Yes.
Very much so…
(Although it is due to the 5 million + alt accounts, smurfing, throwers, fast queue throwers, boosted players, paid boosters etc. … so pretty much things completely out of the match makers control. )
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Matchmaker is not trying to keep you anywhere. When you are on new account, you start at 2350 and do 5 initial placement which can place you anywhere between 1100 to 3400 based on your performance and win/loss score. Then after you are placed, you have after placement bonus with huge SR bonus which slowly go down over 15 games. You can literary end up hundreds of SR from where you were placed. So its completely wrong to say that matchmaker true sto keep you where you were placed.
If you talk about seasonal placement, you are still wrong, because they are correction your SR to be close to your MMR. Meaning its your skill which is deciding where you will be.
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Correct. It’s possible to move around. But from everything in this thread, the matchmaker is trying to keep matches artificially close. Which means your mobility is less natural. This is by definition the handicapping and rigging people speak of.
When you force the odds of a match (local), you’re taking away from the rankings (global). The integrity has to give out somewhere. In this case, the rating structure and metrics lose accuracy and precision.
If you’re ranking by SR, why matchmake with anything but SR? I want to play on a non-rigged ladder that classifies people by skill. So why are my matches being formed using some other metric?
Matchmake me the way you rank me. And stop the rigging.
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Holy crow, how many alts do you have? how many games did you throw to get so many accounts placed so low? You wine about a rigged system, and then pop up on a 7th alt at the same rank. Nothing rigged, you either hard throw or just can’t play this game.
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I have 2 accnts, 1 for posting, this one for playing.
I was told using alts on forums is BM. I’ve always been proudly <500.
It’s quite obviously rigged, as per everything in this thread so far.
Oh so the other one is muted, and this is your way of trying to avoid it. And don’t lie, it’s not worth it, if you suck, like the rest of us, just admit it and maybe somebody will help you too.
Hardly, and frankly I’m real tired of conspiracy theories and hypotheticals regarding the matchmaker.
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Sounds hypothetical to me.
If there is an unending flow of them it sure does affect things… esp. for higher tier players pushing out of their first placements. If say half your playerbase are alts, and continuously there are new ones from higher tier players then it definitely deflates the relative SR and overinflates the top tiers.
The idea here that I am (or anyone else) in any way talking about what Overwatch calls ‘placement matches’ is absurd and has no bearing on this discussion.
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The only thing is that the top tiers are relatively small in comparison to the rest of the playerbase. Diamond+ only is 15% so it’s not really possible for such a large impact. Also why would high tier smurfs deflate SR? That’s really only relevant in T500 where there are numbered spots i.e. pushing people out of T500 and where SR gains are low imo. The thing with smurfs is there are really few that are super high rank, and those will climb relatively quickly according to Jeff. I’ve seen it firsthand.
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The impact of a flood of Plats and Low Diamonds is pretty substantial on the playerbase. Sprinkle in the Masters+ people, its probably about 20% of the playerbase potentially. Nothing to sneeze at.
Some on alternate accounts do it to play with friends. Had a “Gold” Widow yesterday in a stack admit to me their main was like 3800… 
Happens almost every day on some level.
It doesn’t depend upon high ranks, only the fact that people well above Gold which is now even below average are alting and its really making for bad play in QP at least and comp around that tier. Almost every game now for a 5+ year old game as 1-4 accounts that are sub 30th level. I know for a fact 3/4 of them are PC and Console alts, not new players, they play far too well.
Well if everyone had a smurf that was plat+ then it would be around 40% of the playerbase so yeah that is a large amount.
Well yeah it happens at every rank. But it still won’t affect you in the long term.
2350 is still the average last time I checked. Sure it does affect individual games but smurfs won’t stay in that rank. They will climb over time unless they hard throw, at which point they get reported and banned. It is really hard for a hard smurf to stay in a low rank. Sure it introduces volatility and isn’t fun to play against, but the number of smurfs is lower than the actual lower rank playerbase. Basically if a game against a smurf is a guaranteed loss, then if you can win the ones where you aren’t against a smurf then you can climb over time.
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Its higher now - just into Plat is the median.
Can I see the source for that? I can’t find anything recent that says otherwise.
Funny you should ask - I too thought Gold was,. but that is from old statistics. Someone recently directed me to a site which showed late 2020 stats and indeed, the median was just into Plat but I haven’t found it again and I wanted to link it…
Hmm. The most recent one I can find is the HP site which was February 2020. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if it hasn’t changed much. It was ~2300 in season 8 as well.
I will see if I can find it - someone linked it to me once - it was update for like Q4 2020 and clearly showed the median into Plat.
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[quote=“Eyevou-1808, post:16, topic:590087”]
No, no it doesn’t. MM doesn’t care about your SR.[/quote]
Except it does. This account has consistently been diamond for several seasons. I’m faced against high plat/diamond/low master players.
My other account? It’s in gold/plat, I play the same heroes as on this account but it’s facing high silver/gold players in a lot of the games. No diamond players. No master players.
It’s okay that you don’t understand how mmr works, really it is. It’s not like Blizzard are making it easy for people to understand. I’d just like you to know that all evidence that has been gathered over the past 4 years (including developer posts) points to your theory not being the case.
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So why am I facing silver players on my other account?