Matchmaker issues

Competitive Discussion
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I just want to begin that I know overwatch is first and foremost there to make money. Regardless of your stance on what features are illogical for blizzard to implement because they would reduce their revenue or likely minded points, I simply want to communicate the many issues that make competitive overwatch extremely un-competitive.

  1. Short seasons: they feel meaningless. Having 2 month seasons means there is a total of 6 different pools of players who can claim top 500 in a given year. Sounds great, but the more players that get to top 500 the less prestigious the rank becomes, which gives less incentive to care about climbing to begin with. This can induce smurfing, inting games just because etc.

  2. No soft mmr resets atleast every year (and now a hard mmr reset needed for ow2). Before I explain my reasoning, here is what I think a soft mmr and hard mmr reset entails:

Soft mmr Reset: everyone’s mmr is reset. Players Above diamond sr are reset to 3000 sr as their starting point. Depending on how aggressive the mmr is at moving players, we could use the data of each player below diamond to place them at the lower end of the sr range that the matchmaker believes to be “confident in”. Meaning, players below diamond will start slightly lower than where they ended the season, removing floating accounts and incentivising climbing for them too.

Hard mmr Reset: everyone’s mmr is reset. Everyone starts at the rank of the highest player count (probably gold).

Players who climbed one season can be much worse the next due to meta shifts, buying accounts, etc. If they climbed during a meta playing an easy meta hero such as mercy in the moth meta or moira in GOATS, these players should quickly drop after that meta dissipates. They SHOULD drop, but if the 50/50 matchmaker is to be believed (and I do from my own experience), worse players will player against each other just like the better players will in the same rank. Now we have an issue. If you are someone who climbed during one meta but are much worse in another, paid for boosting, smurfing or what have you, how can the matchmaker determine where you belong if worse and better players are always facing each other? It could only do that by looking at performance as well, performance that is brought down and up by plat/diamond players in top 500, GM players in bronze etc. I have no idea how the matchmaker could balance anything, and I personally believe it can’t without some reset to clear up the ladder here and there.

Boosters and smurfs are nearly always able to climb to their ranks no problem I hear some of you cry, so how can the 50/50 matchmaker exist? Well, new accounts have the highest level of variability in mmr. Trying to rank up on a gold border 300 game per season silver player’s account to gm would be almost impossible in comparison :). This is yet another reason an mmr reset would be great, because the matchmaker solidifies your rank, regardless of if you are a plat/diamind (playing way below your level) in top 500 or a GM (playing way above your level) in bronze on high level accounts.

A soft mmr reset DOES NOT prevent the issue of boosting, smurfing etc, but it does not let it control the actual ladder system. Additionally, it gives everyone a clean slate, some hope that they can escape where they once were even if for short time. Maintaining a healthy ladder requires some form of mmr resets, otherwise you are always playing against the system for climbing or dropping, which is especially felt on higher level accounts.

  1. No sr decay. Pretty obvious, but sr decay persuades players to play more overwatch. This will more accurately measure where each player belongs, and prevent them from claiming the usual top 500 title given to them as a god given right. It could start at masters not diamond like once before, but it needs to exist.

  2. Short climb: this ties into soft mmr resets and sr decay, but a short climb only gives incentive to smurf. Bad quality games plus mmr shooting players to GM in less than an hour after placing with no sr decay to boot means there is no incentive to play. Of course I will have a higher incentive to smurf when all my incentive and value of top 500 is gone.

While most of these points seem to address higher level of play, I believe this would also benefit players at the lower ranks as well. Regardless of if my points are logically sound in practice, the current overwatch ladder is terrible, and will be terrible unless we atleast get an mmr reset for overwatch 2, and a change in how the ladder works.

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I agree. they should do a hard reset with every season

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I reset my MMR every few months by making a new acc just to prove im not washed boosted in rigged games etc. Just made a new1 this will be my 4th GM ACC

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Only if the seasons were longer. With current metrics, Hard MMR reset after every 3rd season. Gives time for climb.

But if they were 4 to 6 month seasons… yeah.

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I kinda like the way hearthstone does it right now tbh.

