I refuse to believe the game doesn't set people up to lose on purpose

I could also show you the games. I went 11-4 yesterday and I can remember only one game where I won where I was legitimately contributing a lot. It’s to no surprise that battle mercying contributed into winning a game on overtime.

The other games my team basically just ran the enemy team over without sweating. Most I did was playing bait to doomfist. My team gets all the cards too because enemy team gives up.

First game of the day is 5minute game on Doraro with 52% offensive assists on mercy and then it’s just downgrading from there.

Lost games were basically super long games where I try my hardest or enemy team just facerolls us instead. I cannot exactly improve when it’s silver rein versus smurf widow who’s apparently killing everyone and we can’t even move the payload around first corner on havanna.

Maybe I just need to forget healing and pewpew the widows myself instead and then watch my tanks die to their tanks because moira is dead again or something equally funny.

The matchmaking will never be perfect because there is no such thing. Competitive activities specially team oriented ones will always have a degree of uncertainty that is impossible to control. The important thing to understand is that the game doesn’t set you up for defeat as much as it sets you up for victory. There will always be matches that you cannot win regardless of how well you play, and matches that are impossible to lose no matter how bad you play, that is something that will never change.

Yeah, but I’d like someone to look into why I’ll get 15-20 of the “cannot win” games in a row fairly often.

I never, ever, EVER get 15 “cannot lose” in a row so it’s hard to blame statistical streaks. Also, it’s a very predictable thing, the games are absolutely horrible for a while and it stays the same unless you stop playing for months.

Like if I play today I will get trash games for sure. I know.

Also, it doesn’t work across roles (like if I queued tank or sup I’d be fine, only DPS is in a streak now).

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IF this is true then you might actually be the problem I’m afraid. It’s hard to accept but it is a possibility that you need to consider. I personally never get that many matches like that, if I get more than 3 games like that in a row that is already too much. I honestly think you are letting your personal bias affect your judgement and if I were to review your last 5 matches I bet I would see that I’m right.

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My teammate reaper tells me he cannot ulti because enemy team has baptiste and he will lamp it and roadhog can hook him.

So he will stay on reaper and never ulti. :roll_eyes: Instead of looking for alternate avenues, switching his playstyle, baiting cooldowns or swapping characters. Long as he doesn’t get hooked, reaper’s ulti annihilates lamp. He said we never pushed, which would be correct, we had a new tank on sigma (oh I like how this theme keeps repeating on my games btw, new players as gold border player)

Team feeds a lot and we have a new tank on sigma versus experienced enemy rein. You know how badly that goes. Meaning enemy rein gets free shatters because sigma doesn’t turn left. I lose after 11mins and get complimented on my heals and stuff and the cycle begins anew. I even managed a succesful hail mary superjump ress, to no avail, we literally have a reinhardt in our flank. Junkrat was so scared of the turret killing him he didn’t contest the payload, so I was on mercy alone contesting payload for the last moment.

They’re not random. This game has selective matchmaking in competitive and was confirmed by the devs back on the old forums.

Honestly most of the games yesterday felt bad either because my team was terrible. Mostly, tanks could just not tank at all, teammates falling to stupid new player traps like Bastion, etc.

Also, the whole “obligatory Rein” thing is throwing a lot of players as you cannot switch to other tanks to deal with things. Like, you can’t dive on Bastion because now they’ve got a Rein and you don’t so you’re doomed.

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Not mirroring rein/zarya/ana is legitimately throwing now that rein is super strong.

And I hate it.

I liked playing with sigma and ball and roadhog with mercy/zen.

Yeah and the DPS are capitalizing on it too by running Rein counters like Mei/Doomfist/Reaper a lot.

So you have to play Rein and you have to play him in the worst possible matchups. Fun!

I wish my teams tried to counter rein.

The best rein counter unfortunately is another rein. Otherwise your team plays shatter and nanofood for rein.

You can play counters on the DPS end. Mei, as horribly weak as she is, is kind of cleaning up on megaboosted Rein scrubs who don’t know how to play him.

You can really feel how OP Rein is because Rein play quality takes a nosedive as the decent Reins float out of your elo and garbage ones that only succeed because OP take their place.

I only need mmr to give me every single new reinhardt player. :’)

Nothing is more fun than watching lv 70 reinhardt charge into 1vs6 when your other healer is a zenyatta, also a new player who had played ana in a winning round and now keeps swapping healers and reseting his ulti charge.

Or watching your silver rein struggle alone against experienced rein and master smurf pocketed widow. Other tank is god knows where.

I’m pretty sure my mmr is not on silver level so it would be nice if I could get similar level teammates who know that your character moves if you press wasd.

They’re about as random as a 2 headed coin.

10 wins. 10 losses. Repeat.

There is no forced lose streaks but you are more than likely to notice your losing matches far more than your winning matches.

