Hi!
The following thoughts are from the perspective of someone who has over 1000 hours (so not the most hours but certainly not a trivial amount) across 4 accounts. These are the observations, and feedback of someone who doesn’t play this game anymore. I don’t have any friends that play this game. I don’t know anyone who plays this game, and its a shame because I used to love Overwatch and I feel like it could be better.
Most importantly, these thoughts are from the perspective of a solo queuer competitive player who occasionally might duo queue. Its important to keep this in mind.
When Overwatch competitive was created, it was designed to be a 6 v 6 game where every gameplay system strongly encouraged players to actually group in 6 stacks to play against each other in a coordinated fashion. You lose with your team, you win with your team. I think we all know that in practice this doesn’t pan out. For the past 300 or so hours of play I’ve been trying to log and recognize patterns and collect insights into what I’ve observed. Below are these insights.
Many games are lost due to players having misaligned goals
The 6 players on your team don’t have aligned goals. i.e you playing comp because you want to win by any means necessary, but your widow is playing comp to practice Widow in a competitive environment. Or your Ana is practicing Ana and won’t switch regardless of how she’s countered. Neither of these would be an issue if the entire team didn’t suffer from them.
The matchmaker matches players based on a false equivalencies
So what are false equivalencies? Consider the following team rank scores:
(This is based on real matches that I see VERY often)
Enemy Team
tank tank dps dps heals heals
2650, 2680, 1490, 1645, 2301, 2320 = 13,086
Your team
tank tank dps dps heals heals
2100, 2350, 2208, 2,013, 2105, 2230 = 13,006
In this case, the matchmaker believes that the enemy team has an advantage. This is just not true. It will never be true. IN 100% of the times I’ve come across this problem (which is fairly often), the team with the disproportionately high ranking members always loses. Always. Why? Because a 2208 dps is going to more than make up for in value a perfectly playing plat tank. They will vastly out perform the bronze dps in every scenario and it will be more than enough to win the game.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the enemy. They’ve put you in a game you cannot possibly hope to win, AND you are advantaged which means that when you lose, your entire team will derank significantly. In some cases, wiping away two full wins depending on how even the matchmaker thought you were.
The matchmaker appears to ensure that you win 50% of your matches regardless of how good you are as an individual
This problem has several facets. I think that the previous issue is caused by this one. I’m trying to think of how I can describe this issue but its something that you feel so I’ll give a couple examples.
Scenario 1:
Let’s say you’ve been playing a few matches and you’ve won each one. The next game starts and you look at the enemy team and it seems pretty even. You get out there and its like you’re playing at a different level. The level of play the enemy team is pulling is so far out of reach of how your team is playing, maybe even what you’re capable of, that you know there’s 0 chance of winning. Your team loses without ever gaining so much as a single tick in a massive stomp.
Scenario 2:
You’ve been playing a few matches and you’ve lost each one. The next game starts and you look at the enemy team and its pretty even. You get out there and its like your team is playing on a different level. The enemy team has an insanely non-competitive comp, the tanks are off in some random corner away from the team, you 5v1 every one of their team and cap both points in under 2 minutes.
BOTH of these scenarios feel awful. The worst part about them is that you can feel them at the start of the match. It actually feels as though the matchmaker has put you into a match you cannot possibly lose or that you cannot possibly win. Was it your skill that put you here? No it was the matchmaker that decided you should win this game or that you should lose this game. Its terrible when this happens.
I’d like to say that this happens rarely, but for me on my account its like clockwork. When you queue with 5 random people you’re rolling the die and its clear that there’s some mechanical placement happening in order to determine whether a team wins or loses. The net result is, you’ve played 6 hours and you’re right where you started in terms of progression.
The matchmaker has NO clue how good you are after your first placement match
Okay so I’m going to provide my own experience, but I want to provide my wife’s first because her’s is more egregious and really this is the main event that caused me to realize how flawed the matchmaker is.
My wife started playing last year. It was her first FPS ever and when she started she could barely look and run at the same time. She settled into a healer main and eventually started to play a lot of Mercy and Moira.
Once she was able to we decided to play comp. At the time, my main account was in low plat. She placed in mid silver. We played a lot of comp games but when we lost we lost while advantaged and when we won we won while advantaged. with a win ratio of around 40% we slowly deranked.
So my wife landed in bronze and I in gold (eventually low gold). After that we continued to play a 0 sum game. She started to get really good at Mercy. Like… really good. I was a Mercy main for most of Overwatch and so I was able to help her. But no matter what, the matchmaking system was keeping us at 50% win ratio at best.
Fast forward, 200 hours, we met some friends who were GM and we played with them. They actually asked her, “what rank are you really? Like on your main account?” They were convinced she was playing at a bare minimum of plat but thought she was probably diamond. They knew there was no way she was in bronze, for sure.
