I hit Diamond 5 - Here Are My Thoughts

Competitive Discussion
1

Hello all. I made a popular post awhile back about being stuck in Bronze 5 S1, and hit Diamond 5 today in S2

After 104 Support games, I have hit Diamond 5 for the first time. OW2 is the first time I touched competitive seriously. Kiriko one trick.

S1 - Stuck in Bronze 5 with 80% WR over 28 games, finally moved up to end the season at Plat 3 with 147 games.

S2 Start - Support Rank was dropped to Gold 4. Here is how it broke down:

  • 7/0: Gold 1
  • 7/2: Plat 3
  • 7/5: Plat 2
  • 7/3: Plat 1

From there, on the cusp of Diamond, I was 21/9. 70% Winrate.

Things got wild from there. Last season Masters/GMs/Top 500 in the lobbies and heavily stacked against teams. It was absolutely wild:

7/12 (8 straight losses): Plat 1
7/10: Plat 1
7/6: Plat 2

From there - it was win streaks then loss streaks over and over. Go on win streak, then be hit with loss streak with stacked against teams. Rinse repeat.

Plat 1 refresh 4 times. W/R pushed down to 48% at the lowest, then starting getting traction and ending at 52% winrate when I hit Diamond 5.

HERE IS THE THING- there are SO many smurfs right now alongside the accounts that slide down from Season 2.

I met so many people playing alts to farm low ranks while they wait out the season. It was ruining this ELOs games 70% of the time even if it was to my benefit. The skill gap was unreal at times.

My personal stats on Kirko was getting better even when losing like crazy. I was playing at my top level and beyond but getting teams that were no where near this skill tier.

IDK whats going on, but when I hit that wall it felt TERRIBLE. It was so obvious the matchmaking is busted alongside the problem of smurfs/alt accounts. ON TOP OF THAT: HOG AND DOOM WERE BEING ABUSED.

I stuck through to reach my goal rank thankfully this early, I will likely uninstall now and play other games as it was not fun and my ego drove me to keep going.

I suspect this new system is partially set to take advantage of players mentality (read: addiction) to keep playing more matches.

It would be a lot more fun to play fair games and climb naturally instead of thrown around in ranks.

Cheers.

20 Likes
2

Great write up, I think until smurfs are addressed the game will die a slow death. But I think the smurfs would kick up such a fuss they would back off on any changes to actually address it.

I believe without addressing this no other change will improve things.

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There is some good news here. As more characters are released and hidden behind a battlepass that requires doing challenges to unlock heroes, we may see the slowdown of smurfing account… maybe.

I really dislike that the community stopped using phone numbers tied to accounts. We should have kept that to prevent smurfing / alts. I know this isn’t agreed with everyone, but I’m hardcore on that stance.

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Overwatch is nothing more than a cheap carnival game.

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That’s a really good point.

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Why does blizzard have any reason to know my phone number?

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It’s mfa. You should have it on there to protect your account anyways.

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Wow why didn’t I think of this. Perfect analogy.

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your funny,

do you not realise everything you do nowadays is tracked , from shopping at your local gas station , to gaming , they know you , they know what you do and play ,they know what you buy and when , your phone number is the least of your tracking issues ,

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Let me pose this question to you and everyone for this matter in regards to giving details.

You were more than happy to give your bank details to corporations where there online secruity is laughable at the best of time.

You’re playing an online game where, unless you’re on a vpn, reveals your IP which can be tracked.

But many others before yourself, draw the line at giving your phone number out, why, because a phone number is more personal than your bank account?

They tried to tackle the smurfing issue by requesting your phone number linked to your account so you’re unable to hop from one account to the next incredibly easily.
Unless you’re loaded and got multiple phones, the mindset would be
“This is too much effort to set up” and the number of smurfs would effectively dribble down.

Unfortunately, players didn’t like this idea so blizzard pulled it and now for console players Smurfpocalypse is happening once more and it’s us as a player base who’s at fault here for pressuring blizzard to remove it.

Yes the authentication was buggy at launch but we reap what we sow

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That only will work when they will play the new characters, which is most of the time not the case. You can play all old heros forever to smurf with them. If there will be one extra-super-special-killer Hero, its easy to buy a battle pass for once.

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Well, I’m part of the player base and I’m certainly not at fault. I was literally one of the first people to complain about how smurfs we’re ruining Overwatch, and I was ecstatic to learn that Blizzard was finally doing something to rid us of their plague. Only to then learn that they almost immediately caved to all whiners. Does Blizz seriously not understand that it was mostly the toxic smurf a-holes that were doing the whining?? The majority of us were perfectly fine providing our phone numbers if it makes the game better.

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What’s wild is some of the smurfs I talked with had multiple OW1 accounts and talked about how many times they bought the $30 game again to have a fresh account.

They were ecstatic that they could just start a new account for free or BUY A OW2 RANKED READY ACCOUNT FOR ~$10.

Phone numbers are apart of our public identity now. Using this for 2FA and to ensure accounts are not abused needs to be re-evaluated.

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This is the fundamental problem with Overwatch. Even if the came could be perfectly balanced, the abnormal win/loss streaks kill it. At its core the game needs to be fun. Addiction is the right word. There are some pretty interesting articles that can be found about game producers doing research into addictive behavior.

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It feels eerily similar to LoL right now and how that game removed visible MMR and created a system that feeds a psychological addiction to “climbing”. Everyone knows how infamous that game it’s with toxicity that festered from this change.

Most game companies now have player psychologists to determined how to maximize engagement and feed this addiction to get the next “high”. (On top of that, how to drive sales to skins/cosmetics)

The silence from the devs is deafening. I miss the days of community engagement (Thinking back to Halo 2 and Bungie doing blogs on devs thoughts, changes, data, etc each week) that provided transparency.

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I also hit Diamond 5 for the first time (yesterday). I played OW1 but never reached that far before. And I reached Plat 1 in the first season in OW2. Playing 99% Ana.

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Congrats!! It’s a steep climb right now!

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Understood, which is why I said maybe. We are only a few months into the game. A lot will change overtime. Obviously, the current heroes will always be able to carry in low elo regardless if they are good or not with the right player.

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The old heros will be also able to carry with the right player, the better they are the more they will be be able to carry.

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That is true, it just gives everyone better odds.