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).
But sure… I won’t discount the possibility that you’ve experienced different responses.
Or maybe more people realize when something is incorrect and they’re just not very polite in trying to convey their points?
If you think that doesn’t happen on this forum, you’re wearing rose tinted glasses (as mentioned by another user to someone else).
That’s a fair statement. Though I suppose it’s more based on why one goes looking for information?
You’ve even admitted yourself you’d seek out confirmation bias rather than looking for a more subjective understanding.
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?
Our experiences are different then, or maybe we’re talking about different points in time, or different subreddits. There are strictly competitive subreddits, which aren’t going to feature (or even tolerate) conversations outside of tips, tricks, strategies etc. Then there’s more general subreddits where these kinds of conversations are allowed. Guess it comes down to which ones you’re talking about. In my experience, the general subreddits where progression conversations took place were not civil, mature, or open-minded. And how civil one thinks the FOX news or MSNBC youtube comments sections are, for example, is going to have a lot to do with your political ideologies.
Also, are you saying that anyone who thinks the game is rigged is part of a conspiracy theory? And if so, why?
Again, is the implication that anyone who disagrees is doing so on the basis of emotion? I’ve straddled the fence between both sides of this argument, and I think there’s valid points to be made on either side. But neither side has seen the code, and neither side has provided conclusive evidence. That skill “solves” climbing doesn’t invalidate any and every claim that the matchmaker has problems (I’m not saying that you’re saying it does, but this is not an “open and shut” case).
People rally around Taleswapper as the final say on this, but he isn’t: all he’s done is present generalities about how sorting algorithms can be written and then makes the highly questionable leap to “that’s how they’ve been written here.”
I retracted my post on this topic when I made the same (egregious) mistake of suggesting that general matchmaking theory best practices had found their way into into Overwatch – with absolutely no evidence that this was the case. This is like advocating that every doctor is a good one because SOME take the Hippocratic oath seriously. This is a category error.
To be clear, you’re suggesting that every criticism of the matchmaker is either flawed or emotional? How do you qualify an emotional argument? It would seem to me that most (if not all) of the arguments you’re referring to as emotional are just standard issue abductive reasoning. I’m not even sure what an “emotional argument” is now that I think about it. Whether an argument is effusive or not has no bearing on whether it’s right or wrong. Beyond expressing it emotionally or not, underlying claims are still being made, and those are judged on the basis of whether they’re valid/sound.
I haven’t posted there on the general Overwatch forums. I found the lack of moderation, immaturity, and tribalism there to be a problem; not to mention that it was mostly a breeding ground for bad Mercy fan art. And Competitive Overwatch and Overwatch University, et al, aren’t places where matchmaking can be discussed much without being off-topic.
Whether something is “incorrect” or not is not an excuse to be rude and disrespectful. And the category of what’s “objectively true” about matchmaking which goes above and beyond opinion or confidence or belief is small. There’s a lot of speculation taking place on both sides.
To me there is no question which side of this debate is more aggressive and rude. Typically it goes something like this:
Scenario 1:
Upset Person A experiences something in the game that tilts them. They come to the forum with complaints and theories about the situation. Those posts are swarmed upon by people that disagree with them. They’re often insulting and personally demeaning, and they’re placed into this category of generally delusional, lazy, conspiratorial or senseless. People attack these people not as a new person entering this arena, but as an extension of all the other people they’ve rolled around in the mud with. Person A is attacking the game, and then people attack THEM. Those people get defensive having been insulted, and they respond in kind.
In fact, Taleswapper is maybe the only person on these forums who seems to have a standard of behavior below which they will fall (and he deserves a ton of credit for that).
Scenario 2:
Someone who’s smurfed or hardcore grinded their way to rank X makes a post on the forums offering that this situation proves that anyone who criticizes the matchmaker is a hardstuck “copium” addict. The gauntlet having being thrown (which reminds, check out Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel” – awesome movie) people get defensive and the predictable ensues.
I have never seen anyone rudely attack Taleswapper or anyone else like him who calmly and respectfully tries to explain how the matchmaker works in fact-based way.
I think there’s some justification for spending time here to write and debate, so it’s not all just an egregious waste of time (I’m honestly way more bitter about all the hours spent playing Overwatch). I credit this place with me A) doing a hell of a lot more writing and proofreading than I otherwise would have and B) getting me into a fairly common routine of analyzing my own arguments and reasoning and that of others. It’s clear you do the same, so cut yourself some slack.
I honestly think you’ve become a better writer and communicator since first knowing you, and I think I have too. Not that either of us were bad before, but there have been a lot exchanges that forced me to think through my arguments (and yours and others) and there’s no way that all that time and practice doesn’t come with improvements. I think you, Basil, Tale, Cuth, Rigged (I know you’ll disagree on this one), myself, and others have elevated the level of discourse on this topic, or at least we routinely present arguments that take time and effort to respond to and unpack.
We all do it. We have a strong internal sense of what’s true and what’s right and wrong, and we seek out information that confirms it, all while being less “moved” and impressed with information that doesn’t fit our worldview. No one likes to be wrong.
