Give us an example of a competitive game that doesn’t use this type of matchmaking system.
I’ll wait.
Hint: you can’t.
4 Likes
My personal experience with matchmaking on my main account is that most games are pretty balanced and every 3-5 matches there’s a steamroll one way or the other. Not to say that games can’t be decided in the hero select screen or that every game is winnable, but I really do think that the matchmaker is good and fair in most cases. Lower tiers are always going to have lower quality games and less consistent gameplay which will cause more problems and more steamrolls, but most of the time (even queuing at night in masters) everyone is around the same sr unless someone decayed or there’s some weird group playing together.
This is not how it works. It actually does basically what you are asking. It ONLY matches on MMR. That’s it, just one number. This has been explicitly stated by Blizzard multiple times. Just one number, no weird tier system that the conspiracy theorist come up with to explain how match making holds them down.
- It tries to get everyone in a match with as close as MMR as possible, this is the number 1 thing the matchmaker tries to do
- While MMRs won’t always be identical, you will be the lowest MMR player on your team as often as the highest.
- These games are only balanced on the assumption your rank is in fact accurate. Your SR chases your MMR so it can never stray far from it. If you deserve to be ranked higher, that means you play better than your MMR would imply, which means the game isn’t actually balanced. It’s stacked in your teams favor.
Imagine where you keep winning one, losing one, winning one, losing one for multiple seasons… same SR the whole time. No progression. You think you’ll keep playing?
2 Likes
Somehow nobody mentions how powerful it would be simply for the matchmaker to pick teammates who lost the last two games. Building a team of people already on tilt would be easy - and devastating.
Something I’ve noticed - after a win streak, before the bad games begin, queue times will go up drastically. Notably, the estimated queue time will be consistently half the real queue time. When the queues get shorter again, the games also improve.
My theory is this: everybody has a public SR and a private MMR. Matchmaker creates games with a specific public SR and a specific private MMR. The more of a streak you get onto, the more the Matchmaker looks for teammates with appropriate SR but much lower MMR. Eventually this requirement becomes specific enough to affect queue time - and produce virtually unwinnable matches.
In fact - we’ve been told by the team that MMR is more volatile than SR. After even a modest win streak your MMR should be much higher than your SR. So let’s say Matchmaker simply tries to make the match MMR and SR be the same. Your MMR is way above the target average so you have to be paired with people who are way below. Simple as that.
1 Like
As someone with a spare widow account, I have to say this isn’t the reason at all. You have to maintain high mmr and keep getting high MMR matches in order to climb.
The real reason is that it’s hard to get kills when your whole team switches off tank/healer or afks because they are mad at you for not getting kills. Thus they fall to a lower rank…and play with poor players…and then climb back up…i don’t believe the overwatch community’s consistent throwing of games when they feel the widow isn’t performing well enough stops unless you get to extremely high level.
the funny thing is…your healers can get killed in under 12 sec resulting in a loss… you are told to switch as widow. If you don’t, they switch to 5 dps…one of them swaps to mei and creates walls at spawn…and you lose…so then the system has a hard time judging these widow players’s skill accurately. These widow players in your games that get kills every 20 sec at your rank, probably are only getting killing every 50 sec or so at a higher rank, so then their teammates throw and their mmr falls.
SR is basically a judgment of how performance has been on average. But if every time you get high mmr in gold, you then lose games with poor performance due to people throwing, then you will not be able to maintain high mmr long enough to hit plat easily.
People need a scapegoat when the team is losing, and if the widow isn’t getting at least 1 kill per 30 sec, the widow gets blamed, regardless of whether the larger reason for losing is due to healers getting cut too easily or tanks just standing on point but not doing any useful damage so they are basically just feeding ult charge to enemy dps and enemy healers
I have to admit recently one of the things I’ve been fixing in plat is taking trash damage to pump up my stats when I have a better target I could be firing at… Don’t give healers ult by focusing the wrong person.
Anyway because of the players in this game’s refusal to acknowledge their own flaws and blame widows, even if a widow is capable of playing at 2600 if the team and winning half of the games if the team’s were to play seriously, in reality the widow must be able to super hard carry at that rank in order to make up for people throwing due to anger at widow.
