Misplaced players / Bad Placement System / "Too few avoid slots"

General Discussion
1

This is about issues I’ve had in the Role Queue Beta, overall match quality has improved for me and I like the system a lot more than the old one, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems. I’d also like to say that I don’t actually want more avoid slots, but in the Beta I couldn’t avoid all people I wanted to.
TL;DR at the bottom.

Now, I really try not to be a person that blames her teammates for a loss. I know I can’t possibly see what exactly they’re doing, and I know people have off days, or even off matches. You know, maybe they played one too much without taking a break and are exhausted. But please, the team depends on the Main Tank making space, a bad Main Tank is far worse than a bad DPS or Support. Please Blizzard, how does a 3000 peak player (last two seasons, even dropped down to 2900), end up at almost 3500. HOW?! And it was even on their main role, they mostly played tank in the old system. How do they end up at a tier where they’re basically feeding at? Why are placements so impactful, when it’s literally only 5 matches? I’m assuming that’s the reason they got so high, because they really were not good and clearly never played in that tier before.

I’ve also seen horrible DPS, like a Torb constantly spamming on main choke Horizon second and dying when we were setting up to go top. And I do mean, he didn’t do that once. He did it often enough for our whole team to completely tilt about it, our luck was that we also had a misplaced Zarya on our team. A very toxic Zarya, but she carried us nonetheless.
Or an Ashe frontlining the whole time and dying, that I haven’t seen in the killfeed once the whole match.
Want to know what the Torb and Ashe had in common? Both bronze portraits with one star. Both calling other people on the team “hardstuck” when confronted (not by me). Yeah, I don’t know but I’m pretty sure they just couldn’t care less about their alt in a Beta.

Since we have 3 avoid slots, this Beta is the first time I already avoided 3 and wanted to avoid a 4th and 5th player. Mostly because of how misplaced they are (not their fault, obviously), but also because of people not trying at all and others getting very tilted because of #1 and 2.

Overall, I’ve seen match quality increase a lot, also toxicity whise. I think 2/2/2 was the right step for the competitive aspect. Why did you have to take a step in a casual direction with placements? I have nothing against the casual community, but placements are in Comp, not QP or Arcade. The only benefit I see from this is for those who only do placements for CP. And that has no place in Comp imo, and Jeff even said a while back that he regrets golden guns being bound to competitive. Imo, if someone doesn’t care enough to, at the bare minimum, play 10 placement matches for a role, they should not play that role competitively to begin with.

Scott Mercer even says that the matchmaker needs data, data I believe 5 placement matches can and will not accurately provide. Of course, even after placements, SR gains and losses are still higher, but as others pointed out in the forums, it’s not fun whatsoever to play these additional matches in which you’re basically throwing, hurting your team and in which you can’t even enjoy playing itself, because the enemy is so much better than you. And placements are even more important for new players. What do you think might happen to someone who’s somewhat interested in Overwatch, but has a horrible experience in their first few competitive matches? Especially if they get placed too high, they will likely underperform, get blamed by their teammates, and overall have little fun playing against the enemy team as they are much better. If they get placed too low, they might get cocky, and could be very crushed by every loss. While trying to rank up, as they probably don’t know a bunch and have never talked to an OW coach, they might start doing more mistakes than before because the enemy team doesn’t punish them and they get a victory over them. Long story short, misplacing new players feels horrible, no matter how quickly the MM would actually make up for it.
I don’t want to go over everything again, but same goes for old players obviously.

I do find it funny and sad at the same time though, that instead of admitting mistake, you claim GM/Top 500 players are as bad as any other person at identifying how good they are doing on a role. Some heroes across roles have similar playstyles, so of course Jjonak will pop off on Widow, a backline DPS, and in terms of decision making/being aware of the enemy DPS, his gamesense is probably good enough to do that on ladder anyway. And almost every Pro has good aim too, as far as I know. Not to mention that ladder is random anyway, not in terms of SR, but lookikng at DPS Queue times now and old streams, even in Top 500, people mostly had a good teamcomp, which often meant 2 Tanks and 2 Supports. But as the Queue time now suggests, there are way more DPS players than Tank and Support up there, how many times do you think a DPS player had to flex to a Tank or Support? And do you honestly think they actually are as good as people who main these roles/heroes in GM/Top 500? Because I don’t, and as you said yourself, neither do they. But hey, our system isn’t flawed, they are just underestimating themselves lawl.

