This.
Well, it’s more profitable to let smurfs go unpunished (those who are deliberately de-ranked to play with one or more of their friends).
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What Blizzard will tell you is true and what they actually believe are likely different in many cases. They tend to say “everything is fine, don’t worry” no matter what.
So whatever the opinion is that calms the most people and generates the most money is what they will say.
Obviously, going back to the ban issue, there is a reason they have not just outright confirmed the system is automated despite it being completely evident (and actually they claimed it was not prior to the truth being discovered) and there is a reason they state you cannot be suspended for one-tricking despite the fact that it happens. I am well aware of how they bend the perception such as “accounts sold” instead of a player-count number or whatever. I am just saying, if he was a puppet, he would echo their SR is accurate PR and he did not. It surprised me is all and it made me reevaluate my opinion which was largely the same as yours.
While what he said about one-sided matches is true, smurfs are specific in that they are, well, smurfs. What I’m trying to say that you can recognize a smurf pretty easily and it doesn’t take a long time, regardless of what else happens in a match. OW has many script-heavy abilities and rock/paper/scissors matchups, but it’s pretty easy to tell a smurf from a lucky McCree flanking and having a deadeye four kill potg.
Usually, you can take a quick look at their movement and aim, combos, animation cancelling etc. and it’s not that hard to tell.
Not to mention they often don’t have issues with discussing their smurfness with other participants.
Blizzard even has a smurf queue for low levels.
I’ve seen multiple accounts where a person is top 500 or gm during a season, and throws their way down to bronze. I frankly don’t believe blizzard has any internal monitoring to prevent that behavior, because those accounts would have been banned long ago if they did.
This seems like a weird opinion to me.
Consider, if you divided up Mike Trout’s MLB career into not entirely random portions you could quite easily create the statistical appearance of several completely different players.
One might only play defense.
One could strike out a lot.
One could be the best hitter of all time.
One might have been injured most of the time.
Etc.
A computer looking at that segmented data would believe these are different players and assign them different skill/performance ratings (WAR for lack of a clear comparison in baseball terminology).
If you merged all your accounts together you’d get more accurate representation of what the system defines as “skill”. Peaks and valleys would be flattened out statistically.
I get that huge portions of the player base want to see constant progress in their rating, the ability to ‘climb’, but I don’t think that’s really what SR is attempting to provide.
I think a lot of players would be well served by reading Microsoft’s white paper on TrueSkill that was developed back when Bungie made Halo 2 and quite honestly built the foundation systems like this are based on.
What? What did he gain and give up by getting green text? Dude was crazy dedicated to helping people long before he got it, and puts tons of time into keeping gameday threads updated and answering questions.
I see irony is your strong suit.
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I do not care about climbing, if I am gold (which is downright insulting and I solo carry myself out of those games), keep me gold. If I am platinum, keep me platinum (easy games, but I cannot carry without at least one teammate that I jive with). If I am in diamond, keep me in diamond (most balanced games, but I hate not being the top performer in the lobby 24/7). I am not magically gaining or losing skill when I hop accounts or play season to season. My first season was one game away from diamond and I have not put a lot of effort into improving as I am fine with floating and yet the system cannot even do that properly.
Do you know what the game does if you play placements without any MMR data? I do. Reading the paper might help me understand it better, but I am just seeing stuff that makes no logical sense to begin with to the point where I do not feel there is a point to pretend the system is accurate. It gets an idea and that is about it. The game knows I am not masters plus or silver and below. Great. It can tell if someone sucks really badly or if someone is godlike. K. What about literally everyone else? Who cares if we throw diamonds in gold or boost gold players up to diamond. And THAT is why you get those crazy teammates.
Being a suck-up for brownie points isn’t any better.
Alt-accounts are just flooding the game and noone can really deny it at this point.
The goal of matchmaking is to ensure frequent matchquality, but almost all reasons for the existence of alt-accounts reduce the matchquality to 0, turning matches into onesided jokes with griefing, smurfing and soft-throwing being rampant.
This is obviously out in the open for everyone to see and experience, but Blizzard earns 20€ for every such account that gets created.
This is obviously not playing the long-game and completely contradictory towards Blizzards “standards”, but Activision won’t put a stop to it.
You seen to have missed my point about how someone like Mike Trout (the best overall baseball player of this generation) could be made to statistically look like a completely different player if you divided up his career.
Sometimes he goes 0-4.
Sometimes terrible players go 4-4 with a super clutch home run to win a game.
Small sample sizes will cause events like this to seem like valuable information.
You suggested your accounts are ranked across as many as three tiers and each of them fluctuates, that’s not abnormal.
You likely have good games and bad. So do your opponents.
If you had one account, it would likely fluctuate less. That’s the nature and influence of sample size on statistics.
The largest portion of the player base isn’t at the top or bottom of the skill curve so apparent differences may seem larger than they should match to match, but that doesn’t mean they’re ranked incorrectly. Sometimes people pop off, sometimes you miss by just enough to lose in a landslide.
Again, returning to my MLB example, if you only looked at Mike Trout’s career in like 3 game portions, he’d go from legitimately superhuman to terrible quite quickly.
Does that mean the applicable rating systems are broken? Or that you’re not looking at the data properly?
Sure, it’s also a part of the culture of the game now. It’s too late to shut the door, because they have been so accepting of it. Whatever it’s done to matchmaking, none of which is good, has just embedded that culture further. As it’s got worse, people just feel less and less bad about adding to the problem.
I think a big take away in discussions like this is that Blizzard really need to find a way to incentivize using “one true account”.
I have no idea how you solve that problem.
Reputation systems only matter if people can’t throw away their reputation and start over again.
This isn’t really an issue exclusive to Overwatch.
After a lot of skipped seasons, I actually intended to get back and climb this one, but it has been almost nothing but alt-accounts sending my climb into uncontrollable nonsense.
I don’t even know what the point is. You get this flood of alt-accounts in every single match and there’s absolutely no place for it to get better on the ladder.
They’re even well into over 4k SR matches.
I had a GM match with both teams being completely stacked with alt-accounts.
Those that were on our team were throwing. Those that were on the enemy team threw harder. We won that match.