Sometimes you will get a streak of bad games but it’s not like all of them are impossible to win because “it’s my TeAms faUlt hOLdINg mE bAck”. Normally people play 80-90% of thier max capability and 100% when they are really tryharding but if you lost 2, then you are already tilted enough to perform only 60% of what you normally do, hence why it’s always recommended to stop playing after losing 2. The first couple games can be luck and impossible to win but if you are on a streak its basically you who isn’t playing up to his max potential because you are angry and tilted. I’m gonna be harsh but that is what the truth is, if the problems show up everywhere you go, you might be the problem.

If you expect to climb daily or weekly you expect too much. You aren’t going to improve at anything if you have decided that its not you who needs improving but “the system” and even if you improve it’s not gonna show in a week but its gonna show when after a year or two you compare your SR to what it was to what it is. Seriously the more I improved I climbed even though it took me 16 seasons to go from “I’m bronze in Overwatch and I dont even know how to use keyboard and mouse together (live in a third world country so gaming was new to me)” to “Finally I made it to Diamond!”. In gold I felt like it wasn’t my fault or being stuck but the system but then all it took was having my brother sit beside me (who is high diamond, VOD reviews work too instead of a sibling :wink: ) and point out to me my mistakes and how I should improve and then Diamond I reached. I was surprised how many stupid things I did in gold that although seemed unimportant had led me to a lose. You are not going to improve daily but you will degrade in performance if you are tilted. My best advice would be take your losing matches and get them VODs reviewed and you’ll have your eyes opened.

Whenever I check my losing match vods, I keep seeing teammates who perform even worse than what I had originally gauged in the match. So it’s definitely an eye-opener. =)

Such as Moira fading into enemy team, seeing a dva and then trying to pathetically run away from her and letting dva get a free kill. Instead of fighting, strafing, succing and orbing herself.

She also didn’t ever heal orb anybody, not even herself, so she died to genji too. She also died a second time after getting a ress to a dva bomb because pressing fade button is too hard. Then she didn’t bother to use winston bubble right next to her for protection and was shot by mccree. Then when we were finally on overtime after she had died to genji blade, she walked in on the point which I was personally still contesting with valk, damage orbed and died swiftly.

I was ressing the winston by dropping down on the pit and breaking enemy los during this time so we could have a tank on point to contest with primal.

All in all, she just let me soloheal practically the whole game because she spent more time in spawn than playing the game.

Inb4 “you’re supposed to heal your second support”. I was, but I cannot account for every single mistake they make, like running headfirst out of los and getting themselves killed. Or walking straight forward into enemy fire and not using a single personal cooldown. Just like I cannot ress every time a widow kills my zenyatta teammate, I cannot erase teammate poor plays.

i have to agree. the game takes in the players skill when matchmaking, how is it ive had multiple times where im close to breaking the next 100 in a tier - like 2400 to 2500 etc- and then i suddenly get one tricks. literally had a 1100 hour bastion thrower . a pharah one trick thrower who spammed and intentionally tried to tilt us. thats just 2 examples. and its always near a break into the next 100 sr tier ah yes cant forget last nights ana. who sat BEHIND the enemy like on eichenwald DPSING . when we were on DEF. we lost that ofc . my experience ::7/10 times ur 1-2 games away from breaking into the next tier. you get habitual throwers. ALSO why is it silvers can play with plats. i have gotten many plat games with silvers on my teams. you can guess how that went…

literally me. i get to 2700s role q heal. drop to almost silveR SILVER. then back to high gold…end in low plat…repeat next season. its broken i am atleast low plat in heals. im mid plat in open q. :crazy_face:

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Nah, it’s the lapsed content locusts getting new seasonal unlocks. Makes the game experience like picking apples in an orchard swarming with Breaking Bad substance-addicted killer bees.

It’s not out of the realm of possibilities that people set themselves up to lose as well

Confirmation Bias and denial are powerful things. This is sort of how conspiracy theories exist because it tries to give order where none exists.

However, the claim you(the OP) make is not unlike a conspiracy theory in that it does not survive critical thought. We can ignore all the people who swiftly rank back up to where they were when they make a new account. We can also ignore the simple statistical fact that if you are where you belong you have a 50-50 chance of winning and if you flip a coin 100 times it is VERY likely you have a sequence of 6 heads and one of 6 tails.

Let us ignore that and focus on the simple implausibility of the claim itself. In order to execute this Blizzard would have to be coding before the game started that it is time for some people to lose and some people to win and they would have to KNOW how to build a game to make that happen. However, this would not just apply to one person after all. There are 12 people in the game and ALL of them have to have their skill so perfectly known AND know whose time it is to win and whose time it is to lose that they can set up games to accommodate perfectly all the people who their algorithm determines it is time to win and time to lose. The amount of complexity to code that, and the amount of players needed to execute it, is a quite frankly insane amount of work and would require something like triple the active player base to adequately implement even if you could. It is simply not practical and probably not possible to do so.