Forced losses ruin ranked

No it doesnt.

Not true.

yes it is true but if you dont want to agree thats ok

I don’t mind a fair fight. But the same fair fight whether i’m 1850 or 2400?

That’s the problem with forcing even matches. It makes the actual ranking pointless, and cancels out the skill (or lack of) for ALL players.

Hey, you’re really good? Too bad. You have the same 50% chance to win this match, no matter which rank you are.

Well, that’s not how ranked anything should work.

Let the RANKS sort people out. Stop trying to force even matches. Smurfs should not be put against opposing smurfs just to force an even match. Because then their SR game is NOT the same SR game as everyone else. It’s harder, on purpose, just to make things fair.

5 Likes

its true! lets say i have improved and could easily play in plat, but i am hardstuck in silver, because the matchmaker gives me plat-skilled enemies for a 50:50 balance. this way i have plat games in silver. and SR is completely pointless.

1 Like

Which is a thing i and nobody will do but you keep saying is not forced. The community is just a joke.

I am recording my games pretty often and i dont see anything being forced in there when i watch it back. And i have loss streaks too.

Thats nonsense, you will not have plat games in silver unless you group up with high plat duo.

If you improved to easily play in plat, you would feel like smurf in silver games and climb easily.

Matchmaker doest care about you as individual player. He is creating games to have balanced teams. Please dont tell me that you think you are some kind of special case and matchmaker is balancing games around you :slight_smile:

1 Like

That doesn’t make any sense.

Blizzard stated that every game is matched closely around a 50:50 winchance for every team. To accomplish that, the matchmaker needs to find people of supposedly equal skill.

Not every player in Gold for example has the same level of skill. Not every player also plays constantly on the same level. The matchmaker has to GUESS the skill of a player and has to accept some sort of inaccuracy (so do we).

In the end, we have a randomly assembled team with different skill levels. The combined MMR/SR will give the matchmaker his average team-skill-number. He also tries to find fitting players on the other side.

A player placed in silver has to play a lot of games to reach plat, even if he would win every game.

With your logic, Xion, a misplaced player would directly rise to plat, if he would belong there, because he would be able to beat everyone below this rank.

Reality shows, that there are - in contrast - VERY experienced and skilled players im lower ranks. Commonly described as smurfs. But also very good players, that could grind out their true rank, if they would take the time.

Nevertheless the matchmaker is forced to put that players in games, because the 50:50 winchance stands above all.

What do you think the matchmaker does next? He finds a player with a good MMR. Maybe with an MMR too good for silver (by average). He is placed in a team with a lower skilled player to get a more compatible average SR (by math). We all know, that TRUE skill can’t be measured by numbers in complex environment like Overwatch. It’s always a guess by a weak AI.

And now the matchmaker needs opponents. He will do the same trick on the other team: Place “good” players with “medium” and “bad” players together to form a mathematically equal team.

This is how the matchmaker could build a team:

Team 1:
P1 MMR: +3
P2 MMR: +3
P3 MMR: 0
P4 MMR: -1
P5 MMR: -2
P6 MMR: -3

Average MMR: 0

Team 2:
P1 MMR: +3
P2 MMR: +1
P2 MMR: +1
P3 MMR: -1
P4 MMR: -1
P5 MMR: -3

Average MMR: 0

Mathematically, there would be an even chance, but we all know, that Team 1 is at a giant advantage with 2 extremely skilled players. There is a lot of carry potential.

In comparison Team 2 has one very good player and four that hover around the average and also one deadweight potato. The skilled one would have it a lot harder to carry the low performers alone.

Conclusion: Your MMR determines the actual difficulty of your matches. The SR is only the “pool” the matchmaker has available to gather your opponents.

Again by avarage it’s probable to gain SR if you improve constantly. But you would have to grind it out the hard way, because in every bracket are also good players, that want to climb, too.

While only ONE of two good players can win, ONE has to stay low to make the system work. And it could happen, that you will randomly lose to dumb things even if you are a decent player.

And random sh!t happens often in Overwatch…

2 Likes

It does the exact opposite. Your ideas is what makes skill pointless.

I cant say I dont agree with majority of stuff you wrote, but its not like this all the time. If you will play 1000 games , majority of them still will have people very close to your MMR/SR. And if one team have bigger advantage as you said is very questionable as one one them can be winston one trick and second hog main who cant play main tank at that elo. In that case even lower ranked reaper will wreck them.

And I would like to say one important thing. The lower you are in ladder system, more easy is to escape and climb, it will get exponencialy harder in higher ranks.

You can gain 80 SR for match in low bronze, you really in gold + unless you are godly player 1 of milion. You can simply escape bronze/silver/gold with good performance, you dont even need above 50% winrate.

That’s NOT what MMR is. MMR as explained in the Jeff Kaplan/Seagull session IS a number that’s typically between -3 to 3, and it stands for standard deviations from the mean rank. So if your MMR is 3 (and it actually can be slightly higher than 3 in decimals), you are at the top end of the playerbase (so a player at Grandmaster), and if your MMR is -3 (or lower), you are at the bottom end of the playerbase (so lower Bronze, <500). An MMR of 0 would be the mean, so somewhere in high Gold. MMR is straight-up your rank compared to the playerbase.

It is NOT a value that differentiates between “Good” and “Bad” players at some given SR. Given 15 players at SR 2700 for Tank, all 15 players have the same MMR for Tank. In fact, given all players in Overwatch at SR 2900 for Support, ALL of those players would have the same MMR for Support.

Matchmaker does not know or give a damn that maybe 7 of those 15 tank players mentioned above might not even be deserving of that rank (whether they reached it as a result of a lucky win streak, held that rank for more than 2 years, slowly climbed to it, suffered a bad losing streak as a result of playing drunk one night, is smurfing, or paid for a boost, etc.), it only cares about what rank (which is their MMR) they have at the present.

