If blizzard (a billion dollar company) actually allowed their devs to program a matchmaker that does what it’s supposed to do (and ONLY what it’s supposed to do), which is (in case you’ve forgotten because blizzard certainly has) match players of similar skill together so the matches AREN’T one-sided stomps.
Both the QP and comp matchmakers have been hot trash for a while now with a significant portion of my games being seemingly decided before they even begin. I still play them out just the same, but when we inevitably win/lose I just put “gg matchmaker diff” in chat and move on.
Now, let me get this straight : I don’t hate SBMM when it’s done well, it’s a great tool for making matches hard, but fair. but this implementation skips the fair and doubles down on the hard for most of my matches (around 60-80%) by giving me enemies that seem about at my skill level or higher and teammates that seem to play incredibly badly regardless of role or hero, and for the rest of them I practically don’t even have to do anything (because either my teammates are way better than me and the enemy team OR the enemy team is way worse than our team) and we just win.
Very rarely will I get a match nowadays that feels tense, like the teams are very close in skill (unlike in OW1 where I remember most of my matches feeling like this, but that could just be rose-tinted-glasses. I DEFINITELY would’ve remembered stomps being this bad and this frequent if they happened that often back in OW1 though.)
I will go back and watch the replay afterwards thinking “oh there’s no way they actually did this badly, I was just focusing on myself too much ingame to notice how they were actually playing” and I will see junkrats jumping in a straight line at the enemy team firing randomly and dying over and over again, d.vas that just fly in and die every fight without using matrix OR EVEN FIRING THEIR WEAPONS, I have seen tanks swap TO doom into a mauga and say “I’m better” before throwing the whole game away because they’re too headstrong to admit they have to counterswap. Having an ana+mercy right behind me SHOULD guarantee that i’ll live 2 charges of venture ult (given that i only have to be healed for a combined total of 11hp to survive), but with the teammates that this matchmaker gives me, apparently 11hp over 1.11 seconds (technically a little more because of the DPS passive but still not more than 20hp/s) is too much to ask!
What’s really fun is when the enemy team realizes you’re the only competent player on your team and starts hardfocusing you so you die first every fight (because god forbid your team peels for you at all) and because the rest of your team isn’t as good they just fall over for free after you die. I have seen my team lose many a 4v3 because I died first on DPS or support after getting 2 picks. This is not a tank-exclusive experience btw, this can happen regardless of what role you’re playing.
You might say “oh well of course the quick play matchmaker is bad, why are you complaining so much, people want to play with their friends and that’s why it’s so terrible!”
All of the above example happened in comp matches ranging from high gold to low plat.
Every time, the enemy team played cohesively at a diamond level or above.
Every time, my team lost.
Games where the matchmaker gives me straight up brand new players (EVEN IN COMP!!!) that have default everything and go 0-0-7 should NEVER happen, regardless of mode (except maybe in arcade or something).
I will not say that i’m perfect or that I’m t500, but I usually perform at least well if not exceptionally well in all of my games. I pick my heroes around what my team is playing, I hit most of my shots (uncap your fps ingame and cap your fps externally with Rivatuner. I promise you will love it and it will drastically improve your aim consistency.) I position reasonably well, and I know how all of the abilities work and most ability interactions off the top of my head. This (if the matchmaker actually worked), should guarantee that my teammates (and enemies) will play at around the same skill level as I do (or at least that there will be an equal amount of bad players on my team as there are on the enemy team), leaving the outcome to be decided by the microgame and tense team-fights, as opposed to a 5-minute steamroll where one team literally doesn’t have time to group up once.
Matchmaking being fixed would also lessen the need for leaver penalties (not that they should be in QP anyways), decrease the amount of avoids in play (lowering queue times), and just make the game feel better to play in general (which blizzard should be concerned about if they want people to spend money on the game instead of just uninstalling after 5 matches of being stomped over and over and over again.)
Oh, and INB4 some random person comes in here and says something about the “ELO ranking system” and how it’s sooo perfect and guarantees fair matches and clearly you’re just bad because there’s no possible way the ELO ranking system could be flawed… The ELO ranking system was designed for a use case where you are the only person that can affect your ranking. This is not the case in OW2. Your team MASSIVELY affects the outcome of the match, and having your ranking be 4/5ths out of your control (assuming that Overwatch uses a mostly unmodified ELO system) is insanely bad design. Other games allow you to rank up when you perform well regardless of whether you win or lose the match and Overwatch really should adopt a similar system (especially with the amount of data it tracks already and the variability in team comps and maps) as it basically removes ELO hell (with a good matchmaker that is) because it allows good players in low ranks to rise to the rank they belong in far faster than in an unmodified ELO system so stomps happen less often and close games (the meat+potatoes of Overwatch) happen more often.
Even if something like this raises queue times, i will more than happily wait 5+ minutes for a good fair QP game than wait less than 1 minute for a stomp, regardless of if I’m the one stomping or being stomped.
Edit : the (tenuously reliable) solution to this problem is (unfortunately) don’t play on weekends when not in a stack. Soloq-ers are just not allowed to play the game on weekends apparently.
Edit 2: go read this post as well for the reason behind this
quality matches or just get people in as fast as possible. This whole thing stems from the very beginning when OW2 launched. Getting rid of the 2nd tank, nerfing tanks next season, and now. Nerfing support characters to cater DPS role. They’ve lost there goal for this game.