I’ve read a lot of complaints about the matchmaker and the influence of MMR.
But I think the issues is so much simpler to understand when you approach it on the surface.
As an individual player, you should fully expect your teammates to perform and share the same knowledge about the game as you do.
As is obvious, this is a combined effort and the obsession over individual performance is frustrating. Several heros require the support of their team to perform at their highest, they are inherently built like this. Not to mention, developer efforts to make your input more impactful during games I believe has largely been a failure.
The balance simply does not reflect that.
In a perfect world, you should be matched with teams that should practically end in a stalemate if the matchmakers priority is to provide you with a 50% win rate, and terms like rolling, roll, or being rolled would probably not be in the cultural zeitgeist if it weren’t so true. Stomp losses, or Rolling wins should be few and far between.
It’s very simple, if I’m Diamond 3 then everyone on my team and the enemy team should be Diamond 3. Any player who should be rated higher should perform just enough to clench a win for their team, and any player that should lose should have their team lose by a small margin. This should be how the majority of matches play out.
The current implementation of the matchmaker like many are fully aware, can very often serve players up with a complete loss or a total cake walk. That should not be the case if you’re actually at the rank you’re meant to be at, and because of this the current matchmaker, in my opinion is an utter failure
I think the games would be a lot better if everyone was ranked on their individual performance. Instead it seems the better you play the worse your team is, and you end up stuck at the same rank surrounded by idiots.
I get people have off days and that’s fine. But after 2k hours over 7 years I’m matched with people who don’t even know how to play their hero and don’t know their way around the maps.
It’s so frustrating when you seem to be the only one on your team who actually knows how to play the game. And this isn’t bronze, I’m currently p3.
So much of this game is knowledge. Having players from drastically different ranks in matches introduces a variable that most times results in a heavily weighted match.
If there’s one Plat 5 and one Dia 3 in my support line up and the enemies team, you CAN NOT expect that the diamond players will instinctively pick the critical piece to your composition.
Instead the plat player could pick kiriko but have poor suzu usage, meanwhile the enemy teams diamond support player locks kiriko and is perfect in their utility. I’m not a gambling man, but I’m willing to bet the enemy team is going to win this match up.
EDIT: Listen up Blizz, there are just WAY too many variables in this game for the match maker to be this lenient when selecting match ups.
Exactly. They either need to make the match-ups much tighter and except that queue times are going to be longer. Or move back to the open queue model and balance the heroes accordingly. Unfortunately, instead it looks like they are going to make it worse still, with the removal of rank limits across groups in season 9.
Unfortunately the current system just bases things on a roles rank, it has no clue to tell if that bronze DPS, is in the hands of a GM1 player. just the opponents in that match getting rolled and a hit on their rank. and you cant leave without being suspended or banned, so forced to suffer for the next 5+ min for it to be over, only to get them again in the next match… until this is resolved there will be no new blood to the game, as who is going to sit there match after match and take that abuse and come back for more.
My friend (Masuimi) posted a video in another thread of a guy who is supposed to be high plat/low diamond who messed up going up a lift and then tries to shoot his own team through what is clearly frozen glass.
Building a model for determining individual performance honestly shouldnt be difficult at this point given the number of games (and hence data) that the ow dev team has. Obviously this wont be the case for new characters, which is why they should keep those characters out of comp for a while post-release to gather stats. They do this, but it seems to be so people can learn the character a bit instead of getting stats. But overall, speaking as an ML engineer who uses stats all day every day, this should be doable.
This would reduce boosting, allow derankers to be identified easily, make it so smurfs rank up substantially faster, catch throwers, and even keep your teammates from losing SR if you have a bad game. Fact is, it should be possible for you to lose SR for a win or gain SR for a loss depending on your performance - you could be getting hard carried or you could be getting severely weighed down by a thrower, moron, tilted psycho, or just someone just having a trash game. It would result in waaaaaaay less toxicity towards teammates since you are only competing with yourself and their performance doesnt really matter.
But Blizz wont do this because if people only had themselves to blame for being bad then they might stop playing the game. This isnt meant to be a truly competitive experience, its meant to be an addicting one.
More weight being placed on individual performance would definitely be preferable to the current system that is entirely based around wins/losses. I think that would be a positive improvement, but i also think that some aspects of the games design lead to cascading effects. That also contributes to the frustration caused by a single player on a team not performing at the same level of their team. Another example of this is when a team doesnt play a composition that works well together or address the composition of the enemy team. Mechanically a person can be playing a Lucio at their assigned skill level , but if they are paired with a Zenyatta and a Dva , playing into a Zarya, Ana Kiriko, they are going to have a tougher time. I often feel like new players arent being taught some of the key things that promote being effective in the game. They go in maining a character and spend allot of time being rolled because they havent learned to effectively play a pool of characters or have the knowledge to identify when they are making suboptimal picks for the game they are playing. I think this is where the matchmaker fails in many cases. When the data it is basing matches on is exclusively wins/losses this leads to people with significantly different levels of experience being thrown together.
your lucio example would be better if you used mauga.
the real problem for lucio right now is mauga. Lucio can’t kill mauga and you need zen/ana to carry as support vs a mauga right now. Heck, even super, a pro, failed to carry as ana vs mauga while hitting almost every nade on the character, how the heck is a lucio supposed to make up a damage deficit to kill the mauga?
and slaughtering the healers didn’t change that. I went 1v2 vs the enemy healers, killed both, and we still lost the fight to the mauga
True, Ill be honest, I considered making him the example, but with the news of upcoming nerfs I figured he would likely not be as much of a problem soon.