TL;DR: - I’ve seen a lot of tanks misplaced, like High Plat/Low Diamond last season as Tank mains, now playing in Low Master, High Master tank now carrying in Low Master
-I’ve wanted to avoid some DPS (more than usually), because they obviously didn’t care, playing on an alt, and called everyone “hardstuck” that called them out, I assume that’s because of the Beta Season and not Role Queue itself though
-Most toxicity I’ve seen comes from the first and second point
-Placements are way too short, 10 should be the minimum to avoid the awful feeling of being misplaced and to allow the MM to actually do its job, people who would just do the placements for CP imo don’t belong in Comp on that role anyway
-Blizzard doesn’t believe GMs/Top 500s when they tell them the MM has placed their Off Roles too high

5 Likes
2

I agree with more avoid slots like 3 for each role at the least and that the beta had some weird placement results but the 5 placements r fine because all it does is just tell you earlier then it used to where it thinks you are. in a few seasons 10 games will end up being way too long but rn placements technically don’t end after 5 games

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As I said, I don’t actually want more than 3 avoid slots, right now there are just issues where I’d want to avoid more people. But I see that overall it would cause more harm than good.

true, but I’d say then make seasons longer, again, the only downside would be CP, which again, shouldn’t even be bound to competitive in the first place. I’ve also had bad experiences in my own placements. Make seasons longer, 10 placements, I’m all for it. Seasons are ridiculously short compared to other games anyway.

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I just know that I might not want to finish my placements on all roles if i need to play 30 games total as not seeing a rank makes me not want to invest a ton of time where as if i have a number i want to move it up so im either solid in my rank or get into the next rank. of course this could just be me idk but I don’t care about placements after the 1st season as the rank doesn’t change massively so even if placements were extended with season length it would be more tedious to me. obviously you are opposite to me and thats fine but i would be curious to know what majority of players think.

1 Like
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Eh… If you ask me, the SR system has always been pretty bad. It is hard to tell the difference and the only reason I can is because tanks and supports are trying DPS. There is really no fixing it without a reset. So it is hard to care. For every boosted player, you have a deranked player. It all sort of evens out.

As for avoid slots, one issue is that you can no longer see groups which makes avoiding less valuable. Hopefully they change it back.

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I don’t see them adding it back until they come up with a cool looking design for groups just because blizzard likes their games to look polished. Maybe this is a ways away because they might have more important things to focus on idk. As for sr system being broken I agree when the gamemode first came out i threw games because i thought i got competitive points for golden guns just for playing and severely ruined my anchor stats which had me in low bronze since it was season 1 and there weren’t other stats to go off. When i finally figured out i wasn’t getting points I started trying to climb but unlike everyone else at the time who got to the rank they deserved to be at pretty quickly it took me a while to climb and still does on my main but on alt accounts I usually will rank up 3 seasons before i get my main to that rank. I could be over glorifying how good i was back then but i definitely feel the effects of the anchor stats now.

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Fair enough, placements aren’t that important between seasons, right.

8

initial placements could probably be longer though or they could say that your rank is a placement preview while you are still doing placements and that would fix both of our issues with either version of placements, but Blizzard doesn’t like to show us stuff like that normally because they don’t want other games copying their system

1 Like
9

nope, totally disagree. Sure, there was a time with a lot of smurfs in Master, but other than that phase, people usually belong there. Again, I looked at their profile, they were Low Diamond/High Plat palyers. They should not be in my games. The tanks in my game wasn’t trying DPS, they were a tank main, playing tank, 500 SR above their skill level. I rarely, if ever, see any boosted players.

No, a hard reset would just make things worse than now, now you need a few horrible games to get to your true rank, with a hard set you’d have horrible matches for months and it ultimately wouldn’t change much in SR.

10

While 10 placements would result in better matchmaking, it would be a monumental pain for those of us former flex players who like to play everything to have to play 30 placement matches. When I queue for role-locked comp, I check all three boxes and just play whatever hand I’m dealt. Even the 15 placements I had to play for the beta season made the placement experience feel noticeably grindier than the usual 10.

More placements would be fine for people who main one role but would drive other folks (like myself) away from comp completely. I’m not going to play 30 matches just to officially begin my season. That’s hours and hours of play just to unlock actual play.

