They make more money off of the shop than people actually playing. It’s F2P so tons of brainwashed andy’s and cheaters who will always be around. Add on that for those who refuse to see just how bad this actually is they will deny it all to the death and keep playing. Then there’s those like me who have been playing for forever and though we hate it right now deep down we still love what it was and what it could be. So no matter how long the break or even if we uninstall we will always be back. There is no doubt though that since the release of “OW2” the player base has dropped dramatically.
2 Likes
The problem very much is the game itself. I think it can be attributed to multiple factors(it’s nearly every gameplay element) which will skew everyone’s perception of what a fair match should look like.
I think something a lot of people don’t accept around here is that this is a PVP game and magically all at the same time, the game is both balanced but total bs in the same millisecond for everyone who plays the game. However, I do think it is wildly odd that there will be games where my team is like 2-40 and the enemy is just 40-1 across the board, I don’t think that is a losers/winners queue issue though.
Ok so you are a Blizz defender. That’s cool. You lack critical thinking, logic, and reasoning so I’m not going to respond to you anymore nor should anyone else because you seriously won’t see what is actually going on. OP did the time and effort to come up with hard statistics based off his games and you say “No cuz Blizz said it no happen…”. Sorry but good bye and good luck. May the power of the Loser’s Que be with you.
5 Likes
The problem here is, you have a bunch of people saying “it is forcing the 50/50 games, and after I win one, it forces me to lose one”
And then, we get people saying “It is forcing streaks, I keep winning 5 and then losing 5”
And others saying, “I had a loss of 13 games, there has to be a loses queue”
NOTE: all of these people are complaining about stuff which is ABSOLUTELY not the same thing as each other.
That isn’t being a blizz defender, that is looking at the complaints and being able to show they are full of it.
Ok? so which is it? Which one is the matchmaker forcing, because these people are all complaining that it is forcing completely different behavour…
Apply some critical thinking yourself. These people are all claiming some conspiracy which are all unable to happen at the same time.
People who quit playing do not buy skins at the shop. The entire model behind free-to-play is that you want as many people playing the game as possible. And the way you get that is to have close matches. The worst possible outcome for player engagement is loss streaks. If you were going to skew matchmaking the thing you would absolutely do is try to prevent loss streaks. That’s priority one.
That’s what the data suggests. And it’s what players complain about. (Win streaks also decrease engagement, but not as much as loss streaks).
So loser’s and winner’s queue literally decrease revenue. I think that’s the biggest hurdle people who believe in winner’s and loser’s queue have to overcome in order to have a plausible theory: why would the company implement a system that the data suggests is most likely to decrease their revenue?
It’s not odd, if you remember, that whole 50/50 thing doesn’t mean strict “win-loss” pattern.
Using same analogy with OP, flipping coin does have 50% chance for either side…on infinite number of attempts.
Your excuse for it is too simplistic. If the match making system isn’t good enough to give you a 50/50 win rate short term, meaning something resembling a pattern like win then lose, win then lose, win win then lose, win, then lose lose, then the match making system isn’t good enough to match you up consistently with people of higher or lower skill than you.
-
The match making system is likely not all that accurate. Meaning even if Blizzard coded it to give you a 50/50 win/lose win/lose win/lose type of experience that the match maker would lack the actual accuracy to pull it off.
-
The match maker will never be able to compensate for how two players might have synergy by random happen stance. Sometimes dynamic duos arise out of pure coincidence. Not because both players are 90% playing at 180%, but because sometimes two 70% players compliment each other and play at 180% despite being 140% worth separate.
-
Match maker can’t account for when someone gets bored and swaps to a class they’re terrible at.
TL:DR Either the matchmaking algorithm is so good it can calculate you an accurate win/lose win/lose win/lose experience due to team mates and opponents, or it’s so inaccurate that it can’t prevent a win/lose win/lose win/lose experience unless:
The matchmaker is set to do extremes in an attempt to control out comes, AKA it puts a 40% player into matches with 90% players to guarantee a loss and then tries to neutralize that by putting the 40% player into a match full of 10% players.
This would also explain why so many games are wipes now days. If you go to the extremes to guarantee a 50/50 win rate, those wins and losses are going to be landslides as opposed to close matches where your 50/50 desired outcome is not a guarantee.
If you want to bring Mike Tyson out of retirement and guarantee him a 50/50 win rate you don’t match old man Tyson up against old man Holyfield one match, then old man Lennox Louis the next, then old man Buster Douglas the next. Even though Tyson might have a 50/50 chance against any one of those opponents, a 50/50 win percentage is not guaranteed. He could potentially end up 0 and 3.
But if you put Mike Tyson up against Pee Wee Herman he’ll slaughter and get a guaranteed win, then put him up against one of the current heavy weights in their prime that will destroy him he gets the lose, then put him up against Bill Nye he’ll destroy the fake science guy, then put him in the ring with another heavy weight in their prime and get him destroyed and you’ve got a guaranteed win rate of 50/50.