Most subreddits just aren’t a good place for open discussion unless it’s a fairly neutral one, or debate and discussion is the reason it exists. People come to Overwatch related forums wanting to express their opinion, and what they get is immediate, withering confrontation. And it has a chilling effect on other people who see that. And like I said, the way Reddit is run makes it very very easy (if not inevitable) for tribes, groupthink, and hive minds to form. Then those places form an immune system around any dissenting opinion that passes through.
There’s no question that shutting up, and “getting after it” is the superior option when it comes to accomplishing the goal. Life isn’t fair and at the end of the day, people content to merely complain don’t get very far. Overwatch, like so much else, has a tipping point: a critical moment where enough small changes eventually produce a large or irreversible effect. I think anyone with a given mindset about the game (or life in general) is going to, commendably, meet that tipping point, or that line in the sand wherever it is (and in this context, it’s how good should you have to be to get out of, say, gold, and again, keep in mind that people are comparing OW to their other life experiences, ones where there is no Blizzard designing the landscape, and those real-life experiences strongly informs their opinions on what’s fair and what isn’t).
But there is a conversation about where that line/tipping point should be. You combine this with the – indisputable, objective fact – that Blizzard does have some say over where that line falls, and there’s certainly a valid conversation to be had about whether the placement is correct. That’s just the nature of life on this planet: any decision is going to be open to question and criticism.
Group A: “meet the line wherever you find it.”
Group B: “the placement of this line is ridiculous.”
Like you said, it’s going to come down to some reasonable middle ground.
You’re right, and apparently the community doesn’t much agree, lol. But it’s weird because it’s like asking people who are out of work and suffering vs. those who are employed and comfortable what their views on unemployment benefits are (aka identity politics).
As for developers (or any business really) and what they’re trying to do: It’s a spectrum really. Some are more than happy to exploit people any way they can, and it becomes a very “us” vs “them” mentality. Others see business as more of a symbiotic relationship where the goal is for both parties to flourish as much as possible.
I don’t think the gaming industry is generally on the correct side of that spectrum (which is often the case when you have shareholders, because exploitation is profitable in the near term, and people often don’t care much about the long term – they’ve already cashed out their chips by then).
p.s.
I can’t believe how absurdly stupidly long this. I only really see how long the post is after I hit “save.” It doesn’t seem like much while I’m writing it. Ridiculous.
Delusional once again. People complain about having bad teammmates and luck in every game. Why do you think that league of legends is universally known as the most toxic game? Surely a perfect matchmaker would leave no reason for people to be angry? Not the case. Your teammates doing bad matter so much more in that game because the enemy scales in power based off of your teams deaths. Yet in LoL good players will climb just as Overwatch. Bad players are always going to blame something else. That’s why they are bad. It’s really not difficult to understand.
I think this is the most useful bit for me to respond to.
It seems that your current claim, BrightTitan, is that the matchmaker is tuned such that players struggle to advance, because the OW devs want to increase the grind of the competitive ladder in order to make more money.
And that is a different claim than many others are making. It is a specific claim though. And it can be interrogated.
The main question to ask is this: does this version of the matchmaker actually increase Blizzard’s revenue? That is, does it get more players to stick around longer and play more games (and presumably buy loot boxes?)
I think the anecdotal evidence suggests that it does the opposite. Players actually leave rather than sticking around. And this happens for all sorts of reasons, but one of those reasons is the sense that the matchmaker is unfair- that the ranked mode unfairly holds people back from progressing.
And that brings me to my larger point- there are established principles of engagement based game design. Devs know how to do this. And the hypothetical matchmaker that prevents people (or even significantly hinders people) from ranking up ain’t it. Engagement based game design is the opposite of a matchmaker that holds people back.
There are various versions of this, but the shorthand is that gamers must feel like they are continuing to make meaningful progress and have agency if you want them to continue to feel engaged in your game.
That is, they need to progress. That’s point one. And they need to feel like they are progressing because of their skill and their choices. That’s point two. There’s a third component that sometimes gets brought up relating to meaningful social interactions in game. But the first two points are key.
So the whole theory that the matchmaker is purposefully calibrated to hold people back from meaningful progress in order to increase Blizzard’s revenue through engagement based game design does not even make sense on a fundamental level.
If they were doing that in a way that worked- it would require them to let players progress as their skill increased. In fact, if they wanted to skew things- they would skew them in order to increase progression.
Stymieing player progression is like the antithesis of engagement based game design. But the problem is that we are not trying to make a meaningful investigation of what is actually happening in order to better understand it.
We are simply trying to back-fit some theory (any theory, when one is shot down we’ll simply replace it with another) in order to explain why our lack of progress does not relate to our actual skill. And as long as that is our methodology, we will continue to misunderstand what is actually happening in game, we will continue to hinder our progress, and we will continue to undermine a good in-game experience.
Actually one more bit on this point. One of the ways the “rigged matchmaker” theory has been suggested to work is that players are either white-listed or black-listed, and only white-listed players are allowed to move up the ladder. And one way it has been suggested that players might get white-listed is by buying lootboxes.
