This… There’s a difference but it isn’t that stark. Also, if they’re getting paired with plats as a tank, ie the role with the probable lowest queue time, then it means the game thinks they should be able to perform to that level.
3 Likes
Don’t know what ‘children’ you know but when I was on break from school I didn’t wake up in the ‘morning’ if I didn’t have to.
1 Like
Not necessarily. The matchmaking starts reaching farther out from the “native” SR of the anticipated match if it can’t find a suitable player for the last slot. I’ve heard stories of plat tanks ending up in GM games because they’re literally the only tanks available.
Also, there’s functionally no difference between gold and diamond, except mechanical skill gets a little better. People still int, people still throw when they think the team comp is bad, people still make 
plays–the only thing that changes is the number next to the portrait.
1 Like
Maybe I’m just a weirdo then 
most of my friends never wake up earlier and I think they’re weird for that too. Still, the fact remains that the game had to drag players across an elo to make a game in their most populated elo, really makes you 
about player numbers and activity
No it means the game thought you could perform at that level. You probably didn’t have to wait long for a match which means the game isn’t ‘stretching’ to fit your SR with a team.
If you didn’t win the match then that’s just tough breaks; the matchmaker thought you could swing a fair match and you lost, it’s not a function of low populations.
So given you essentially said you were playing relatively early in the day, ie not during peak times, and thus your getting thrown in what you feel is a mismatch is more understandable, or you got thrown in a match with minimum SR ‘stretch’ which means the game thought you had a fair chance and thus the outcome is still justified.
1 Like
Had a tank leaver earlier in QP in the middle of the first round, no backfill until the point activated in the next round. OW isn’t dying though. 
3 Likes
I got thrown into an unfair game because the matchmaker is begging for tank players because DPS queue times are abysmal, and you don’t get more tank players by treating them like garbage to fill up a comp game. And if grabbing two players an elo apart across your most populated elo is considered “Working as Intended”… then that’s probably why you had so few players to pick from.
Tank queues aren’t short because the system is functioning well, they’re short because the queues wetting itself trying to give some players decent queue times, and screwing others over for it.
Imagine being plat player, and you have teammates who laught at someone from their team for being stuck in diamond
Now… what i was doing there was a mystery. But suprise suprise, we got rolled
If you think that’s bad imagine playing QP as your main gamemode. This is why I’ve been avoiding the tank queue (aside from Rein meta) for a while now even though I really like tanking more than the other roles. The amount of games where there’s golds mixed in with (grand)masters is just absurd and barely any of those games are even playable due to how crushing disadvantage it is to have even one more of those players on your team. When I queue DPS the games are usually quite balanced, but when I queue tank the teams are all sorts of fkd up with gold rein OTPs bringing out their Tracers and everything in between. Now I’m not blaming the players for doing that, but jesus christ if this continues for a longer time they need to seriously tweak the matchmaking. At least OW can’t die like HOTS did to this happening as you can leave games in OW where as in HOTS you were stuck in the game until the end
1 Like
That’s not how it works because tanks have pick of the litter in terms of matchmaking.
It’s a well-known fact that, on average, tank is the least populated role, while DPS is the MOST populated. Assuming that there is no difference in rank distribution, which there shouldn’t be because all the ranks are defined by a bell curve, that means that DPS will experience the most SR stretch, ie placed in matches with an average SR well above or below their own, to try and shorten their queues because that’s the match it can find. Tanks, meanwhile, will be put in whatever match happens to most closely match their MMR because the matchmaker doesn’t have to stretch as much to populate the role. I say MMR because we know from the devs there is a correcting variable that not only boosts SR gain when a player is performing significantly better than average but also places them in higher SR matches if they’re doing better over time.
By your own admission the rest of your team was mid-plat in one case, with you as the low outlier but pretty close to plat yourself, and in another case your team was low-mid gold, again with a single low outlier and you sounding like the high outlier but still in gold.
