Quickplay MMR impacts your placement matches?

Competitive Discussion
1

Lost ~300 SR in placement matches, despite my winrate being higher this season than last two. Down to gold from Plat last few seasons.

I appreciate a lot goes into calculating SR, but I’ve not been this low since they stopped artificially lowering your SR to force you to play games throughout the season.

I don’t feel I’ve gotten worse - my winrate this season is comfortably higher than last two, although admittedly that was with / against gold players instead of exclusively Plat and Diamond. But despite several of them being massive stomps in our favour with me carrying ridiculously, my SR is embarrassingly low.

I have only two theories to explain this:
A. I’ve been teaming up with some silver friends in QP / end of last season’s Comp and this has pulled my MMR down to the point where the Placement matches aren’t sufficient to climb it back up.

B. I just didn’t get to go WM enough for my scoped accuracy / critical rating to boost the SR and boost me out of gold.

Either way, I’m pretty disappointed that it feels like I’m being punished this season for reasons other than my performance.

2

Quick play MMR does not affect competitive MMR.

“Long story short, you have a separate matchmaking rating for Competitive Play than you do for other modes.” – Jeff Kaplan
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20760837867#post-3

Please give me:

Season 8, complete record: ?W-?L-?D
Season 8 ending: ???

Season 9, placements record: ?W - ?L - ?D
Season 9 start: ???

to try to better understand what is going on.

3

QP MMR only matters the first time you play comp. It’s used as a reference point. Once you play comp it only uses you comp mmr from the last season.

So basically no, QP MMR doesn’t affect anything.

4

It actually doesn’t even impact first placements. You are always put on a 2500 avg game your first placement.

1 Like
5

Technically, you can get to Level 25 without ever having played a game of Quick Play

6

This MM is worst MM i have seen, it specially provide unfair matches, my first 10 games was very poor but MM placed me in team that can win 5 vs 6 and give me 1.9k. This is very big rating i expect something about 1-500. After that MM starts place me versus 6 ppl stacks we just staying on respaund

rating means nothing don’t know why blizzard do this , just ±20 rating much better system

7

Stats:
Season 6 - W4 / L6: 2638
Season 7 - W6 / L4: 2602
Season 8 - W2 / D1 / L7: 2630 placement; End of season was W4/D1/L10: 2546

This season I won my first match; lost the next two; and the rests were all wins with one more loss somewhere in the mix for W7/L3: 2281.

The weird thing is, looking at my Career Profile, my stats for the season are significantly better across the board that in those previous seasons.
Which is understandable, given I was playing against weaker opponents.
But without it giving me stronger opponents even after stomping in my last series of wins, it appears as if it was low-balling my placement matches by the time it gave me a rank.

Addendum: Just played one additional match, another comfortable win with my performance being very solid. SR 2299 for us vs 2297 for enemy team - all gold rankss both team. New SR is 2305 with L3/W8.

So that’s an average of 100SR down per loss; with a specific increase of 24SR for an easy win which is part of a winning streak featuring several stomps and me popping off.

8

Thanks for the data. My theory is that if you don’t play very many games in a season (or maybe don’t play for a while), your account goes into soft reset mode. That is, your MMR stays the same for your first match back, but it goes up and down very dramatically, and looks something like this:

2546 W
2700 L
2350 L
2100 W
2150 W
2200 W
2230 W
2220 L
2240 W
2260 W
2281

If your losses are front loaded, it really hurts because movements are so high in the beginning. Slight variations in performance likely have an exaggerated effect as well.

“There’s a couple of other things at work. One is the matchmaker’s confidence in what your MMR should be. Play a lot of games, it gets more certain. Don’t play Overwatch for a while, it gets less certain. The more certain the matchmaker is about your MMR, the less your MMR will change in either direction based on a win or loss.” – Scott Mercer https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20749737390#post-3

9

Yeah, that’s sort of what I anticipated - however I don’t play much Comp at all for it to become that confident - especially with some of these stomps being very one sided and my stats being comparably higher due to this.

Several games where we’re face-rolling the enemy and my stats are getting padded should make the match-maker go “Hmmm, I may have been over-hasty”; not “Hmmm, yeah, face-rolling the opposition half-a-dozen games in a row seems about right.”

If anything, this makes me think that Kaplan’s statement about Comp having a different queue is either misleading - or more likely outdated for the new season - as I’ve played way more QP recently (and again, with Silvers with consistently subpar results because of that), which would in theory give the match-maker a lot of confidence.