I value contributions like this. They remind of how little some people understand of both what they responded to, and what they are talking about. Especially when they give a contradiction within the same post, and proceed to a veiled insult.
letâs get to the point, kabaji can climb, you canât, nothing is wrong with the matchmaker
the only flaw it might have is that it is not accurate enough, but to think that it actively keeps people down?? how does it decide who it keeps down, the examples given happen on both ends, but only one end is used for the argument.
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You now subscribe to the âperforming well/poorly causes the matchmaker to balance you outâ theory? You previously have subscribed to the âperforming well causes the matchmaker to rig games in your favorâ theory.
Have you changed your mind since last week? Or do you not realize that these two statements are directly contradictory?
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You really need to work on your reasoning skills. There are a vast number of ways that a matchmaker can be flawed, but still allow people to climb.
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The way I say the matchmaker works is the same way I have said it has worked for a very long time, and itâs the actual way it works:
You are placed in matchmaker created games where each side has as close to a 50% chance of winning as possible. If you play well then you will be matched with scrubs in order to make the teams fair (handicapping), you must carry them just in order for the teams to be fair. If you play poorly then you will be placed with better people in order to make the teams fair. The matchmaker continues like this unless you:
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get really bad stats individually in which case you will be placed with other people who under performed and will rank down on a loss streak. In these games you could try your hardest and you would probably not win.
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get really good stats individually in which case you will be placed with other people who over performed and will rank up on a win streak. In these games you donât even have to try in order to win.
thatâs exactly the way the matchmaker works, you know it and I know it. Our time would be better spent talking about why this is so bad for matchmaking and why people hate it.
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Why though? There is still QP, Aracde etc which wouldnât force 6 stacks. There is also nothing wrong with being a scrub: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub
Letâs consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play âfor funâ and not explore the extremities of the game. They wonât find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, theyâll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later.
And there is nothing wrong with that, they can still play comp, they just wonât be successful.:
Letâs return to the group of scrubs. They donât know the first thing about all the depth Iâve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more âfun.â Superficially, their argument does at least look valid, since often their games will be more âwet and wildâ than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of this âfunâ on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isnât nearly as satisfying as reading your opponentâs mind to such a degree that you can counter his every move, even his every counter.
Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics theyâve either never seen or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.
It would only be enforced for competitive, just like at your local beach volleyball competition, you canât enter unless you have a team of 4 people. Sure you can just go play at the beach with less people to have fun (QP) but of course there has to be a minimum rule for comp.
Similarly there is a general concept in software design called the âpit of successâ. The idea being that you design your software in a way it is easy for people to fall into the right patterns.
At the moment that is not the case with Overwatch and we can see where full freedom in competitive has brought us. People turn on each other and blame the system, symptoms of a failed system.
I just fail to see why just like almost any other team based competition, why the minimum requirement wouldnât be to have a valid team. Sure I guess you could just turn up and sub for a team with a man down, but the current system in Overwatch just doesnât work.
(*) Please note the italicized text is taken from the link in this post
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Sounds like theyâre moving towards breaking down SR by role and providing more after-game context (hopefully a scoreboard, graphs, etc) as to what contributed to your SR gain vs what negatively affected it.
If thatâs true, Iâm hyped for these changes and OW comp will be moving into the right direction!! Still not convinced it will mitigate the smurf/thrower and toxicity problems that suffocate the ranked experience thoâŚ
P.S. LFG isnât bad at all bad⌠in theory. In practice, I get laggy games (90+ ping occasionally) and filling the group takes well over 5 min. Queue times another 5⌠unfortunately, not worth the wait either since often times teams are widely unbalanced (more so than soloqâŚ). Comms arenât everything Jeff.. LFG search does worse job finding equal MMR teammates than soloqâŚ
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Not really ofc. But if there is simple/easy solution and blizzard are just stupid enough to see it, then they should prolly share it. Its easy right? Why cant you explain if its soooooo easy?
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So are you saying something like this?
Imagine a 2500 SR player, Joe. His average MMR is also 2500, but MMR moves very quickly.
2500 SR, playes well for a few games, his MMR goes up to 2750. The game matches him with 2500 SR / 2250 MMR player to keep things fair.
He then plays poorly for a few games, his MMR drops to 2250. The game matches him with a 2500 SR / 2750 MMR player to keep things fair.
