While I agree that changes need to be made to fix some of comp’s issues, those are some god awful ideas.
Backfill for comp? No thanks. The leaver issue is overstated. Keep track on a spreadsheet. Over a few seasons I guarantee you’ll see a net-zero distribution of leavers, as in you’ll have the same amount for you as you will against you. Having a leaver sucks. Getting back filled into a comp game that’s already begun?? Absolutely f**king not.
Making team chat compulsory: while I agree with this in theory, it’s impractical. People could just mute their mics, or mute everyone in the game so they can’t hear any chat. And Blizzard will never take away the ability to mute someone. Also, there are plenty of people with anxiety issues who would prefer to not be in voice. There are people who get tilted easily and have gotten off voice to be less cancerous to their new teammates (I’ve had that happen more than once: “hey PersonNotInVoice, care to join us?!”, PNIV: “Sorry I’m tilted from my last game, need to stay out of voice right now.”)
Locking placements. Why? What does this accomplish? What if I work on the road and can’t get home to play until a month after the season starts? What if I am on vacation? What if I work full time and can only get in a few games here and there on the weekends when the wife is out doing errands? Locking placements achieves nothing.
The SR system used to be similar to that. This is a team game. Not CoD. If you want a CoD type game, go play CoD.
The reporting system needs a fix. I agree. It’s awful right now. OW’s support team is not big enough to individually handle every report. It’s not like WoW where there is a continuous game in which the GMs can interact with. Thousands on top of thousands of games are played each day. To individually check every report? The man hours required to do that is insane. They’d have to watch every second of every game. They’d have to find the offense that was reported, watch what happened, and then watch the rest of the game to figure out if the reported offense continued. They’d have to watch even if it was a false report. That will never happen. It’s simply not possible.
Why? Jephph has already stated that the team doesn’t view smurfing as an issue. And honestly, it really isn’t. I have a 2nd account to play with my RL buddies who are in bronze/silver. There aren’t many players who intentionally throw their downwards and then stay there. You see a few “Bronze to GM” things, but it’s a bannable offense and it’s not done often. I saw a decent amount of smurfs when I made my new account. I was sub-level 100 and the game placed me with similarly leveled, and similarly skilled players. On my main account which I’ve been playing since season 1, I rarely see a smurf. I’m level 600 something, and typically get matched up with people around that level. Diamond is supposed to be “full of smurfs” but I just don’t see it. I get a few here and there, but I queue dodge if I have to and that’s the end of it. My friends in bronze/silver aren’t the best at the game (obviously). We hop in discord and 3 or 4 stack and have a blast. It’s some of the most fun I have in Overwatch. We don’t always get in team chat because we’re having fun in discord and just shooting the sh*t. We don’t throw games, and I, despite being 1500-2000 SR higher than them, don’t win every game I play with them. We’ve gotten to gold once. Making it so alt accounts can’t play comp does two things: it dissuades people from buying 2nd accounts (which is what you want), and it loses Blizzard money. Guess who wins that argument? Money. Money wins every time.
I agree that Blizzard should have the ability to tell the difference by now, hell even Valve had that years ago. But it’d be easy to abuse this by making it seem like a random unintentional DC. Simply unplug your ethernet cable or disconnect from WiFi and it’ll seem like an internet issue. It’s too abusable to be a thing. Unless they punish you for DCing, which then you can an appeal if you have evidence that your internet/power went out. I get what you’re saying but it has some issues
they will my man. I think season 10 hasn’t been that toxic. the past 4 matches i didn’t think i was cheated out of a win. i felt that the matches i lost were because the enemy outskilled us.
I always found it quite easy to balance stuff in comp.
1.- If you leave, you get blocked for the entire season. I’m agree with that. Bad internet problems are as bad as a ragequit.
2.- If you win, with one gold medal, your SR goes up a bit. If you win with 2 gold medals, your SR goes more up than previous. With 3 gold medals or more, stuff will go up incresingly. If you have only bronze and silver, and win, your SR will remain the same. If you have 0 medals, then your SR goes down despite the victory.
3.- The same thing below, but in case of losing. If you lose with one gold medal, your SR remains the same. With two medals your SR goes up a bit, and with more than two gold medals your SR goes up in the same way of a bronze/silver victory. If you have 0 medals and lose, your SR goes down with a x2 multiplier.
