So many people blame their lack of climbing on the fact that they get put against groups, and demand a strictly solo queue to fix this “problem”.
I’m so glad to see that this very common misconception is false.
Anyways, overall it’s a great post. Thanks so much for all the details, really helps to understand what’s actually going on under the hood.
Win or lose though, matches with premades are generally less enjoyable. I noted that above, if the premade has a ‘hard carry’ or behave exclusionarily towards you; or as is commonly the case, you become the scapegoat for a loss.
There’s a lot of maths here that try to ensure numbers; but there seems to be little or no concern regarding match quality.
It’s great if I have a 50-50 chance of winning a match, less so when that match is basically going to be decided over which 2800+ player in the premade is better.
It’s all very well saying “the premade gets to play with friends! Yay!” when the solo queue players they’re put with might as well not exist to them at best, or be treated as some kind of servant to fill their group’s needs at worst.
That… usually only triggers “Group up with me” for me. Maybe you’ve had better luck with it than I have?
Yeah I often bring up the topic of WoW, because It is a Blizzard product. I recall playing World of Warcraft and being a DEDICATED PvP player. I was all-in when it came to battlegrounds. I earned the gear and fought hard. From my time spent in the battlegrounds I had major issues of;
The first being, the players put into the match were a Premade vs a Pug’d in group. I was in PLENTY of matches where the premade had excellent communications and they were pitted against a pug group of players. Which is what most of us thought of being qued in for "random battelgrounds. Which meant all randoms, and instead it was entire GUILDS being placed against solo-que players. So it was a wash-out match.
That brings up the discussion of a new mode design where they have here on Overwatch “solo que” and “team mode” ques for both quick play and Comp mode. Food for thought… 
My only complaint I have as of lately when being in a 4+ group, is the amount of smurfs I run into. In this sniper meta, if you come across a GM widow smurf playing on a plat account, their win chance will be lower and they will destroy your team meaning you will lose a ton of SR. Smurfs literally take all those calculations, and throw them out the window.
Several months back we implemented a restriction that prevents the matchmaker from creating games that are severely one-sided.
That isn’t comforting. I have noticed it, but it’s crazy it took a year and a half to implement this. This is the kind of thing that lead to the belief Blizzard was punishing you for winning and giving you gift victories for losing. There was pretty strong evidence for it too.
On top of that when someone views the idea of matchmaking they view it as making an inherently fair game. Rather you view that based on MMR (which once again it does not seem Blizzard uses traditional MMR values like League players are used to) or through any other calculations some of which might go into making up MMR, why in god’s name would you ever not prohibit one sided matches. Especially when it’s been a complaint for over a year that one sided matches occur so frequently?
What? What?
Is the patch coming out today?
Why does PBSR even still exist for Plat and below?! It’s old, out-dated tech that is no loner relevant to this game. 3 seasons since the original change to remove PBSR for Diamond+. Pretty sure that’s enough time for it to “bake in”. At this point, there is no overwhelmingly valid reason to not remove PBSR across the board.
The excuse of “removing PBSR will keep smurfs at lower ranks longer” is not valid enough. Smurfs can stay at lower ranks for as long as they want regardless of which system is in place. In addition, what % of the 40 million OW accounts are smurf accounts? The smurf issue is drastically overblown and they will exist regardless of which system is in place. The only thing that can be done about smurfs is to report them and move on.
Also, the excuse of “PBSR allows higher skilled people to rank faster” is also not valid enough. If you truly out skill your current rank by that large of a margin, you will climb regardless if PBSR is there or not.
Lastly, people getting “carried” to higher ranks is also not a valid enough of an excuse as this currently happens anyway. If someone has another player that’s willing to boost/carry them the PBSR system means nothing. Anyone who’s not truly in a rank they belong will fall when SoloQ’ing
The entire point to the removal of PBSR, (which the Development team stated themselves), is to encourage players to play for the WIN rather than hero-squat in a attempt to stat-pad. This was great news to hear…at first. Except now we are almost 3 full seasons into the change and for some reason only roughly the top 15% of OW players have access to a system that encourages team play.
There is no point to this system. Please remove it for everyone.
Again, this is the reason why we are getting the Looking for Group feature, if you specialize in a specific role, you will find it more valuable to properly place into a role on a team that is building rather that going in solo-queue.
Considering that I had that question posted in the post below the original post, we are likely still going to keep things the way they are.
This would be correct, if you are the group leader, players who connect to PSE1 would see your listing first.
Game Director Jeff Kaplan has already stated before that there will not be any increased penalties to skill rating for leaving a Competitive Match:
Unfortunately this would badly manipulate skill rating, and leave the door open for exploits to allow players to cheat the system or bully other players. This post explains:
It is important to know that performance-based metrics are a very small factor in your SR calculation. So it is important to know that unless you are consistently losing more than winning, I would not worry too much about PBSRAs.
Rejoining a game is only possible during certain phases of the game. If you leave a game either during the pre-game or during the first minute of the game, the game will automatically cancel (remember the 10 second rule does not apply to the leaver, but as a warning to other players that the match will cancel). You can rejoin the match during the initial hero selection screen if you are lucky enough to quickly reconnect though.
Otherwise, you can only rejoin any-time after one-minute of match time has passed up until the match completes. However you only have two minutes to do so without penalty. If you rejoin a match after two-minutes, you will still automatically be marked with a loss an be penalized with a -50 SR cut and a ten-minute suspension. This rule ensures that no one can abusive the leaver system by attempting to return to a match after deliberately leaving in order to avoid such penalties. Furthermore leaving three or more times in a single match will result in an automatic penalty. If you fail to return to a match by the time it ends normally (regardless of match result) you will be penalized.