This phenomenon is quite easy to explain:

New and “good enough” players get more or less placed in Gold, where the average resides. The lower you go on the ladder, the less common are really good players (makes sense).

But we know, that low skill can be faked by smurfs. They drop intentionally to lower ranks to kick some butts and then, when they gained too much SR, they throw again to compensate for their PBSR extrapoints. I’m not smurfing so I have to guess, that a diamond smurf in silver would have to throw 2-3 matches for one uber-stomp-quadruple-genji-nanoblade-teamwipe. It’s dumb, but it happends. Some people are that mentally disturbed to pull that off.

On the other hand there are good players that don’t play that often. They got placed - maybe years ago - in a low rank but don’t have the time or the endurance to grind out their real rank. Maybe they only play QP normally and gained a lot of experience there? Or in Arcade. So it’s simply a fact, that players can have (intentionally or by accident) an underrated SR/MMR.

These players hang around in low level brackets. But the pool of possible team mates is limited by your rank (blurs out on the edges a little bit).

So in lower brackets it’s not always possible for the matchmaker to find a good match for you. The lower you go and the better you are, the bigger your chance to win - even if the team-mmr/sr is even.

Team 1:

  • P1 MMR: +3
  • P2 MMR: -1
  • P3 MMR: -2
  • P4 MMR: -2
  • P5 MMR: -2
  • P5 MMR: -3

Team 2:
P1 MMR: 0
P2 MMR: -1
P3 MMR: -1
P4 MMR: -1
P5 MMR: -2
P6 MMR: -2

Both teams would have an average MMR of -1.17, but Team 1 has the big bad smurf without any counterbalance. The gap between the best player and the match’s average is gigantic. Team 1 gets an autowin.

And only by this, you are climbing faster in lower ranks. The match maker doesn’t find any counterpart and matches you in games you can most easily win, if you’re not going to throw.

But in silver / gold and even plat the population is much bigger and more diverse, so the chance of being matched with equally skilled enemies rises and in most cases, the matchmaker finds a fitting enemy.

I genuinely believe that there are plat players hardstuck in silver because of bad matchmaking. They COULD grind it out for sure, but if you are not GM material, it takes a looooooot of time.


Let’s take a look at a matchmaker without MMR. Only SR.

The matchmaker would just grab the next 11 players next to your SR in the queue. No proactive skill check. No handicapping. Full transparency.

I think there would be a lot more “chaotic” and unpredictable games and much bigger swings in game quality, but on the other hand the “good” and the “bad” players would quickly be seperated from each other.

SR would actually stand for your current skill rank. You’ll get, what you give.

I think it would be much more fun to play without MMR.

1 Like

I know that -3 and +3 are both the extremes of the MMR spectrum and can be translated to SR (bronze / gm). I took the plain numbers to make it clearer. And to be fair, no one knows, how MMR is really calculated.

If
-0.80111 is low gold for example
-0.20002 could be high gold

but in reality there is a quite measurable difference.

And the presence of PBSR alone should be evidence enough, that they HAVE internally the numbers to calculate a specific MMR for you. Even for your favorite heroes or even maps and game mode.

They can EASILY see that you are a bad junkrat for your rank. With overbuff, a lot of people can. The can see, if you are a main tank or an off tank player.

They may, hower, don’t use a lot of these stats for the matchmaking.

As long time Platinum player, I have to definitely say no here. No there are not plat players stuck in silver. Low plat player might be stuck in mid gold. High/mid player can be stuck in high gold for a while, but never in silver.

You reaaallllly think blizz is going to express a huge bug in there matchmaker? you think there going to state that there matchmaker is rigged to the public? When the heck has Blizz ever been honest on something they messed up on? It must be nice to be a Naive Blizz boot licker.

This is in line with what i’ve seen for 19 seasons of Overwatch. Exactly.

You can see the difficulty of matches go up and down, up and down. The problem is, that is actually due to the system giving you good, then bad, good, then bad. Teammates.

I’m guessing those who don’t see it, don’t end up grabbing the matchmaker’s attention with unusually high or low MMR. But i’ve seen Smurfs even say that they no longer have to try to throw. The game has balanced them out, even in lower ranks.

So… what if you’re not a Smurf? The game does the same thing, balances you out, and you’re stuck in endless “even matches.”

Truly random matches should be the goal, and let the RANKS become the difficulty. Instead, they’re trying to adjust the difficulty to your skill at all times. Makes playing the game kind of pointless!

3 Likes

I edited your numbers above to make a point. What if big bad smurf is playing DPS and the +2 MMR on the other team is support.

How fair is that game in 2-2-2?

100% …

1 Like

Man…the salt is heavy with this guy.

8 loses in a row that you were FORCED to lose that had 100% nothing at all to do with you. 11 other players in the game, 100% of the blame falls on all of them and there is literally nothing you could have done…

Riiiiiight, sure thing buddy.

Everyone always thinks “It’s not me, I’m doing all the work, my team are just idiots” when they are all thinking the same about you. If you lose 8 games in a row that means 88 other players came and went, the one consistent factor was you.

1 Like

Ok, but you don’t know any of this, you’re just wildly speculating. Can you cite a source please?

I can make up mystical background forces to explain my losses and make it anything’s fault but mine as well.

(yes I know there is an MMR, but you have no idea if this is how it works, unless you have access to a source I’ve never seen. Maybe it weighs higher skill and lower skill differently for all you know? Maybe it weights skill difference between roles different for all you know. Maybe it considers the MMR balance of your previous say 5 matches to be assured you get a good balance and don’t end up on the bad side multiple times in a row? I’m just speculating, point is so are you)

1 Like