Been observing this game more lately, trying to figure out just what it is that makes it the most frustrating experience in the history of gaming.
I think on major problem is…
1 Bad Player = Loss. (for the most part)
The game has taken away any carry potential. And the matchmaker works way too hard to do, well, whatever the heck it’s trying to do.
It’s to the point where you can see what will be a win or loss in the first push of the game. Every single time i have a player who sits in spawn for 30 seconds before choosing a hero, it’s a loss. Nearly every single time we have a true new player, it’s a loss.
What happens is, Overwatch becomes a game of “whoever has the worst player loses.” Or so it seems to me.
How do you fix that though?
Make it less team dependent? How? Tone down all abilities so actual skill is what wins?
Fix the SR system so it doesn’t matter much, win or lose, better players actually get more SR than literal throwers?
Chang the matchmaking so newer players start at the bottom?
I mean, we add these new players as friends, and watch them end up at about 1400. Why were they in our games in the first place, is what i wonder? Tons of them. You see them go through and shrug it off, we’re insane enough to add them as friends (or even if you avoid them you can check profiles later). and yeah… it’s worse than you might think. Calling 2350 “average” these days is a joke imo. New, pretty good players are probably 1400 and should start there.
I think 222 queue times, role handcuffs, inability to flex/solve win conditions, and old/dead game just did it in for most people. More burner accounts entering the mix every day of the week. People have just given up. No reset, no point.
I also find I’ve been paired up with fewer and fewer smurfs/carries on my own team. I’m looking out for them, but they’re just never there. It’s mostly on me to win the match, every time.
Like is my mmr/ksr just so bloated for my sr, that I’m basically the designated carry/smurf? The cheaters and smurfstacks are never on my team, I’m 9/10 always against them (when they’re on their way up). Sometimes I’ll see them on their way down, however.
Nah bro it’s because sr is a thing people care about it too much making a loss 10x more frustrating it’s in every competitive game that’s what keeps the grind going SR
You win a match through value added. i.e. you’re solving their smurfs or rounding out your throwers. Because of this you don’t mindlessly pad stats. Your pbsr is mild because account is old/stuck/anchored.
Net gain, +27sr.
Meanwhile you beat smurfs, who had beaten other smurfs, etc etc…you basically wintrade their mmr. Now you’ve shot up like 300mmr for that one lousy win. Another manipulation that happens is one of the smurfs wins a bunch but vs. you they just leave, dumping their accumulated mmr onto you/your team.
Recall you haven’t even changed SR much.
It’s lowpop, so matchmaker:
Tries to kapsack a fair match at your current elo, bringing in oddball burner accounts with huge sr/mmr mismatch.
You win streak a little, and start accumulating mmr at a much faster rate than sr. Eventually the ksr (knapsack rating) is just too much, and you lose. You’re not 3-4 tiers out of rank, just maybe 1-2, so you don’t reach escape velocity (your signal doesn’t exceed the backpressure/noise thresdholds).
So now you’re now spent, tilted, etc…and the matchmaker keeps asking too much of you. Until you just stop caring, slack off, and reverse your try. You lose a couple naturally. Meanwhile, a leaver or two undoes your gains, and your mmr finally drops back to somewhere near your SR.
That’s the process. Same trash every night for 4-years straight without a single season change or reset. Unfun, uncompetitive, and layoff-worthy.
This is a case where the GAME itself beat the players. A game where people seem to have more fun NOT trying, but screwing around on alts, throwing, and trolling. To me, that means the GAME is the problem. It should be more rewarding to try.
I feel in OW, you’re just kinda… THERE. You’re just there, at the mercy of everything around you. If you do good, the game adjusts for the next match. If you do bad, for some reason the game also adjusts for the next match. That’s the frustration. You have to become a pro overnight just to rank up, and there’s not much difference you can make in games any more.
At launch, you could take a point 3v1. Now, the game added so many heroes and counters to every little thing. Maybe it comes down to having too many counters? Before, if the enemy didn’t counter you, it was going to be much easier. Felt like more direct counters, and a game of chess. Now, good luck trying to do anything at all without like 3 abilities shutting you down.
I’m not a pro, and this is just the view of someone in low gold. But i think it reflects the feelings of a LOT of players.
The game is absolutely the problem. More specifically, the ladder grind experience, and it’s designers. No good systems designer blames the end-users. And no one with a spine turns the customer into the product. There should be full transparency, accountability, and integrity for anything labelled an esport product/service/ecosystem. Stop hiding behind rigged algs and terrible patents. If it’s not rigged, show us why, and let us improve it, publically.
Meanwhile, this. A reset would solve this. Imagine if placements were reseeded properly, and actually mattered? You would have every reason to try (or not) because you could warpzone to a fresh rank based on pbsr-weighted win/loss. Not satisfied with the result? Grind some more, or wait for next season - when reset happens again and you are again, reincentivized to display maximum skill.