In a very stale, chemically cleaned, experiment world… yes. maybe.
Sadly though you are dealing with humans, that all have different skills and approaches to solving problems. You also, again because humans, have to deal with different peaks in performance levels.
2 people of equal skill are unlikely be the same, or play the same.
Not to be a jerk, this seems subjective. The match maker is already grouping teams of wildly different ranks.
it also seems dismissive to simply say two teams of the same skill will still result in what we’re experiencing today when we have no data to support either.
When you queue in to ranked would you rather have a team of players of all the same skill level or would you rather just leave it up to chance and let the match maker make that decision for you?
That is because it doesn’t match on ranks. It uses MMR.
Because what you have now is 2 teams of similar skill according to their MMR score.
So there would be very little different.
Honestly… I’d rather queue and go against people better than me, so I can learn and be forced to step up. But instead I get similar skills and the games a little bit meh a lot of the time.
That is because it doesn’t match on ranks. It uses MMR.
A mysterious number of which the community has a poor understanding of, and as it currently stands factors in Quick Play performance.
Because what you have now is 2 teams of similar skill according to their MMR score. So there would be very little different.
Again, see first response. You’ll have to excuse me, but I can’t just take you at your word that there would be very little difference.
Honestly… I’d rather queue and go against people better than me, so I can learn and be forced to step up. But instead I get similar skills and the games a little bit meh a lot of the time.
You definitely don’t want that, you learn nothing from being stomped. If you want to get better, research the game. Hone in your gamesense. Understand match ups, positioning, cool down usage, ult management, predicting enemy ults etc. etc.
The edge you gain from that should be the determining factor in your games, not your skill and 9 other unpredictable variables.
I have little faith in my team when the match maker is taking it’s best efforts to undermine me.
if MMR is being used to match players in ranked games, who’s to say that isn’t culpable in the issues that we are currently experiencing with the matchmaker
Games are matched on MMR, and everyone in the lobby has a similar MMR. I don’t really know what more you’d need.
as an individual player, I have no way of determining an individual skill when their MMR is hidden from me. A person could be hypothetically diamond, but their MMR reflects gold or silver, or masters, or grandmasters, and that in effect is a problem for me because it’s not making it clear what the individuals skill level is. they could be masters and play like someone at a lower rank.
I 100% want that. I played scrimmed with GM and T500 players and learnt far more in those couple of months than I did in years playing the game.
I also have scrim with top 500 and grandmaster players when I would play tournaments so then since you have as well, you’d obviously know that you don’t really gain any knowledge from being stomped because you are overwhelmed by the enemy team. You don’t learn how to gain an advantage on a matchup because you’re making mistakes on a multitude of levels. When you look back on your ranked games and you look at those moments where you’re just like why did I lose that? It looked like we were going to win. it’s those small, incremental decisions that you make during the fight that is the determining factor.
That is a you problem. Don’t blame the match maker.
it’s not a me problem because I didn’t design the matchmaker. It’s just inherently that way.
Isnt it a bit counter productive though to have two different values that supposedly represent our skill level? Currently rank is nothing but cosmetic and is used to encourage players to grind away to achieve a better cosmetic score that doesnt actually translate to what their actual skill level is believed to be. If MMR is the value that actually has practical application in determining what kind of matches you have and the level of competition the game feels you are ready for, why is that not displayed and act as the only value we look at? It seems like the current system of two separate stats acts as a smoke screen to cover for the teams inability to provide balanced games. Since we dont have access to our actual MMR we have no way of knowing whether we are in lopsided games beyond our own experience playing. We are basically left to trust that the system is working as intended since all we see are the cosmetic rank value of the match. It becomes tougher and tougher to believe that when the quality of the matches dont reflect it.
I think people often fail to realize that you can get to just about all but the highest by being incompetent at one of the 3 major skillsets—mechanics, positioning, and game sense.
If your aim is good enough, you can have enough impact to win games despite your poor positioning/game sense. Imagine a Widow who frontlines but can kill 2 before dying every time. Similarly, someone with bad aim can make up for it with positioning. Someone can be good or bad in certain matchups (e.g. Junkrat one trick into Pharah) and you are just observing them in a game they underperform.
But in the long run, people end up in the same rank as you because they win/lose the same number of games as you do. The matchmaker is not perfect but it gets you in the ballpark. In the absence of manipulating it (e.g. boosting), you end up pretty close to where you belong. GM players aren’t in silver. Gold players aren’t in masters. Etc.
I think the skill spread is too loose, but I think to expect everyone to be the same rank is unrealistic. The queue times for certain ranks would take too long. Comps also affect skill expression, so a D2 may not perform up to par without the proper comp and teamwork. A system like this really only makes sense for 5 stacks that often play together. Sometimes you get rolled until your team figures out its synergy. None of the teams with solo queuers are warmed up,
We’ve no reason to believe that MMR isn’t as broken and buggy as the rest of the game, or that the developers don’t throw untested code and changes live into the matchmaking algorithm. The game as been getting progressively worse ever since OW2 was launched, I don’t think a single season has actually made improvements. To the point now where the game is significantly worse than it was at launch, which was already a big downgrade to OW1.