Absolutely don’t think it’s a thing at all
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Back in I think season 3 or 4, can’t remember which one… I went 5 wins 2 losses and deranked from Gold 1 to Silver 1 Support.
Same season I went 5 wins 14 losses and ranked up from Plat 4 to Diamond 4 Tank.
Feels weird. There is definitely a lot going on behind the scenes with the comp SR/MMR that they do not disclose.
The longer I go without spending a dime, I get extremely janky latency issues, whilst playing with 70ms.
Reality warping moments where my last 3 seconds are rewritten and I’m looking at my deathcam.
I’ve watched a Firestrike fly straight through my Mercy and deal 0 damage.
I’ve stood point blank in a narrow hallway as Torb, 1 v 1’ing a Brig. Popped E and right clicked her chest 4 times dealing 0 damage to her and then dying. She did not use shield once.
Had a Hanzo 1 shott-ing me from Narnia all game until near the end my teammate typed ‘… i JUST SAW THAT ARROW BEND TO YOUR HEAD’.
I see these things happen in nearly every game while playing with consistent 70ms ping.
I did an experiment and paid for the S7 battlepass. Those weird latency issues dissapeared for a week. I was on winstreaks for that week and climbed in rank for the first time in a while.
Acti-Blizz has patents that state they aim to make the game more fun for paying customers, or people more likely to pay. They don’t state the exact system they have in place to do this, but I believe those latency bugs have something to do with it.
It is possible also the PotG system favors spenders over non spenders. As I’ve had games where I get a 4 or 5k ult and the PotG goes to something like a Mercy who gets 1 rez and 1 kill. Or just a DPS or tank who gets 1 kill.
It might not be that your DPS teammates are plebs. It might be that the game is forcing some of their shots to not land.
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I’ve got recently a 9 win streaks, it was so unreal. i feel ashamed of myself, like i was cheating or exploiting a bug. I’ve seldom seen that. I’m so conditioned by this game, i couldn’t even enjoy it.
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Its easy to do if you understand how to manipulate the matchmaking…
Its not going to do much to help your rank though… since its looking at player parameters and not win and losses
You lost that match because the enemy Genji was in your backlines doing whatever the hell he wanted. You rarely peeled for your teammates, and only really bubbled an ally if they were directly in front of you.
You had a lot of damage because Zarya’s beam goes through D.va’s defense-matrix. But while doing so Genji/Reaper were in the backlines killing your team, so you ultimately lost the fight.
Here’s one example:
- @1:34 Genji is standing in the middle of your team, directly behind you, but you never turn around
- @1:35 Genji is directly to your right attacking you, but you are tunnel-visioned on the baby D.va and don’t even notice him
- @1:38 Genji dashes through you, then kills Hanzo, directly next next to you, but you are still oblivious to Genji
- @1:40 Genji shiruken & dashes through you again to 1v2 your Ana & Bastion, but yet again you completely ignore him
- @1:43 you almost died (42 hp) from a lack of heals, because Ana (only support alive) was busy fighting off the Genji
My advice is to work on your spacial awareness & peeling for your backline, then you should easily climb out of Gold. 
(For reference I’m a Gold tank player myself and I noticed your mistakes because I make them too lol 
)
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Now go over my games.
That Hollywood game was very special as the trio I was paired-up with (thanks, match-making) was cheating.
Ever seen a tank use aim hacks and didn’t know what to do, once he was getting hard-punished by the enemy tank for using it? Or his DPS using wallhacks and possibly soft-lock but without the aim to back it up?
The amount of people that think forced results are a thing is alarming.
If you think forced losses happen, so should forced wins… If you’re in a “forced win” go afk and see what happens.
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I still win those… I have tested it. This is not the gotcha you believe it to be. 
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Well done.
Still doesn’t prove forced results though, because that quite frankly is insane.
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I do agree that nothing is “forced.” It is more of an influence. Technically that is how matchmaking should work as is. My assertion is not particularly controversial. You put higher MMR players with lower MMR players to achieve a balance. The inherent issue is that sometimes the higher MMR players are better than the algorithm believes. The opposite is also true.
And then you add the human element like some degenerate Hog player who refuses to swap versus someone who has been struggling a bit on another tank they have been trying to learn, but they decided to go back to their main, Sigma, to counter the Hog player. Maybe an insomniac stayed up until 3 A.M. on the forums ranting about matchmaking and this kid just got off school and popped some Addy with their GFuel. Perhaps a Mercy one trick gets into a lobby where both DPS are playing some hyper aggressive dive heroes and they keep getting picked whereas normally she would be with a hitscan or flier and have a lot of uptime.
