So you don’t play this game and haven’t played it for 3 years.
What makes you think your opinion matters here?
@Tracism new acc. So full mmr reset.
@schottky can’t mention being or have been gm around people like you without you projecting that person as “ego boosted” lol. Pointing out that someones opinion on the state of a gamemode doesn’t matter since that person hasn’t played it in years has absolutely nothing to do with my sr or my ability to play. Stop projecting.
He literally said otherwise in his post, and nowhere did he suggest this. Stop strawmanning.
How old is the person you’re responding to? And if you don’t know that, why are you making such a ridiculous statement? Also, at what age are you claiming reflexes slow to the point to seriously degrade gaming performance?
Clearly.
Which other Overwatch related sites are you hanging out where no one complains about matchmaking?
Thousands of hours on the ladder/game, playing since day in 2016, streams, streams, friends. I’ve heard the classic excuses like teammates and luck but people complaing about ‘systematic handicapping’ is ridiculous and it’s only here.
I’m curious if you’ve watched these videos, because they haven’t said anything that I haven’t been saying for the past 4 years.
They mentioned nothing about the conspiracy theories that Lettuce is talking about and is rampant on these forums and nowhere else.
They talk A LOT about player mentality and game design, nothing about a “broken matchmaker”, unless you count the ways players break the matchmaker.
The types of matchmaker complaints that I detailed here are only found on the forums in any quantity other than a random rant that slips by. No one in any other game that uses a SBMM system has these complaints.
Not that they don’t have complaints, but these specific ones are only here. It’s…strange, to say the least.
You do realise these bad players are more likely to be on the opposing team giving you free wins? Only 5 bad players can be on your team and the other team can have 6 as naturally you won’t be one of these bad players.
Plat is above average which is about where you gauge your skill at so it is most likely that it has got it about right until you shake that rust off.
As I pointed out, I was playing competitive less than 2 years ago, and I still do play this game, so obviously you’re too lazy to check profiles on Overbuff or anything like that.
With that lack of effort, it’s no wonder you’re not leveling up.
Think I’ll just mute you; lazy people who think they should be handed rank are a waste of time to argue with.
Bro. You are a Tank main quickplay player. you have like 800 hours in that deathmatch circus. The fact you volunteraly play that dumpster fire mode is 100% indiciative that you are the kind of teammate that throws games without even noticing.
Reddit… Overwatch community there is WAY HEALTHIER than here.
Less toxic too…
Even Valorant. And the games SBMM’s are about as similar as any games could be.
Just to add to this and clarify a little more: There are people complaining about bad matchmaking in literally every game. However, as you said, the theory of the system systematically handicapping people and holding some players back is specific to the Overwatch forums.
By “healthier” you mean more homogeneous POVs – fewer dissenting opinions, and more people who all tend to agree with each other? I’d judge the health of a community, not by how few disagreements there or how many people have locked arms while conforming to the same beliefs, but by how productively and civilly people can disagree while being heard and respected. And in my experience, Reddit is not that. I’d say that dissenting opinions have been so consistently attacked and with such prejudice that people with different opinions don’t even bother posting there anymore.
Reddit has features which enable people to more brazenly and rudely gang up on and personally attack and demean others (less stringent and different moderation rules) and more focused targeting of dissenting opinions (downvoting). Any group founded on consensus is going to seem more placid and “at home” to the people who share those beliefs.
I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’s saying the algorithm is specifically targeting them: i.e. Blizzard has identified something about singular “player X” in particular and then some kind of mission forms around this person where it’s like: “Guys, we MUST bring player X down at all costs” and they all go back to their command posts and start plotting.
And no, I don’t think that talk about handicapping (to assign handicaps or a handicap to a contestant) is specific to the Overwatch forums at all. Whether one wants to call it rigging or algorithmic handicapping or what have you, it still falls under the umbrella of criticism targeting “deliberate developer grind” which is a topic you’ll hear discussed a TON across many different titles and genres.
