is it just me or are ranks massively inflated atm? I’ve been going negative and climbing, or playing poorly/not improving, going even, and climbing fast. Its so weird!
I keep having games where I’m thinking “no way ppl are doing that… what are they doing!! how can they be so dumb!” etc. Like I’ll have a diamond ana main who is sitting on point on koth all game its like. They have gold rated positioning but they’re suddenly diamond??? What is going on…
I’ve not improved and I’m climbing easily. I’m convinced that sr is currently inflated, maybe by an entire rank division or more. Its insane
Theres either huge rank inflation OR theres a ridiculous amount of account boosting going on
It’s because of the huge influx of new players. The vast majority of the new players are Bronze or Silver. That means that all the old Bronze and Silver players get pushed up, which essentially pushes everyone on the ladder up a full rank or two. Think about it this way. If everyone who was still playing OW1 (and had played for years) is more skilled than the players who just started playing OW2, then those players have to be slotted in beneath all the old OW1 players. Which means everyone got ranked up.
The easiest way to see that this happened is just to realize that top 500 is GM1 now- and not even all GM1 players are top 500. By the end of OW1, top 500 was pretty much everyone in GM. So many new players essentially just means older players are more impressive now relative to the entire player base (which includes the new players). So if the ladder rankings are a true reflection of the relative skills of all the players in the game, older players should have ranked up a bunch with the influx of newer (less skilled) players.
Honestly, the best thing to do to make sense of all of this (and to make peace with it) is just to re-think what the ranks mean now. Top 500 is what GM used to be. mid-low GM is what Masters used to be. And so forth. Current Bronze is worse than old Bronze. But if you think about it, it’s really just more like it was when OW1 launched. KarQ was pretty open about the fact that 2016-2017 GM was the equivalent of 2020-2021 Masters. So with the launch of OW2 and the huge influx of new players it’s like the cycle is repeating itself.
What taleswapper said, also, the devs have said recently that in S1 and S2, everyone was erroneously lower than they should have been by maybe two divisions or so. That bug was fixed in S3. I too have found that myself and others have been able to reach higher ranks than before.
I hate to sound like a gatekeeper, but its all the new players messing things up. I see people running into fights 1v5, pushing up without the team, not pushing in when we have the advantage, letting people take way too much space for no reason.
This didnt happen nearly as much in O1. And i play in diamond which isnt amazing at the game, but id say youre expected to know the games mechanics, and what not to do.
You and i both know the ranked system is broken, yet you couldn’t resist the chance to own me to inflate your own ego and judge me based off one statement with little context. Do you understand how sad that is
in quick play I’ve been playing with and against t500 , even t100 players non stop and was confused because in ow1 it would’ve been a total spawn camp, I wouldn’t be able to play the game. Now, its like I’m holding my own. I don’t think I’ve improved that much. Something is not right.
Every single profile I check has gone up about 500 sr this season from last season. Has it just taken 3 seasons for the new players coming in to comp to cause the sr inflation and it be felt through all the ranks? Maybe…
Makes sense tho. It’s like I’m climbing and I want to feel like I deserve it but it just feels cheap knowing that it doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
So you’re saying that diamond is still the top 20% and masters is still top 7% and GM is still top 1-2%, its just that we’re comparatively better and closer to that 1-2% now because we’ve been here for 7 years… makes sense ig. Still feels naff tho, but ig we’ll get used to it.
I’ve seen so many friends who were dia-masters rocket to gm 5 this season. Guess I’ll grind it out and try to join them. Watch me get hard stuck mid master and mald on here LMAO
No it’s not. The devs acknowledged there is a bug that’s inflating peoples ranks, except they said it’s only in high GM which is just a lie for damage control. I had masters dps in my last game that ran up 2v5 without tanks or supports and fed. Gold level plays. Like OP said, they are going 50/50 win loss and still climbing, many others have said they are losing more than they’re winning and still climbing and it has gotten to the point where they have to apologize to people for being bad and the system pushes them up rank when they are not winning. It’s a bug. Some accounts have it some don’t. This game is a disaster.
this is exactly what I mean. There are golds and plats who are now masters and its just bizarre. Everyone has been pushed up like 500sr minimum but they are still very bad and are in masters lobbies and just get crapped on. Other times you’re the one crapping on the boosted gold players who have no idea what they’re doing. Its bizarre
If its a bug, (hopefully it is) then I imagine we’re all gonna derank when it gets fixed. Thats gonna feel bad
I think the only remedy at this point is to full reset everyone’s rank and MMR but I doubt they’d do that. This team has made massive mistakes since OW2 launched and they’ve had far more serious bugs than OW1 ever had. With inflated SR accounts and matchmaking just throwing huge rank gaps in the same game spreading 4 ranks, I just struggle to stay interested in overwatch. It’s not competitive at all anymore and a part of me thinks the devs are just aiming for a more casual game but want to keep the “ranked” system to give people something to grind for but don’t actually care if it’s competitive. Their primary goal here is to keep people playing and buying skins and you don’t need fair competition to do that.
I am worried they’re going to reset it and I’m going to have to climb all over again. Despite rank inflation, I believe I earned my rank.
I don’t think the inflation applied to my account because the game was insisting I was gold for a while, which I am definitely not. Climbing through ranks was just as challenging as it was in ow1 for me personally. In ow1 I also went on large win streaks followed by large loss streaks. I feel like if the inflation happened to me then it wouldn’t have taken 206 games to go from gold 1 to diamond 5 when I was always plat in ow1.
Is this a reasonable take or am I just so bad/unlucky even rank inflation doesn’t want to boost me?
We noticed in S2 that our rating curve was shifted so that everyone’s ranks were lower than they should have been. With S3 we fixed it so that players are closer to where they should be!
Of course since our curve has been shifted for a while, everyone is used to the system being harsher than intended. We didn’t actually realize how noticeable the effect was going to be, or else we would have messaged this out more in advance!
I know, gr. That’s why that quote doesn’t really apply. The current issue in Overwatch is that there are players with clear skill disparities in ranks far higher than they’ve ever been in before. Whenever someone posts a “dev response” that justifies it, it’s typically quoted out of context.
We aren’t talking about OW2 season 1 players boosted beyond all recognition. We’re talking about long time players who have magically, suddenly shot up to record highs during the clown show that has been season 3.
Of course, whether it was the soft reset of season 1 or the bronze bug or the stumbled iterations throughout seasons 1 and 2, it’s all sort of culminated in the currently ridiculous season 3.
The logical answer would be to hopefully reach a point where the matchmaker IS a moderate level of decent. If that’s the case, reset the MMR and let things sort themselves out correctly this time.
EDIT:
If my initial response to your post was taking it out of context and you were essentially saying the same thing, my apologies for misunderstanding.
