Hard Rank Reset every season?

Competitive Discussion
1

The normal rank resets now place you within a certain range of your previous rank from the last season. If I ended as 3200 last season, chances are I’ll probably sit in diamond for this season. It doesn’t seem like a bad idea, but it might be bad for new players. The term, ‘elo hell’ may come up because they feel trapped in their rank that they get repeatedly every season. Many players that initially placed gold won’t feel like their rank accurately represents their skill. They could be trapped with new players that also placed gold.

I know Seagull always says, “If you are good, you will climb in rank.”

But when? After 10 games, 20 games, 50 games? People might not have the motivation or the time to play that many games to get out of their rank.

Hard rank resets would cause less toxic games and less ranting on the forums. People would get more accurate ratings then the ones based off how they perform in games now, as opposed to whenever they first started playing competitive.

I don’t know how you all feel about hard rank resets, but I think it could benefit the community.

Thoughts?

2

There is no benefit from a hard reset. It just makes for poor quality matches every season as you get a mix bag of bronzes-GMs in the same game.

The people who advocate for a hard reset are those who think they belong higher but really don’t. But in reality:

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3

Then they don’t climb lol. Ranks aren’t handed to you. If you aren’t willing to put in the time, then you get nothing. A rank reset would just make smurfs worse and for very poor match quality for half of every season.

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4

Over a lot of games, depending on the win %. You have to play a ton more games with a 55% winrate to match the SR gains of a smaller amount of games with an 80% winrate.

Ok then goodbye.

Competitive FFA had an MMR reset, and I was in a lobby with Happy (DPS player for the Guangzhou Charge in the Overwatch League) VS a lobby of only gold players. Doesn’t sound like fun, I doubt anyone would want that in comp. An MMR reset would force literally every single masters and GM player to become a smurf at the start of a season. Keep in mind the amount of smurfs you face right now is made up of a tiny amount of masters and GM players, now times that amount by 100.

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5

What are these? I don’t think they exist.

But they’re generally wrong. Playing 50+ games will get your SR to move very close to where it belongs.

Because it’s true.

Yes, 50 games per season is a minimum in my mind. 50 games is enough time both for your SR to become more accurate AND for you to get better and keep climbing if you’re looking at your gameplay critically and intently.

Completely false. It would put people in games with Bronze and against Grand Masters. Every game would be a farce, and it would take forever to work everyone back to their own SR (not because it takes a large number of matches per player, but because the players will not all play at the exact same time. Some will come back in 3 weeks, others 1 week, others in 2 months, etc).

Jeff Kaplan says they tested a hard reset internally. It went exactly as badly as everyone says.

He says it in this interview.

Placing gold in your first competitive season ever is normal. It means you’re average. Roughly half of the community is better than you, and roughly half is worse than you. New players that don’t belong in gold will fall relatively quickly.

I placed early on in gold, and thought that’s where I belonged. I fell over the next number of seasons to low bronze primarily due to not playing very much. Most seasons I would do placements and about 10 more games. Over the last 3 seasons I’ve been much more intentional in my gameplay. I’ve climbed from around 700 to 1927. It took fixing things (such as switching away from a very large monitor), focusing on a single hero, and quite a few games. The last 2 seasons I’ve maintained higher than a 60% win rate and been moving very well. I received informal coaching from people willing to watch my videos, and I’ve stopped flexing around to random heroes just because others on the team were unwilling to play a role.

The bottom line is, once you’ve played 50 games, you’re probably in the right SR. After that, you’re going to have to fix things to climb.

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6

I think jayne at some point said that it’s about 2sr per hour if you’re not a smurf.

In that case comp is not for them, simple as that.

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7

No it wouldnt be accurate at all… im a diamond player… brb playing against gm players in all of my placement games and getting stomped in all of them… brb getting placed in bronze as a result and then stomping on all the low elo players on my way back…

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8

I dont believe that, if youre dps i can see. But as support you rely too much on a team thats a coinflip. Will they work with you, or will they go death-match with a optional objective that can be ignored?

