I have noticed this happens with Quickplay.
Recently did qualifying matches to be placed. Was placed at a low rank, and quickly started winning and rising. This was a nice experience after quickplay matchmaking turning from good to horrible.
Was winning 60-70% of matches, enjoying myself, relaxing. No big deal at all.
Did not rise a ton… likely no significant MMR changes happened… then all my games turned bad. I was being given teammates that simply cannot do anything useful. Enemy teams were fine, and also often included obvious smurfs and likely cheaters. The enemy team often had people performing far beyond the rank, repeatedly, reliably, and reliably 1v5 too.
Despite witnessing these things, all my teams included some type of inept players… worse than most of the people in the rank. The enemy teams functioned fine.
Many stomps, most of them losing stomps.
What’s puzzling about this is it wasn’t like that at first. Was winning considerable amount, and teammates seemed ok. Suddenly all the teams I was assigned to were dysfunctional, and the high win rate flipped into high loss rate … and mostly unwinnable games.
Kind of frustrating to see the game behave, then suddenly throw me into all unwinnable games with awful teammates.
Does not feel or seem fair, is demoralizing, and it’s also kind of frustrating to see that it doesn’t matter much if I do better or worse… the games are mostly decided before the match starts.
Wasn’t like that before.
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This is what happened to me too, first 25 games felt great, i was with and against masters/gm, won most of the time, and then, gold and silvers teamates…, for the rest of the remaining games, who just died in few seconds out of the spawn EVERY GAMES until the 50 are done, and now that new players only have 20 games to do, i suspect this is where the rank inflation comes from, if I had only 20 games to do, i would be high master low gm, i ended up mid diamond, one rank difference. Since last season, ALL new players start at minimum one entire rank too high, or more. And that explains all the atrocious teamates. And they see they lose most of the time, so they don’t play often, and so they are still here, being that one guy ruining your game, and the mm will almost always place one of them in your team, and if it didn’t place one in the enemy team, it’s a forced loss, same thing happening both in qp and ranked.
Rank reset (with some inflation) + less qp for new players (inflation because the forced loss streak at the end is not here anymore, after 20-25 games) wasn’t the greatest idea, you have silvers and gold players in plat and diamond, high gold and low plat in diamond. You can feel it, these players shouldn’t be in this lobby, and they want to maintain their rank so they will just only play once in a while because they refuse to rank down faster, and they are a lot, enough to make others experience miserable, and also theirs.
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Um yup. Nearly every game, ruined.
Support player. Imagine if most of your heroes kit was investing in your teammates, whom cannot win and only poop themselves.
Plus the people who lose intentionally and try to piss off teammates. That’s really very common now.
I wasn’t seeing a lot of this stuff because the matchmaking system was creating somewhat fair matches. The worst of Competitive is worse than the worst of Quickplay. When quickplay was horrible (most of the time) people weren’t as bad as this.
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Man… I just got a lose streak of 10. I’ve filled my avoid and perma avoid list just between today and yesterday with people actively trolling or that they’re just really really bad.
This never or barely never happened to me. It’s getting really awful.
And all this in “high rank”. I was able to reach high m2 in tank and m5 in 6v6 last season, just to lose until almost m4 in tank and d2 in 6v6. All in one/two days…
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I was considering competitive because 90% of my solo qp are just me getting stomped. But if this disease is over there too… I guess its back to other games.
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That’s not fine. A good MM would mean you win about 50% of your matches. See - when people are winning and having a good time, they don’t mind that the system is skewed, because it is skewed in their favor (at that time at least). A little dirty secret is that while you were having that nice time winning 60-70% of your matches, somebody else must’ve been taking the loss for you. Somebody else was on the wrong side of the system - and they were frustrated. Because it’s a zero sum game. You can’t have everyone winning 60-70% of their matches.