So what it sounds like is the matchmaker threw you into a harder match because it thought you had a chance, you took an L, which happens, then the game threw you in a lower-tier game to win back some SR, and you took another L. Reverse the scenario and the story is still the same; you got put in matches that were perfectly winnable and you didn’t win, there is no ‘game is dying, sky is falling’ needed to justify why you got put in these games and no reason for why you lost other than the other teams did better.
1 Like
I wholly agree with your latter statement, the difference between gold and diamond is fairly minimal, which just reinforces that both of OP’s matches were perfectly winnable for them because they were well inside the gold/plat bell curve.
As for the former, I have heard of serious SR stretching at the highest ends, but I’ve never heard of plats being put into GM comp matches. While I won’t dismiss the matter out of hand, SR stretching for tanks is going to be minimal: if rank performance is evenly distributed within a role, which to our knowledge it is, then the least popular role will most likely end up in an ‘average’ match because the matchmaker builds a match around being able to find them, while the most populated role, ie DPS, are actually sorted into matches last because it needs to liquidate whoever has been in queue the longest regardless of the SR average, within reason.
Yeah, I’ma have to ask why then my “MMR” goes from mid gold to plat between a game, and why whenever I queue dps I’m always at where I should be, almost like if I’m in a dps queue for 10 mins, the game is spending it’s time whittling down the 20 other players of my exact same elo by dragging across tanks from all over the place.
Like do you hear yourself here? “We have 1,000 DPS players waiting 300 supports, and 50 tanks.” All the dps players logically by their sheer volume would dot about every place in the elo spectrum, whereas tanks would be few and far between, so what do ya do when you have 1,000 players waiting for only 50 to go around? You slam the 50 into whatever games need a new tank player to make the DPS queues shorter!
Apart from the fact I got the low ELO game BEFORE the high elo game, and by low outlier, you mean player 500 sr away from me. If matching a player 500 sr away from another player is “System working as intended” then a gosh darn new system better get developed quick! Otherwise this whole ladder experience is a sham and there should be no difference between me getting placed in high silver or high plat next season when placements roll around.
If I’m ranked a gold/plat border player, then I should be given gold/plat border games, not games that range ±250 SR out from where I stand, and it certainly should not be dragging players 500- SR away from me in order to create a “balanced game”
Except that’s not how the rank distribution works. The ranks within a role are, to our knowledge, evenly distributed for all roles, in which case it isn’t going to build match SR’s around the most populated role because it has a giant stack of those players that it needs to throw into whatever match it can find due to SR stretch. It has no problem finding DPS players so there’s no reason for the matchmaker to prioritize putting DPS players into as ‘balanced’ of a match, and this is reflected by the SR stretch.
If you haven’t experienced SR variance in your DPS matches there are more than a few explanations, the top of which are that your DPS MMR is different from your tank MMR- again, MMR is distinct from SR- or that you’re experiencing confirmation bias.
Also, the game has been throwing people into matches with a +/-250 range since the earliest days of competitive, in fact the commonly observed limits across the game’s life for matchmaking are within a factor of 2 of the ranges you just described: you can be put into any match with an SR average within +/-500 of your current SR, and paired with anyone within a +/-1000 limit of your own.
Your experience is not special, you aren’t the victim of low populations or bad matchmaking. You got put in fair matches and you just so happened to lose to the team that played better.
Na man,
You just described to me the broken system of a dead game scrounging around for players to fill up a roll.
Also I’m gonna need that 20 page thesis so you’re own confirmation bias and anecdotal evidence isn’t equally as worthless as my own, until then you’re just saying whatever you want with 0 backing behind it.
I’m not the one making baseless claims of a dead game based on two matches that could have just as easily happened in Season 2 as Season 20. Ya basic.
Also, I’m just gonna link this here, read it yourself and do your own research: Groups and Matchmaking in Overwatch
1 Like
Didn’t disprove my argument, so I’ma stop wasting my time in a finger pointing contest with ya, have fun making your baseless claims somewhere else friend 
They should never have mixed ranks in a comp game to begin with. It makes no sense to have a game mode designed in putting the most balanced team together to allow people above or below people in the same game. That’s about as sensical as having a pro player join a collegiate game and say this is fair.
1 Like
I see the same names in FFA, I don’t know about quick play.