Sorry, Blizz.
Your matchmaker, whether you realize it or not, will do ANYTHNG to force people to 50% win rate and it’s literally the worst matchmaker in the history of video games. Everyone from Broze to Top 500 can see this. It’s a joke.
Swear words.
I’m done. Uninstalling EVERYTHING from Blizzard.
Game is dead they had to do something to even it out…
I’ve been playing online shooter games since the early 2000s and I genuinely feel this is the worst matchmaker ever made. Blizzard will never come out and admit it but they made it to reduce queue times, not make fair matches.
Come say hello: From competitive players: a letter to the devs
Maybe if everyone “supports” the letter… no nvm they don’t care/don’t read the forums lmao
Yup, it’s feels very artificial and contrived.
But I guess having a positive experience now is correlated to spending dollars in the Store, so complaining probably won’t matter. We are probably just a backdrop for the whales at this point.
I dont think it is forcing 50/50. But the game most definitely has a lot of one sided matches. So one sided that the entire team has less elims then 1 of the enemy supports. I cant imagine Blizz thinking their matchmaker is ok lol.
Their reference point of what makes a matchmaker “ok” might be quite different from ours though. Perhaps it’s currently dragging in the big bucks by conditioning player spending with positive matchmaker experiences?
We assume that everyone has these perceptions of the matchmaking but in reality we don’t yet know how representative we are of the whole player base. If a lot of players have seemingly net-negative experiences of the matchmaking, there has to be an equal amount of net-positive experiences out there as well, considering the underlying logic of the game being zero-sum.
The general truth regarding social media tend to be along the lines of: if it’s free, you are the product being sold. This is probably mostly the case in F2P-gaming as well.
My win rate was a little worse than 50% last week. My last 4 series (by series I mean the 19 matches needed to get a new rank) were like this:
I’m starting to see a pattern here, something happened to me also in season 2. It seems like you are climbing and then the matchmaker puts you into roflstomps. Then it suddenly becomes more lenient, giving you either balanced matches or winning steamrolls. It’s like you have two consecutive steps on a staircase, the upper one is full of champions, the lower one is full of people that are still learning how to play… it doesn’t feel natural to me, like having more steps in between were you GRADUALLY find better players.
I think the matchmaker works very well in my case, though, at least from Blizzard’s point of view: every time I got stomped, I came for more because I wanted that damn win. So it successfully kept me a lot of time raging against my TV.
Not anymore. When the matchmaker puts me into stomps I’ll just quit for a couple of days or switch to quickplay. In the end, it’s just a game, I want to have fun, not ruin my existence because of an algorithm 
They don’t force anything. If your games a fairly even balanced over a season and you’re in the right rank range, you’ll probably end up around 50%
I’ve been climbing, so my win rate around 55% on tank and 70% on DPS. Not getting anything “forced” or “rigged”, that’s all a myth.
In fact I went 3-8 last night on support and still moved up, because my MMR says I shouldn’t be in that rank. So if you’re not climbing, you’re doing something wrong or are at your peak.
Consider how those wins and losses would of impacted your SR in the past, and your progress over those games sounds about right.
Gold 1 is 2400-2500sr. So if you were sat 2460 before you’ll be 2385 now. Adding some adjustments along the way you’ll be right a the bottom of gold 1.
I can’t say it’s forced or rigged (and I can’t say the opposite too) without looking at the matchmaker code. It may very well be our mindset when we play. But it still doesn’t feel natural to me to get so many stomps, one after the other.
I’m not a champion, I’m fairly new at this game having started playing at the end of season 1. I don’t know if I’m at my peak, I can tell you that I’m doing my best every time but it’s not enough if my 4 team mates, for example, constantly feed in the enemy team.
Regarding doing something wrong, I know I make mistakes (my worst ones: tunnel vision, I need to raise my awareness of my squad positioning). I’m sure that queueing solo and no communication and coordination with the rest of the team will keep me down at a certain point, probably Gold 1 is that point.
Stomps happen. And they usually happen because of what we do in game (both good and bad), and how we and our picks click with others. Staggering and not grouping is the biggest cause of stomps and snowballing (hence why they are looking a defender spawns when points are taken)
I’m a terrible player. I’m climbing because I’m focusing on what I’m doing and trying to do it better.
I was silver at the start of OW2. I play solo, basically never communicate, listen to music while playing most of the time. Now I’ve climbed tank and DPS to diamond.
I think that may depend on whatever the player base actually assume the win condition for ranking up to be.
Again, concepts like forced and rigged are somewhat relative to whatever rule set the player base expects. If the win condition isn’t strictly what they assume it to be, by whatever reason, they are probably going to feel cheated.