So, since MM cannot guarantee exact 50% win-rate for you at all times, it then tries to approximate it “on average over a long time” = i.e. if you were winning too much, it will put you into teams where you’re supposed to lose. It feels terrible because math does not account for feeling, but you also cannot expect to always be on that 60-70%. You have to be at around 50% for it to be fair to everyone, so you get terrible matches. Yeah, they need to work on making it be 50% without the need for terrible matches, but it is what it is now.
Inconvenient truth about overwatch. Nothing wrong with match making.
It never tries to. No at blizzard gives a flying one what your win rate is.
You’ve just misinterpreted what they said. They match on a number and try to have it so both teams about the same number. Now, it’s very unlikely 2 teams will be identical so one team will always have a fractionally higher average MMR. This means, mathematically speaking one team could be tagged as having a slightly higher than 50% chance of winning (doesn’t matter in reality, but it’s a numbers game).
If they match well, and do it consistently. You’ll naturally gravitate towards 50% as you find your place on the distribution bell curve.
I wouldn’t say a good MM means you only win 50% of your matches. That would mean no one would climb and there would be absolutely 0 reason to play or even have a Comp mode. A sign of a good MM is how close the matches are. If you’re hitting a winrate of 50%, then that means you are at the rank you’re supposed to be at.
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Not true. That natural end point of 50% is based on your ability to play not changing.
So, to climb, you have to improve. Hence why the whole “got gud” meme became so prominent. Because it was true.
How close a match is, is of no relevance to match making. Just player actions. OW games can massively snowball on just one player not paying attention or missing their mark. Happens at all levels.
This is depressing because I was experiencing the same thing. Thinking and hoping maybe competitive would be a better experience but it doesn’t look like it from other players. I‘d probably find more joy in another game too unless by some miracle Blizzard fixes MM.
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Me when 70% win rate: 
Me when win rate starts to even out: 
But seriously I never make any generalizations on the MM based on a few dozen games. In my thousands of games, it’s always been decent.
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It always been weird that people unironically believe, that just throwing more hours should make them “climb” for some reason, and if they don’t, its the MM fault.
Well if someone starts consistently blaming the MM and throwing said generalizations, you know who they are (and how they are) 
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It’s… almost like I said this in the last sentence
Yep. And it’s a sign that, under those conditions it’s clearly working as intended.
Ultimately it isn’t why a match end up being low quality, and it isn’t responsible for your progress (or lack of). It’s just a very easy target to blame when you don’t want to take responsibility.
There does seem to be something rather goofy going on with this Season’s MM though. I hit Diamond 3 the last like 2 weeks of Season 18 and remained there for the rest of the Season. When Season 19 released, I was having the typical 50-50 OW experience for like the first couple of days. Since then, things have gone pretty south. My rank has plummeted and I’ve honestly no idea why.
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That’s nothing to do with match making.
Possibly just you becoming complacent
Matchmaking has been worse I think because they are mixing players with 100 hours with players that have thousands of hours.
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I’d be more likely to agree with you if that were the case. I started out at >500 Bronze in OW1 and I’ve had to claw, bite and drag myself face down through every rank since. I don’t get comfortable sitting in a rank. I watch my matches back from the enemies pov to look for my mistakes. I have time to do this because Support queues are awful right now (I’ve been in a 30 min queue so far). I take every chance I can to learn. I know for a fact that I make mistakes and I’m harder on myself about them. Something is seriously out of whack right now. I’m queueing solo and I’m getting match ranges from around Gold 5 to Diamond 2 more often lately.
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Same. 470sr, eventually hit GM5 a few seasons back.
Match making isn’t why I sucked and dropped like a lead balloon. And it isn’t why I learnt to play better and climb. It just takes time.
That amount of time, is probably what leads people to this blaming of things that aren’t responsible. They want instant gratification. Sadly, if you don’t start with the prerequisite set of skills, it could take years to learn them and earn your way up.
Not sure what play time has to do with it. It’s not a factor the calculation of your mmr, not of match making. It’s completely irrelevant.