When someone talks about loot taking too long to obtain. Or pay to win. Or progression taking too long. Or strategic paywalls. Etc. They’re all talking about grind in one form or another. At the core of it, people criticizing the matchmaker are just criticizing another form of perceived grind, so I don’t think there’s grounds to classify this as something specific to a subset of OW players.
Then you haven’t read some of those guys’ posts carefully enough because there are plenty of people who argue exactly that. Rigged and Hulk come to mind as the biggest proponents, but also more recently there have been new people on the forums who try to paint a similar picture.
The games I have played semi seriously besides Overwatch are Fortnite, Valorant, COD, and Halo. They all have a fundamentally similar matchmaker to Overwatch, and while I certainly read plenty of ‘bad matchmaker’-topics, I have never read anything related to what you are suggesting here or what I said above. I’ll admit I was also never as active on their respective forums, but this has been my honest experience.
Oh yes, most definitely agree with this here, but those are not games that have a matchmaker similar to Overwatch. Discussions happening on these issues are usually in reference to MMO/RPG-ish games.
I think you are giving your former debating allies too much credit here. Most people on the ‘rigged’-side don’t base their argument on grind to keep the players engaged. As far as I can tell, you are the only one making this argument.
You know, your post got me thinking. There’s really different issues here, and how people interpret them.
there’s whether or not a person views the degree of difficulty involved in climbing out of a particular rank as problematic, artificially difficult, intentional, etc.
and secondly, there’s the issue of what to do about it and why
I think this is actually where the community is divided. If you think A) ranks are artificially difficult to climb out of AND you see this largely as a non-issue which is resolved by grinding skill, then you basically fall on one side of the argument, and you consider the solution within your purview.
If you think B) ranks are artificially difficult to climb out of, and you see this as Blizzard essentially setting up a barbed-wire fence around progression for the sake of engagement, and you see acquiring more skill (where acquiring UNDUE levels of skill is essentially a remedy to deliberate grind) as basically dancing to Blizzard’s tune, you’re going to approach this conversation very differently.
So there are two questions here: has Blizzard made progression artificially difficult (through intent or mismanagement; and let us be clear, mismanagement CAN lead to an environment where climbing becomes artificially difficult, and we know this because Blizzard HAS adjusted the matchmaking algorithms in the past to address this issue – that is a fact), and the second question is: what to do about it. One solution is to keep your head down and grind so much skill that it becomes a cure-all. Another is to petition Blizzard to change what you perceive as broken.
How a person views these two factors probably has a lot to do with which side of the argument they fall on. I think these types of nuances get lost in this conversation all the time – on both sides.
Fair enough. I haven’t seen many of those arguments then.
People ask why Overwatch is one of the most uniquely toxic games around, and I think it really does come down to the (over-reliance[?] on the) team-work aspect of OW. I am totally for giving props to those who take a Zen-like approach to this game, where every game is about improving, with a tight and focused view on their own gameplay – not SR or winning. That’s awesome. That’s the gold standard. But if you aren’t there, Overwatch is a travesty. It really is. Fornite, Valorant, Apex, Rainbox Six are all different than Overwatch in that the carry potential (for any given player at that rank, I’m not talking about GM’s in Plat) is higher and those game are balanced very differently. I think the very things that make Overwatch different (and to some extent appealing) are also what makes it frustrating and infuriating. I have good friends who play both Overwatch, Apex, and Rainbow six, and they’re top 10% in each of those games, and they passionately hate Overwatch because of how it blunts skill and progression through the teamwork element.
Grinding mechanical skill is sort of the silver bullet because it really makes all of these problems, well, less problematic, but see my last post on how different people are likely to respond to what they perceive as artificial grind, and the fact that they don’t play games to grind mechanics. I will absolutely argue to the end of the earth that mismanagement, apathy, or greed can and do create artificial difficulty, and I don’t care how much Taleswapper argues otherwise, he cannot prove that those things do not exist in Overwatch, nor can he make the argument that they – CANNOT – exist in Overwatch. That skill can solve the climbing issue does not disprove all and any criticisms. Some people become rich under wretchedly corrupt govts, that they succeed doesn’t disprove corruption.
