I rarely have a match that is somewhat equal. The snowballing is fast and decisive, usually due to one or two players that are far, faaaaaar above the rest (always on the same team). And frequently in this tank war centric game it is the tanks and the disparity between them that is the issue.
There should rarely be a game that completely shuts down an entire team due to one or two players. I just had several games in a row which that is the case. Granted it is better to be on the winning side, but I don’t really find that much fun either. I assume the reason that blizzard has never been transparent about matchmaking is because they don’t want to pull back the curtain showing the incompetent data points and metrics they use for placements. It feels like two people in a team = two people in a team regardless of their individual SR. As long as the combined sum isn’t too far off for the whole team, we don’t care that one player is the major contributor.
When overwatch (what is it 1…2…1 again) works it is pretty fun. But when it doesn’t (which is more often than not) it just sucks and feels like I wasted my time.
I would bet if you peeled back the layers and saw the true numbers between teams, they wouldn’t even be close most of the time.
In Comp? Probably a bit. In anything else? No. Outside of Comp that tries to use it as a gauge, most modes use EOMM for match making, which prioritizes overall engagement in the game rather than the quality of the specific match you’re in.
No, it doesn’t.
Outside of competitive the match maker still attempts to make even teams but the teams have a higher chance of a wider spread of MMR than competitive, which is generally tighter. Open queue excluded, which is wide grouping by default - I guess somewhat comparable to quick play?
these days its meaningless as they changed the algorithms to some stupid engagement-based match making garbage instead of the traditional skill based matchmaking
Its related to the game core mechanics of ult charge and respawn timers.
If it relies on 2 players, its not a tank war centric game.
The winning team has insane stats…
Teamplay usually overcomes 1/2 players carrying.
Yet if the team lacks communication, just pressing “forward” as soon as they spawn, not minding the hero picks, its a loss.
Sometimes it just takes one wipe / ult combo to set up a stagger and turn the tables even if the stats seemed obviously one-sided.
SR does represent your skills if you play long enough. But at some point, you’ll need to work with your team or upgrade your own gamesense to keep winning. At that point, one would feel the game outcome is out of their reach… because it is if the player keeps playing as selfishly and carelessly.
The fact that most matches end in a stomp would suggest that’s just inaccurate. I’ve been playing for a handful of hours today since I’m sick, and I can count on literally 1 hand the number of matches I would consider even closed to being “even teams”. The answer is 3. 3 out of all the matches I’ve played today. Heck, at one point my tank just completely gave up after the first point on Rialto (for some reason…we were winning) and we still basically walked over the enemy team and pushed it to the end.
It’s widely known (regardless of what PR stuff they put out) that Activision (Parent Company of Blizzard) has closely researched EOMM many many years now. Its present in all their Call of Duty titles, and just the way Overwatch plays, you can tell its present here too. There’s just no way they wouldn’t use it in a F2P game in which the only means of making money is through Battle Pass and Skin Purchases.
They HAVE to keep you engaged, and that’s where the Engagement Optimized Match Making comes in. The more you play, the more you’ll be exposed to skins, FOMO kicks in and you’re more inclined to buy them yourself, and thus they make money.
Overwatch keeps players engaged by attempting to create fair matches.
So I guess you’re partially correct at least.
It’s still meaningless because you have smurfs stomping on proper lower ranks or boosted lowbies stinking up ranks way above their pay grade. Every match is still luck of the draw like QP.
Matchmaking is impossible to do in f2p unless everyone has one account.
They’ve actually published papers on Engagement Based Match Making and how it’s role provides better Engagement and retainment than sbmm. If I could link outside links I’d show you, but it’s easily searchable.
The gist of it is that their method of matching players to set up specific ranges of wins and losses is far more engaging for the player than simply matching based on skill.
I’ll look up the paper tomorrow and post the “tl;dr” version then if you want.
No thank you.
Are you saying all the Team 4 staff who work on Overwatch and have spoken candidly about the subject of match making, rank, match rigging (and related) are lying?
