They have been quiet for long enough for people to forget.
Can i just have my rank on my banner pls 
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Well, if you lost all of them and you drop down, it should then put you in a game against lower stat players where you can much easier carry or beat those players to make greater differences and you eventually climb back up. So, you’d probably just break even after a loss streak and come back and win the games. I mean, it’s not bringing everyone down or the rank population would be a pyramid shape rather than a bell curve.
This is good overall. I’m pleased with the shorter sets, role-based matchmaking, and confirmation that trying to “farm stats” instead of doing what it takes to win is not a good approach to climbing. Too many things are impossible to quantify.
I think the last point to address should be the way top500 works currently compared to in OW1 - In OW1 once you reached a certain level, you needed to win MORE than you lost to stay even. Currently, top100, top10 etc. seem to be more about playtime than performance.
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Pretty good info and communication. I don’t wanna sound like a Blizzard stan, but outright stating that your MMR changes depending on how recently you played certainly puts some things to rest, as well as stating there are no winner or loser ques and it’s just you (for the most part) getting as evenly matched as possible… with some good or bad luck thrown in, because hey… 10 people… 10 non-static elements… it just makes sense.
Hopefully with the coming adjustments it’ll be even more even, however all that means is people seeing more of this 50/50 thing they think is some kind of conspiracy…
Specifically on the mmr adjustment after not having played for a while, it makes sense. You’re not going to play at the exact same quality level you did previously. I don’t think it’s there (at least not solely) to “rope you back in”.
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You didnt read that very well.
It is telling you to win the match
Dont focus on things OTHER THAN TRYING TO WIN THE MATCH
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You’ve gone into detail about the ranking system and matchmaking, but could you address how you made Competitive (and the game in general) so much less rewarding to play?
I probably played an average of 50 hours per season since like season 10, and now it feels like any reason I had to play and increase my rank has been taken away.
I can’t look back on my journey from silver to diamond anymore, because my stats before season 32 have all been removed.
There are no permanent rewards like sprays or icons, either just for being there or reaching top 500. Last season I reached top 500 for the first time, and you’d think that would be a huge and exciting moment. But I couldn’t find any reason to care, because in a few months it’d be like it never happened. Other people still have their shiny animated sprays to show off, but all I get is a temporary title that gets me flamed when I don’t perform well.
I can’t even see my own rank while I’m playing, which doesn’t seem like a big deal, but yet another thing to obfuscate any progress I might be making.
And obviously profile level and borders are gone, which doesn’t just affect competitive but was an overarching goal which meant every single thing you did on the game at least counted towards something.
Did you think removing all that stuff would make me more thankful for battlepass progress, because it really didn’t. It’s just killed any drive I might’ve had to play. You can fix the ranks and the matchmaking, you could even make them perfect, but what reason would I have for interacting with them at all?
I really just want to understand the thinking, since it seems like an active effort was made to remove anything the player might get enjoyment out of which wasn’t tied to the battlepass.
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Its basically saying they want you to focus on winning rather than trying to bloat your stats. A DPS say having a high damage stat can be from shooting the tank the entire game and not having impactful contribution. They want you to focus on winning so you don’t focus on trash damage or healing or whatever to bloat and get higher mmr despite doing more or less nothing.
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“”“Understanding what causes one-sided matches and how to reduce their frequency has become a major area of focus for our team.”""
5v5 (1 less tank and tank gigabuffs) causes one-sided matches, I don’t know if OW team will admit it though.
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I mean, if it only applied to one team and not both I’d agree but
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. For our matchmaker, we’re implementing role delta changes that will match similarly ranked players within each role.
Just remove this system. Bring back the old one where we see updates every game. It literally doesn’t matter anyways what the rank is so no one feels bad now that we all know it’s just a whatever number.
we’re implementing some updates to the matchmaker that try to place pairs of players with similar MMR on each role on either team. This means that opposing tanks should be more similarly matched than before and likewise for the other respective roles.
“We didn’t care about match quality and only about queue times”
Also yeah. It will “try” to match people. But if the queue times arent good enough I doubt this match maker is going to try very hard.
This is some communication which is at least better than the complete silence we’ve seen for a while but it honestly still feels like it is completely out of touch with the community at large.
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Sounds good. Especially the Seaso 4 bit.
7 to 5 wins and 20 to 15 losses honestly won’t make me the least bit more incentivised to play ranked. I guess you guys have your research and know what you’re doing, but it’s definitely not for me. Similar to the balancing philosophy of a slow drip of small minor adjustments when sometimes it feels like a hammer is needed!!
