No really, How are we supposed to play the game like this?

Right, but I was responding to someone who said you should gain or lose SR based on skill regardless of whether you win or lose.

The problem is that not all players can play all characters equally well, and also, it doesn’t factor in that smurfs regularly throw matches and thus would lower their ā€˜skill ranking’ just as much as wins and losses.

Basically, so long as getting another new account is not a big deal, and there being no real tier or reward system or reason to stay highly ranked, all that’s left is a game where the high level players are bored and have nothing to do, so they will naturally start to form their own types of ā€˜fun’. You can watch this type of psychology play out in basically any kind of human ingroup, people aren’t good at being bored.

See I don’t think it CAN just be this, because the person right above you was talking about how frequently you’ll see uneven matches in the same game. I’ve noticed this too - and it’s not like the high level accounts that are stomping us are paired up in a group, so there’s no reason the game couldn’t just… Distribute them equally to both teams.

It’s like dodgeball - if you have five kids that are great at the game, five kids that are mediocre, and five kids that are bad, then you probably shouldn’t make a team with all five of the great kids on one team. That would be inherently unfair.

We as players expect the matchmaker to put those good kids equally so that it’s at least a chance that the game itself will be fair, but it very clearly does not do that - that’s why you see matches where one team has ridiculously high level accounts and the other team is mostly brand new accounts and it’s a total smashfest. Because the matchmaker clearly doesn’t have the proper parameters in place to do this basic kind of distribution sorting - after all, all of these players are playing at the same time. They are there, ready to be sorted, so it’s not a quantity issue, it’s a sorting issue.

How do we know this? It doesn’t show anymore.

I’m 99% sure it’s a quantity issue; I’ve always played a lot of games off peak where MM turns to mush and after 2/2/2 everything felt like that.

There’s a line between grouped members - I mean I haven’t played for a few weeks because the game is trash now, but did they change it so you can’t see that anymore? Because I haven’t heard about them making it invisible or anything. Or, I saw people grouped up - like a two stack - when this happened, so contextually if you see SOME people grouped, you would obviously see the other ones that are grouped. But I guess I could have missed that in an update.

If it were just a quantity issue and not the game simply not knowing how to sort people, then even if there were only 12 players in the ENTIRE overwatch game, and it put all the good ones on one team, and all the bad ones on the other - that would inherently mean that yes, the matchmaker does not actually take your skill into account, or, not enough to make a difference when giving you matches.

I mean for every match you have 12 players. They are right there. So it makes no sense to say that the matchmaker IS matching ā€˜for skill’ when it regularly very clearly doesn’t with the 12 players it has for that specific match - does that make sense? I feel like I’m not putting what I want to express into words very well today, but the pollen count is like five kabillion and my head feels like a balloon that’s gonna float away at any second so, sorry about that.

Thats a possibility. Other possibility is that the game has much more players on PC. Enough to make the number of them smurfing quite high even taking into account the paywall.

It’s arcade and customs only now.

Hard to say. With massive variance the game could appear perfectly balanced but if one of the team’s best player has a hero pool and playstyle that counters the other team’s best player it could be an absolute bloodbath of a roflstomp.

That’s the worst part honestly, it devolves into a game of solo carrying potatoes against someone else doing the same.

What we’re specifically talking about is the frequency of very high level or houred accounts being put with lower level accounts though - which yes, can be different from skill, but also it’s a good indicator of general game knowledge etc.

For instance, I’m regularly getting matches where I have newbies asking me where healthpacks are who clearly have never played the game before. The account they are being matched with, mine, has well over a thousand hours on it. And to add even more problems, we’re getting put up against a team with FIVE accounts that have over 2,000 hours on them. Do you see a problem there? Because I sure do.

If the game ended up NOT being a stomp, I’d assume that hours don’t mean that much. But that’s not what happens. The match turns out to be an absolute stomp to the point where my team can’t even leave spawn because no one even knows what they’re doing, and yet the enemy is a perfectly formulated Rein Zarya Mercy Soldier deathmachine.

Why not give us half of those high hour accounts? Why not put half the newbies on the enemy team? The matchmaker clearly isn’t doing it’s job, because we have a clear discrepancy in MANY matches - this isn’t a fluke, it’s something that’s happening to the majority of my (and other players) matches.

What mode is this?

Like this:

suggests a stack. I rarely see proper tank synergy anywhere outside GM and stacks.

Pre 2/2/2 this only happened at weird hours. Now it happens all the time. And I know the game tries to put lower levels in their own matches; my alt had such long queue times because of this that I never bothered leveling it beyond 12 or so.

I largely play arcade quickplay and have tried to play 2/2/2 quickplay but find it much more difficult to get along with.

With 2/2/2 standard quickplay, the discrepancy between players seems to be much more likely. As in, I notice there’s always a ā€˜chunk’ of the 2/2/2 that is really low level and not very good. It could be anything, your healers, damage, tanks, but you’re probably not going to have one good ā€˜chunk’ and it makes each game feel like a struggle.

