Which is why I was saying
I was just suggesting something they COULD do about it.
Still more worried about the EASILY detectable accounts doing smurfing which Blizzard just leaves to do their business.
This is of course the only sane mentality to hold if you’d like to improve at the game and climb. It is my own mentality. It does not in any way mean that one is not able to dislike the effect smurfing has on match quality. As someone who doesn’t really care if I ever pass or even reach my peak of low diamond I don’t really care if smurfs make it easier or harder for me to climb. I feel similarly about throwers. What they do is degrade the quality of matches. And that’s enough reason for Blizzard to make concerted effort at minimizing their impact. I play this game for fun and landslides make the game less fun from either side.
Probably no more than your own mistakes and your own performance in each game. I myself, have played in mostly Gold Rank, I believe I belong here right now and I review my own games a lot. I make a lot of mistakes that cost matches. I am working to improve and I have over the last three years, but really so has everyone else the game has evolved so much.
I once fell to bronze briefly due to tilt in season 3, but quickly rebounded in season 4 all the way to low platinum. I proved there that I did not belong in Bronze because I had the experience, game sense, and mechanical skills to exploit the Bronze and Silver ranks and climb back. I struggle to reach higher in Platinum ranks, because I am being outplayed by others (and I love facing against stronger opponents) and I just don’t have enough experience at higher ranks to survive.
Also, I have had significant lifestyle changes which impacted my time playing Overwatch. I am attending college, studying Graphic Design, and I have a full time job as a graphic designer. I used to be able to play Overwatch as much as eight hours a night, 7 days a week. Now its about 8 to 12 hours a week overall and most of it is not even spent in Competitive.
In conclusion, I will remind that while “uncontrollable factors” like the “perception” of smurfs seem like they are holding a player back, it still comes down to the player perfecting their skill and improving against stronger opponents regardless if those opponents are ranked correctly or not.
The issue isn’t about climbing. I don’t care where I rank. I just want fun, competitive games against people of my skill level. That is being robbed from me by smurfs. I’ve been just as angry after wins as I have after losses because the match just was not fun due to a smurf.
I don’t know how many ways I can explain to you that it is NOT ABOUT RANK. It is about MATCH EXPERIENCE. Watching my team get farmed by a lvl 5 Widow or Genji all match and not being able to leave spawn isn’t fun.
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This is like missing the point 101.
Who cares if you get a shiny emblem that means some 5 million players are still better than you? OW is a casual game. A lot of people play this game to have a good time. As you’ve already admitted you don’t like games where it feels your own impact has less influence on the game (where your efforts are mostly irrelevant to the outcome). This is completely normal and very common. The factors we are discussing make these scenarios more likely and sap enjoyment out of the game. This has nothing to do with “wahh I can’t climb cause ‘factor x that similarly effects everyone who plays’ and everything to do with ‘factor x leads to worse less enjoyable games for all participants’.
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This is a commonplace suggestion, and its not a bad one, however I feel it would discourage new players from continuing to invest time into the game and become long term players.
This is already being done (see my quoted post from Jeff Kaplan above) or check out Kawummba’s guide here:
This comes down to they specifically separate the MMR from Quick Play and Competitive Modes. This is mostly to benefit quick queue times and a more casual experience in Quick Play.
This is already being done to some extent. One of the factors in your MMR adjustement after each competitive match is comparing the opponent’s MMRs to that of your own to determine the strength of schedule. If going into the match they had superior MMR to that of your own, you will lose less if you lose and gain more if you win.
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I agree, but it does nothing for the enjoyment of people playing with / against smurfs.
They don’t stop you climbing (they CAN delay it at end of season bronze, because it fills up with them, so your skill doesn’t really get a look in for those games)
It is the obvious accounts which Blizzard just ignores which is doing the real damage down there.
I get it, there are limited dev resources, but, this has been a big problem, for a long time. Both my kids stopped playing because of it.
Hell, I almost stopped playing because of it.
Of the two that’s are being done currently I mean what I said. Do it more aggressively. Top 100 players have no reason to play gold-plat initially or place diamond after ten games. Not if they’re trying on their main heroes. Strengthen the adjustment for truly extreme cases and you will make this period shorter.
Your personal stats also have strong influence on your SR gain and loss. If your team effectively gets spawn camped nobody on either team is gonna have close to average stats and so they actually lose more/gain less normally. I saw a stream where a guy in mid plat got dominated by Kajabi I believe and lost 29SR. And ultimately the match maker is trying to create balanced games. If dafran is on a team of plats vs a team of plats the current matchmaker thinks that’s a balanced team (that’s why it was made a match to begin with). So you don’t get much of a grace period.
This is all stuff they’d have to think about though. Rather than a basic team elo system that’s existed for like close to two decades (that all already account for account uncertainty, streaks and often personal performance). They’ve literally done the bare minimum here for a team based comp game. Given their resources I can’t help but find it disappointing.