Stomps don’t really sound that enganging…
And I believe what they found is: people stop playing after too many loses in a row. So why do so many of the “EOMM Crowd” say the game forces loss-streaks on them?
I think the SR, MMR, ELO etc… can all be true. I do believe there has to be something because how could they so consistently stack teams against mine. I don’t believe they are incompetent to that doing the right thing, its that they don’t believe in doing the right thing. Judging by their focus on the blue-hair attitude, one can get an idea of what motivates them to get up in the morning and make sure guys like us get stomped. They believe that the rich in skill should pay for the opposite. That is the same sentiment they have about the populous.
And that is why their match-making is so absurdly frustrating.
Yeah feel free to post a replay for that.
With that being said, SR/Rank does mean something for sure, but then again, in a Team game where your top ranked player does not have a good day and the enemy’s worst ranked player is “on fire” … will be one sided.
It doesnt take much of those factors stacking to create a perceived stomp. Take into account that 1 team winning fights by 10% more damage/effectiveness is a close match up but in the end, that team might win 9/10 team fights and look like a “stomp”.
Those 2 things are VERY different to an actual stomp.
I’d like to chime in here because I too am a victim of poor matchmaking. And the devs aren’t lying per say but they aren’t telling you the whole truth. It is EOMM and the system is attempting you to keep playing.
Can you explain to me that if MM is so accurate to find “fair games” then why is it when every game I play is either stomp or be stomped? shouldn’t be it be a close to fair match? In every single game i played before I, and my friends, quit for good every game went like this:
Team A= 0-10 kills collectively low DPS low healing low dmg mitigation
Team B= 40-50 kills collectively high DPs high healing high mitigation.
Which team I was on depends on the amount of wins/losses I had. If I was on Team A (losing) for 2-3 games then the game would put me in team B (winning team) after 2–3 games just enough to get some wins to keep me playing then the cycle repeats itself. Very VERY rarely did I ever have 1 game where the odds were even. Maybe 1 in about 20.
I am really unsure how you cannot see this.
They specifically said it’s not.
Are they lying or what?
Because in Overwatch, even 10 players with the exact same skill can produce a stomp.
There are way to many factors which could cause this, and the matchmaker has no control over them.
SR is quite literally the only thing that matters as far as matchmaking is concerned nowadays.
And that even applies to non-comp….difference being that your SR is hidden there…but you do have an “SR” there as well
Because the matchmaker cannot account for so many variables that exist that lead to stomps. People expect it to somehow do miracles. What can the mm do about people who decide to throw, just made a Smurf acc, are drunk, are tilted, had to afk mid game, are distracted. Won’t swap when countered, their hero is bad on a certain map but want to force it, their team just made a comp that doesn’t work together where the enemy did? Trying a hero they don’t normally play, so they are significantly worse than their mmr.
There are just so many factors that lead to a stomp, even if the matchmaker had everyone at the exact same rank and mmr every game, there would still be plenty of stomps due to player choices it cannot account for.
The problem is the internal MMR , it has less importance than the relationship between the 2.
The artificial decay of accounts keep putting people that were Diamond 2, 3 seasons ago, vs Silver1/Gold 3 … sure this is something that mainly happens during placements but those 10 matches are insane.
Those should not only be the “minority”, but straight up should be non existent.
PS: LOL @ internal MMR when you queue in a stack. Thats a whole can of worms.
It’s the same as SR. You can easily keep track of it.
The problem with suggesting that EOMM is responsible for too many stomps is that the research found that close matches were most engaging. And loss streaks were least engaging. And win streaks weren’t much better than loss streaks.
So what you want in an EOMM is to get players to have close matches with few streaks.
But, for some reason, no one ever suggests that EOMM is the culprit for too few streaks and too few stomps. If OW did use an EOMM (and there’s no reason to suppose it does), the most likely result of getting rid of it would be more loss streaks and more stomps. Because those are the biggest killers of engagement.