Blizzard openly admits skill has nothing to do with rank

Competitive Discussion
1

Rank = losing/winning
Your skill and stats means nothing in terms of rank. This is why higher MMR can stuck easy in lower ranks. No matter how good you are if you have throwers/leavers/potatoes in your team it’s mission impossible to win the game. So for exmaple if your MMR is diamond you will be playing vs other diamond MMR players in silver, hence the reason your rank can be miles away from your actual skills.

Q: Why am I hard stuck at a low rating that doesn’t reflect my skill?
A: Ultimately, the only way you can increase your rating is to win more matches than you lose. Since we’re putting any given player on a random team with 9 random other players, with enough matches, that player’s contributions are the only constant factor throughout, so their rating should end up reflecting their skill.

There are some interesting phenomena here, though, that make this more complicated. For example, we have data showing that matches become less predictable the lower the average rating of a match. Predictability is a measure of how likely the favored team is to win because two teams never have identical ratings. One team is always going to be slightly favorite for a variety of reasons: team coordination, gameplay mistakes, and new players who are trying out different roles and 30+ heroes. The result is that we get a little bit less signal to use to calibrate ratings. We’re working on some ways to use the signal we get more clearly, so stay tuned!

Q: So you don’t take the number of eliminations, damage dealt, healing provided, or any other scoreboard stats to adjust my MMR after each match?
A: In Overwatch 2, your MMR adjustment after every match is not impacted by your performance in each match (regardless of your skill tier). This is for a few reasons. We don’t want players to be focused on doing things other than trying to focus on the objectives and win the match. Dealing the most damage or getting kills won’t help your team if your actions don’t help them push the payload or capture a control point. Also, for some heroes, especially those in the support role, it can be challenging to determine if the numbers they produce reflect their skill.

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The system overall is pretty bad right now. There are dozens of issues that make it bad. The changes in s9 should fix hopefully a lot of them. Because right now the state of competitive is horrible.

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3

Hold up. How come if it’s based on wins/losses I’ll go 5-2 and derank

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This is the worst season. I feel like actual bots are being put in diamond games to fill out a leaving (or waiting on S9) player base. They’ve now put all their eggs in a basket with Season 9. If it doesn’t work out for them, they might as well close servers because people are done.

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Yes and no.

Saying it has nothing to do with it is utterly misleading and unhelpful.

Your performance, has nothing to do with it. Winning does. But to win against better players, you need to be better too.

Skill has everything, yet nothing to do with your rank.

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Your skill means nothing in a 5vs5 game if there is a big diff in tank/dps role…
Your personal skill is 1 out of 5 in your team = 20% impact…

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If that basic maths is how you want to calculate it, fair.

The more skill you have, the more consistantly you perform. The more consistantly you perform, the more you win. The more you win, the higher you climb.

It is a fairly simple system. Not without its flaws, but it does a job. The cream always rises to the top (+plus some cheaters, some cheaters still suuuuck)

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Nevermind when you have 2 throwers in your team…
Proof: 5K5N7N
Master player on all rank except on dps is platinum 1 however did 1k dmg and 0 kill the whole game… When a platinum dps does 1k dmg it’s a clear sign of blatant throwing… So where does it leave your skill impact?

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Happens. Nothing you can do. They ruin games, not seasons.

Report and move on. You did your thing (i assume, not watching. currently playing).

Doom on my team in the game I just played, afk’d on defence because he got tilted when someone asked to swap. This stuff happens because people play with their egos. Just got to let him do his thing. Report avoid move on.

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We all keep moving on… up and down… We all depend on our team, the game is designed to make it impossible to carry if you have one bad/thrower player on your team while the enemy has the rank related skills.

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Are you working on improving your skills as a play.

If yes. Don’t worry about it, you’ll climb as you improve.

If no. They you shouldn’t be concerned with who’s doing what, just chill and enjoy playing.

The biggest downer any online game has, is the people who play it. There will always be the stupid elements of the community who set out to grief games, or have an ego so big they tilt fast and grief that way.

Every game has it, every game in the future will have it. It isn’t worth sweating over. Overwatch is very quick to slap suspensions down on people the community decide are disrupting games. (possibly too quick)

I had a game that I won earlier, I was just doing my own thing minding my business, when I suddenly see in chat the DPS on my giving the enemy Widow absolute dogs abuse because they thought they were cheating (they weren’t). But they lost their heads, so did the Widow and the enemy team and the game dribbled into a nothing match and an easy win. Could of been a fun game, but some kids decided they wanted to berate each other instead. Nothing anyone can do about it. People are just weird online.

