I deleted my post because the experience of playing Overwatch in 2022, (on console, I can’t speak to other formats) in my opinion, is so hellishly bad that there’s nothing positive or supportive to say. I was convinced that I could go back and re-commit to the game with a better understanding of the underlying mechanics. I thought I might be able to give people a bit of that same of optimism so they’d pick up the game again and play with a clear and focused mindset. But I turned the console on, and just had the worst damned matches imaginable. The insights into how and why it worked the way it did didn’t matter.
If the quality of the experience is an unavoidable consequence of game formats like Overwatch in general, then there’s no point in making any statement about it at all. If it’s doing the best it can and the experience is still awful, then in some sense the experience deserves to stand on its own. People should be encouraged or discouraged to play the game based on how it feels from moment to moment. And if it feels terrible, what sort of defense could you really put forward? What’s left to say, but, um, “Hey, just ignore the experience and keep practicing”?
To be clear, I’m of the mindset now that some form of matchmaking is required to solve certain issues. Now, you can say that you personally don’t care about those issues, or that they’re less important than some of your other priorities, but you can’t say that they don’t objectively solve or address what they set out to solve. A very early version of Halo is the first game to institute SBMM. Interest and enthusiasm in the game soared as a result. Prior to that, the gaming world DID have random matchmaking, with players grouped solely by ping (Doom, versions of Quake, I believe). What happened in ping based matchmaking? The best players stomped everyone else into dust – repeatedly. New players were turned off, and better players were bored. This is a problem if you’re a developer tasked with, you know, feeding your family and staying in business. It’s unreasonable to assert that a developer have no consideration above and beyond what some subset of their community wants. You’ll agree that profit is not an inconsequential factor.
The two sides of this argument don’t really need to reconcile this topic in such a way that one side concedes to the other. All that’s required is an acknowledgement that either side has different views about what a competitive environment should be; and along with that, an understanding that those differences come with broad implications for underlying subsystems.
At best, I think you can say that the current incarnation of ranked makes the sorting process inefficient. But you can’t say that it renders the skill differential between one player and the next meaningless. If more skill equals a greater chance of winning, and less skill the opposite, the relative odds of winning between one player and the next conform to their level of skill, which is what a latter effectively is. It is quite a pronouncement to say that skill and results have little if any correlation to one another, and the burden of proof would be on you to present evidence for this. Data. Facts.
If you’re really committed to seeking the truth (and everyone here should be) study python for a few months and build a mock gaming lobby. Create a thousand random players and assign them each a skill level, with that skill level correlating to some unit of measure that has predictive power for their likelihood of winning. Create one algorithm that matches these players randomly. Create another that matches players based on some range, with each player matched relative to his counterpart on the other team. Have them play 500 matches and see what the two winrates and SR are. Your algorithm doesn’t have to be as complex as the Blizzard algo, it only has to tell you which model would take longer to properly sort the players relative to skill. Someone who knows this stuff better than me tell me why this project totally fails. 
But even if you find that random is better, you still can’t really justify Blizzard using a less profitable algorithm. And even if you could, you’d only be doing so on the basis of opinion: my way of running a business is better than yours – and even that fails to the logic that your objectives and Blizzard’s are different, and so it’s only logical that your methods would differ.
Further, we already know that increasing your skill will allow you to climb. So increase your skill, or don’t. But there’s no logical argument which can establish an “ethical” level of grind. How much or how little is determined by what the market will bear, everything else is opinion. It’s hard to make an argument that this even falls into the realm of ethics.
Likewise! I respect your passion for this issue. And no disrespect taken. I just don’t know what’s left to be said that hasn’t been said already. Positions have been staked out (for the most part, though I still think there’s some problematic ambiguity regarding this whole discourse) and laid out countless times. See prior comments about both sides not needing to come an agreement on what the best system is, since both have different definitions of what “best” means, and preferences cannot or do not have to reconcile: I cannot reasonably argue that your favorite color should be orange.