He then plays a game or two of his life. His MMR shoots up to 3000, and he is put in games with 2500 SR / 3000 MMR players, against 2500 SR / 2000 MMR players, leading to total stomps in his favor.
For many players, solo-queue competitive is their favorite mode. If you remove someoneâs favorite mode, they will likely quit. They donât want to be shoved into the quick play ghetto. This is either self-evident to you (as it should be), or it is not.
Iâm familiar with play-to-win, but Iâm not sure it really applies to this discussion, as he is focusing on 1v1 games, and you are complaining about your teammates. I doubt you mind much if the enemy has scrubs.
Nothing is keeping you from making a valid team. Why donât you LFG or form a friends lists / guild on your own?
You donât think enough people are leaving/have left already?
1v1 can be extrapolated to teams. This is either self-evident to you (as it should be), or it is not?
Iâm not, please find the reference in this thread. This is either self-evident to you (as it should be), or it is not?
Correct, easy wins.
I think you have misconstrued the proposal and are trying to suggest I personally have a problem in that regard? In fact your response is what I tell many other forums goers when they complain about issues with team-mates. Myself Iâm happy enough as is.
I am simply trying to offer a general solution that:
- Removes a large percentage of the complaints about any kind of toxicity in game and on the forums
- Encourages people to take responsibility for their performance because they would have no-one to blame but themselves
- Trying to present an analogy like many other competitive team events. I thought the beach volleyball one was ok and thought that This is either self-evident to you (as it should be), or it is not?
This proposal, which I have made in many other threads doesnât seem to take so it would seem to indicate it isnât the âpit of successâ as far as game design goes.
This is either self-evident to you (as it should be), or it is not? (*)
(*) I thought I would use this from your above quote as it seems like you like using it to emphasize your points and perhaps it can aid you in understanding my response?
Hmm, thatâs a decent way of describing it, but I doubt the MMR variation is that wide between the players he is playing with. I would imagine itâs closer to something like :
2500SR/2500MMR plays well for a few games, he is now 2600SR/2700MMR The game matches him with 2500MMR/2600SR players to keep things fair.
You would think that the skill difference between a 2500MMR/2600SR player and a 2700MMR/2600SR player wouldnât be that much (200MR difference), but it is because a 2500MMR player with 2600SR indicates that the player has been playing below his current SR threshold since his MMR is lower than his SR (possibly far below), where as our 2600SR player with 2700MMR indicates he is playing well and playing beyond his SR (who knows how far beyond) since his MMR is higher than his SR.
So, the key takeaway is this: a 2600MMR player with 2700SR indicates that the player has been playing below his current SR threshold (possibly far below) and so the matchmaker should not pair him with someone who is say, 2700MMR with 2600SR because the max possible skill variance is far too high and will lead to frustration.
The team must believe. If that was done. Than team only mode would fall apart. The Q times would be so high. People would abandon it and just go solo.
You will always have different metas on various ranks but the important thing is to balance it from the top, mainly for the pro scene because if they would have balanced it for your average joe player (which would be 2.2-2.4k I believe) you would have the most one-sided and broken gameplay in the higher ranks.
And yes, 2-2-2 is the most common meta, usually with main tank like Rein and off-tank like Zarya/D.Va, a short-ranged dps with a flank/backline harass purpose such as Genji/Tracer or a more situational hero like Junk, Mei, Reaper etc. paired up with a more medium/long range DPS such as McCree/Ashe/Widow/Hanzo and then you have two healers usually a main heal and a flex healer (or commonly refered to as off-heal) which means you combine a healer with lots of general heal output aka Ana (or Moira on some points) with one of the other healers that offers less heal in general but have something that make them worth picking, Mercy for Res, Lucio for boops, Zen as ulti-counter & focus fire, Brigitte because sheâs broken etc.
Now GOAT do see play, a lot of it, but itâs nowhere near as popular as your average 2-2-2 set up and just like Sym/Bastion plays which increased in popularity lately itâs still extremely rare if you look at the playtime it sees compared to ânormal comp gamesâ, most deviations from 2-2-2 come as a response of having to go all in. Like you should start a game by keeping in mind that the opponents might run something like GOAT but most of the time they wont and those games tend to either be 1) very short due to GOAT comp steamrolling through the points 2) People adapt and force GOAT to switch 3) GOAT picked as an all-in effort when things looking grim so the overall minutes on GOAT is low, however it doesnât mean itâs not having a bad effect on the ladder and pro scene because few people actually seems to enjoy playing GOAT, playing against GOAT is even more frown upon and watch a game with GOAT is rather lacklusting. Now as long as such oppressive meta is in the mix everything else have to adapt to it in one way or another in order not to get extremely punished by it so something can be meta yet not played that much.