4.- In competitive, remove the final vote stuff, and instead convert that to medals (5+ Mercy resurections, 8+ players teleported, +8 enemies killed by ulting, enemy players killed by surrounding…)
That way SR will adjust much more to reality, instead of the horrible stuff we have right now, which the worse MM i’ve ever seen in gaming history.
It can. Rage quitter will most likely stay in the game connected to the server, probably even play other modes. Bad-Internet-Victim (who shouldn’t play comp anyway) will get disconnected from servers and most likely restart the game as quickly as possible.
BTW: I’m disappointed that they didn’t even put the PTR changes live…
And no offense but with heroes as divisive as Junkrat and Hanzo they aren’t going to throw those balance changes out after less than a few weeks to live, even if they do nothing to change them.
Medals mean nothing. Elims dont move payloads. Teamwork does. As for leaving = season ban, Blizzard crashes on a lot of players. So a game bug would cause a lot of bans.
Its getting pretty bad, to the point that its amazing that blizzard still thinks its ok to have solo queue without some kind of role select to force balanced team compositions.
It’s been broken since S2… Every new season they put a new coat of paint on an old worn out turd and call it a new season. They don’t know how to fix their own game… IMO they never did and they released this complete tragedy of a ranking system way too early. Competitive mode is hardly fair or competitive. TBH I hope everyone leaves competitive mode and it completely crashes and burns… At least they would have no choice but to fix it. They release new content, new heroes, new maps, OWL but they barley ever touch competitive mode or its inner workings. It’s a damn shame… I’ll still play DM or maybe QP… But when it comes to this rigged and very depressing casino-like trash ranking system… I’m good… I’ve already waited 3 years for something positive to change in competitive but it looks like we might get Half-Life 3 sooner… With no hard season resets its becomes more and more stale season after season. I have so many friends that have left OW competitive or they have left OW for good. They all say the same thing… Great game, Trash Ranked mode. This game would be better off without competitive mode tbh… Unless Blizzard finally discovers how to make a great competitive ranked system I feel nothing but sorrow and pity for anyone who plays this game competitively.
They could definitely tell if someone used their in-game controls to exit the game. If they could tell when people used alt+f4, or turned off their wifi, then their game would be spyware.
But there is no way to determine whether someone pulled the ethernet/power, and whether it actually failed on its own. Even if there was, whenever someone manged to prove that they DC’d, Blizzard still couldn’t do anything about it, because if they gave SR back to that player, they would have to give it back to the rest of their team to be fair, too. AND take it away from the opposing team, cause ‘they didn’t win fairly’.
I mean, yeah, the system is annoying, and they could use more manual moderation on the reports, but that requires paying people to just sit there and wade through all the reports. That wouldn’t be sustainable unless we started paying a subscription.
Backfill? Wouldn’t be fair if someone left near the end of the match and you loaded in only to lose before you even get to the objective. No way in hell that would happen.
And how would you determine if an account is a smurf/alt? If they used the same IP address? Nope Multiple people can use the same PC with different accounts.
And how does one assess individual skill? They would need a full blown AI watching every match that is intelligent enough to assess strategy; and besides, they already try to differentiate based on how well an individual performs based on damage done, kills, deaths, etc, but that is a very unreliable system, because you can have someone who only killed the enemy healers, meaning the rest of the team got steamrolled because they had no sustain, but even though that person enabled the victory, according to ‘stats’ they didn’t do much. So they can’t lean on individual skill too heavily, or it can become exceedingly unfair.
I opted to take a break from this game. Competitive is really just the same recipe as quick play but with a few extra dashes of salt.
Blizzard knows what the issues are (one tricks, no incentive to build viable team comps, no LFG features in game, pitiful tools in game to deal with toxic / disruptive players [only two ‘avoid as team’?? GET REAL], etc) - but until they make real measurable progress to fix them, I’ll be doing other games and won’t be recommending this game to anybody.
We play games because they are fun. The moment a game is no longer fun, then it is time to move on to something else.
I encourage you to follow your bliss. Sometimes that means taking an extended break then checking back in after a few months.