How often I go 6 wins and my last game for my rank update takes me 6+ loses… and the fact that I hear of lots of people doing the exact same thing. It just keeps happening over and over on all three roles. I get 6 wins in 6 to 8 games and then a long string of nightmare games without people that can’t possibly be anywhere near my rank.
These are not minor loses either. These are teams with dps only moira that dies the instant the round starts. Tanks that run away from their supports every change they get. DPS that somehow manage to go 1-10 on junkrat.
I had a tank that went 4-18 on Orisa vs Hog. End of the match I check and he is a new account silver. Everyone else I could see in the match was gold/plat. We couldn’t heal him fast enough.
For example, we all know that if the matchmaking is functioning as intended that a player will win roughly 50% of their games once they’ve settled at the rank they belong at.
So they focus on the outcome—win 50% of matches—and code the matchmaker for that outcome, without realizing that how you arrive at that outcome is very important to the player experience and the competitive integrity of the system.
If you flip a coin 7 times in a row and get heads, that’s a pretty unlikely streak. Those who understand gambler’s fallacy know that it doesn’t make the subsequent flips any more likely to be tails than a 50% shot, however they understand that over a large enough sample size, the heads ratio will converge back to 50%.
BlizzTurd looks at that coin and says, okay they got heads twice, now we need to make the chance of tails 60%. Wow they still got heads another time, 65% chance of tails. By flip 7 you’re at like 90% chance of tails.
This is an allegory for what happens to the difficulty of enemy teams as you win more and more sequential matches. It’s important to note that this isn’t “the matchmaker functioning as intended and giving you harder opponents” as the fanboys will proclaim, because if this was a natural phenomenon the difficulty of matches would scale much more gradually, and one’s teammates should be increasing in skill at the same rate as one’s opponents.
I think what they attempt to do is to “smooth” out this implementation using a rolling average, and it’s resulting in the weird streaky behavior. But basically nobody working for them anymore understands how the matchmaker was designed. So they keep bandaging stuff on top of it, and sewing in patches of spaghetti code, all of which are just making the issue worse which is that the players recognize that it doesn’t “feel” fair.
And I tell you, it ruins the game in the long run. It becomes predictable, frustrating, self-defeating. Wins mean nothing, losses feel forced. There’s nothing natural about it, so you might as well not even try.
At this point, they’d be better just to turn their MMR thing off, make matches based on rank, and let nature take it’s course. I think we’d naturally end up at more balanced matches, once we reach our ranks naturally. The harder Blizz tries to force some kind of outcome, the worse it gets.
This is a design choice that got carried from OW1. The flaws were less obvious in OW1 only due to the second tank, 2 “less skilled” tanks with some luck could have a good alchemy like Rein/Zarya or abuse some mechanics with double shielding, so they could win over more skilled tanks and that somehow was enough to feel less forced to win or lose.
It was already a bad mix of match making and crap balancing, but with OW2 you can see this magnified 10 times with the lack of the second tank, and the hero balancing all over the place. We can even say that today, we see the true face of the match maker, and it’s a disgusting one.
I know it’s a design choice to have those impossible or easy games because the match making philosophy they adopted goes that way, I’m quoting Josh Kepke (match maker dev at Blizzard) → tight games aren’t fun. But I don’t believe it should be an excuse to provide the player with the most frustrating games, or the most boring ones.