Has Blizzard ever discussed changing the matchmaking system to try and pair players of like skill together rather than giving everyone a 50% winrate? It’s obviously fun for the not good accounts and troll accounts but super irritating for good players who solo queue instead of 5 man queue.
My recommendation would be to try and shift to a system where it takes longer to pair but matches players of like skill together instead of forcing a 50% win ratio for all accounts and see how well that plays out. Current system is just irritating to most players I think. Maybe I’m wrong and people love the current matchmaking system and I’m the odd one out.
I’d just like to see a natural system where it pairs players of similar skill rather than matching losing players with winning players to try and get everyone to 50% win average for “engagement”. Not cool. =/
finger on the monkey paw curls
“Every game now gives one team two bots disguised as players who throw the game. This means that there are 5 winners and 3 losers, so each player will end up with a 62.5% winrate.”
It’s definitely not a lie. I have no bias. It very much will match you to give you a 50% chance of winning and losing each game. It does this by matching players as quickly as possible which means matching players likely to lose with players likely to win. That’s why every match has players that grealty over perform and greatly under perform. At least this is the case with all my ranked games in USA servers. I always overperform and always have a teammate that underperforms. And opponents always have teammates that over perform and under perform. It’s never an equal match where everyone is of similar skill. This has been my experience. But I’ve only gotten to Diamond solo queue so maybe it improves at higher ranks but I can’t get there solo.
It is a lie. You have made an imaginary matchmaker in your head and claimed it’s what Overwatch uses.
The matchmaker has a very simple way of working. You have a skill rating and it tries to find you 9 other players of similar rating. If the queues get too long ( >10 minutes) then it finds you one person who plays the same role as you of similar rating and then expands the search.
The end result is each team has a similar rating and each player has someone on the other team of similar role of very close rating. If you win your rating goes up and if you lose it goes down. As a consequence of that last sentence you have a 50% win rate. As a spoiler though any non random matchmaker will generate a 50% win rate.
I guess it all comes down to the player skill rating system being very unreliable then. The most common term I see used at the end of every game is role, “diff”. Where one team had a huge gap in skill between the tanks or dps or healers on the opposing side. Maybe this is just because many players are extremely inconsistent in their in game performance. I suppose I’m extremely consistent so it just seems odd to me to have good games and bad games.
I feel like they could use an AI tool to judge a players skill based on more than win/loss so when a player goes 0-10 K/D in a game the system realizes they are ranked way too highly and drops them an entire bracket and vice versa. I think that would more quickly separate the wheat from the chafe than pure win/loss. Because pure win loss balance just puts low skill players with high skill ones which is just irritating for the higher skill players.
I noticed this only works with silver/gold/platinum because in platinum and diamond it never ever puts me with higher ranked players. I’m the highest rank in 90% of my games and have MVP and best stats virtually every game in a row. But if one person on the team goes 0-20, that’s just a loss and I can’t carry those games. And I play against teams with the same problem so I know I’m not cursed.
My theory is that better matchmaking is entirely possible but it would piss off most of the players who aren’t very good but spend a lot of money on the game, or even a little money. And pissing off these customers would hurt the bottom line more than irritating a smaller minority of very consistently good players.
But that’s the whole point of ranked and quickplay. Maybe have the ranked system use a good matchmaking system and Quickplay use the system you described where it tries to get everyone a 50-50 win/loss regardless of how good the skill rating system is.
But overall it is problematic and it seems like a lot of folks have gone to Marvel Rivals because they’re tired of Overwatch. It is fatiguing to always be the carry and just get loss after loss because of bad matchmaking sandbags that you know will just be in your next game regardless of how much they’re deranking it.
You are literally asking for two things that mean the exact same thing. Demanding that Blizzard pairs players of “like skill” together is exactly what causes a 50% win rate in the first place. Think about the math for a second: if the matchmaker perfectly puts ten players of the exact same skill level into a single lobby, the statistical chance of either team winning is a coin flip—exactly 50%. Over a large sample size of perfectly balanced games, your win rate will naturally stabilize right there. This isn’t some conspiracy where the system artificially forces a loss by giving you “sandbag” teammates. It is just the mathematical proof that the MMR system is actually doing its job and has found your true rank. The matchmaker uses Role Delta to balance the specific MMR of opposing roles, meaning it matches your tank’s skill against the enemy tank’s skill to keep the odds fair. If you are stuck at a 50% win rate, the system isn’t dragging you down, you have just plateaued at your current mechanical and tactical ceiling. The only way to consistently achieve a win rate above 50% is to actually play at a skill level that is objectively higher than the current MMR bracket you are in. You don’t need a different matchmaking system, you just need to improve your gameplay.
Wait… I’m confused. According to the dev’s own words, they attempt to get it to a “fair” match in which there’s a close probability for either side to win. If not they take players and move them to make it closer.
I did not mention that change because they got rid of it months ago when it turned out it was not actually doing anything. By their words it had no measurable affect on wins or losses or ending streaks but was merely adding another layer of convolution which only resulted in a slightly longer matchmaking time.
The reason for that, and it was obvious to me that would not work from the start, is that they already stated that their system only has about a 50% accuracy rate at predicting who will win. The reason for that is rather interesting when you think about it and is the reason most people find games so random.
Basically if two team play and one is 2500 SR and the other team is 2520 SR the 2520 team is favored but the gap is not that large. Even a 2550 opponent vs 2500, which I imagine results in the favored/uphill/etc modifiers is nothing when compared to the other variables that go into that rating.
That might sound weird but think about all the variables in a match just for one player. The map itself, the heroes they pick, the heroes they face on the enemy team, how they work with what their teammates pick, and how they are feeling in that moment. None of those are a constant but a person’s rating is the average performance across many games of all of those.
When you take 10 people, all of whom have that element of randomness, and match them together that is going to be a bigger determinant of the game than a 50SR team difference. That is why the system cannot predict and it is why people make up grand conspiracies about the system being out to get them and trying to make them lose games by putting them with “worse” teammates.
I’m just about done with this game. Match making has literally been garbage and has gotten worse the past 3 weeks. The game is absolutely unplayable. 0 enjoyment in playing. I know this has been a common problem, but how long before you realize they don’t care to balance games and playing just isn’t worth your time. Blizzard is going down hill fast, get out while you can.
