Hard SR reset needed

I’m surprised there’s never been a hard SR reset, and really think their should be one. How many people bought the game ages ago and tried competitive before they really knew how to play. Betting a lot of people would place different now.

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No. If they improve they will climb. People are the at the rank they deserve 99.9 percent of the time

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That doesnt affect your MMR though.
You can be set to 0 and still play with Masters because said MMR

Technically from what I understand, there was a hard reset of MMR between season 1 and 2 (mainly because of the revamp from the old 1-100 SR system to the current 1-5000 system). Season 2 had a awkward period of mismatches and it caused a majority of players (like over 80%) to bulk up in Gold and Platinum. They worked to flatten the curve by not resetting MMR and instead work to artificially lower SR for few seasons.

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Wasnt there also one for a like a week when role queue was released.

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You refer to the Role Queue Beta. I made the terrible mistake of misleading the community thinking the matches from Role Queue Beta would not apply to the hidden MMR for starting in season 18 based on what I read of the Role Queue news blog post, but Principle Designer Scott Mercer was kind enough to correct my error. The hidden MMR from Role Queue Beta season did apply to the placement matches of season 18.

Needless to say this was the one time I made a really bad mistake and mislead the entire Overwatch community and I am still sorry for the error.

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They should just make it so people place a bit lower than they typically would place.

Season 3 through 5 did that with the skill rating, however it didn’t feel good (knowing if you win 10 placement matches you will still end up about 200 SR below what you ended in the previous season). They stopped doing that in season 6.

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I remember when you did this, I remember playing a lot of Genji to practice my dps and I ended up losing like 400 Sr because I thought it didn’t matter haha. It sucked, but it’s all good now, I’m probably a low play dps player anyways haha

Everything is a tradeoff really. As much as people say they don’t like it, Blizzard has built an entire industry on giving people a reason to grind numbers.

You can still play after placements. I don’t see what would be interesting about seeing someone who doesn’t play competitive place again, especially when it comes at the cost of the quality of other matches.

The problem with SR isn’t that it places you at your skill level, or that it isn’t accurate(though I will say I see a fair amount of people in my games who are not at my level), it’s that it feels pointless after a few seasons. As a placement mechanism, that’s great, because it means they’ve placed you generally where you should be, but as a game mechanism, there’s nothing particularly fun about it. There’s nothing to look forward to, nothing to really enjoy about the system.

Of course, if you get better and climb, that’s something to look forward to, but most people don’t/aren’t, and since it’s a zero sum game, for everyone that climbs, someone will fall.

We don’t need a hard reset, what we need is a different system beyond slapping a ranking onto QP. The competitive system was the most poorly thought out part of this game.

I recall a bug that caused a hard SR reset for a few hours - happened maybe a year ago?

It was terrible.

I am gold and I was placed in a game where at least two of my teammates were masters - not sure about the others.

They were completely thrown off by the lack of abilities of teammates - with good reason, some like me were very low skill relative to them. You could tell from voice chat it was frustrating and they could tell immediatly something was wrong matchmaking wise.

I could not keep up with the pace of the game - even with only one or two highly ranked players in each team - it was all just too fast for me to keep up. Dead. Dead. Dead.

You WANT to be placed in your skill range. Being teamed up well outside of your rank in either direction is not fun (+/- 1500SR).

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When season 18 first started, it wiped out ALL previous hidden MMR which was not intended. So they had to stop season 18 and resume season 17, until they could fix the problem.

So yeah… that is what a hard reset did look like.

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Yep. The MM was all over the place. It was actually really tragic to watch.

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Only people who have a good reason to want a SR reset are the ones that are in the upper side of the rank pyramid and want a way to curbstomp their matches.

I don’t think that’s a good reason to reset the whole game SR, but other than that, I see no other reason to ever reset SR values.

It was interesting - a great unintended experiment.

It quickly proved that a hard SR or MMR reset is not a good option at all. It would be frustrating chaos for weeks until everyone gets sorted out.

No, a hard SR reset isn’t needed. What IS needed is a hard cap on MMR data accumulation. The current system actively encourages smurfing because for someone obsessed with climbing rank and nothing else if you do improve you stand a better chance at climbing on an account with no previous data on it.

Maybe they could get rid of some of the older MMR stats. Maybe only count the last 3 seasons.

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In a sense it already kind of does this, if a player does not play for an extended amount of time, the game is going to be extremely uncertain of their hidden MMR rating, and when they return then more likely gain or lose more SR in their first few matches. Consistently players truly do belong at the rankings they are at, unless they make a very significant change to their play style including but not limited to:

  • Developing better mechanical skills through aim training, mouse sensitivity recalibration, etc.
  • Develop a better sense of gameplay awareness including understanding the win conditions of each team fight and the match overall
  • Play a lot more and develop the two skills listed above naturally