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…Yes…how is this new to you? lol. MMR has ALWAYS been the way Overwatch pairs you with other players. ALWAYS. The only difference overwatch 1 and overwatch 2 is you had a shiny number to look at, but that was never how you were actually paired with people. MMR numerically is just -5 all the way to +5 and I assume +6 when that new rank comes out.

Stats in OW are overall not a good metric to measure whether a player did well or not. There are some things that cannot be measured with numbers. How do you measure a player’s good decisions that allowed them to win a team fight through numbers? Being able to do damage and heal and kill things are all very important, but for a game like overwatch its not enough.

The only reasonable way to measure if a player did well over hundreds of matches is to measure how much they’ve won vs lost.

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13

This is the ONE thing I hope they change with the ranking system.
Two players could be silver, but one is playing at Silver MMR and the other at a Diamond+ MMR. If both have a ~50% win loss, they both will be silvers but miles away in skill.

If this game was sensible, maintaining a 50% win loss with a MMR way above your current rank, you should earn SR until your SR matches your MMR (and vice-versa, having a 50% win loss with a MMR way below your SR, should take points off of you until it matches)

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It does.

Performance based SR is gone. But there are adjustments based on the lobby you’re in and streaks and so on.

These will be displayed after each match next season for clarity.

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100% lies. Rigged algorithm. Forced win/loss regardless of anyone skill.

That’s actually insane. It should be based on Your performance /team performance/ enemy performance/ win/loss.

It is a DISASTER.

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i wouldnt listen to a WORD anyone related to this game has to say. they are liars through and through.

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Who would you recommend listening to instead?

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OP. Reread this. Reread it again.

Okay, now, you say skill has nothing to do with rank. What is the only constant factor in all your matches ? You. Your skill. Your ability to push your team toward victory.

As far as leavers, throwers and so on are concerned, out of the hundred of matches you’ll play in a season, how many matches are we talking about ? 1% ? 5% ? And out of those X% matches, what is the ratio of undeserved loss to undeserved wins, objectively ? I’m pretty sure the algorithm doesn’t say “let’s put all the throwers on Dpsdiff-2817’s team !”, so statistics tell us if you play enough games it should balance itself out. It doesn’t feel like it, because human brains tend to remember the very bad things much better then the “meh” ones, but that doesn’t prove anything.

How do you objectively evaluate individual performances ? I’m an Ana main, you can look at how much heal I did, how much damage I did, my sleep dart usage and hit percentage, things like that, but it still won’t be a complete picture (how many kills happen because of me, how many would have happen even if I wasn’t there, how many would have happen if the “base-line Ana of my rank” was there instead of me ?), there will be things that the software sees as more important then others. If I remember right, this was a problem earlier in Overwatch’s history : Mercy’s performance was based on the number of rez she pulled off, so it was objectively better, from your own MMR perspective, to let a teammate die and rez them then to heal them.

To use winrate as the only metric has one big advantage : the software doesn’t have to decide what’s good gameplay and what’s not good gameplay. If you win all the games you, on paper, should have won, well, you did your job, but not much. If you lose game you should have won, a lot, clearly you’re not as good as the software thought you were. If you win games you should win and some you should lose, it must mean you’re doing better then expected and should be put in a higher rank.

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Just have an account dedicated to metal ranks, then you wouldn’t be throwing around such a silly low %. :slight_smile:

This one is a platinum 3 game with a 4 stack throwers: Z80AHB
Explain me again how my skill matters, please…

The very next game a leaver also on the same team: WNCWF0

So that’s 2 out 2 2 games makes it 100% so far… (1%? 5%? LOL)

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My only account’s highest rank ever is low diamond, then I took a break, now I’m chilling in gold, and I’ve only met a single thrower in all my games this season.

And I’ll be seriously interested by such a number. Like, for the next week, every game you note if someone threw (stayed in spawn, didn’t shoot, just ran forward without doing anything all game long, left the game, things like that, not just “I think they were bad” but “they were actively trying to make us lose”) and, if someone did, if they were on your team or not.