It’s a different environment obviously with a different kind of game and no teams but they have one month seasons and “reset” the rank but not the MMR (at least from what I understand they changed to this system over a year ago). Granted I’m drastically oversimplifying it I think, but your MMR is just the rank you finished the previous season at (so if I finish the previous season at Gold 4 I predominantly will play against other people who finished the previous season and at that and nearby ranks). The way they make it work is that their ranks are based on “stars” with every win gaining a base of one star and streaks doubling the amount of stars earned. At the start of every season players get a “boost” to their stats earned based on where they finished (for example people finishing from gold5-1 will get 4 bonus stars per win to start the season) with the bonus decreasing as they get closer to their previous rank.

That way all games on ranked should be competitive and the season is all about getting back to where you were before with the bonuses then getting yourself as far as you can beyond that before the next season starts to make getting back there easier. They also have “safeties” every 5 ranks that you can’t drop below once you pass it and in the initial bronze ranks you can’t lose stars with a loss at all. Basically once I hit silver 5 I can’t go back to silver 6 no matter how much I lose. Naturally in OW that could risk making boosting reliable but doing resets in that fashion would help make boosted players only a problem for at most a season or two after they got boosted while aiding all players to get back to a rank they previously earned to challenge themselves further to get higher.

Granted it may not work as simply for OW since it isn’t just 1v1 and much like GM/top500 in OW there is the legend rank that just ranks the players that have earned it based on slightly different metrics since there aren’t stars at that rank just going up or down on the legend rankings.

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I think that might be a great solution for 2 month seasons. But 2 month seasons force the acceleration of players to their mmr due to how short each season is which should be fine for the majority of the playerbase, but… for boosted/smurf accounts it can get quite problematic. Also, for accounts sedimented in certain ranks I feel that mmr really locks some players in place. Which means, this system is fine but, once again my opinion, this would need mmr resets frequently enough to not have a mass of accounts where they don’t belong.

Once again, this is my take, but I think you have a good take too :slight_smile:

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I need an mmr reset and I think it should be once or twice a year. Playing against smurfs with teammates that are either themselves smurfing or legit silvers is a nightmare; it’s a total crapshot. By the end of the game you can easily line up who on each team is meant to pair against the opposition. I really don’t think it should be like that.

There’s no reason people should feel punished for playing with friends or having a bad season. Getting stuck in a rank too high or too low and being punished for playing well and propped up if you play badly, that’s a bad system.

Also why is streaking gone? I know it’s not related but win and loss streaks were good. They got people where they should be faster.

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Not true. Boosting hardstuck accounts is the easiest thing. Because matchmaking handicapping is working on your side in this case. If you have stable MMR and low SR, matchmaker puts you in matches with better players or at least with and against those who has similar 50/50%. As a smurf or booster you have more chances to win (establish the difference) on these accounts than on the accounts with low lvl border and high winrate especially. That is why all boosted accounts drops SR dramatically after the boost, having high winrates handicaps you with worse teammates and better enemies in order to make even matches. Yes, that is how stupid Overwatch is.

However, I agree with your general point of the need of MMR reset and bringing back SR decays for inactivity.

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This would make no difference to the state of the game, and I’ll tell you why. SR is generated in the long term, it is an Overwatch player’s rank and reputation, established across their whole career. MMR incorporates similar long term data, including SR itself. But it also pivots on comprehensive mathematical statistics about current and recent player performance, on a per-match time frame. Overwatch’s developers have said that MMR generates a mathematical model for each player within just a couple dozen matches.

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I am not sure what your point was with this comment (I do apologise), but assuming it was based around resetting the data on everyone’s accounts, I think that would be a good thing, since no mmr system in my eyes can be perfect, and to top it off, I think the current system is too forceful at what it does. I might be wrong, since this is relative for each player.

