Exactly this. Google things like Forced Streaks, Forced 50/50, and Rigged Matchmaking.
ALL OVERWATCH.
Because gamers are not stupid. They see what companies are doing, and they’re not afraid to call it out.
It’s not a coincidence that SO many players have caught on to this.
I don’t think it’s too far from an actual scam. I honestly believe players could have a case against Blizzard for a rigged game. Let’s get the Government involved. They’ll change this crap REAL fast.
Yep…we’ve all been there…the Mercy that doesn’t heal…the Ana (when she first came out) that is just “trying her out”…the Sombra that isn’t on mic…the Bastion that can’t move and asks, “can I get a shield”…the Rein that rushes headlong down long corridors alone and then gets pissed at not being healed…those that grief by logging out, waiting a minute or two while you’re 5v6 and then comes back as if he got logged out…and all those that get tilted and go straight to Genji!
You know matchmaking is broken when your games at 2200 SR are played at the same skill level as matches at 3200 SR. The game fails to separate players capable of different skill levels by using a non-transparent rating system. It’s designed to rate individual players on their stats as opposed to simply winning a match alone. That wouldn’t be a problem if Overwatch were a free-for-all, but it’s a team game. Blizzard seems to have difficulty grasping basic concepts that professional leagues like the NBA, NFL, etc have been doing for decades.
As someone that has been to both 2200 and 3700 in his career, I can confirm that a 3200 team would annihilate a 2200 team every single time. Who are you kidding here?
To the OP, and in fairness to Blizzard:
I do not think Blizzard designed MMR specifically to affect player’s mobility in the SR system. Rather, I think they did it to ensure that matches have an artificial veneer of fairness. They want players to see that their matches are narrowly contested, because that is good optics for their product. The careers of individual Competitive Overwatch players are just a casualty on that ‘greater mission.’
When your losing streak hit, were you close to crossing into another tier?
I can see where the OP is coming from but after playing a lot of comp matches, I can’t say the system is rigged but it does show interesting patterns.
Each time I played a lot of comp matches, I went on a win streak to give me a new season high but then I would go on a losing streak that would make me loss 300-500SR. It didn’t matter what time of day I logged on, the losing matches just felt “predetermined”.
Each time though, the losing started when I was close to hitting plat, but based on previous comp grinds, all I would have to do is keep playing to hit a new season high.
So the only thing I could really notice is medals. Whenever I got gold or multiple silver medals, I would be paired with players that worked well together on the next match. If I didn’t get any medals or just one bronze, well then I get the racist genji/hanzo or someone flat out leaving the match making it a 5v6.
So all these “git gud” comments might be true, just replace gud with medals, “git medals”. 
Eh well that’s just your opinion. It’s not as though you have any evidence, do you?
Matches in Gold are roughly the same as matches in Diamond. People have slightly better aim in Diamond and tend to time ults slightly better, but it’s mostly the same match.
Good job ignoring the rest of that comment by the way.
More evidence than the OP has to suggest that the ranking system is rigged. It’s laughable to suggest that you can be stuck >1000sr from your “true rank”. 500sr maybe, but that would normalise with enough matches played.
Everyone knows Blizzard tries to make games fair, from their view, by setting up teams with an outcome of about 50% chance to win or lose. That is the very definition of rigging.
Everyone knows Blizzard tries to make games fair, from their view, by setting up teams with an outcome of about 50% chance to win or lose. That is the very definition of rigging.
So let me get this straight, you want them to set up games with an UNEQUAL chance of winning? Isn’t that what you’re already accusing them of doing?
Whatever is natural. That’s just life dude. Some people are just better than others at certain things, but I see in my Gold matches (I’m 2300 currently) the same accuracy, game sense, positioning, map awareness, as players in Diamond and Platinum. In a natural system, (like life) these players would never be in Gold.
Right, and how do you want blizzard to determine this? Ah yes, by pairing you with teammates and enemies of a similar MMR until you settle at a certain range.
No, actually I think MMR is a perversion of natural competition. One of my recent games 9n attack on Lunar Colony, the first point, I saw my Reinhardt player walk to a Bastion with his shield up, who’s shooting him the whole time and then trying to melee the Bastion. Repeatedly. These players should be in lower tiers but the matchmaker pairs them with high Plats and low Diamonds MMR-wise to offset the imbalance.
