Basically as it says in the title. I am a mid-Masters Tank player, but the past few seasons I’ve really been put off playing ranked with how bad the Tank experience is. I played a few games after the mid-season patch but it still isn’t much better.
Hence I play most of my games in Quick Play where I play with friends. My friends never play ranked, or when they do, they are around silver/gold. Thing is, whenever I play with them, I literally cannot play my main role (Tank) without causing the games to become extremely sweaty. We’ll go up against Masters/GM stacks that completely stomp us. Every. Single. Game. The skill gap is so big that my friends just get destroyed every single game and it isn’t fun for them. So I swap off my main role and fill into DPS/Support (which I am around plat/diamond level), and the games become manageable. I still have to carry some games, but they can at least make plays and have fun.
It’s just incredibly demoralizing that I can’t play my main role without my friends all suffering immensely. For a mode that’s labeled as “unranked” it sure does take your ranked MMR heavily into account. I have literally spectated 20 of their games without me and it’s a massive difference. I was legitimately surprised at the difference in match quality.
It would not be fair to just loosen MMR so that you could crush the other team either. The reason your friends take the hit is because they are YOUR friends.
I really think the devs behind the matchmaker need to be replaced. Too many years of stomp and get stomped matches, and they just won’t or can’t fix the matchmaker, both fireable offenses. You do not let incompetence fester in your company.
I understand your point, which is at this point what I quite honestly have to do. Even when I off-role the games get significantly harder. To the point where I sometimes just say I won’t play, despite wanting to, just to save them from being stomped all the time. How is that ever the right game design, where in a non-competitive mode I cant play with my friends.
To be clear, I do not believe it should be this way. I wouldn’t mind if quickplay had no MMR data at all and if you wanted a competitive experience, you should go play competitive.
The problem is these developers cater hard to people who want to take the casual mode seriously. The leaver penalties are genuinely more harsh in quickplay than competitive which is lowkey messed up.
I’m feeling the same, been for a while. ~5 months ago my best bud got a new job and two coworkers started playing OW2 with us. He, his wife, and I have been playing consistently since 2016 and we see Gold - Top 500 in our QP lobbies.
Now, I love the two coworkers: they’re fun, energetic, and chill teammates. But they’re sub-bronze. One only plays Hanzo and the other loves Widowmaker, but will swap Mercy. We try to get them to switch it up, but this is more of a weekend party game to them. Understandable.
Unfortunately, the matchmaker simply cannot find us anything fair. And I get it: our stack is as wide in skill as you can get. But it just leaves me feeling terrible. After 5 or 6 back-to-back DEFEAT screens, I admittedly tilt a bit, and as an overthinker I consistently apologize that “it’s not them, it’s the matchmaker”.
I don’t know. You’re just venting, I’m just venting. It’s just the nature of this game these days. Casual modes are played by far more sweaty smurfs and the matchmaker is, in my opinion, incapable of doing a proper job. So we’re left with imbalanced, cheesed lobbies every game.
I totally get your feeling. And don’t get me wrong, I love my friends to death, and I love playing with them regardless of the fact I have to off-role. But sometimes I just feel so guilty for making their games unnecessarily hard.
let me tell you something, you and your friend are just a bad group from system’s perspective. too much skill gap in your group and too little advantage you can offer to compensate the disadvantage they give you.
i myself is a diamond, my friends are just average palyes around metal (best at plat5 i think), even with this small difference, caomparing to your case, the match up becomes harder as the say when i’m in the group, especially when i’m dps, back from the good old days and now and will be so in the future.
i tried to get a new account. after a couple of win streaks, the game play is almost the same, my medal friends just can’t deal with diamond palyer and those above them.
sure diamonds are more manageable in you dps/support case, but other master palyers still do QP with medal frineds and QP match making is way loose than in RK, that’s when your friends meet their limit.
either your friend get over the fact i will be a harder match when you’re tank or you give up the role entirely to offer a better match up, or all of you enjoys teaming up and chatting over a gameplay and care less about win and lose because it’s the nature of your composition
btw way, “unranked” means there’s no ranking, not matchmaking doesn’t work here. otherwise, you as a master tank should stomped most of the game and it’s their turn to complain the matching system. it sure takes mmr less seriously to keep quality of que time so when master and above want to join QP and there won’t be like 10min waiting and 2 min gameplay.
also if the games without you seem to be the same, that means the system didn’t work. you’re the strange factor to the matchmaking system tbh
QP has separate MMR from competitive, but if you play enough they’re most likely quite close together.
Anyway, qp matchmaking i believe prioritizes speed, matching groups sizes and then matching mmr.
You being high ranked probably pushes the matchmaker look into groups with at least a high ranked Tank, and more often it finds that they’re grouped with other high ranked players. And then it just goes from there, prioritizing speed, unfortunately.
Unrestricted grouping is one of the biggest issues for match quality in qp.
Regardless, if there was no matchmaking and it was just random, the highest skilled players would just generally roll lobbies. So that is not really an option either, in my opinion. While it could be “entertaining” to pubstomp for a bit, it would get old.