As far as I understand, this is what I make of mmr and sr only systems

Sr only:

  • will take a long time after an sr reset (if any), to reach the rank you “belong at”, ruining games along the way due to skill differences
  • However, over infinite amount of games played players will reach their true rank

MMR only:

  • Assuming the implementation is correct, each player is evaluated based on certain factors to predict where they belong, and accelerate their progression to the sr that the mmr dictates them to be at.
  • If implemented incorrectly, or inaccurately I should say, whether its by how forceful the matchmaker is, what factors it attributes your skill towards, or the very foundation of what defines a “skilled player” worthy of ranking up etc., you get a mix and match of players who don’t belong, however the matchmaker keeps afloat.

To summarise, I definitely don’t think the system in place is accurate enough in any way, and having a change of how the matchmaker works plus an mmr reset to not have weird anomalies would be for the best! Another thing to note is the influx of cheaters that could cause these issues too for all I know, so having a clean-up for overwatch 2 would be quite a good measure as well.

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The single easiest way to handle the issue is institute MMR/SR decay. This would reward the most active players on single accounts and remove those from the system over time who are gone or just plain have too many alts. Done in conjunction with an MMR reset would be the single best thing they could do launching OW 2. You should not get an auto-rank into an effectively new game.

Now, with this, they should remove the stack limits in Masters/GM/Top 500 as well…

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For the same reason that MMR resets would not make a difference, MMR/SR decay would not make a difference. MMR is the problem, it should not exist.

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Explain why this wouldn’t help. Your MMR is not fixed btw…

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You’re making me repeat myself. The answer is this:

What I’m saying is, decay or reset does not matter. When MMR is able to work effectively within a couple dozen matches, it already defeats the purpose of ranked competition.

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That’s okay, you can do it :slight_smile:

I read this, but it doesn’t answer the question. We all know this is how it works, this is why I also indicated MMR is not fixed.

It isn’t fixed… not sure how this doesn’t make sense.

SR is simply a derived number heavily weighted by MMR; MMR is the value that is used for matchmaking. It’s effectively uncooked SR; a decay system would restore balance in the system because as it is, the curve of relative skill is based on accounts, not players… MMR/SR decay would stem the problem of rank distortion incurred from old accounts and alts… we need a system that ranks active players, not including someone who literally quit play three years ago, or the dude with 25 alts (there are more than you think) in GM…

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What do you mean “MMR is not fixed?”

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The MMR system starts you at effectively 2250 “SR” in terms of MMR, as you said, the system is about 80% accurate at around 15 matches (assuming “fair” matches which is nigh impossible now), is more or less probably 98% accurate by 30. You notice that SR swings are a lot smaller past 30…

The system is using a Machine Learning approach based on basic sampling to do it’s work; I work in Data Loss Prevention with tools that sound very similar to this system, and the 15-30 is the exact same recommendations for improving accuracy of say document sampling to teach the ML systems for accuracy/confidence.

The problem with never having a reset is that it gets harder and harder performance-wise to overcome your rating unless you have dramatic upticks for very extended periods. Add to that your ‘Ranking’ is relative in theory to other players, but in reality your account is judged against other accounts; allowing players to have too many alts in Comp literally stacks the system, and combined with old accounts creates a distorted view of actual skill of player vs player.

Blizz adopted “ELO system” is great for Chess, where its a player, not an account being judged in a game where both parties know all details (or can).

One big issue I have with the current system is it does an adaptive method which was instituted to help streamers in their “Road to GM” runs, the system accelerates your wins losses as it sees fit with fewer matches. This is great for them, but be the guy on a new account who has bad luck in placements, that account is now damned. With a smaller playerbase, too many alts, the odds on someone quitting due to facing a GM on an alt (which is practically guaranteed in at least 1-2 of your placement matches) combined with throwers and leavers, it’s all a big mess now and that only makes it worse for new accounts. That nonsense needs to be removed ASAP.

MMR/SR decay would vastly improve the situation as it would effectively downgrade and remove old accounts (frankly any inactive account older than say six months needs to have an automatic MMR/SR reset done on it and it’s data points removed from the MMR system), and it would stem alt account creation as most people lack the will/drive to constantly keep up MMR across more than around 3-5 accounts. Go wild and add a paid $5 month SMS authentication to even play Comp and I guarantee you many people actively playing would literally rise in 1 rank overnight…

1 Like