Overwatch places far too much emphasis on coordination between players, which takes away from good players to boost up the not as good players.
I dunno if you’re into sports like basketball or not, but in the NBA, very few teams are close to a 50/50 win loss record. Games can be wildly one sided up until the playoffs, where the good teams are matched together because they’ve done well throughout the regular season. And thars natural, the only way to get to the playoffs is by winning games, and nothing else. No MMR.
What becomes clearer and clearer to me is that none of the people who believe the matchmaker is rigged have any sort of background in stats at all, and instead just conjecture wildly until they come up with something that makes it not their fault.
You have a total misunderstanding of the relation between SR and MMR. High uncertainty in matchmaking algorithms makes for poor quality matches (see: streak multipliers before they were removed). SR doesn’t affect matchmaking.
Of course SR doesn’t affect matchmaking, that’s the entire problem. SR should be the only thing affecting a team’s roster creation. There should be nothing else interfering with that natural system. SR follows your MMR, or so Jeff Kaplan would have us believe.
MMR seemingly encourages one tricking, while Blizzard tells us that we should flex. MMR doesn’t seem to account for which players on a team play a certain hero. Some people just can’t play a certain hero that would round out the team’s composition. That’s just another contributing factor. A role queue would do wonders to fix this system. I remember when League of Legends switched from blind pick to a role/character queue in ranked, and it was WAY better. Every match was good, role queue completely eliminated bad team compositions. Blizzard needs to step up and define the team composition into choices like 2-2-2, triple tank, and whatever else, and players can queue up for a specific role in the type of team composition they’d like to play in. Overwatch already has heroes defined as Offense, Support, Defense, Tank. Though they can’t seem to balance these classes… there are 13 DPS heroes to Overwatch’s total of like 27 or 28 heroes.
SR is just a front for an unfriendly floating point number. Besides, that isn’t what’s being argued in this thread. The idea here is that the matchmaker magically knows what the result of a match will be before it starts, and puts all the throwers and bad players on your team to arbitrarily sandbag you. If there was no SR front, people would complain even more about the matchmaker because of very small changes in MMR per win. It just so happens that if you increase that uncertainty, the % of bad games goes up even further.
Neither you nor cuthbert have ever taken a stats class. It’s blindingly obvious.
First of all, you don’t need to be a statistician in order to notice trends independently of other people. The majority of threads on this forum are about matchmaking. People have noticed something is off, and Blizzard is indeed hiding MMR’s criteria from us.
Secondly, yeah, the matchmaker does have an idea of the outcome of a match. That’s the entire point of having MMR to begin with.
Third, your individual MMR and SR rely heavily on how your team performs. It’s not like your Mercy can heal the Rein when he charges solo down a hallway into a 6 stack. Mercy will have less healing per match because the Rein made poor choices. Likewise, the Rein can’t protect his team if they’re running solo all over the map. Moira cant heal flankers very well. DPS have a rough time without tanks creating space. The result is a vicious cycle, and your MMR will suffer
You’re correct that you don’t be a statistician to notice trends. But you absolutely must sound mathematical reasoning if you’re going to claim that Blizzard employees who literally are statisticians have done it all wrong. And from the statements, you’ve made, it’s clear you don’t really understand how rating systems work and are going off of conjecture and anecdotes rather than mathematics. Matchmaking as it is implemented in Overwatch is pretty damn good.
Again, if you were familiar with how rating uncertainty is calculated, the way the game works would make sense. If you were familiar with why hidden uncertainty factors are important for a team based game, it would make sense. If you had any sort of maths background, you would see that the way the game is implemented is as good as it can reasonably get. No matchmaker is perfect, or even close to. It’s just that statistics aren’t nice and don’t always behave the way you want them to.
If you win, you go up, if you lose you go down. If you’re above average, on average you’ll win more.
It’s that simple.
The problem isn’t the math itself, that’s a little strange. I’ve never said that. The problem is the desired outcome and the method Blizzard is using to try and reach that goal. That’s what should be changed.
But it’s not that simple, its demonstrably not that that simple. You can win games, a lot of games in a row, and then lose a lot of games in a row. That’s unnatural and people naturally are pattern-seeking animals. We’re not stupid, despite voting Donald Trump into the WH.