2 Likes
It is odd from the perspective that it simply shouldn’t be happening but one thing I didn’t account for is that maybe it is happening because of 5v5 and not because the game is intentionally putting GMs in my game(it has done this but not in a few days now so maybe they did fix something lol?).
I guess the reason it is so baffling is because 5v5 will have more engagements than 6v6, thus the enemy team has 40-1 across the board. But I don’t know, I can clearly tell when someone is just too good and I’ve been matched into a bad game.
The thing is the matchmaker is using 1 player to force the win or lose, it is universal. In open Q it is always a non flexing dps. They always do it and might swap to a tank in the last 10 seconds. It happens so often I suspect it is some kind of bot because they do not join chat.
I can say 100% if you could filter out players by being in or opting out of team chat matchmaking would improve massively. When I used the group function I had the best matches on my old account consistently
1 Like
You are wasting your breath and time on this guy. He doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand it.
Various forms of engagement based systems are implemented in a variety of spaces from ads, to social media, to video games, etc. Which is nothing new, we’ve known about this for a long time.
And even in those specific areas like the one we’re talking about now, engagement based matchmaking, numerous companies are working on and improving said systems at all times. You can’t point to one system and say “THAT’S what engagement based matchmaking is” because it’s ever-changing and specific to a company’s needs.
All I’m saying is based on the facts, evidence and lived experiences of current Overwatch players. It looks like OW is currently employing a system that preys on how humans experience gambling. In this type of system, lose streaks doesn’t hinder engagement. In fact, just like gambling, it actually promotes engagement for a lot of people.
1 Like
The reason the games are wipes is that 5v5 is more unstable… basically your point 2 and 3 is WAY more amplified now.
And people are seeing these wipes all the time, and then saying it is bad matchmaking.
BUT… that isn’t the matchmaker, that is just 5v5. You make the game more sensitive to stuff like this, and people will then blame the matchmaker for it.
And the matchmaker was never great to begin with (see your point 1).
You don’t have the mental capacity to understand that he is literally arguing the same thing I am.
There isn’t a winners or loses queue.
2 Likes
I want a system that rates players based on their ability to flex and to filter any player who will not join chat, only mains 2 dps.
This is where a clan system would be good.
1 Like
It’s actually way more accurate than you think it is, though. When Yeatle recently did his Ramattra only unranked to GM he was playing against top 500 players while he was still in Plat. It took the matchmaker only a handful of matches to determine that Yeatle couldn’t be placed in a fair lobby unless he were playing against top 500 players. That is, the matchmaker discovered that Yeatle was well within the top percentile of players in just a few matches.
That’s honestly quite impressive. And that’s with Yeatle not playing at his best either. He was deliberately handicapping himself in two ways- no comms, and one-tricking Ramattra.
And we can learn a few things from this. The first is that the matchmaker is actually good at assessing player skill. The second is that the matchmaker is striving for fair matches. If the matchmaker wanted to force Yeatle to win it would not have been giving him top 500 opponents. If, however, the matchmaker wanted to force Yeatle to lose it would have given him much worse teammates.
As it happened, however, Yeatle ended up playing (quite quickly after starting his new account) in the same lobbies he played in on his main account- lobbies where he had top 500 teammates and top 500 opponents, fair lobbies.
Actually, an addendum to this: the devs have been quite transparent that it is more difficult to make fair matches at the lower ranks than it is at the higher ranks. But why is that? And Yeatle gives us a good indication here as well: lower skilled players do not play with anything like the consistency Yeatle does. While the matchmaker can quite quickly assess Yeatle’s skill and build lobbies for him, a Bronze player or a Silver player will not perform consistently across various maps and teamp comps, etc. So while the matchmaker can build lobbies for a certain baseline performance, it cannot possibly build accurate lobbies when various players in that lobby are performing (for whatever reason) much better or much worse than their baseline performance. And that deviation from the baseline performance happens much more in lower ranked lobbies than in higher ranked lobbies.
2 Likes
agree.
I would like 7v7 with rebalanced heroes.
1 Like
The problem is people saying “I don’t feel like I have enough impact in my games” so they move to 5v5 where they do have more impact, but so does everyone else 
Moving to 7v7 will give more stable games, but with people complaining that they have less impact…
You can’t have both, and people were complaining about both in 6v6 already.
1 Like
No denying that. If you pull 10 random gladiators from history and throw them into a game of team death match, you have a certain % out come that it’ll be a landslide victory for one team or the other. If you pull 20 the odds of a landslide win gets smaller, 30 even smaller, 40 of course smaller and so on and so forth.
However, doesn’t that mean the less people you have on a team the more you need “slick tricks” to encourage, if not force a 50/50 win ratio?
Uneven number of players brings extra instability. As that odd one out is wildcard, that will either win game or ruin everything.
You still end up 50/50 eventually. (globally you always have it…) - the issue is how stompy the games feel on the way there.
Eventually you get to your rank, and will bounce around a 50% win rate. (for the majority of the mid ranks anyway).
Maybe, I’ve not really thought about the dynamics of it, but certainly not having each side divide by 3 nicely, and having to make one role a LOT stronger than the others because of it doesn’t help 
1 Like