Yeah i like reset each season too. I mean, it’s the way people play games. They have seasons, and resets. You don’t still play season 1 of Diablo III, or have any reason to keep playing Fortnite if they didn’t make drastic changes each season.
Maybe OW2 could think of seasons differently. Make them longer, but more varied. You’d get a full reset, but a new hero would release. Or some big changes to balance.
I think new seasons should feel like a fresh start. They tried map rotations and hero pools, but that’s not what “new season” should mean, if you ask me. It should be like “oh wow, new season in OW i might come back and see how i do!”
Instead, we know how we’re gonna do. Exact same as the last 21 seasons.
The only thing wrong with overwatch is no cell phone verification for competitive. Won’t solve smurfs but will dramatically reduce it. It is a casual player base after all. Very few people will go get multiple numbers just to Smurf.
Not bringing back the leaver system from last August and not allowing stacks to use it.
performance based Sr has to go. Servers no purpose when players Smurf way more than people actually admit. Especially on console. Not that it ever was accurate at determining a players outcome in a match. Never will be. Serves no purpose.
Last but not least. The matchmaker. the matchmaker doesn’t need to think. It just needs to place players in the same Sr together and create a match. That’s it.
No this team is projected to win.this team is projected to lose.this player is the best player in the lobby put him with the worst player against the second and third best players. To create 50 50. No. That is artificially manipulating players sr.it not only boosts players permanently in a elo they don’t belong. It holds back players to make it take longer to reach where they belong.
Yeah, but OW’s matchmaking system makes it way worse than what it should be. Especially with all of its gatekeeping and win streak killing programming. This game is rigged against casual gamers. They want you to play 12 hr streams and promote their crappy competitive system. They want players to be addicted to reaching their top rank again. OW is a pharmaceutical company that wants you to keep coming back for more.
I believe the carry potential is still there in lower elos. I can’t speak to plat and higher but brone-gold I can safely say a play maker will carry. Will they get a 6k without ulting before the enemy team notices them? Of course not but if they set the momentum and the team follows that momentum they can carry.
I don’t like the matchmaking. After seeing matches that had bronze, silver, gold, and diamond mixed together, I have no faith in the matchmaking.
Maybe I’m miss understanding coaches and streams when they talk about “win conditions” but it seems like win conditions should be visible before you hit the team fight.
If your weakest link is in the most pivotal role then yeah it’s gonna be a hard time. For example sake, I would much rather take a bronze DPS than a bronze Tank/Support in a gold match.
There is a PBSR system that technically does what you’re asking. It’s tricky tho. It can accidentally condition you to play worse.
Yeaahhh tbh I agree with this. After goofing off on enough alt/smurf accounts I have found it to be almost impossible to place below gold on new accounts. Doesn’t matter how hard you throw. Gold is the only rank I think is improperly populated. The match quality experience in gold is all over the place.
Hell, every GM has to start at 3900. If you climb back into GM or t500 clearly you deserve it. Skill is skill, it doesn’t just disappear & hardly fades away as quickly or severly as some seem to think.
People want constant new. New heros. New maps. New abilities. New this. New that. And that makes the game harder to balance. More isnt better. Season 6 to 8 was the best overwatch has ever been. And that’s gone.
Yeah I’m aware, I’m just pointing out that it’s similar in concept, having to start lower & rise back up. It still favors their mmr being higher, but aside from smurfs, the same problems you run into in gold also appear in master so by their logic some of them would drop.
I might be wrong here but I think you are talking about alt accounts. Alt accounts don’t have that big impact on the game (they do more then normal) but not by much as an alt account is within a rank or peaked 2 ranks above said rank they are playing in on that account.
Where a smurf account is based on being a good 2+ ranks lower then their “main account” which where you really do have a much bigger outcome on any game.
(This main account is seen in different lights, 1 which is the most relevant where you are at your peak SR for 2+ seasons or 2 where you have the most play time, but that can also be a alt so kinda not the right wording as a main account)
That’s fine because overwatch’s game design is not suitable for meaningful competitive play in the first place.
But i do understand that an every-season total reset would just add even more gibberish to what is already an essentially random system, so that’s undesirable. But there’s an alternative.
Low-tier resets. Every season, if you finished at 1999 or below, you get an SR reset. Start clean next season.
The reality is that most people playing in Silver and Bronze aren’t really that bad. Some are, of course, but most could pretty easily land gold, based solely on skill and output. The trouble is down here, few games are actually determined by skill or output. They’re determined by which team has a member leave first. they’re determined by which team caught the youtube memelord. They’re determined by which team has the dude who just had five games lost to youtube memelords and leavers, and is tilted beyond belief. They’re determined by which team has a guy using Starbucks wifi to play. Every match is determined on the loading screen, before any hero is selected, before the first pixel bullet is fired.
Since these games are already randomized to the max, resetting SR every season down there wouldn’t cause any real harm.