sometimes far less even and they had less of an opportunity than before to make a difference to secure a win. To look at it another way, if a player has the ability to stretch 10% for a win through a combination of better attention to fundamentals (positioning, cooldown management, communication, counters, etc…) and an occasional uncharacteristically fantastic play (extreme focus resulting in better mechanical ability than they typically demonstrate for a short period of time) but the number of games that require 15% more performance from them than usual increase in frequency, they would notice less consistent results from those games of increased effort and begin to recognize that some games just feel “unfair”. That’s not fun. To be clear, I don’t think we’re there yet. When I play with friends in Bronze in QP, I can hard carry as characters who are not my mains, so I know it is still generally ranking people by something that makes sense. Also, I’m not a data scientist/mathematician/statistician, so I don’t know if my math makes sense or not.
I’m sure they are trying to balance compromises in healer quality against each other AND other roles but I doubt they’ve got it perfected and for now, the difference is noticeable.
Or, maybe I’m just thinking too much about this when I have other things to do…
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The issue is new players and old in the same games. Old players expect certain things to just happen. Group up, take high ground, save ults, certain positions everyone takes on defence etc. Now it just never happens. New players go in alone, never take high ground, use ult on cooldown, literally set up outside spawn on defence. We had years of these unwritten rules becoming the norm and now they just don’t exist, it’s a free for all and it’s incredibly frustrating to play. Plat in OW2 is worse than bronze was in the last year of OW1.
But if you can’t beat them, join them? I’ve switched from a 3k hour support main to basically trolling on ball and it’s a hell of a lot more fun. Sure the game isn’t serious any more and I don’t care if I win or lose. But if you’re the only one who takes it seriously anyway why bother right?
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Whether or not the game is intentionally rigged or the matchmaking is so bugged that is just feels like it is a secondary problem. The main issue is that as long as people feel that matches are rigged they will gradually stop playing. Blizz should be scrambling to fix whichever is causing the issue. Anyway, hope to see you under my bed 
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It’s called support btw they heal you when they can but also get kills and do dmg
Every single game and thats in plat and diamond. Like literal bots when u watch the replay back
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