That is, at least, a coherent theory if one were looking for a ‘Blizzard is doing things that undermine the accuracy of the ladder in order to increase their revenue’ theory. I don’t think there’s any evidence of it occurring, but it at least makes sense on a fundamental level.
The big problem with it is that if Blizzard wanted to implement a pay-to-win scheme, they would need to let the players know about it. How can they expect us to pay-to-win, if we don’t know we need to buy lootboxes in order to progress?
I used to agree with you on this (remember our ‘dial’ conversations), but the more I think about it, the more I am inclined to believe it’s not true for Overwatch.
A few weeks ago, I gave the following example to demonstrate that being only marginally better than your peers results in an insane amount of games:
We have established that a 50% wr means you are accurately placed on the ladder, i.e., your actual skill corresponds with your SR. I think it is reasonable to assume that 52% wr corresponds to being marginally better than your peers.
Let’s, then, assume a hypothetical player who is placed at 2500 SR on the ladder and to which the above property of being marginally better than others at 2500 SR applies. Now to rank up 100 SR, said player would have to play 100 games. This is an insane amount of games that most players don’t even play in one season, and that’s the requirement to climb a small amount. You can play with the numbers a little if your definition of ‘marginally better’ is different to mine, but you’ll find the ballpark of the number of games is very similar.
Here is the crucial logical conclusion: the above observation holds true for any matchmaker, be it ELO, TrueSkill, or any other variant. In any matchmaking version, 50% will mean accurately placed and being marginally better will result in a ton of games to climb. The only scenario for which you could logically assume ‘artificial grind’ is one in which the matchmaker treats some players of the population differently than others, i.e., preventing some but not all to climb. And I know you don’t assume that.
I agree on this and I think they are taking a step in the right direction by changing to a 5v5 design. The game will still be more team reliant than the other games mentioned, but it’ll definitely reduce the feeling of ‘being held back by team mates’, I think.
I have a feeling that we will be talking about this again once OW2 releases with a battle pass and or the pve part of the game where this will be of great relevance, hah.
If anything you have inspired a few people to pick up on it. You know it is very important for me to not misrepresent the arguments made on both sides of the debate. I take this very seriously, and I have only ever seen you make this point. Although, I obviously can’t claim to have read every single post and comment made on this topic on here.
I wrote about this while ago. The devs used to have a bit more progression built in, in that they artificially started you lower after placements so you could climb. This was about as artificial as you can get, even though I normally hate calling anything in a video game artificial since it’s all artificial.
There really isn’t progression in OW and I really don’t think it was ever intended. Not that you can’t improve, but it takes massive amounts of improvement, as you noticed, to do so.
I hear people say that it’s marketed otherwise, but I never saw the marketing where it said you’ll get more SR on time played. I could have missed it, or likely just interpreted it differently though.
Like, BT is taking above about “grinding skill”. That’s just not how skill works. No amount of grinding will raise your SR.
This is a good point and one I’ve brought up as well. If we want to see what engagement based game design looks like in an OW context, we only have to wait for OW2 (and particularly once the PVE comes in). One thing that I expect to see is one or more options for player progression that are not tied to winning competitive matches.
Players will be unlocking resources with which to progress their PVE skill trees, for instance. And while I am sure there will be ways to do this solely through playing the game, there very well may be ways to increase the rate of gain by spending currency.
But the core element will remain- engagement based systems require a sense of progression. The whole impetus behind the ‘rigged matchmaker’ theories is to find a way to explain lack of progression.
That is the opposite of engagement based game design. Players need to be able to at least pay to gain access to player progression- and that’s true even in nefarious engagement based design.
That’s very interesting, thanks for that! My point stands though, something like this would only ever be possible for placement matches. Other than that, artificial grind could only exist in a system that treats different players differently, which no matchmaker of the games under consideration does.
Yeah. I don’t know what the whole system will look like, but I do know they’ve already said they want hero missions to be replayable and there will be end game content. So whatever form it takes, it’s clearly being designed with long term engagement in mind.
I think it’s funny that someone has a complaint about artificial grind in a game that I don’t even think has grind, and if you do choose to progress then it’s very much not artificial.
The fact that people think they should progress at all is the problem here. “Should”, being a key word, rather than “could”.
I have no idea what you’ve been saying for the past four years. I don’t read every member’s post on here.
Lettuce simply mentioned complaints about the matchmaker. If he wishes to then he may now backtrack that statement and move the goalposts. I simply responded to that claim.
You evidently haven’t watched the second video. The matchmaker is literally described as being [a vulgar term beginning with S.]
Matchmaking is what he said. Not the system, not the matchmaker, but the fact that people camp their ranks, too many smurfs, and game design choices around groups. Again, player mentality and game design.
You, on the other hand, appear to believe that the matchmaker puts people on your team that it KNOWS are bad in an effort to ensure your win rate stays at 50% .
No one with any sense is making the complaint you guys make here. If you are actually making a complaint about how player behavior drives a poor experience given OW team based design, them please be more clear so we can get this silly argument over with.