I will say at least it’s nice to hear rank decay will eventually be going at start of seasons and MM is hopefully going to be improved - that’s cool, but I’m just not sure I’ll be there playing it with the way ranks update.
Also, maybe I’m just being a little too impatient but I just feel like things need to move quicker in this live service model… Season 4 is still about 3 months away and I’m assuming these complaints have been known about since season 1. But I’m not a game dev so easy to sit here and complain I guess! At least some things are moving in the right direction.
The increased communication lately is a positive too. Hopefully it keeps up.
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- based on your internal hidden matchmaking rating (mmr).
Did they explain how the MMR is calculated?
Did they explain why they’re not using a simple SR?
Did they acknowledge people hate having their actual skill not shown, and not explained, and not based on winning?
Are they using any other kind of tech in the match (not matchmaking related), like aim-assist/resist, hitbox adjustment, i/o throttling to artificially force closer results?
I guess another deaf dumb and blind response from Keller.
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A lot of what they’re saying is good (though a bit obvious and never should have happened in the first place) but this is one of the parts that worries me.
I’m sure they have some stats somewhere showing that people get to 5-6 wins then go on a losing streak and stop playing. But the 5-6wins isn’t the important part here, people stop playing because they don’t want to see their rank drop - even though we know it actually already has.
It’s still a psychological block. ‘I need two more wins to see my rank drop because I’m 5-10 and then ANOTHER 7 wins to get back to where I was, welp, why bother’. This will still happen at 3-8 going for 5 wins or whatever it is.
Seagull called the removal of wins needed but than the team would find out players were still not be happy reverting back to OW1.
A full reset should had happen at launch. No one is going to care about going against OWL. They should push back to their rank rather quickly. This just seems like an excuse not to do it.
How would we benefit from a reset? Players would actually play more with those who are truly in their rank. Yes, until you get out of gold atleast I found that to be ELO issue. You will still be matched with carried people and the clueless. Once I hit platinum, I was in and out of there and stayed in diamond. Never tried to push further.
What bugs me is the justification of carrying. Well so and so teamed up and attempted to play togther. They already have a snippet to stop some pairing up. Maybe this system should record rank with so and so. Meaning include a clan and solo MMR.
Folks they are trying to do what they can not to scrap or revert the system.
If they’re too transparent it will be abysed
While I’d prefer this, I think the primary idea is that it reduces que times… probably not the best idea, but if they’re going to work on this system maybe it will be refined in the next couple of seasons.
We can hate it all we want, but like I said with the first comment, the vast majority of people would abuse the system if it was too transparent.
I sincerely doubt it, but I would love if people who suggest this is true could actually provide physical evidence. There must be some. People who suspect it must be prepared to collect that evidence so we can take it with an overwhelming confidence to Blizzard and get an official statement on it. They’re not going to do that themselves, unfortunately.
These are great changes. The big things that needed to change:
- No more seasonal rank decay.
- The previously mentioned matching role MMR rather than team average MMR.
- More frequent rank updates.
These are great. As well as another attempt at explaining to folks how MMR functions and why teams are sometimes unevenly matched (mostly lower player populations at the ends of the skill curve and more difficulty estimating the skills of lower ranked players).
There’s a bit of a threshold response here so while not everyone will understand what is being communicated, some will better understand after this communication than they did before it.
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Q: Why do I sometimes have a large win or loss streak?
A: Sometimes, if a player goes on a very long win/loss streak, it’s indicative that their internal rating is not well-calibrated. The best way to calibrate your rank is to continue playing competitively. The more data we have, the closer you’ll get to a rank that best represents your skill. However, there are times when players are going to get lucky with their win streaks or the opposite with loss streaks.We’re investigating this and will be testing some changes to see if we can reduce this kind of streaking in the future.
But what about when matches constantly alternate between win and lose streaks? Wouldn’t this indicate that the matchmaker is not accurately placing the player? The only way I can explain this is that the matchmaker is consistently pulling a higher MMR player from a less impactful role/hero down to balance out a lower MMR game until their MMR gets low enough to be put back in normal games.
You have a 1500 Tank and the enemy has a 3000 Tank? Don’t worry, this 3000 Mercy player will make up the difference. Oh the Mercy lost 15 games in a row and dropped down to 1500? Well, we don’t need her anymore so she can be put back in normal games until she’s back up to 3000 again (rinse and repeat).
No idea if this is actually what happens, but it sure feels like it.
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