Since Blizzard acknowledged that they need to remake competetive system, i want to share my thoughts.
First i want to say that i love this game and been playing for ears. There is no other game that i would comeback for so many years.
Back in OW1 i always wanted it to be 5v5 because 6v6 just felt not impactfull and it seemed there is always too many people.
In 2020 i left comment about 5v5 Welcome to Season 21 of Competitive Play - #35 by Borlay-2480
I remember after couple years i lost my hope for 5v5 when one day i heared that thay actualy going to make 5v5 with OW2.
I was so happy… until couple days later i heared about 7 wins and 20 loses and my first thought was - They had to screw something… they just cant make everything right, they have to add some nonsense.
So let me share my ideas again and i hope i will not need to wait for 3 years this time.
First lets address MMR.
I feel that MMR makes sense in 2 case:
-
When there is soft rank reset each season like it is in Apex Legends and like it was in OW 2 first seasons since you don’t need to reset MMR. But rank reset have their own problems and in Apex Legends it makes sense to have soft reset because balancing ranked system when you have 20 teams it’s hard (which teams should get points and which teams should lose? And how many?) so soft reset helps with that.
But OW has only 2 teams in the lobby which simplifies who gets points and who loses. So ranked system can be more stable and we don’t need soft reset. -
Second reason wen MMR makes sense is when ranked system is very grindy, when you need to play a lot of games to climb the lader. For example Leaguel of Legeds has grindy system when everytime you go up in division you need to play best of 3 and everytime you go up in tier you need to play best of 5.
Since going up in ranks so slow it makes sense to have MMR which can be ajusted faster than rank.
So… we come to conclusion that if we don’t have soft reset each season (rank decay still can be a thing) and climbing the lader is not slow and gridy we actually don’t need MMR.
And not only we don’t need MMR but having it actually makes things worse because it adds confusion to the player (they can’t see whats behind the bars), having in sync MMR with the ranks is a challenge too because there has to be a logic that maps MMR and your visible Rank.
So if we agree that MMR adds complexity for developers and confusion for the players lets try to design a system thats easy to understand, tansparent, fair and fun to grind. Lets make transparency main priority.
Lets start with the basics:
Firt of all lets keep tiers and divisions like it is except make each division to have 100 SR. By default you win you gain 20 points you lose you lose 20 points. You reach 100 you rank up.
Second lets add SR boost for win streaks so better players can rank up faster:
Every win you gain 1 point for your boost.
Every lose you lose 2 points.
You can have max 5 points.
You can have min 0 points (Current points can't be negative).
If you have 3 points in total you gain 2x SR boost if you win.
If you have 5 points in total you gain 3x SR boost if you win.
So if you have 5 win streak you will gain 3*20 = 60 points per game which makes you rank up faster but if you lose 1 game you can still maintain 2x unless you lose again.
We can show that information somewhere in the competetive menu so you will be able to see and will be motivated to win.
I’m 100% sure that now your MMR has increased gains if you win multiple games in a row, but removing MMR and moving similar logic to your SR makes things not only tansparent, easy to fallow but fun.
And like i mentioned before if we make ranking faster for good players we don’t need MMR that adds other problems.
There is no bonus multiplier for losing SR since we don’t want to encourage losing streaks.
On top of that we could add SR bonuses depending how close the game was and so on. All of that should be visible after each match, how much bonuses there was and way.
Now lets move to the match maker.
Making games 50/50 may sound fair on paper but it actually not fair for the individual players. It’s not fair for best player in the lobby to have worst player in the lobby and it’s not fair for the worst player to be carried by best player.
We need to have some randomness in the match so at the end of the day if you play enough games only your skill will be constant.
So how can we achieve both - balanced and random enough?
The idea for finding a pair for each player is actually very good idea but how we mix those players together should be totally random.
Lets say you have a dps pair where one dps is 1.5 MMR and other is 1.4 MMR and lets say we have support players who have 1.5 MMR and 1.4 MMR.
Instead of puting them like this:
1.5 - 1.4
1.4 - 1.5
We need to put it like this:
1.5 - 1.4
random - mirror.
So the outcome can be:
1.5 - 1.4
1.4 - 1.5
Or
1.5 - 1.4
1.5 - 1.4
Maybe it doesnt look always balanced but we need to focus on making matches in a way that better players will climb where they belong and worse players will drop where they belong so those ranks would be more accurate and games with more accurate ranks will be more balanced and at the end of the day with 50k online players finding 1.5 - 1.5 pairs should not be a problem.
And from looking at this example it’s clear as day that better players on average will win more.
So in conclusion having pairs fo every player but puting those pairs in a random way can achieve both a balanced games and random enough so players can easier rank up or rank down where they belong.
And last bit is placements.
First placements should not have anything to do with the Quick Play. QP should be only for learning the game.
Again it should be completely transparent and clear why you started where you started and why you are placed where you placed.
So lets design first placement matches for new players:
There should be 10 placements for each role.
First game should be in Silver rank.
You win game you go up in 1 division.
You lose game you go down in 1 division.
So if you win 10 games in a row you should be placed Plat 5 or something like that.
If you lose 10 games in a row you should be in Bronze 5.
Easy to fallow, simple to understand, transparent and fair for everyone.
There is no point in adding QP MMR since people play different in QP, some players will try when some players will not try.
And at the end there will always be smurfs that want to smurf and will throw games for that. MMR is not a solution here.
We need to focus on making higher ranks stable and higher quality so those people will have fun playing in their own rank and will not have a reason to smurf in the first place.