Happens in many more games than that. And it’s usually a conversation around particular developers moreso than the genre; and let’s face it, different genres, with different audience sizes, whether the game is AAA, the size of the community, whether a game is likely to have a forum that garners lots of attention, is going to factor heavily into how we perceive or even notice those communities. Decisions about grind do intersect with corporate integrity and culture, and you’re going to see some correlation between progression methodologies, developer leverage, and the character of the people creating the game, as well as outside factors like whether or not the developer is a public company with gluttonous shareholders etc. Taleswapper usually makes decent points but I’ll never agree with his refusal to acknowledge (at least in this context) that algorithms are extensions of the people creating them.
I have seen the engagement argument made quite a lot. These forums are like that one elephant allegory. 5 blind men encounter an elephant, and one grabs the tail and tells you it’s a rope, and the other touches a leg and tells you it’s a tree, and their limited exposure distorts their ability to comprehend the thing as a whole. I’m sure that’s going to be the case to some extent for anyone making their way through this hellish collection of conversations.
Oh just wait until you get close to 3000 and get placed on a loss streak where your teammates are awful (will happen with 95% certainty).
We’re dealing with inadequate programmers working on the matchmaker. Wherever you are on the ladder the game will look to place you in a match that you have a 50% chance of winning whether it places you in gold or diamond. So if you only have a 50% chance of winning guess what rank you’ll probably stay at?..the rank you’re currently at - this is called elo hell.
Played the last several matches really well? Bad idea, the matchmaker will make your teammates worse or give the other team a great player to offset your skills. Been practicing your aim and have quantifiably improved? Bad idea, your skill will quickly be offset. Been playing casually or drunk and lost some SR? No problem, the matchmaker will give you great teammates soon enough and pump you right back to your normal SR.
We’re in the dark ages of gaming right now, in 50 years people will look back at how these games matchmakers work and laugh at how obviously non-functional it is, we’re just sort of waiting for someone with higher intelligence to enter this sphere and fix things, might take another 100 years.
Sounds like you’re saying Overwatch has a uniquely bad matchmaker, which it does so we agree on that. Other people complaining about the matchmaker don’t call it handicapping simply because they know “something” is wrong but they’re not sure what it is therefore they don’t use the word Handicapping because they’re not informed.
I mean more competitively minded. There are the occasional “rigged game” conspirators but more often than not, they conclude through logical discussions.
My experience on Reddit is that people will often provide vast information ad nauseam. Redditors don’t take very well to emotional discussion. Though that’s not to say there haven’t been plenty.
Hilariously that’s what’s happening here. Emotional responses generate more threads and drawn out arguments (proven by, when engaging with some of these individuals they’ll openly admit their thread is an anger fueled rant).
I can’t say I’ve experienced this throughout the majority of Reddit threads I’ve participated in (in more than just Overwatch or gaming in general).
Or maybe more people realize when something is incorrect and they’re just not very polite in trying to convey their points?
That’s a fair statement. Though I suppose it’s more based on why one goes looking for information?
I don’t think you fully remember the majority of threads that have been posted here over the years. Not that I would blame or expect you to. Unfortunately I’ve wasted too much time on these forums.
I’ve definitely seen pay wall, pay to win, etc. on Valorant or Titan.
Interesting points.
The true answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
Experience (from being hard stuck) tells me that, no matter how hard I tried, killing 3 enemies, 4 enemies, 5 enemies, my team would always seemingly fall short in the final moments.
Experience from resolving this through grinding skill, tells me that, at the end of the day, I don’t have to care what my team does as long as my impact is so much greater than what can be mounted against me.
So I can see where people come up with this idea that their teammates are bad.
Yet… Without being the LEGITIMATE difference maker, are these people really in a position to label their teammates in such a toxic fashion?
That’s a question that has to be decided by the community (I think). Game designers design their games the best way they can to keep a myriad of people happy while also making sure they can still pay their own bills (which is a reasonable expectation). No?
i am posting from my “white-listed” account - which i got to gm in under 5 hours going 21-2. THIS IS ONLY BECAUSE MY IP IS WHITE-LISTED AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SKILL?