Overwatch 2 Developer Blog: Explaining matchmaker goals and plans, part 2

Overwatch 2 Developer Blog: Explaining matchmaker goals and plans, part 2

We’re back for part 2 of our matchmaker series to talk about matchmaker in competitive and future plans!

View Full Article

28 Likes

“In Overwatch 2, your MMR adjustment after every match is not impacted by your performance in each match (regardless of your skill tier). This is for a few reasons. We don’t want players to be focused on doing things other than trying to focus on the objectives and win the match.”

So…Don’t try to win? huh?

32 Likes

Well, another Matchmaking Blog Post, and again no mention about how the root cause of all this is “Not enough Support players”.

You’re going to have to tell people about that eventually, before you start buffing the Support Role.


That said, good frequent posting of blog posts relative to the last one we got on the cadence of blog posts.

7 Likes

Wow, part 2 finally appears! Looking forward to what it says.

1 Like

For competitive play in Season 3, we’ll reduce the number of wins between competitive updates from 7 to 5 wins or 20 to 15 losses.

problem’s all solved guys

Starting with Season 4, we’re planning to remove seasonal competitive rank resets and all current and past seasonal rank decay.

why wait?

45 Likes

We’re investigating this and will be testing some changes to see if we can reduce this kind of streaking in the future.

Short of “hey buddy, we noticed you lost 15 games in a row tonight, why don’t you take a break and cool off?”, I don’t see how they could try to break streaks.

Sometimes you’re just playing out of your mind and everyone who stands in your way is prime for the slaying. Having some kind of super accelerated MMR that kills streaks is going to be jarring on both ends of the spectrum (wins and losses)–what happens if your MMR is already going light speed in one direction, you quit for the night, and your play changes just because you took a break?

Now you’re stranded in elo hell and get to enjoy being wrecked (if you overshot your true skill level) or have to slog further than normal (if you were tilted off the face of the earth).

It’s just saying “we don’t want players to do dumb/weird things that don’t specifically go towards winning the match”, like the stupid “farm X damage mitigated” challenges. Performance based MMR tends to encourage a different approach to gaming the algorithm, rather than focusing on winning.

12 Likes

Odd to me, and whack given the results so far.

1 Like

Some interesting changes here. Wish they were coming sooner. Sounds like I won’t be touching comp until season 4 when the rank decay goes away.

15 Likes

Q: So you don’t take the number of eliminations, damage dealt, healing provided, or any other scoreboard stats to adjust my MMR after each match?
A: In Overwatch 2, your MMR adjustment after every match is not impacted by your performance in each match (regardless of your skill tier).

Feel like this requires more explanation….because that sounds an awful lot like what the MMR is supposed to reflect - a recent performance indicator no?…and I even think it’s been mentioned in the past that it does take those things into consideration (comparing to other players of your rank for example)…in OW1 anyway….

18 Likes

Yay communication.

Ok Dva buffs when? :rabbit2:

4 Likes

Arg, remember when they said they would stop competitive.

Toxicity just gonna increase with this.

As history has shown time and again.

It’s more acknowledgement that the scoreboard is ultimately not as important in determining who is contributing the most. If you’re consistently contributing that will show in wins over time.

An example specific to dps:

In a lot of matches you’ll see 1 player with a huge amount of damage but no more elims than anybody else. In that situation they are, on paper, contributing more. However realistically all they’ve done is throw damage at the tank who didn’t die and feed the enemy supports ult charge. If anything they’ve hurt the team and the other dps with moderate damage but high elims and low deaths is better. However even that lacks context and can not be true.

Think of it this way. Who was more important? The player who tunnelled the tank all game and has better stats or the Widowmaker who has half of their elims and damage but won every fight by killing the supports?

Stats never have and never will tell the whole story so basing rank on them is counterproductive and would push players who don’t actually do anything useful further up the ladder.

20 Likes

No, what he’s referring to here is what happened in Heroes of the Storm when people figured out the skill-based algorithm and what it looked like. You had people who would do anything and everything not to die, for example, because it weighted your k:d ratio VERY high (so does Overwatch but not quite as much). It wanted specific things from specific heroes. So what you could have happen in Overwatch, for example, would be Mercy players allowing teammates to die so they could ressurect them for the extra ‘bump’ they would get in performance metric because it rates resses higher than straight healing (for example).

It wants people to play to win, not to maximize their stats, in other words.

6 Likes

Interesting, you can hard carry 10 matches but lose all of them and the matchmaking doesn’t care about your performance and thinks you belong in a lower skill tier.

37 Likes

still seems whack to me. So they calculate with bananas and peanuts? We knew that.

I thought that was what the MMR was there for? To determine how well you play in games and change on that performance? It’s good that they’re changing the UI and finally matching based on similar skill levels though

4 Likes

Glad they’re communicating! Two things I’m very excited for:

-No more rank resets after each season
-Tanks getting matched with equally-skilled opposing tanks

9 Likes

Doesn’t it say “other than”. Meaning they want you to mainly focus on the objective and wining? They don’t want players distracted on farming stats to bloat their performance in a game where it’s relative. Like I can get 10k shield mitigation in gold but 10k in diamond, but it’s not the same thing, right? Or a player might just play a hero that doesn’t mitigate as much as another, etc.

1 Like

Not sure what you’re talking about.

What was wrong with the system in OW1?
Why couldn’t we keep this?

15 Likes