Overwatch is a hard game.
Although there are outliers, when you are new, you are generally very, very, very bad at the game.
Towards the end of OW1, it was obvious that putting new players in gold by default was entirely wrong. They simply did not belong there.
It was obvious and reduced the match quality significantly, while giving a terrible experience to new players.
Many players saw this coming:
From their last blog, I cannot believe that they put new players just below the average OW player:
First, new players initially started at an MMR value slightly below average. You can think of it in terms of skill tiers around the lower divisions of Silver.
They’ve since changed it to bronze 5 but good lord.
As someone that has genuine been in every rank from bronze to masters, there is a huge difference between most brand new players and experienced silver players - only players proficient in another FPS can compete.
This must have been terrible for everyone involved. ESPECIALLY new players.
I’d be amazed if they retained even 10% of them.
I hope they can recover…