I’m someone who mostly plays Overwatch casually, taking increasingly lengthy breaks as time goes on, and every time I hop back into the game I feel like my favourite game mode, Mystery Heroes, becomes less and less enjoyable due to the fact that everyone else seems to have gotten better while I’ve stayed the same or gotten worse due to my lack of playtime. Almost every game I’m in is full of players with gold and silver portraits while I’m still at two bronze stars, and it shows in how much better they are than me. It’s not even close most of the time. Whether it’s aiming, moving, or map knowledge, the majority of players are usually several steps ahead. I still get the occasional win when my team is full of great people as well, but I increasingly feel like dead weight when it’s obvious that I’m just not in the same league as most of the other players.
It’s getting to the point where I’m just not really having much fun in Mystery Heroes any more. I don’t think I’ve ever run into this problem in regular games, which makes me feel like Mystery Heroes probably doesn’t have proper matchmaking and the majority of the playerbase has just gotten a lot better over time.
Given that the queue times are still super quick, I’d really love the option to be able to wait on longer queues if it meant getting matched with players who’re closer to my skill level in Mystery Heroes.
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It definitely uses MMR. Queue times can actually get rather long for me in that mode, while it repeatedly finds me the same small set of other Master-level players who like to play it.
There are ways for it to get thrown off, though, the biggest one being groups. If you have 3-5 players grouped on either team with varying skill levels, which is quite common during events, the matchmaker has no idea what to do with that.
I think the teams are the most frustrating part for me. It’s really terrible to get a 4 stack on your team and 1 or 2 of those people are sub 50. I get it, people want to pair up and have fun but it also degrades the experience for the other people on the team.
That might be it. I think I’ve seen quite a few groups while playing lately. Does MMR decay over time at all? It might also be that because I take such long breaks I just get really rusty and don’t know the new maps/heroes, but it’s finding me matches based on however well I was doing the last time I played. Perhaps the only fix is to just wait for a bunch of losses, though I feel like I’ll just end up taking another break again if the MMR stuff takes that long to kick in.
Yeah, I almost always have a worse experience when large groups get involved. I’ve gotten in the habit of avoiding the groups on both teams at the end, regardless of outcome, just to hopefully not be in a similar situation the next match.
I can’t say for sure. I do remember after I took a 1 or 2 month break before, I came back and won several times in a row in Quick Play before starting to get more even matches again, which would suggest that there is some kind of decay. That’s just one anecdote that could easily be a coincidence, though.
Edit: Actually, remembering now… I came back after they updated Colorblind Mode, which drastically improved my play, so I would have been winning more regardless.
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