All disconnection penalties still stand because while a match may be canceled early, Blizzard does not want a player who has issues with staying connected to immediately return to Competitive play until they take time to troubleshoot their issues. Also I fear matches would be less likely to complete normally if players know there is an exploit to cancel the match early if they lose the first team fight in a match.
Adjustments to each players skill rating is strictly based on that player’s individual SR compared to the opposing team’s average SR.
SR adjustments are not accounted for when there is a leaver. See this post for details:
There is no specified release date, I am personally predicting next Tuesday as Tuesdays is when most live patches are launched.
At the time of your post there was a severe network outage for players in Europe. This problem should now be resolved.
This is suppose to happen but actually more or less near your skill rating based on that 10 game win-loss record. There are no hard resets to MMR in Competitive Seasons.
As I said, the game moves too fast for that nonsense in my opinion. (note I misspelled in my original post)
Most likely next Tuesday for live patches.
As a minor update, based on confusion of the original post I organized most of the content into a TL;DR bullet list in my intial post just below.
Hi Scott,
Firstly fantastic post, you have come out swinging in both building up the new looking for group feature and also dazzling us with statistics. I do feel that the statistics are genuine, but at the same time they don’t tell us the whole picture. I’d be curious to know about the composition of stacks that group up do stacks of predominantly dps mains, support mains, tank mains win more than another type of stack, do stacks win more in a tighter sr range or when they are almost a full 1000sr apart, etc. etc.
Now onto the main course, the LFG system is a great idea that I was over the moon to hear about, however on further reflection I have become a bit more pessimistic about it, I feel you done a bit of a Pontius Pilate and just washed your hands of all the toxicity of the matchmaker by letting people build their own little groups, giving people what they want is a great thing but is it really what they needed?
I feel this has the potential to create a new kind of what I am going to call “pre emptive toxicity” when you look to build a team for a tilt at ranked you might start by unfairly looking at win rates of players on the roles they desire to play and dismiss them out of hand for only having a say 49% winrate after 2 games on a hero, and the player who wants to use the LFG to play comp in a fun social environment is never able to play in a group due to being “bad”
Thank you for continuing to reinforce that it is just a game and that people should play for fun and not a little number.
Kind regards,
Kyle
Great game and comp is totally fun but my only complaint is that too much SR is lost on a loss. I went 25-8 and over 19,600 healing as Lucio in a match and still lost around 20 SR and we held them off a long time. My friend was Moira and took gold elims and gold damage along with 10k healing. We carried two matches as far as we could and I still lost about 40 SR for the two losses. Maybe that’s the plan but 40 SR is a lot to lose after doing so well, in my opinion.
Man who the hell lied to you? If anything, you should never play with friends and I mean that. They can become increasingly toxic. Overwatch in itself can be a very toxic game that can make anyone rage, and especially if you’re in a group with your friends. You will be more prone to rage to them than to randoms. I learned that lesson over quite some time and majorly doing solo. You guys always preaching about teamwork or group work but it just doesn’t work or it’s just me. Probably. I do is that for me, the idea of having ‘fun’ with my friends is impossible that I only play QP and Arcade with them.
Thanks for taking the time to share this info with the players! I’m excited to play with the new LFG tool.
So, what’s the point of Decay? I feel as if there is decay, then there shouldn’t be a bonus. Why even decay the player if you’re going to boost them back up?
I think its just you. I have made friends who want to work together in Overwatch but that is because I follow the morals of play nice, play fair. And the personal friends I bring into Overwatch are equally minded. Yes we lose and we can get frustrated but we work to solve our problems and not blame each other.
The purpose of decay is to keep you dedicated to the game if you want to maintain that high rank. Back in season 1 there was no skill rating decay, so players quickly jammed up the top 500 slots and could not be easily knocked out when players below that rank couldn’t find comparable matches to them.
[Insert here url of “Leaving Mid-Match and Skill Rating Adjustments” notice from 2016 (forum won’t let me)]
I understand this adjustment for the team with more people, but why do it to the team with less people too?
Game time affected that adjustment, so you can’t do something like leave 5 seconds before the game ends to increase the SR of the other teammates.
I once won a game where a teamate left midgame thinking he couldn’t win, and it was a really hard game cause of that. It felt great to win it, of course, but with that adjustment it’s like saying that in normal circunstances, it’s not worth it to play a game when a teammate leaves, since it’s too much effort for the same normal gain of a normal game.
If there was a handicap adjustment to only the team with the leaver, it would dramatically increase incentive to force or bully players into leaving and groups could easily manipulate the game to inflate their SR appropriately.
But, as I said, if you leave late in the game, when you already helped to win the game, the difference would be minimal. And that can be adjusted to be even smaller.
(Btw, maybe you understood the reverse of what I said?)
First understand there are no adjustments made when there is a leaver. I think you are under the impression that there is, but there is not.
Simply put, by having any sort of handicap when there is a leaver increases leaver behavior and more toxicity in game. So instead by promoting grouping up, players can have better control of their game and work with consistently reliable teammates.
Ehm… All I’m saying is after reading that. All you are saying is like I said something about the team with more people, when I’m just talking about the team with less people. I said I think that doing no adjustment for the team with more people is ok.