As a relative high rated soloqueue player, it is also always an experience to be pulled into those lobbies. e.g. a 3-4 stack of totally random ranked players vs a 5-stack of gms.
The only option i guess would be for blizzard to implement the same matchmaking rules in qp as they have in competitive for the “wide groups” now. It would just make queues quite a bit longer.
whats your proposed solution? You q as master with silvers…? what exactly do you expect? anything Above silver will give your friends troubles and anything below masters gets owned by you.
the easiest for you enjoyment and the one of your friends is to make a new account, which shifts the disenjoyment to the enemies.
There’s a couple ways you could go about it. The first is to make some sort of logarithmic curve to the MMR scaling. If one person on a team is an outlier, make it so that doesn’t affect the group as much. Get somewhat of a group MMR or at least balance the groups. Increased matchmaking time would be fine. Right now it’s just stacks of Masters/GM players we run into. Or add a new mode outside of “Unranked” and make it actual “Quick Play” where you turn down the MMR matching significantly and there are no leaver penalties. You can say “But then worse players will just get stomped”, which is only the case if they run into really good players. Only less than 5% of players is Masters or above, so the odds of running into one of them is a lot lower. And for people who still don’t want that risk, they can play Unranked.
I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here, but not being able to play with my friends just sucks. Even when I offrole, the MMR makes the games a lot harder still. To the point where I still have to play my best heroes.
That would just be creating a stompfest for you in particular unless the opposite team also has a high rank player.
That’ll happen, but I thought it usually tries to matchup the roles (ie if your a masters tank with everyone else gold then the enemy will also have a higher ranked tank with lower ranked team mates
That could work where you just have no matchmaking or group restrictions whatsoever, though the issue would be splitting the playerbase.
Another reason you’ve kinda alluded to here. Why would someone want to play this outside of people wanting to try and stomp people (ie masters+ stacks) OR widely spread groups? I suppose it might work out in that there’s more widely spread groups than there is high rank stacks but o dunno if it would be any different than what you currently face in unranked.
Why would close ranked players or solo queuers want to play this mode outside of wanting to punish themselves…?
Yeh it’s sucks, but the alternative is to have it such for everyone else shrug Prob just have better matchmaking for unranked and perhaps the option to wait longer for closer matches (ie one high rank with low ranks in the same roles).
Alternatively just make a smurf/alt account like everyone.
It’s hard to hire new talent when you pay below market rate and have a massive, swollen, oozing pimple when it comes to PR due to a CAL brought about by the state your business is located in. Ask yourself: would you like to work at a studio found liable for some pretty gross sexual misconduct such that the state’s labor board stepped in?
Good chance if we fired them this instant they wouldn’t be able to effectively replace those seats for weeks, if not months. And, even when they do, they’d still have to spend several weeks further getting familiarized both with the workflow and backend development tools.
Blizzard is just suffering from extreme brain drain the last 4-5 years now that a lot of their senior developer staff have either left the company, been shamed out from wildly inappropriate behavior, or managed out by the Kotick Regime that plagued us for so long. On that last one specifically, we are still feeling a lot of the reverberations of his time at the company today, despite his departure.
I’d be shocked if the company doesn’t go belly-up before we even get halfway through their announced Worldsoul Saga for WoW.
I love Blizzard. I grew up with Blizzard. However, they did what any industry leader should never, EVER do: get comfortable. The disastrous launch of Diablo III was probably the death knell only few saw. Then we got Diablo: Immortal, followed by the circus that was Warcraft III: Remastered, and Shadowlands following it.
Overwatch was the last great chance they had, and unless they suddenly pull out a massive banger, I don’t see them getting another opportunity like it. Players are just far too distrustful at this point, and with good reason.
Ok , first , ur ranked mmr isn’t necessarily the same as ur QP mmr , it can differ , QP and Comp have sperate mmr .
U can be Master in comp , but GM in QP or Plat in QP or Master in QP , same applies for every player including ur friends .
Second , the skill gap between u and ur friends (game knowledge and everything related to it) can be one of the factors ur game with ur party are not going well , maybe ur playstyle and pace is very different than ur friends , Im assuming ur an experienced player , maybe trying to play at the pace of ur friends will help them catch up to u in QP and synchronise ur team plays better .
To put it simple , if they’re playing too passively, maybe u should play at a slower pace with them (even though this can ruin ur playstyle a bit when u go back to Comp) .
As for ur low to mid rank friends , from my experience, it’s better for them to learn a game like OW the hard way , getting swaety games in QP is pretty common whatever ur COMP rank is tbh .
And getting stopmed in QP is better than facing the same scenario for the first time in comp cus ur gonna lose SR , and it can teach them alot if they’re willing to grind comp later .
The only real difference between QP and Comp is that QP has no visual SR and the games are a little shorter on some game modes .
Prob just have better matchmaking for unranked and perhaps the option to wait longer for closer matches (ie one high rank with low ranks in the same roles).