Again this would come to statistics and factors that only Blizzard has access to and determine. If it needed to be done, I am sure it would have been done already.
You refer to performance-based adjustments. First these only apply for ranks Platinum and lower, and secondly, it is said to be an extremely minor factor in skill rating adjustments. Without knowing the overall factors such as strength of schedule, frequency of play from the user (the less an account plays has more fluctating adjustments), and where they stand on the competitive ladder (the higher you are the less you gain), there is not enough evidence to suggest this was the only factor in the larger SR loss.
I’m not saying it was the only factor. I’m saying clearly the loss in SR wasn’t mitigated by the fact that they lost to a top 100 player spawn camping them.
The argument that “if they should have done something they would have done something” is the most bootlicker argument I’ve ever heard in my life. You could say it to defend literally any action taken by a figure of authority or someone with more access to data. By that logic OW’s balance should be close to perfect instead of being more rigid and mirrored at a competitive level than any other esport I’ve ever seen. Clearly they would never make a balance decision that shouldn’t be made as they have much more detailed information than us.
You also haven’t addressed the strongest and most generally applicable and provable argument which is that smurfing degrades match making quality. When your scape goat of “you just blame it for being stuck” was disproven and it was just pointed out the objective effect it has on games you were very quick to drop the subject.
Anyways I can’t take anyone who uses “if it would make sense to do they’d certainly have done it” as an unironic argument seriously. Keep seeing Road to Bronze parties in LFG every day and arguing they have better internal data and are surely doing whatever makes the most sense to do. Can’t risk that level 3 after all. Peace
what are u on? THis game is about domination and competition. So if u are not dominate so take rules of compete.
To be strictly accurate, it was proven, at a time when there were strong win/loss streak bonuses and strong PBSR. Both of those mechanics, which serve as catch-up to correctly place a misplaced player, are much weaker today.
I suppose that Blizzard does keep metrics on how quickly new accounts find a stable SR on average, but I strongly suspect that the time it took to adjust the pro player in that story under older, stronger systems is substantially less than the time it takes to place a mid-masters player (who will be subject to more variance do to less overwhelming skill) to stabilize under today’s weaker compensation systems.
Let me rephrase that. I know that it takes longer. It took Dafran 24 games just to get to the bottom of Grandmaster on his soldier run, in which he had not only his own top-tier skills but also insane levels of cooperation that no normal player could expect (forming comps around him, yielding soldier to him, pocket mercies, etc) from most of teams after the first hour because so many of them knew that it was him.
That’s about as ideal as you could hope for, and yet, he was still hundreds of SR away from matching his actual rank. Extrapolating that he would keep gaining at the same rate, he still had over a dozen more games to go to achieve something approaching parity with his main.
That gives us an updated estimate of roughly 36 games to achieve SR parity today in circumstances roughly comparable to the original anecdote. (Granted, we can’t see the internal MMR, but we have been repeatedly assured that SR is a close analog for it.)
The spirit of the quote may still be intact … i.e., they don’t consider smurfing a problem because alt accounts are placed ‘quickly’, but the details are misleading and ‘quickly’ is more than twice the number of matches that it was then.
TL;DR: The 15 matches quote is misleading and outdated.
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I’ve held Gold rank consistently since about Season 4, aside from a couple of tilts/bad loss streaks that I was very quickly able to recover.
I’m not going to question whether this is where I should be, it’s not a question. Maybe I could get to low Plat, I’ve been close before, if I concerned myself with some proper reading up and tutorials, and just raw hours of practice and focus on one thing. But, I know from experienced, I am outclassed by a lot, by anyone about 2800 upwards.
Climbing is not what this is about.
It’s about match quality. It’s about playing a punchbag for someone for their own personal amusement. It’s about people cheating the system. Nobody wants to be on the wrong end of those things, and Blizzards efforts toward cleaning them up; to call them inadequate would be a great kindness.
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Yes we will do something! We will make money from them!
Only thing you can do is to report them if they are ‘‘throwing’’ but just like earlier said having alt accounts is not against tos.
Thats what i’ve done (reported those whos throwing or those who use deranking title in lfg system) the past few years if players are throwing, it should be so clear by now when people have done so many threads about it.
I report them when they are obviously smurfing.
It is not throwing, if I feel like playing another Hero. In theory, it would be possible to maintain a lower rating without being punished. That wouldn’t really fit into the “Throwing” category.
However, it should be possible to detect such practices automatically and allow Smurfs to play predominantly against other Smurfs.
Maybe they’re even doing that already?
Sooo… You kinda just admit that youre abusing the report system?
Not at all, they have broken TOS. They had to, to be in this state. It HAS to be either account sharing, which is against TOS, selling of accounts, which is against TOS, or they had to throw down, which is ALSO against TOS.
Either way, they get a report.
No abuse of the report system involved.
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Well, I thought I’ve found an easy solution - last time there were smurfs I drank some beer!
Well the beer was enjoyable, but in the end the number of smurfs had doubled… 