Overwatch 2 developer blog: Matchmaker and competitive deep dive, part 1

theres nothing in this text indicating that they want to change the mm its a clown fiesta and all they did is finally admitt it the game will die even faster unless they somehow rebrand it form “comp shooter” wich it isnt and never was to casual shooter

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Because with how few master players there are, you might never get a game to play. I think if there are infinite amount of players at every single skill tier, it’d be no brainer to just create matches with same tiered people. That’s literally easier to implement than this “frankenstein” mode. It’s just that queue time seems to be a higher priority to them to fulfill.

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it doesnt its simply there to conceal the fact that their skill rating is a complete clown fiesta

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There are a few things that people are oversimplifying to JuSt GiVe Me PeOPlE oF tHe SaME rANk!!!

  1. there isn’t a big enough playerbase to make matches of equal skill - this is a fantasy and needs to stop
  2. there are multiple ways of quantifying skill disparity - people seem to be ok with a non-linear system as long as it’s labeled the same (e.g gold to gold) without knowing how it impacts chances of winning. The reality is that you have no idea was a 200 sr difference means or whether a 200 sr difference in support is equal to a 200 sr difference in DPS but people universally accept it as truth.
  3. No one seems to want to discuss the fact that groups cause disparity in matchmaking. My worst matches are because I’m in groups. Would we be ok with NOT grouping with friends that aren’t in our narrow skill tier?
  4. People can be carried or held back by teammates. Without a way of checking this, we will see people misplaced for long periods of time. People seem to think that players ending up at their correct SR eventually has had nothing to do with MMR when it has had everything to do with MMR at this point. When asked why you want to change it, all the nuance is skipped and people default to “but I just want plats in my game”

Unfortunately, while these blogs are good for people that are interested in the complexity of the problem, Blizzard is expecting people to think critically about the problem but the majority of the community isn’t there yet.

Maybe it’s better if Blizzard foregoes SR entirely and let’s people see why their MMR nosedived despite them winning

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There would be more masters players, if they weren’t artificially deranked at the start of a new season purely for the sake of driving engagement and increasing playtime numbers via a forced grind.

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I’m sure all of this bad MMR is to shorten the queue times only, they could’ve reverted to a perfectly fine working rank system of OW1 at this point but the queue times and low active players count are probably so bad they’re in maintenance mode

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These are all things that I’ve said. And I’m happy to read they’re getting fixed. Starting new players in gold was always an issue, matching roles is a HUGE fix to the old MMR.

Hypothetically, let’s say something crazy happens and a Bronze ranked player really has a GM MMR. In that case, yes, that Bronze player will get matched with GM ranked players who have GM MMR. That’s the correct behavior because they really do have GM skill, assuming the system is working correctly. The rank means literally nothing to the matchmaker.

Now what would probably happen once that player wins a game is that they would get a massive boost to their rank. And if they lose their rank is basically untouched. Eventually their rank will climb to GM, even though their skill has been constant this whole time.

I know this sounds completely pointless, and it is. But lots of games do this, because they’ve done extensive research on player psychology and they determined that people are more likely to keep playing if you do this. It’s emotional manipulation. If they just showed you your real rank all the time, that rank would change very very slowly, which feels unsatisfying to many people. In the beginning of a new season, you’d have the same rank as before, and nothing in particular is driving you to play more Competitive.

I think it’s totally fair to be opposed to this system. But people should at least try to understand it.

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OW1 worked exactly the same way. It showed you an SR number that changes every game, but that was just a cosmetic layer on top of your true MMR.

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" hey our newest change to our matchmaker is to just put it in the trash bin, have fun!"

That’s basically what blizz did at the moment.
You would get better balanced matches with a wii balanceboard for christ sake.

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People keep asking why SR is a thing - it’s the hamster wheel to keep people playing. Likely MMR settles in and rarely moves much. They need ppl to keep that hamster wheel spinning so they deflate/inflate your score with SR without breaking matchmaking. They especially have to lean on it harder now because THERE IS NO OTHER REWARDS FOR PLAYING except for BP points, if you bought it.

This was true in OW1. People only notice now because they completely broke the system with new players etc. and sticking everyone in bronze/silver. Your mmr likely didn’t really move at all.

Simplicity is the key to creating good systems. Overengineering for outliers is not a smart way to go.

