Would chess or tennis players tolerate an opaque unaccountable bureaucracy that decided how much a person ascended or descended the ranking upon wins or losses? I think not. I think they’d want to know precisely why they are being matched and ranked as they are, and that if you did to them what is being done to us then players would strike or form new associations that did actually respect the player’s need to understand why he’s ranked as he is.
How is this opaque matchmaker even a thing? It looks like gross negligence by Blizzard, a blatant corruption of electronic sports. The ranking/matchmaking should be a deterministic algorithm based on publicly known information, otherwise only a fool would trust it (sadly, there are many that do). Ergo the constant posts about “Matchmaker won’t let me rank up” or “Can we have a season SR reset?” and so on.
Everyone who chirps “you’re at the rank you deserve” and so on – how would you know? The only people who could possibly know are the ones who have access to the information of how the system works, i.e. Blizzard employees.
The need for transparency and accountability by Blizzard should be something everyone can agree on. Open up the algorithms and the data, and don’t be so arrogant as to think you have designed the best possible matchmaking system. Found your system on transparency and comprehensibility, invite third parties to critique your design, and refine it so it’s actually the best system it can be.
Until Blizzard becomes transparent and accountable, there’s no reason whatsoever to trust anything they say about their algorithms; the default attitude should be cynicism and distrust, to assume that whatever they’re doing it’s only to get more cash in their pockets and not to make the game the best it can be, because there’s simply no reason a legitimate electronic sport would hide this key information.
The more matches I win, the higher up the ranks I go
The less I die, the higher my chance of winning
The more I use cover the less I die
The more often I am with my team, the less I die because I am not the only one being targeted and it is easier to focus fire enemies
Sometimes there is a stronger player or combination on the enemy team and the more effort I focus in disrupting it the more chance I will win
The more often I use the high ground, the easier I find it to shoot my enemies below me
The more often I support the main tank, the more often I win
Now all the points I list above could be trash and maybe they have no impact whatsoever on the rank I deserve, but there definitely appears to be a correlation between them and me going up in rank.
So:
Maybe I don’t?
But it seems many of the people lower rank than me don’t do the above or do it very well, and those above me do it better and no doubt more so in all honesty the MM doesn’t really bother me.
I find swings of up to ~400 SR while playing in about the same way. I find myself on both sides of a ridiculous differential in skill, getting stomped or stomping. I find myself matched with teammates of wildly different skills. And as I said, it’s foolish to mindlessly trust what Blizzard is doing with their algorithms, per the lack of transparency.
Sure, in the crude terms you state, the higher you rank the better you are. But that’s a silly point and didn’t even need stating. Nobody is arguing that a newbie can accidentally end up as the #1 ranked OW player or that the best OW player can accidentally wind up with 700SR. Sure, there are rough correlations of level with skill. But clearly there is a huge degree of error in Blizzard’s calculations.
I disagree, you seemed to have a misconception that there was no way to know that someone was at the rank they deserve:
I was simply indicating my findings.
Now I agree transparency with regards to the system could be interesting, but it would only be a mild curiosity as I don’t honestly believe it is holding me or anyone else back.
Whereas:
Indicates you have been correctly placed.
The reason it indicates that is:
A higher skilled player can ‘smurf’ in this environment or rise up through the ranks regardless.
A lesser skilled player would keep dropping.
So where does that leave you? The harsh reality is that you don’t have enough impact in your games to continue climbing
It isn’t a trust issue in the algorithm nor with the skills of your teammates.
Now taking all of that into consideration, yes I think some people are unhappy with the matchmaker because they want to redirect the blame of where they are ranked onto external factors rather than themselves. But that is about the limit of it.
I don’t necessarily ‘trust’ the MM to do a good job, but it does a ‘good enough’ job that seems to produce results that indicate player’s relative skills.
It’s fascinating to watch you dodge the points. Are you being paid to do this, or are you just bored? E.g.:
Oh poor me, I wanted to climb but I just can’t, what horror and awful sadness… /s
And you say this when my actual remark was regarding the wild swings, the mismatched teammates, and the stomping (whether by me or to me). If the algorithm worked then my teammates would typically be about as good or bad as me, the other team would be likewise, and my SR would be relatively stable.
Go back, read more carefully, and reply to points I actually made.
If I’m having no impact then I should consistently keep getting ranked lower (not “random”), until I do have an impact. I.e. players of roughly equal skill should be matched up.