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9

I don’t understand

How do people still think that a hardreset is a good idea ? Especially every season LOL

Do you even think about anything you stated in your post ?

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10

No, hard rank would not be any good idea, in fact they tried it once (between season 3 and 4 I believe) and it turned out to create very unpleasant games for quite some time.

The vast majority of the playerbase is gold and plat, only 12-15% is actually in diamond or higher. With a hard reset you would therefore more than likely just get game after game in which one team is lucky to pull a better player and less terrible (as having silvers or bronze would nothing more than ult batteries). Basically the 3 highest ranks would be bored and frustrated of having to farm newbs, the average players would be frustrated and annoyed because it would kind of, most of the time anyways, be out of their control and the two lowest ranks would uninstall the game as they wouldn’t be able to do much other than charging other peoples ultis and you also have to consider all the alt accounts so even if the system can place you at a pretty account within let’s say 15-30 games you’d have those who don’t want to be placed accurate and it would be much easier to maintain a lower MMR with hard-reset because once you’ve proven yourself it’s kind of hard to decrease the MMR.

SR is pretty irrelevant, or at least it used to be as it only used your MMR to place you in a game with and against others meaning that if the others have a smurf on their team that just throw a few games it’s extremely likely that you also have someone who’s deranked or similar on your team.
I’m an expert of tilting and losing hundreds of SR’s and even when I’ve dropped some ridiculous amount like from 3.2k+ down to 2.7k I often get matched up versus diamonds and people are like surprised as it’s not every day a full plat ranked team meets a team filled with like 4 plats and 2 diamonds. So hard-resetting accounts would make it much easier to smurf.

If your doing your best and just play the game you will get whatever rank you deserve by default, there’s no such thing as ELO hell in the regard some people use it, however it can be hard to improve after a certain point and therefore stopping you from climbing so… well, accept it for what it is or try to improve yourself as that’s really the only way to consistently climb.

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11

But they are not trapped by system so making hard reset just so they can feel better is crazy :smile:

Hard reset would cause total chaos. It would actualy create a lot more toxicity.

Only people who are not placed right where they belong are new people on new accounts, they are placing way too high.

And btw you will climb when you improve, not after certain amount of games. If you are bad at learning and dont do anything do educate yourself about game, you can play 1000000 games and never climb.

What is your SR if i can ask and i expect honest answer.

Anyway, if they hate to do something, its fixing initial placement because its not accurate at all.

12

You must be joking.

It’s bad enough we already have Master and Grandmaster players playing in lower ranks on smurf accounts. You want Blizzard to legitimise their cheating ways by doing a rank reset so you’ll have Master players playing with/against Bronze players etc?

No thanks.

13

Many players that initially placed gold won’t feel like their rank accurately represents their skill. They could be trapped with new players that also placed gold.

I used to think so as well, I was one of those “stuck in Gold”. It turns out that Blizzard is actually quite good at estimating your skill level after a few games played.

You can try a reset out; just buy a second account when Blizz is running a 50% off OW sale again and play on that. Your secondary might get ranked higher than your main, but if you continue playing on both accounts, they should equalize after a few hundred matches. I know because I did exactly that, and I’m not the only one. Sure, you can get a 500 SR difference between accounts, but don’t expect to end up in masters when your main is Gold.

I’m in low-mid plat, and I’ve played a few scrims with and against high diamond/low master players, and they destroyed me. Their reactions are faster, their movements are more unpredictable, etc.

But when? After 10 games, 20 games, 50 games?

Jayne once calculated that if you improve naturally, you can expect a 2-10 SR gain per hour. So, if you’re Gold and want to end up in Master, it’s possible to take 750 hours. The only way to get into a higher rank quick is by playing significantly better than your current rank (and not just mechanically, also game sense wise. There recently was a video where a Genji main dropped from almost Diamond to Silver and still lost games there; it was because he refused to switch when the enemy picked every Genji counter there is and he stopped being impactful). Kabaji recently did a “unranked to GM, Tracer only” challenge, and it took him 11 hours and 41 games to reach GM from Diamond.

People might not have the motivation or the time to play that many games to get out of their rank.

