My God I've Never Seen Such Terrible Matchmaking

[thedrizzle-1753]

@Mandalorian-11203

You can SEE this happen. When the game wants you to lose, it will FORCE you to lose.

no it doesnt…

See detailed explanation of the system

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/how-competitive-skill-rating-works-season-9/14009?u=thedrizzle-1753

@Kaawumba-1133

Forced loss streaks

There is an old and persistent conspiracy theory that Blizzard’s algorithms force players to have a 50% win rate by nefarious means (if a player is doing well, very poor players are put on his team to make him lose, often for many games in a row). This has been contradicted by Blizzard (7, 46), is contradicted by people’s ability to climb (13), and would be a horrible and difficult-to-implement design. The truth is much simpler. If a player wins more than he loses, his SR/MMR goes up. As it rises, he is placed against stronger opponents (and with stronger allies), which increases the chance that he will lose (7). Once in equilibrium, the average person he faces (and is allied with) is at his skill level, and the only way to go up is to become a better player. The win/loss patterns and streaks are fully consistent (in the mathematical sense) with the system as Blizzard describes it, and are not consistent with a system in which Blizzard forces wins and losses (34).

Blizzar’s debunk of forced winrate:

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20753625906#post-13

Scott Mercer, Principal Designer of Overwatch

We’re always trying to put you in fair matches that we think you have a 50% chance to win, and do it quickly so you’re playing Overwatch instead of staring at a queue timer. We never intentionally seek to put you in an unfair one.

I’ve seen comments like “I just won three games in a row, so the matchmaker put me in a bad stomp to get back to a 50% win rate”. It doesn’t do anything like that at all. It just keeps on trying to find fair matches. If you do win more than you lose, your SR will slowly go up. As that happens it’ll also put you up stronger opponents that match your new SR. That’s not so you lose, it’s to keep your matches fair.

There’s one other thing to remember, though. The results of a match that the matchmaker thought was perfectly fair don’t always result in a match that is hard fought every meter of the payload and you win by just holding them off from reaching the final checkpoint at 0:00 time remaining. Matches with teams of equal skill result in 3-0 stomps more than you think. Maybe an early fight snowballed out of control due to staggered spawns, maybe a player decided he was going to try to pickup a new hero that match, or perhaps your’s cat decided to play with your keyboard right before you used that Graviton Surge and it wildly missed its mark. We’re all human, and we don’t perform at the perfectly same level all the time. It’s one of the reasons competitive games are so much fun to play and watch.