This is why I rarely use my widow account lately. It’s not fun if players throw even though it was their own mistakes. I swap to mccree or soldier when I am honestly not doing enough for too long because I feel for my teammates. But when you are losing 2 people every 20 sec you can’t do much, but you are always told to swap.
One thing people really don’t talk about enough is that not fighting too fast/ doing a fight with sustain slowly is far better for widow players at lower rank cause it gives them more shots and time. If you go in with the intent to dive and wipe too fast, you are basically saying, play at several levels above this game if you wish to carry.
That’s why as a tank player on winston, I play very differently when i have widow/hanzos on my team. In korea you have widow and hanzo in many of your games…esp with 4 dps because your team is angry at the widow/hanzo players, so the most important thing is playing slow and giving the snipers time to get picks while blocking genji/winston/flankers from attacking your healers…and occasionally distracting enemy snipers and the like. Chasing down kills is not nearly as important as just keeping your team up and giving your snipers time to work. Even in gold, I rarely if ever had a single sniper that couldn’t manage to get the right picks if i could drag out the fight for 60 sec while keeping people busy. Obviously if the enemy team is coordinating a push against your widow and your team doesn’t run counter dive then either your team or the widow may need to swap.
But I just want to say that bad tanks are among the primary reasons widow players can’t climb quite as easily. Most of my diamond/master dps friends say you need to play widow 500 points above your rank to consistently climb when people throw because you play widow
2 Likes
So what’s the alternative? Move people up ranks to where they dont belong?
I never said the system was purposefully holding me back. I’m just stating it’s flawed logic to conclude that an individual has complete control over their SR. If you’re solo queuing, then you don’t get to control any of your teammates. You’re at the mercy of the matchmaker for getting a good team or a bad one. The system results in incorrect SR because it is flawed. I make no mention of intent.
Good thing I never said I knew exactly how it did this. I’m just coming up with a model that explains what we witness. The exact stats or calculations used don’t matter. All that matters is that performance-based stat calculations are used.
This is why people saying that a leaver, troll, thrower is more likely to be on the opposing team is wrong. That statement only holds if the matchmaker is randomized, and we know for a fact it isn’t.
The variables are the direct result of human behavior. It doesn’t throw the variable off, it creates them.
Because they are thousands of SR above those people they play with and against. The problem with the system is that your skill level has to be well above the SR you’re trying to obtain. It doesn’t apply to top 500 players because there really is nothing above them.
Ideally, the system should work where your skill and SR are the same.
No, they rank up because of their skill being so much higher than everyone until they hit GM again.
It’s only when your skill is the equivalent of 500 SR or less than your actual SR that your team’s skill becomes a significant factor.
And I will reiterate that my ego doesn’t come into play. I’m stuck in gold because I’m a gold player who only queues in small teams. My alt is stuck in silver because I’m a gold player only solo queuing.
This stuff is really elementary. So, the only reason I can see that you don’t understand it is that you’re being difficult on purpose, because I refuse to believe anyone could be this dense. I can only explain the same thing so many ways, and I’m tired of repeating myself. So, you can continue this absurd exchange alone. I’ve said my peace to you.
There isn’t one… It’s to keep moving people up and down up and down. Give them a feeling of progression by giving them good games mixed with bad games ![:confused:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=5" ":confused:")
I’ve never heard a bigger joke in my entire life. Bronze players are being held hostage! THE ELO CONSPIRACY IS BEING KEPT A SECRET!
No. You’re in bronze because you’re a bronze level player.
3 Likes
But they have that already at their own rank where they match up mechanically against their competition.
I imagine both of us are correct in that the high skilled matches are the Widows being placed together (including me). MMR trends, rather than if you have a high or low MMR. Because I agree with everything you are saying, but also know that what I’ve said is a factor. Two diamond level snipers at gold, one on each team, and only one team is going to be carried to victory, with both player’s teams being equally toxic.
I play uniquely in that I learn forced teamwork and position manipulation over skill and communication. This allows me to force the team to carry me while I focus on my aim. I climb to 2700+, play Widow, then drop down to 2000. So I know exactly what you’re talking about. I play on console so people are going to be toxic about just any little thing (you played Mercy, I don’t like your voice, I don’t like the skin on your hero I like, etc 500x more toxic than PC). So even when I play heroes that are meta, I can only maintain a 40-55% winrate. I like that you are learning adaptation, and so am I. I knew this game would be about juking the social meta-system, so I devised my manipulation tactics.
