Questions on SR

I am just below Gold in rank, currently sitting at 1968 for my SR. I had been on a losing streak of about 6 games, losing 20 or 30 SR each time, even though my individual performance was pretty good. Then I won a game as Reinhardt, getting 2 gold and 1 bronze medals, 5 earthshatter kills, and blocking over 22,000 damage.

But I only gained 11 SR.

Why is this? It seems so incredibly unfair to me. If I lose sometimes up to 3 times as much SR as I gain, how am I ever supposed to climb without an absurdly high win rate? (especially when the system itself strives to make everyone’s win rate 50%)

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Your SR changes are modified by comparing your statistics to other players of your hero, sr, and map. If you underperform, you will gain less. Medals don’t matter, as they compare you to your teammates. See more at
How Competitive Skill Rating Works (Season 15) → performance modifier.

This has a number of negative side effects, including punishing players who flex to needed heroes (that they are bad at) for the good of the team.

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If the performance modifier is supposed to be a small factor, then why is it apparently affecting me so much? What even does it take into account? If it’s not medals, then is it eliminations? That hardly seems fair for tanks. In fact, the whole performance modifier in general hardly seems fair after a certain point. I like the idea that was proposed there: that after a certain number of games, at which point the SR and MMR have been normalized for the player in question, the performance modifier is removed.

I don’t think this happens in solo queue, perhaps in placements (but that would be invisible anyway) normally there isn’t so much variance.

It is likely that one of the following is true:

  • You were grouped up
  • You left a match early sometime before
  • You didn’t recall your SR from your previous game correctly
  • You swapped characters multiple times doing little each swap?

From what I understand in a normal balanced solo queue match, you can’t go much below a 20 SR gain or a 30 SR loss. (Happy to be corrected if someone knows better)

You said you had just broken a losing streak, so in addition to performance modifier you also probably had a losing streak penalty still in effect.

As for performance based SR, it compares you to the average performance to others at your rank, on that same hero. Medals compare you to your team, regardless of hero or role. I don’t think anybody knows exactly which stats are considered, but it’s likely that it considers most of the per-ten-minute metrics, damage/10, elims/10, heals/10, deaths/10, etc.

Since it’s compared only against others on the same hero, it’s a reasonably fair metric, but you can perform ‘poorly’ for reasons outside of your control while still doing everything right from a play-to-win point of view. The obvious one is if you are support and your team is stomping… there sometimes simply isn’t much damage to heal. Worse yet, if the enemy is playing timidly, as a DPS you may not have much opportunity to damage… unless you overextend into them, where you might pad your stats, but you also might throw.

For overall good SR gains, it’s probably best to not consider performance based SR in your decisions. You’ll probably only hurt your win rate and overall SR gain for the sake of padding a few points here and there, unless of course you’re playing at a rank far below your actual skill. In that case playing greedy will help you rank up to your appropriate rank much faster. If you try to play greedy and fail then you’ll only hurt yourself.

11 SR is very low and unusual. Average is 24. My guess is you were playing blue rectangle man, while more aggression (but not to the point of feeding) is what is necessary to get good SR as a tank. Another different type of bad reinhardt play (that still gets medals) is hitting playing YOLOrein (hitting shift on cooldown, die, repeat). Without watching you play, I can only guess. However, when I play tank my gains tend to be low too, so I may be the wrong person to ask.

Blizzard hasn’t published what actually effects performance modifiers, so it is difficult to be sure, especially for tanks where good vs bad performance is difficult to quantify.

If you are losing between 20-30 and gained 11 you are not performing very well. SR is affected by many things too, its not that simple as gold elims or damage blocked. Nobody except blizz knows exactly. Try to record your games and watch them back or find a coach.