Overwatch 2 was highly anticipated sequel to the immensely popular first installment, is no exception. While various factors contribute to a player’s skill level, I firmly believe that unlocking access to additional ranks in Overwatch 2 RANKS should be tied to the length of the account age. My reasons behind this perspective and explore how it could positively impact the gaming experience.
Building a Foundation of Experience:
Question: How does account age correlate with a player’s experience?
Answer: Account age serves as a testament to a player’s longevity and commitment to the game. The longer someone has been actively playing, the more likely they are to have encountered diverse in-game situations, strategies, and metas. This experience is invaluable in competitive play.
Encouraging Long-Term Engagement:
Question: Why is long-term engagement important for the health of the game?
Answer: Games thrive on an engaged player base. By incentivizing long-term commitment through account age, Overwatch 2 can maintain a dedicated community, fostering a sense of loyalty among players. This not only benefits the game’s longevity but also ensures a consistent and experienced player pool in competitive modes.
Mitigating the Impact of Smurfing:
Question: How does tying ranks to account age help address the issue of smurfing?
Answer: Smurfing, or creating secondary accounts to play at lower skill levels, can disrupt the balance of competitive matches. By linking additional ranks to account age, Overwatch 2 can deter smurfing, as players will need to invest time into a single account to unlock higher ranks. This promotes fair competition and discourages the creation of alternate accounts solely for the purpose of exploiting lower-level matches.
Promoting Skill Growth Over Time:
Question: How does account age reflect a player’s skill growth?
Answer: Overwatch is a dynamic game, with constant updates, balance changes, and evolving metas. Account age reflects a player’s ability to adapt and grow with the game over time. By tying rank progression to account age, Overwatch 2 encourages players to continuously develop their skills and stay relevant in the ever-changing landscape of the game.
linking rank progression in Overwatch 2 to account age offers a holistic approach to competitive gaming. It recognizes and rewards players for their long-term commitment, helps maintain a dedicated player base, addresses issues like smurfing, and promotes a culture of continuous skill development. While individual skilll remains crucial, integrating account age as a factor in rank progression could contribute to a more balanced and rewarding competitive experience in Overwatch 2.
I’d normally agree, but 99% of the playerbase has approximately 50% winrate, and it is by design, so it’s not like Bronze players are losing every game while GMs have nothing but wins.
Yes, kind of, but the problem is that you don’t know your skill peers since many old accounts have low SR due to seasons of inactivity and decay + a soft reset during the transition between OW 1 and 2, but they are still matched with skilled players that are around the same mmr, which leads to them being the bottom rank and still being stuck there due to constantly being matched with the top quarter of players.
If the majority of players are able to “climb” several divisions by just making an alt, then the system might be the problem.
The only real solution is to play a few hundred games like I did and you eventually climb to where your MMR thinks you belong even with 50% win rate, but most players aren’t that active.
What if I’m for example a mercy one trick with a 6 years old account and placed in masters, then my team doesn’t fit mercy or she’s taken and I have to play a hero I have ever touched ?
A player at 6 months shouldn’t have access to GM rank. But a player that’s been player for 7 years should have well access into Gm rank if their skill is up to par
if Blizzard wants to embolden community relations they should do so with updates to the base game, not by revamping matchmaking to toss in all the OG’s together regardless of proficiency.
by relegating matchmaking by account age rather than skill you’re just creating an entirely different matchmaking issue, genuine new players will play with smurfs all the same and high level players will be inadvertently “smurfing” on their main accounts with the people that have been metal rank for the past half decade.
you are severely overestimating the average OW player, people generally belong in their ranks and artificially inflating their ranking on the preconception that long time players are also good players is a faulty one.
what if that player belongs at that rank despite their account age? is policy-mandated smurfing now a thing because their accounts aren’t old enough to get out of the kiddy pool?
fwiw i think your idea is great for deterring smurfing but it’s at the cost of the total annihilation of competitive ranked as we know it, the idea that long time players are automatically qualified as “good” is a tad bit optimistic as well.
After reading all of that, you didn’t actually explain what you want to change at all. I’m guessing it’s something in the ball park of rank=time played, but that’s just silly.
What if someone is a top1% Val player, comes to ow where they are easily diamond maybe master off the bat? Do we just bar them to bronze lobbies? No way.
Obviously if someone is bad yet have played a long time you wouldn’t put them into t500/pro lobbies either.
Experience alone does not merit an increase in rank. Everyone is playing the same game that you are at varied rates, and someone’s experience and longevity in a game is only loosely correlated to a higher skill level as you need to be intrinsically interested in improving in the first place. This means that if you are set on being better, then you will seek out reasons to be better and begin watching your personal performance more carefully on a macro and micro level. Because of that, incorporating experience into ranks at a disproportionate and undeserving rate will worsen matchmaking.
Players will flounder in gold for years even with 500+ matches played in a season; some players just want to play the game in a competitive setting and don’t care about the climb. Obviously they care about winning, but their personal skill level is accurately gold. In most of my recent poor matches in what should be GM lobbies with underperforming players, those players have a diamond or lower title within their account that is still visible in history - which is an effect of boosting people into tiers they don’t belong in.
For whatever reason the folks behind the competitive ladder thought it was appropriate to give everyone a massive MMR/SR boost in Season 2 and 3 after their stupid OW1 to OW2 reset nuked matchmaking.
Now let’s observe the opposite effect. What happens when I play on one of my duo accounts with significantly less play time? I’m GM1 dps, but do you think it’d be fair for me to be against Diamond 2 - Master 3 players? What about a 2600 (~Plat3) in a silver lobby? Incorporating account experience into a game makes matchmaking worse because the players in it will possess wildly different skill ranges, and unless you’re two tiers of skill ahead you cannot reliably ‘carry’ a match. E.g a diamond player can reliably carry a gold lobby for wins, but cannot do so in platinum because their proficiencies are too close. This is a good rule of thumb between silver and master where the bell curve is matched.
I understand the idea, but experience does not always correlate to lower or higher merit.