Over in arcade quickplay it’s a lot more varied, there’s a 25% ish chance that you’ll get a good matchup. The rest of the time there’s a lot of high levels on your or the enemy team that make the game an absolute snooze - and I mean that as someone who hates games where it’s too easy for me, because then I just end up doing nothing all game and I feel like I’m just waiting for the match to end because our Genji is just off killing the entire enemy team at spawn and we’re sitting on point watching the clouds roll by, y’know? I just want to play the game.

This was always an issue for that level of play; It’s been a common gripe since the beginning of time for GM players to get low masters and diamonds in their games every so often.

It’s not every game by any stretch, but enough to have an effect on the overall quality of games.

Legitimate question, if you ask me.

I’m an actual new player, not a smurf, picked the game up for something new during quarantine. I like it. It’s a creative blend of gameplay genres all mashed together into something that feels wonderful when it works… but I can’t stomach this game for more than an hour or two.

MM is utterly atrocious. I get thrashed just about every game, doesn’t matter which mode, QP, Comp, doesn’t matter. On rare occasions I’m fortunate enough to be on the team doing the thrashing, but I can’t say that’s fun. I want to play DPS, but when I do, I wait for 10-15 minutes and then about 30% of the time get kicked due to server errors or people who leave the game. When I play healer, I get yelled at because… i’m still learning how to play healer. When I play tank it’s kinda fun but I’d prefer to play DPS. 17 DPS heroes and we’re supposed to wait 15 minutes to play, only to get kicked because someone left? Sorry, but get effing real. It’s a cool game with a big money league and all, but no. Not worth my time.

On top of that the community is the most toxic i’ve experienced anywhere in gaming and I play League, DOTA.

When I lose in comp, I lose say, 20 points, but then when I win, I gain back like, 18. It’s downright Sisyphean, like a cruel and unusual joke.

I’m still dabbling in overwatch because I love the artstyle and the gameplay, but 9 out of 10 Overwatch indicators tell me that I’m not actually welcome in this game.

Oh, and I like how the feedback forum has a swear filter. God forbid the devs have to see how heinous the language is that people use against each other in this game.

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What are you talking about? New players and smurfs mean more money.

The game is doing great.

Wait, you actually want to enjoy the game?

This is the input they need to hear. Why would people like you stay if you can’t just enjoy the game?

This is one of those games where it’s worth it to find 2 or 3 friends to group up with, because playing Overwatch as a solo queue player is frustrating. A lot of players don’t communicate via voice, but they still expect players to play their way, typically typing their frustrations after the fact.

Unlike LoL or DOTA2 where certain lanes can be played half-the-time alone by a solo queue player, Overwatch relies on team synergy between heroes to work during the whole game. Only heroes with really good escapes like Tracer, Genjie can go lone wolf, and even then they rely a lot on main tank initiation prior to these DPS heroes dashing/blinking in.

I hope you find a group of friends to play regularly with, and like me you’ll have a really great time in this game. Good luck!

Yep that is also a big factor

Old thread but it’s still relevant, and I’m surprised that it doesn’t actually get talked about that much, if you compare it to posts about hero balance or whatever.

I’m only about to get my 3rd star while being a Bronze border (I have about 350 hours in this game, as far as I can remember, but I play a lot of custom games.) and it seems very unfair to see that you have a fresh, level 5 in your match when the other team (or your team) has 3 gold border players. It doesn’t seem healthy for a new player to consistently get stomped, or stomp the other team when the game is either a white wash or you get destroyed. I’ve been in Silver before, I distinctly remember that I got placed against Diamond rank a number of times before I climbed out of it.

Is there really not enough people playing anymore for the game to match more evenly? Or is there something inherently wrong with the way that the matchmaking works? Not to mention that unlike in other multiplayer games, (take CoD Team Deathmatch) having a 5v6 is such a disadvantage for your team especially when you rely on wins to go up SR, and not individual player skill. The second someone leaves the chances of you losing go up exponentially, not like it has much to do with my point but I just typed it out for some reason.

Granted, I play in the Oceanic server on console, so there isn’t many people in my region as others. I’m not sure what it’s like for the Oceanic region on PC though. (It’s very hard to find any arcade mode other than Quick Play Classic without a 30+ minute queue time in the daytime, if you need some insight.)

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It just seems to me that they broke the match maker when they implimented 2-2-2. Sure, the playerbase is a bit smaller but it shouldn’t be this levels of small. I think the reason QPC and OQ games can feel a bit more balanced because players aren’t concentrated into roles.

Think about it, since 2-2-2 players are now unevenly distributed with most in DPS, support second and tank third. Even with a lot of people playing, this creates massive q times. So, they try and fix the q times by making matching sr for tanks lower and generally putting quantity over quality. MM will find a fast game first, rather than a balanced one.

This is why the games feels terrible to play. I, for example, as a diamond player are cosntantly put up against GM/t500 players and I just can’t compete. It just isn’t fun. Then you have new players thrown into an environment they don’t belong.

How can you expect new players to stick around when they are just met with toxicity and bad matchmaking? It’s not fun to feel out of your depth in a new game.