I play Sombra and can make a team win even though they don’t want to. It’s harder on console, but still possible. With Symmetra, it is 5x easier. Muahahahaha. And no this isn’t my main account (duh). I’ve had people try so hard to throw, it was as if it were -3 teammates per toxic teammate (12v4 if two of them). I’ve won in these cases a few times. It isn’t really like that anymore, but how it is now is still annoying and makes the game quite literally (literally) unplayable more than 40% of the time competitively, and that’s with hard carrying. ![:disappointed:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/disappointed.png?v=5" ":disappointed:")
40+ teleports, each one being more useful than the next. Still lost. Was a long game thanks to those teleports.
No, the claim is that it looks for 6 players that are due for a loss.
I find it hilarious that it’s always low-ranked players that complain.
It’s also funny that there are less bronze players than there are players in Diamond, but hey, it must be the fact that you’re specifically being targeted by MM right?
1 Like
I had an interesting experience with matchmaker and its naughty shenanigans, coming from a silver 2.0 (platinum) player, take it with a grain of salt.
After the usual losing streak that dropped me back to gold, I climbed back to plat by going full try hard and having a positive win rate. Last night I was playing a match in Temple of Anubis, first round defending. The enemy rushed us both points in 2 minutes leaving them with 6 hole minutes on their bank for the third round, needless to say it was a “gg” right there, they were clearly better than us, btw most of us were solo players on both teams, we only had a duo stack on our team.
We are now attacking and after much effort and ult stacking, we manage to snag the first point in the last minute, we knew it was a lost cause because but we keep pushing on.
Then suddenly the general chat announces a player leaving the game, “great!, we lost a teammate” I said, but to my surprise the leaver was on the enemy team, “this is our chance, we can turn this around before he comes back” he never came back, my best guess is that he had an internet failure of an electrical cut cause nobody in his right mind would leave such an easy game.
Well, we have a huge chance now, lets just win the game that now is 5v6. It took us all those 4 minutes almost to over time to take the second point, they were really better than us and we knew it, they stop us every time we tried a push, they outplayed us at every turn. we only manage to take the point by just throwing all of our ults at them and hope they’ll stayed dead long enough for us to cap, 5v6.
Third round, we attack, we barely manage to capture the first point by going full dive but we use all of our time, so we couldn’t cap the second point.
Fourth round, by this time most other players would leave and the match would devolve into a emote party, but no, this guys were relentless and for good reason. if we wouldn’t have gone cancer comp to protect the A point they would have steamroll us like they did with a full team on the first round, and they were pretty close plenty of times to fully cap it during those 6 minutes, it was like the lost of their team mate just barely manage to balance the match.
We won, of course but this match makes me believe that we, my teammates and I, were meant to lose, no way around it. The enemy team was clearly better than us despite being a “balance competitive match”, they were meant to win.
We all have been in this type of games, on both sides, where maybe after a lose streak you get a game were you roll over the enemy team, no problem. or in the other side were no matter how hard you try the enemy team is simple far better than yours, this is forced 50/50 its real and I’m convinced of it, this has happened to me time and time again during all this 9 seasons that it can no longer be call coincidence. I was going to lose that match because I have a 55% w/r and we cant allow that in competitive, cant we blizzard?
Want your conspiracy?
You only know how to play deathball. You expect everyone to play deathball.
Now you reach your season high and suddenly everyone only plays Dive because that’s what got them there in the first place. Unfortunately, you don’t know how to play Dive.
Your team goes in head first while you complain that they should be watching the point. They go in 5v6 and lose everytime leaving you with a 1v6 situation that you lose effortlessly.
Clearly Blizzard at fault for creating unwinnable games.
1 Like
No. git gud -20 characters limit
Interesting story but I have to comment on the last sentence. Last season I mained Zen and kept a 67% winrate even after 9 hours, climbed to and ended in masters, etc. The game does not force wins and losses, the game does not force winrates.
no. just no. went from silver to mid masters and still climbing. The game does not give u bad teams when you’re climbing, stop being delusional please
1 Like
The matchmaking will never be balanced unfortunately