I’ve been having a pretty miserable time on Switch, so I figured I’d open a discussion on this. I’m mainly PS4 but recently picked this port up a couple of months ago, and while I could spend all day talking about matchmaking in general or how this game shouldn’t cater to solo queue period because it’s just not made for it, I’ve noticed the Switch competitive experience has been a lot worse for maybe a few reasons.
Leavers. This alone could be responsible for my gold hell. It’s almost guaranteed every other game. 9/10 it’s someone on my team. Curiously this is often at the very beginning of matches, though I have seen it quite a few times should the enemy claim a point fast or win the first round. It’s unreal, as if there are no penalties for leaving.
Matchmaking. I don’t feel as confident comparing this one to PS4, but matchmaking is all over the place. I keep getting solos against 4 stacks in particular, a bunch of low level experience players against 4 stars, almost-all gold rank against-all platinum, or all of the above at once. I keep having lemmings for team mates and three-four gold medals on average by the end. In the odd chance we steamroll them instead, I just feel bad for them. I am not enjoying this.
My worst loss streak so far has been 11 games. I’ve heard of worse but anyhow, what do you figure the deal is? It’s definitely worse than PS4; I’ll die on that hill. Is it the smaller pool of users on the Switch effecting matchmaking? Is it the average age of the Nintendo crowd? Are there more casuals on a Nintendo console in general?
Not to crap on the Switch or its players but I honestly was a bit concerned when they ported Overwatch to Nintendo’s system.
I’ve always known Nintendo to be more story driven, they’d rather tell a good story over having the best graphics or best multiplayer. In fact the only competitive games I can name off the top of my head are the Smash games and Mario Kart (how many competitive games are there on the Switch? Further more, how many are FPS? I honestly don’t know) so when I saw a FPS like Overwatch going to the Switch, I kind of figured it wasn’t going to be a great experience. Simply because that’s probably not something a lot of Switch players are interested in unless they also happen to have played any number of FPS games on other consoles.
So it’s likely your leavers are just people who get fed up and leave to go play Luigi’s Mansion 3 or LoZ: BotW.
Matchmaking on Xbox is just as wonky, I am a Support who sits between 2500-2700 in RQ and 2800-2900 on OQ and I still get paired up with players who meet the bare minimum requirements to queue up on my team at about 1500-1700. Meanwhile the enemy team is stacked with 2900+'s to 3200+'s.
I keep telling myself once I get gold weapon for Doomfist I’m done with comp on Switch, and it can’t come soon enough. I think this’ll be my garbage quickplay port.
As a new platform, y’all are teaching the matchmaker how to function. It doesn’t have a lot of data to go off of yet.
Going off what the dude above me said about NA, NA console players have many trash cans in the mix. If you put too many in the same lobby, a dumpster fire erupts.
On the subject of queue times. I am in Los Angeles, C.A. United States. It depends on the time of day, but I did see the timer roll back to 0:00 once after waiting somewhere between 60 min and 65 min for Open Queue Comp. Right now, I’m in the middle of the day and it’s about 10 min average. Games can be found, but not as easily as other platforms. Just got steamrolled without claiming the point and the matchmaker thought I should be paired up against those people again immediately after, though.
This isn’t related to Switch, but I really hope Overwatch 2 isn’t a mess. I just got mauled via solos against a six stack. Lost all my games so far today and it’s feeling like a waste of time, and time is valuable. There are so many variables in Overwatch that you can’t play solo queue reliably. With all that goes into it, it’s basically made for professional gamers and nothing else, and even that’s debatable. Turrets are a pain. All I can really say for certain about matchmaking is that I’m not so terrible that I deserve to be placed with people who eat bullets on purpose or jump off cliffs. It’s just an unpleasant experience overall. I understand why it’s so popular from an aesthetic standpoint.
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