Because climbing isn’t strictly related to just winning games, at least not in the way most players assume it is. From what most players assume about ranking up, actual cause and effect is somewhat reversed.
Considering that players don’t actually know exactly what their MMR is or how it is calculated this becomes gaslighting in practice. Your hiding (at least some of) the rule set and then shaming players for performing poorly in reference to it.
Believe me, I do the same. I do my best everytime. But in the end if only wins matter and I’m the only one (maybe out of two) to try to regroup, focus supports, stagger the enemy team, then I believe it’s not enough. There’s no use calling these strategies in chat too: your DPS will get out from the respawn zone, go alone in the frontline and get destroyed; your support doesn’t retreat when their team lost the fight, thinks they are Terminator, just to be massacred by the enemy team.
I think this usually happens when you are put in a team with people that do not yet grasp the game mechanics. I still have a lot to learn myself, I can agree with that… but at least MAYBE I got the basics. This is something the matchmaker should TRY to avoid, imho. It’s a team effort after all, I can’t win games alone.
I’ll bet (metaphorically, I’m not a betting person irl) that you theoretically can play games like that when your whole team get’s stomped all over into a certain loss, and still not having it affect your MMR that negatively, maybe even increasing it while your team get’s completely dumpstered and you all losing the match.
But that’s the problem; the majority of the player base wouldn’t ever expect this to be possible.
This. I can’t actually tell if I’m at my peak, because I can’t tell if we really are the inferior team (meaning, players with significantly lower MMR than the enemy team) or we are getting stomped because our skills are similar and we simply need to choose better heroes to deal with the current situation.
And that’s ok, but it will still affect my rank, right? I always got demoted when I lost more than 7 (now 5) matches.
Can’t they just show the MMR? Shouldn’t this be enough to solve most of player concerns?
P.s.: just trying to understand the game better as whole, not just the game mechanics. That’s why I’m asking.
Peaks are changeable. To some degree we are all hard capped by our own biology and at some MMR/Rank improvement becomes hard and that value is different for everyone. But if you are in, let’s say Gold somewhere, the possibility for improvement is still very high.
I don’t know what the average rank is in OW2 but in OW1 a few years ago it were stated to be around 2400 SR, which should be Gold 1 in OW2. Beating the average is quite realistic for a large enough part of the player base, and it’s easier to do the lower you are in MMR/Rank. It’s mostly about having something “click” in understanding how to play the game.
I know, which is why I call it gaslighting. In reality MMR seems to be more about individual performance, even if Blizzard seem to deny this. But most players assume that they are screwed if they end up in the worse team, for obvious reasons.
I’ve seen way to many high rated Mercy mains do Unraked to GM and rank up through the metal ranks with fairly bad win-rates at times. Winning is not always as important as it seems. Not looking or playing like a low elo player is more important, both while winning and losing.
My best tip if I would condense it down to something simple would be: Don’t die:
Play something that have the ability to survive and that you feel fits you. Reaper probably works but you will always have to save your abilities to get out of trouble since he has to get close. Get around the enemy where they can’t see you and wait for abilities to come back before you go in. Rinse and repeat. Try to go for an enemy player that is being focused by someone on your team, or that is looking in some other direction then at you. Don’t overstay your welcome and get out when the enemy team is starting to focus you too much. Don’t over-focus on getting more kills. Survival is more important. When the team fight seems to be lost, get out and try to regroup without dying. Maybe play more around your own team than in your team. Don’t feel guilty if you feel like you are using your teammates as bait sometimes if it works, and especially if it makes you win (without you dying, of course).
And yeah, don’t die.
Anything that increases your MMR should make your rank follow if you can keep doing it over many matches.
More transparency would be nice, yes.
My best tip is just to try and die less over many matches and many days, and see if something happens.
Why do you believe that the “rigged Matchmaker” only affects some players and not others? Also, why do you think that most of the players it doesn’t affect are talented at the game? Interesting thought.
Hey Blizzard, just curious, what’s your number? If a couple 100K more people uninstall, will you then rethink mixing eloes for the sake of que times? Or are ya gonna wait for a solid 1M? 2M? Maybe midseason patch Season 8? Let’s see if we can drop the playerbase down to 1000 people total, globally… I mean hey, maybe it’ll turn around? Maybe all of these matches where one team has 4 kills total and the other team has 27 to 43 kills EACH will start to somehow just magically even out on it’s own, right?
“Forced 50/50” is just a way to say “I’ve reached my appropriate rank and would rather blame everything but my lack of self-improvement for my inability to climb further”