You never know! It is going to skew a lot of the results. I just feel the matchmaking is loose to accommodate queue times and you get into these lobbies that would otherwise not be created. They compromise far too much. I do not believe a 4v5 should even be possible to win with competent matchmaking. Not without a lot of coordination on one team’s part and a complete toxic downfall on the other’s. I should not be able to regularly win while contributing absolutely nothing. It just shouldn’t happen.
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Forced losses are not a thing.
If the matchmaker is working perfectly, your win rate will trend towards 50%.
Everyone has a skill rating. If you win, it goes up and you’re put against higher skill players. If you lose, it goes down and you have easier games. When you hit your ideal skill level, you will win half the time.
If something’s wrong with the matchmaker or you’re just unlucky, the nature of randomness can lead to lose streaks. Bad things tend to stick out in your memory more than good.
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At the end of the day, after 10-20 matches, you end up with one of 3 situations:
1 your win rate is close to 50%
2 your win rate is close to 0%
3 your win rate is close to 100%
And its never situation 1. Most of the time its 2 or 3. 1 is very rare. And if I end up with 20% win rate on one day, then on the next day the games will probably be pretty easy. Sometimes so easy, that it’s not even fun. You will climb in the long run. If you are willing to improve, of course. But this streaks are so frequent, boring and predictable.
I don’t believe that matchmaking forces this streaks. But it’s definitely one of the reasons why they exist in the first place. It feels like out of 20 matches only 5 really matter, because they are balanced and you can influence the outcome. You play good, you don’t make a lot of mistakes, you pop off in crucial moments, you win. In this matches everyone has similar stats, and sometimes they go to overtime. And in the rest 15 you can just afk. And then you climb. And it brings you no pleasure.
Long story short: streaks (win or loose) are too frequent, and developers should address this.
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But they use this matchmaking in all their games. Are you saying that Call of Duty matchmaking is also rigged?
The amount of people completely uneducated about how matchmaking systems work yet making bold claims and huge threads about it is frankly concerning. Please do some research on what “Skill Based Matchmaking” is and how you cannot predict the skill level of any player with 100% accuracy
But Overwatch is most likely not using SBMM, “Skill Based Matchmaking”. It uses EOMM, “Engagement Optimized MatchMaking”, that’s why we are all experiencing lopsided games all of the time and gets sent on these crazy win- and losingstreaks that we hardly even have any control over.
There is one feature in this game that can break the system too, and that’s the avoiding teammates function. I made a thread about it here (OW's feature that can break the MM system), but I wrote a full essay, so no one seems interested.
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Different games developed by different teams. It’s unlikely, that matchmaking is the same.
That’s very true. Instead of matching players with very similar skills, you can do the exact opposite. You can look at the historical data of players and calculate their upper skill limit within a certain range of games and then you match one player with another who is completely out of their league.
That’s something you can predict, a system can work with that.
Why?
Engagement. You can measure a player’s engagement by simply looking at the length of their sessions, their reasons for leaving and their in-game behavior.
Most players don’t want balanced long exhausting games that are decided at 99%.
For most players it is probably about 1/3.
stomp | stomp | more balanced game
win | lose | lose/win
fastQ | fastQ | slowQ
This keeps you in the game. (1/3 is only a simplification, the whole thing depends on your personal predicted session time for that particular time of the day and the size of the available playerpool. )
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What made you think, that ow uses this type of matchmaking? Did developers share something about how matchmaking works at any point?
All these discussions around MM where no one knows the algorithm, how it works, what its objectives are, I thought a lot about it.
My deduction is that the MM must (oversimplifying greatly)
- create quality matches in a hero shooter genre that has characters with completely different abilities.
- respond to the constraints of an f2p service game which must maximize its financial profitability in order to satisfy shareholders, by using player manipulation tricks, tricks which have been perfected over the years and are now perfectly mastered.
But I don’t know how the balance between these two very opposing constraints is found, if it is found, which is the primary constraint and which is secondary (I have a little idea about this)
I dont know anyone who enjoys stomps or loss streaks. Calling that as “engaging matchmaking” is quite wild. If anything, loss streaks & stomps make everyone i know stop playing the fastest.
Maybe everyone i know are the exception, though.
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