Finally, she made a new account and did placements. She was placed in upper plat. There is no way she is a bronze player anymore. The game has ZERO avenue for a solo queuer to play with other players of their skill level because it actively tries to make sure the team as a whole is even, not the individual player - even if that means placing lower performing players in higher tier games and the other way around.
I’ve had my own experience with this. I was stuck in silver as a DPS. I made a new account and it threw me into Diamond where I played with the same 50% win ratio.
So let me address this:
Is there a way for a really good player i.e GM or w/e to solo climb through bronze back to GM?
Of course. Yes. But its not the same. Its not the same as a Plat player being stuck in Bronze. A plat player is better than a bronze player, but he’s not SO much better that he can make up for 2-3 teammates like a GM player can.
New season placement matches are useless and purely cosmetic
All the game does is hide your current rank for 10 matches. It does not give you a chance to start new. Whatever you ranked last season - surprise - that’s what its going to put you in this season. And if you record your rank when the season ends and then pay attention to your wins and losses, you can clearly see that its basically just adding and removing points to your previous season score.
For my wife, who is super competitive, she was always super upset when she had grown so much as a player and yet every season would fall right back into bronze lol. Despite her very clearly not being a bronze player as evidenced by the plat rank on another account and anecdotal realizations from other players.
The game literally tries as hard as it can to ensure you’re stuck in your rank, moving poorly playing teammates into your matches if you’re winning too much in hopes that you will carry them. This is just… the worst system. Its the worst and it feels horrible and I honestly believe this is the main reason noone plays this game anymore.
What can be done to fix this?
The vast majority of players that play Overwatch are solo queuers, that’s the reality. Heroes of the Storm embraced this “forced team work” mentality too and look at what happened to HoTS, noone plays that game either. This is a utopian idea that DOES NOT WORK in practice. It doesn’t. You cannot rank a solo player based on his team and then purposely construct teams designed to make a whole team win or lose and have the individual players suffer for it.
The reason I quit playing this game is because there’s no reward for playing well. None. I get that medals are a meme, but when I heal I’m shocked when my teammate outheals me. Shocked. It never happens. I’m always communicating, always trying to make plays, and by every visible performance metric in the game, I’m massively contributing to the team. I regularly get MVP cards, and top healing cards. As an individual I’m pulling my weight.
But there’s nothing for me in Overwatch. There’s no progression path. I get rewarded with a loss and deranking because someone on my team decided to be trying a new character. Or the match maker placed bronze dps on my team and its not their fault they just can’t out perform the plat dps on their team.
There’s also clear obvious patterns of team performance where you know when you’re going to stomp within the first 20 seconds of the match, or you know when you’re gonna get rolled first 20 seconds of the match, and it always happens after a win or lose streak.
I’ve talked to a ton of people anecdotally about this and they all feel this way. Regardless of whether this is actually happening, its how it feels. And how it feels, is awful. It feels awful to win a match at the matchmaker stage. It feels awful to lose a match at the matchmaker stage. It feels awful to derank because of your team and the supposed “advantage” the game thinks your team has.
I have literally started a match and then just sat in my chair with this face -.- because it was so obvious there’s no way the other team could win. And you’re just sitting there like, “what is this match? What is the other team doing? Are they bots” and this ALWAYS comes after several match losses.
You must rank people based on individual performance and not whether the team wins or loses. There are too many variables that contribute to a win or a loss and its mostly because the matchmaker just tosses disparate populations into the same match because their numbers add up.
Who do I as a solo queue player want to play with?
I want to play with other players of my individual skill level, who are playing in order to win the match. I don’t want to play with people expirimenting on characters they’ve never played before. I don’t want to play with people who are 2 ranks below me or 2 ranks above me.
I ONLY want to play with people of my skill level. All 6 of them. I don’t care if I need to wait 30 minutes for a match, its gonna feel a hell of a lot better than screwing around in unwinnable games or stomp fests every 5-6 matches.
Don’t believe me? Anyone who is skeptical, hear me out. If you are someone who has been playing for YEARS and are still stuck in the same rank for YEARS, go make a new account and place. I guarantee you’ll place 1 - 3 ranks higher than you are now. The game does not reward the individual for playing well, and it will be the death of this game. And I honestly believe its the reason so many people have just stopped playing altogether. Its definitely why all of my friends quit.
The purpose of this post is to just throw out parting feedback as it might be useful to blizz to know why someone stopped playing their game and hopefully they can do something to fix it. If the game functioned more like League where its much more about individual skill, I might come back. But right now, as it is, solo queue games are won and lost by the matchmaker which has no accurate understanding of what rank an individual is in the first place - and how can it if it just ranks you based on a win or a loss.