Matchmaking continues to be a high priority for our team as we move our way into season four.
Well, letâs see what they say. Hopefully itâs planned improvements.
Edit: from reading, sounds like they are slowly identifying problems with the matchmaker, and making improvements. Skill delta is narrowing.
They spend a lot of time talking about stomps occurring when the matchmaker has determined teams should be balanced. They are trying to determine reasons. I suspect one is that the match actually wasnât balanced in the first place. See this situation regularly in QP. 
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Our data has also revealed an additional area for improvement. Specifically, stomps that occur in matches that should be balanced.
Okay. Sounds good.
One of our team goals is to discern why lopsided matches occur and what the matchmaking system can do to mitigate them. âThese types of games could indicate areas where a player gets mis-calibrated, and our ratings need to be smarter,â says Morgan.
Okay. Pretty good so far. I like it.
âWhat makes looking at stomps tricky is that they also happen with two well balanced teams. A really great ultimate, a key pick, or a few lucky critical shots can make a huge impact in a game of Overwatch,â says Scott.
This comes down to a skill issue but Ok.
Part of what weâre currently researching are indicators or measures that show how close or stomp-able actual matches are in-game. âThose measures are really important for long-term improvements because it gives us much more precise signals to look at when assessing new changes,â Morgan explains.
So this seems to be the key issue they need to figure out if weâre going to have better matchmaking.
As we researched these types of matches and what causes them, we saw there were backfills occurring that were a really bad fit for the match, leading to a predictably one-sided match. Season 4 introduced changes that prioritize quality backfills over quick backfills. Weâve already seen improvements in backfilled matches just by holding the match a little longer to look for a player who fits better with the lobby MMR.
Iâm not so sure about this one, but it seems they are at least taking it seriously. I wish them the best of luck in solving this issue, since itâs clearly the biggest issue with the game. As always, Blizz should be prioritizing Quality players over a faster queue time. A faster queue time is meaningless if youâre basically wasting the next 8-20 minutes in a losing match.
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all you say is high-priority but nothing actually gets done correctly; mmr has been bad and still is bad since season1 of OW 1. iâll believe when i actually see change; and so far no change within the past 5 years
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To this end, weâre making significant changes to MMR decay in the Season Four midcycle patch, and weâll continue looking at other ways we can improve ratings in future patches.
Why are they talking about adding decay back into ranks again? We just had decay removed and they want to put it back in already?
That was the SR decay - MMR is its own system
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its been 4 seasons and we are still suffering through long losing streaks and back-to-back stomps
if matchmaking was actually a high priority, it would have been fixed 2 seasons ago
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where is support data?
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fiction. matchmaker needs [the missing data]
this being a playerâs [pace of play]. add a checkbox to queue menu screen that indicates fast pace players. if checked, fast pace players are paired WITH fast pace players. stomps occur for 2 reasons. not all players play at the same pace. the second reason stomps occur is due to faulty or deliberate match server client throttling / nerfing one teams connection and not the other. resulting in one sided artificial outcome match ups. an issue that has reduced since the explosion of rigged match ups, however not totally resolved.
Good question.
Either they donât have enough data since Support is the least played role or the data was so bad that they didnât even bother to show it.
We all know that moment when you play as support and randomly check the scoreboard to find players with Master and Diamond Role Challenger. Basically means youâre working overtime for 20 minutes.
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This is interesting thanks for the update
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When one team has 60+ elems and the other has 0 and stuck in spawn, thereâs a fundamental broken issue with the matchmaking that isnât being addressed.
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That is the first reason that they give for this occurringâthat the match looks balanced to the matchmaker but isnât because thereâs a mis-calibrated player. So the solution to that would be making the rating system smarter so that it calibrates playersâ MMRs faster and more accurately.
But there are also reasons related to the inherent snowball-y nature of OW. Some of those can maybe be mitigated with game design adjustments, like the new stranded spawn feature.
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There is currently MMR decay if the account is inactive for a long period of time. The MMR is decayed and the uncertainty is raised, so the prediction is that the player will be rusty and perform worse, but the system will also quickly adjust if that prediction is wrong.
Solo only queue when?
As we researched these types of matches and what causes them, we saw there were backfills occurring that were a really bad fit for the match
There are leavers because the match is already a stomp.
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Oh hey, Morgan Tweets manifesting as a blog post. Cool.
âWhat makes looking at stomps tricky is that they also happen with two well balanced teams. A really great ultimate, a key pick, or a few lucky critical shots can make a huge impact in a game of Overwatch,â says Scott Mercer.
Well, I can save you half the effort and just say âRanged Oneshot DPSâ.
Both in âActual Stompsâ and âPerceived Stompsâ.
https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=2477
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Ranks are still completely broken though, are you planning to acknowledge that? I play in high Diamond to GM lobbies in QP with a 60%+ win rate but canât get out of Plat in ranked even though I have the best support stats in the lobby every game. I was Diamond in OW1 and never should have been placed lower in the first place. Havenât played ranked since Season 1 and only jumped back in because you promised it would be fixed. My rank got an automatic increase at the start of the season to Plat 5, but after losing 3 games in Master lobbies I suddenly found myself in Gold lobbies, won 5 in a row and went Plat 5 to Plat 5. Yes, I did have the best support stats in those lost games. How am I supposed to climb playing in games that are below my skill level? Iâm obviously gonna get trash SR gains.
Very close to quitting, pointless playing a game that doesnât reward you correctly. I shouldnât have to play QP for a decent match.
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Blizzard. This is the 7th week in a row youâve promised matchmaking fixes.
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As much as I always appreciate them trying to improve the matchmaking system itâs insane how they havenât already died off overdosing on copium that you can have proper matchmaking without bringing back the strict MMR restrictions. I mean they have years of data showing that matches with a mixture of long-time average 50-65 percentile MMR players and 90-100 percentile MMR players is very often a very bad experience for the players and the main underlying reason as to why stomps happen (since you have to exclude unmeasurable player behavior) and no tradeoff of queue times is considerable to the importance of this limitation
And itâs not that they have to abandon player behavior measurements altogether since players âpractisingâ heroes they pretty much never play relative to their main roster of heroes and/or just happen to perform very poorly a during a certain session is not exactly something they canât measure with the surveilance systems they have in place. Itâs just not a good plan to go for the enormous task of creating a system that can fastly accomodate for these behaviors rather than just add in the strict restrictions to MMR, especially when player sessions arenât usually considerably long for the system to pick these up anyways. With strict MMR limits they could at least drop below the threshold and therefore adjust their behavior appropriately to their session after some games
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I dont understand how they think oneshot heroes is a good thing to have.