The fact that you’re declaring me “not enough impact” is making my point – why was I matched up with players of so much higher skill than me such that I had no impact? O.o
Agreed, note the use of the term ‘enough’ as opposed to no. You are correct in your assumption that if you were having no impact you should get ranked lower, when you have sufficient impact you will go higher, when you sit in the middle a whole lot of other factors come into play.
I agree it might be frustrating but that is the reality of the situation.
All things being equal, then even the smallest thing outside of that would likely have a significant impact on the outcome of the match due to the number of variables involved. Any one of your 5 team-mates playing tired from work, or drunk, may well result in a steam roll for the enemy team and vice versa, let alone things that may be affecting you at the time. It can be hard to know just how much of an impact your frustrations at the matchmaker may be impacting your matches subconsciously.
Anything could be going on with any of those 12 players in your match at any time and the closer you are to your true rank, the less impact you will have on the outcome of that match. If you were dying all the time you’d go down, if you were on fire you’d go up.
Each and every one of those things can have a small impact and unless you are the play maker or the potato you will just have to ride those ebbs and flows.
I agree the Overwatch end-game sucks and you reach the end-game pretty quick because after that it is personal improvement. Not loot drops, or a higher level and unfortunately not finding some clannies to play with since grouping up is discouraged in Overwatch.
I agree with some of the things you say, I just don’t think it is the match makers fault. It is a core issue with the game that pretty much after your initial placements are done that’s pretty much it unless you are ready to own your performance.
You have no idea whether this is true since it’s completely hidden from view, and nothing you said addresses the core of my post which is about the imperative of having a transparent system, again, partly so these silly debates that you apparently love to have don’t have to happen anymore.
Chess and tennis aren’t team sports/competitions so it’s easier to rank players because everything is 1v1. How do you rank the starting Right Guard on an American football team? Is the running back a stud or is he a product of a solid o-line, a smart offensive coordinator and a stone wall defense that makes it possible to succeed with a run first, ball control offense?
How many players and coaches have looked great while in New England? How many of look absolutely pedestrian after leaving New England?
Grading individuals in a team competition is a lot harder than grading individuals in an individual competition. Just look at how well draft prospects do when going from college to pros in team sports. It’s hard to accurately rank players even when it is being done by people that rank players for a living.
Is the OW matchmaker perfect? No. How accurate is it? I have no idea (though my console and PC accounts are both in Gold). But I doubt any of the OWL players would be hard stuck in Gold or Plat…
If Blizz was 100% transparent about how the ranking worked then many (most?) people would just focus on gaming the system. Better OW players would be ranked lower than players that were better at gaming the system.
It’s not security through obscurity, it’s teaching to the test. Players won’t rank up because they are getting better at the game, they will rank up because they know what individual stats to focus on even if it means losing the game in the process.
EDIT: The best and worst part about OW is how team-centric it is.
So a great player on a bad team gets ranked lower than a bad player on a great team? You can’t rank individual players based solely/primarily on whether or not their team wins or loses the game.
The problem that Blizz is running into is creating an accurate algorithm that can understand the subjective context of the game. Does the Rein keep dying because of his poor play or because poor play by the healers and/or DPS? If Team A’s healer does 11k of healing, and Team B’s does 9k of healing who should get ranked higher? What if Team A’s healer healed 20% of team damage and Team B’s healed 30% of team damage? If Doomfist keeps wrecking your back line should your healers get a ranking hit for dying too much or should your DPS/off tank get a ranking hit for not peeling?
Win/lose just shows which team won, it doesn’t reflect individual player performance.
If you think Blizzard’s AI can actually determine this I have a bridge to sell you. It’s extremely ironic that you raise the issue of “gaming the system” while also wanting childlike algorithms guessing at which player was truly best.
Don’t match people of disparate skills up and you don’t have this problem. It’s a team game – you all win, you should all get the credit. Why motivate anti-team behavior by creating hidden anti-team metrics?
But even if we are going to be cursed with these childish pipe dreams, they at least need to be transparent about how they work.
because most players who say that have played against a wide range of players in other game modes or pubs or seen VOD reviews. The game play from tier to tier is night and day clear for anyone who knows what to look for in game.
I can guess a person’s SR with in two team fights or so if they are +over mine, ++over mine or well under. I think I’ve been wrong only a handful of times.