Then don’t. Basically, the only person that cares about your SR is yourself. If after your placements you end up in say Silver, there’s a reason for it and there are things you need to improve. You can only improve by playing a lot.

The thing that helped me climb out of Gold when I felt stuck there for a few seasons, was actually to stop looking at my SR and just play a sh*t ton [really, Blizzard? I have to censor it?] of games. I left immediately after one game was over and queued for the next one. I think I climbed 300 SR in one weekend doing that.

14

I don’t think it’s a good idea because it makes things less accurate, not more accurate.

If after a season you were at 3200, chances are that within 24h until the next season your skill didn’t change drastically so you get placed close to it again.
If you have taken a longer break, the placements work differently. If you haven’t played in 2-3 seasons, you rank is so volatile, that you can place 300SR higher while only winning 4/10 games (it happened to me on an alt account multiple times).

The system is designed to work in a way that you should be playing 100-200 games per season to be accurate.

A reset would mean that you would have to play these 100-200 games every season, likely even more to have an accurate rating. All it does is reward people that play lower than the average for only placing, since they won’t drop if they don’t play more and making it much harder for everyone who is playing above average to get back to where they were, not even skill wise but time wise since you would have to win about 50 games in a row to climb from 2500 to 4000 only (being generous with performance based SR below Diamond).
Probably even more since less players will be higher than you as you approach 4000, meaning you might only gain 20 SR and loose 30 SR for a loss.

That would mean, if you have an average of 60% win rate you would have to play about 500 games (if you’re lucky) to barely get to 4000 SR every single season. With 70% win rate still 250 games.

A hard rank reset would mean that at the start of the season Bronze players would play with GMs for at least the first few weeks of everyone placing. It doesn’t really matter when you started playing competitive either.
Yes you can get stuck for a while, even as a GM in Platinum but in the long run you will always get back there. It’s the same the other way around. If as a silver player you buy a new account and place 2500, you will eventually drop down to where you were unless you improve from playing in the higher rank.

There are certainly more points but… I guess that’s enough for now. :smile:

15

:slight_smile: I’m not a con or a pro for a “hard-reset” at the end of the each competitive season but I need to ask to all of those so con for it, if isn’t a hard-reset nor it should ever be, what’s the point of the preliminary matches cos you’ll be just where you was before!? Even more, what’s the point of the competitive seasons without a hard reset cos isn’t bringing absolutely nothing new, each of us are staying where they previously were? Even more, why we have to wait significantly more for a competitive match than for a quick-play. I know that they say “for a balanced game the match-making engine has to look more” in order to not mix let’s say gold with platinum, but that’s should be also available for quickies. Or in those that engine isn’t at all picky and it’s OK for it to mix let’s say bronzies with GM? Thanks in advance for the answers.

16

I think you underestimate how many non-primary accounts there are. It’s every day I’m online ; I see a new set of accounts playing in LFG - “QP for EXP” ; “Throw to Bronze” or “smurf - free carry” with a new set of accounts. Maybe it’s just way worse of a problem on PS4 though.

17

People who don’t want resets are probably boosted players that knows they can’t climb if they go to a lower rank.

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18

Players wanted to put skill into a childs game to make it more than a childs game.
The original rank system was progression based, and reset every month .
(One of the first developer updates)

19

If they don’t have the motivation to play that many games why on earth would they deserve a higher rank all of a sudden. A higher rank is the result of getting better and if you only want to play like 20 games in a season how are you meant to get better?

If the answer is by playing other game modes the question is why play comp at all if someone doesn’t like it and why would SR even matter then?

Basically play enough games and improve and you will increase your SR. Or just have fun in QP / mystery heroes and SR doesn’t matter. Or play a handful of games in total and accept that you won’t improve noticeably…

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20

SR matters in Arcade and the game still pairs you as close as it can. Lower ranked players do complain, they are trying to have fun in Arcade.
I constantly check SR in arcade to see how the game is pairing me and gauge my own SR without playing competitive. I’m gold / plat. I have silver rank friends and it brings me into a lower bracket when I group.