Spamming this line makes you sound angry, or tilted, or ⌠something. You certainly seem beyond the point where we are having a useful conversation.
The line is not used to emphasize a point. To say a statement is self-evident, is to say that it is axiomatic, is to say that it is a first principle, is to say that it is difficult to argue about, because you either accept it or you donât. It is not an argument or a conclusion, but a premise.
If you say that everything you are writing is self-evident, and I disagree, then we really have nothing else to talk about. At this point, you can either rewrite your last comment, or we are done here.
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I could narrow down the numbers.
But anyways, this system as described is completely ridiculous and absurd. Sometimes it rigs matches to 50/50, sometimes it rigs matches to 80/20 (or whatever) depending on some sort of detailed statistical analysis of play.
It is massively easier and more correct to group people by MMR, increase MMR when they win, and lower MMR when they lose. Fortunately, that is what Blizzard does.
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And here in lies the inherent problem:
- Heâd like to fix things
- Nothing major to announce, maybe sometime in the distant future
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Just an FYI. Anyone who thinks Jeff is going to openly and explicitly admit there is a problem with ANYTHING game breaking related is either high or stupid. This is a business, limiting negative publicity is a good thing, admitting to a flawed product is counter intuitive to the concept of maintaining profit growth. If anything they will introduce tweaks on the back end and announce them as an improvement to a great system only making it better for the overall player base.
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The matchmaking is so bad that it overshadows the other glaring issue, hero changes. Every time a hero gets buffed or nerfed itâs a disaster and the problem is almost instantly apparent. If itâs so obvious then why canât they realize it sooner? They need a better way to test this stuff out, a new strategy.
If a hero is weak they should take one of the already present abilities and micro buff or micro nerf it.
Micro buff/nerf example: if doomfist is too strong, then take his shield gain ability and decrease it by 5% and change nothing else. Leave it for a couple of weeks and see how you feel about it. If still too strong, then nerf a bit more. Do this until youâre not sure if you should nerf him anymore, that means heâs in a decent spot.
DF will have to go through changes again because they nerfed him too much. You spend all this time learning a hero and then they take it away, itâs really frustrating.
No more of this changing everything around.
Blizzard doesnât âwantâ to make changes, because they are affriad people will not buy the game or they will leave.
WellâŚif my 12 years of experience with WoW has taught me ANYTHING about BlizzardâŚits that they HAVE had issues with players leaving and not buying expansions because the previous one was so horrible. Blizzard had 12 million players at the time they released Cataclysm. That PLUMMETED by almost half by the time Pandaria was released. Every second expansion after WotLK (ie Cataclysm, and then Warlords or Draenor), were all flops in the communities eyes. But then players came BACK when there was renewed hope after watching the trailers from beta testing etc.
Blizzard should NOT be affraid of upsetting people with longer queue times. people who play WoW who also play Overwatch know that queue times for many games can be anywhere from less than a minute to over an hour.
And what really boggles my mind, is that there is SO much community feedback to draw from for these issues that it should not be this hard to find a simpler way of gauging player skill and matching people into groups that fit them best.
Jeff saidâŚand I am heavily paraphrasingâŚâWe have a formula for the matchmaker systemâŚbut we keep it hidden so people canât exploit the formula and climb too easilyâ
OkâŚbutâŚwhy not just ban people who you suspect of manually cheating the system??? Furthermore, why would you ban someone or close their account if they sat there for months and did countless matches and wrote down all their data and was able to figure out how the system truly worked so he could climb??? That kind of thing takes an absurd amount of time, skill and dedication. As long as they arenât blatantly cheating by using 3rd party programs that alter the game code etc that should really be fair game.
If I sat down at my desk for hours and went through a whole years worth of lottery numbers just to analyze patterns and see what numbers come up most and in doing so increase my chances of winning, how is that cheating?? You have figured out a way to give you an edge over other people. People do that with the stock market every day. Products have trends. Trends are pretty much cyclical and can be predicted.
If Blizzard wants to keep a good majority of their community happy then they need to make some constructive changes to the system OR add othe Competitive options that arenât temporary or seasonal.