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QP and comp have separate MMR.

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Again with the “50% win rate” and play rates.

There’s a point where you gotta play the game yourselves and just ask yourselves if its good or not instead of relying on just data.

Data is useful, but i always feel like you put 100% of your eggs on data.

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The guy I was quoting has a misunderstanding, but I was too lazy to correct him. Remember they said that MMR is always relative? What the guy I quoted really wanted was “My (hidden) MMR is about 3.0, let matchmaker always give me 3.0 teammates”.

The problem is, the amount of players with 3.0 MMR is just not enough to warrant <5 minute queue time. It doesn’t matter if they derank at start of season. MMR doesn’t change, as the article mentioned.

So, if you are top 500, do you want to play 1 guaranteed high quality game in maybe 40 minutes, or 3 maybe low, maybe high quality games in that same time?

It’s also important to remember that our teammates are human. We don’t always perform the same from game to game or even team fight to team fight.

Something that people on forums seem completely incapable of acknowledging.

We’ve got changes coming to the game over the next few months which will dramatically reduce these disparities. We’ll try to find pairs of similarly rated players in each role when making a match. For support and damage roles, which have two slots, each player will be paired with one player on the opposite team. There will still sometimes be matches with a large range of differently skilled players, but in these cases, the two teams will be more like mirror images of each other.

Why do I get the feeling queue times are going to absolutely skyrocket?

A flat SR reset isn’t even bad it’s the fact you have to play at your old mmr at this lower rank that’s terrible. What happens if you only play one game every few days avoiding decay and the gap between your mmr/sr get even bigger every season reset? It’s kind of insane you can potentially be at diamond mmr when you finally climb back to plat from gold or something similar.

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I think this role based player matching within the game will actually be a big improvement people aren’t appreciating enough. Consider the scenario where a Gold groups with a Diamond. Maybe the matchmaker would put a Gold and Diamond on the other team too, but in different roles, which isn’t ideal. Or maybe all 8 other players would be Plat, which also isn’t the best. Maybe there are two Golds, two Diamonds, and a Plat on the enemy team, and 3 Plats on your team. Something like that is how it works today.

In the new system, the enemy team will always have roughly the same skill makeup that yours does. If your Diamond goes tank and your Gold goes Support, that’s what the other team will have too. If your teammates are all Plat, so are theirs. That’s a way better system, basically the best that a matchmaker can realistic do about your group. If a GM tank groups with a Bronze support in QP, the enemy team will also have a GM tank and Bronze support.

Now for my own speculation: perhaps the reason OW2 matchmaking has felt rocky is mainly because of tank diffs. We know that the single tank is a critical role for an OW2 team. But the current system regularly pairs mismatched tanks against each other. Maybe that usually results in a stomp in favor of the better tank’s team. Preventing that situation could improve matchmaking a lot.

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We’ve got changes coming to the game over the next few months

I don’t think the game have a few month tbh, it might not live even a month in such state

Preach!

When I’m playing support and playing my role well, dying less, using cover, healing and using my kit to the maximum, I shouldn’t be punished for their lack of being good at their role. It is impossible for supports to out heal bad decisions (DPS trickling in, tanks not using cover) or failing to play the objective (chasing people instead of getting on and sticking close enough to the robot).

What happens is supports get dragged down into the hole but don’t have the damage or stamina to make take the objective or control space to make any impact. We can ask and communicate that we need help on point but people will still do their own thing because they are chasing a play of the game or just inept.

This works as well when tanks are not being kept up by their healers or DPS isn’t getting picks. If everyone is doing bad at their roles that’s one thing. I’m okay with taking a loss when it’s clear we’re not performing. That is part of the game.

To have a lowered ranking due to a loss when the score board clearly shows you’ve out healed both healers on the enemy team is very frustrating to say the least.

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With all due respect, why do we even have ranks?

All our game modes, including Competitive, only look at MMR when forming a match. We never use your outward facing skill tier or division to form matches.

Just admited that rank has absolutely no meaning and isn’t being used at all, so why have them in the first place then? For the record, I’m not implying that we should get rid of them, but the complete opposite; if you are gonna give us a rank/tier or numeric value that’s suppose to represent our skill, then use it. Otherwise is pointless.

Either that, or get rid of ranks and show us (or everyone, no idea why you keep making everything private) our MMR.

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