Good, thougthful post, though. I have experienced a bit of the misplacing you mentioned myself.

1 Like
11

In that case, I fail to see your problem. What is the best difference?

12

While it would be better transparity to show how many grouped players there are, and while it’s not fair to let solo players go against 6-stacks, it’s actually better for the individual that they don’t see it any more. You go into every game the same way, you play against every enemy the same, which will make you play better.

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DPS is the biggest problem. We have mercy one tricks in GM for DPS… its awful. And the worst thing is they have no penalty to the SR they actually care about by playing DPS.

1 Like
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that I have Low Diamond tanks in my Low Master games, feeding their brains out. That Blizzard would rather tell Top 500 players their judgement is bad than to admit they placed them wrong. In the old system, people were where they belong, because they played many games, now people get a 500 SR boost. People are mispalced in the beta, the placements aren’t working in the beta. I’m not talking about the old system.

15

Yes, but it should sort itself out in a few games according to you instead of the “months” a reset would take. So this is really for the best.

16

It’s still a problem, just because a hard reset would be even worse doesn’t make it not a problem.

17

Realistically the problem is that this was a soft reset and the tanks you are talking about likely deserve to be higher but the old system held them in place. So maybe this is the solution and not the problem. If the acclimate to the new rank, boom, more tanks at higher ranks. If not, it sorts itself out in a few games. Like, other than being perfect, I am not sure what you expected out the this change.

18

A hard reset would be nice, but only if they changed the MMR/SR system (code). The issue with ranking in this game is that the system is too dumb to place you in an objective range with high precision. The system only sees stats and comparative context in other raw stats. It’s circular reasoning of stats, some of which are useless in determining skill. Think about it this way…the system that judges POTG is probably the same system that places people in their ranks after placement. If that’s the system judging where we belong, than doing a hard reset would not solve anything, but only make things worst, but you could argue any reset would just make things worst, and the truth is placements are pointless with an algorithm that can’t actually judge your skill in complete context. They keep placements as a distraction from this fact, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I just try not to fall after placements by playing stat padding heroes, and then actually play to win in ways that don’t show up in the stat sheet all the time after i get placed, because at that point it’s just about wins and losses.

The placement system doesn’t need any games to place you, as it already uses plenty of your games’ history to make prejudgments about you. Placements are an illusion in this system. The system doesn’t plan on disrupting it’s bell curve, or else it would have you play against all type of ranks during placements. It only wishes to justify it’s biases in rigged competition during placements. The system was always built to stagnate like cement. The more history you have, the lower your SR gain (to a point). The system is only as intelligent as it’s mental construct of what it deems the reality it sees in how good people are. If you go and erase the memory and destroy it’s construct based on the memory, the system becomes even dumber, like if you erased a huge portion of a person’s memory, it’s usually not a good thing, but little things the brain removes all the time. Guess what??? Although I love role que, I also realize that role que is the ultimate step in crystalization of the construct that the algorithm sees. It’s much easier to rise and fall with one SR #, than 3. I will climb much slower unless I play only 1 role. If I like to play all roles, it will be hard for me to climb, but it will be easier for the system to manage my stats across separate roles, so it gains more context in 3 SRs than it had in 1. Call it the trinity SR system, but it’s still the one system that judges us, and has not forgotten our sins, and doesn’t forgive us of them either, but holds it against us, despite whatever rapid improvements in our gameplay we might make.

No solution really fixes the root of the issue unless the root is addressed, but let’s be real. Blizzard doesn’t have the money for some super God mode AI to really judge how good or how bad we are. We aren’t going to have some Elon Musk stuff judging us, so we just have to play with this imperfect system and just climb through the bull jive.

19

lmao no. If you deserved to rank up, you did, even in the old system. As I said, they weren’t playing well. They were feeding their brains out, not knowing what and how to do it. They got a ~500 SR boost, with not much playtime.

Yes, it does, but these games are not fun, especially for the ones misplaced. The SR system works, that doesn’t justify the placement system not working.

20

Understandable, not that I think Blizzard would do it, but what would you think of 10 placements just for people’s first placements in the new system, i. e. on first everyone has to do 10 placements for each role, but next seasons they only have to to do 5. If new players come, they also have to do 10 first.

Thank you <3