On xbox you can make an alt free in 30 seconds. There is nothing but alts on all game modes.
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I’ve been from bronze to diamond. Its all bs. Too many alt/smurf accounts.
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As a PS4 player myself, just having a smurf account on any console is tears laughing hilarious! NOBODY cares about you if you are on console, including Blizzard. So having a higher ranked account is pointless.
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It is because solo exists, the only difference up is you might get some coms and better mechanical skill.
SR is worthless unless they force the use of the group up feature
What a beautiful, honest, and true discussion on ranked thus far without the usual white knights ruining the thread. Ranked is truly a joke. The only way to play is:
- Pick what you want to play regardless of team comp.
- Don’t join VC.
- Play hard for the first minute to gauge how the game is going to go, if you are going to be stomped, just throw or soft-throw and practice on a hero you don’t play often.
- If the matchmaker starts giving you free wins, make sure to go the extra mile in humiliating the opposition. Spawn camp them, t-bag them, solo ult 1 of them repeatedly. Just punctuate how terrible the matchmaking is by playing at 200% on your best hero and get 80 plus elims when the game puts you on the steamroll team. Do everything you can to tilt the poor players who got queued into a steamroll.
- Believe in yourself and accept how stupid the matchmaking is. Don’t listen to high-ranked players, white knights, Blizz apologists or even Blizz themselves. Anyone who has played this game long enough and is not a tool knows rank means nothing in this game. You will stomp on diamonds, get stomped by silvers, go like 20 games in a row with all the leavers and worst players all on your team. Smurfs, boosters, derankers, trolls, etc. etc. are all over the place and there is only like a 10% chance of getting a fair game. This 10% is why we’re all here addicted and depressed because we know how enjoyable this game could be if they just fixed matchmaking but instead we’re left chasing that one close, fun, fair match which only happens 1/10th of the time.
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Having experienced silver, gold, and plat thus far, I never really felt a significance between mid-to-high silver and the entirety of gold. However it’s crazy to me how different plat feels.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a dumpster fire, but a preferable dumpster fire over the others.
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Yeah I can feel that. I mean the only difference in plat is it seems like there’s a lot of dps that are good at aiming but don’t know how to play the game.
That doesn’t exist.
Forced loss streaks
There is an old and persistent conspiracy theory that Blizzard’s algorithms force players to have a 50% win rate by nefarious means (if a player is doing well, very poor players are put on his team to make him lose, often for many games in a row). This has been contradicted by Blizzard7, 46, is contradicted by people’s ability to climb13, and would be a horrible and difficult-to-implement design. The truth is much simpler. If a player wins more than he loses, his SR/MMR goes up. As it rises, he is placed against stronger opponents (and with stronger allies), which increases the chance that he will lose7. Once in equilibrium, the average person he faces (and is allied with) is at his skill level, and the only way to go up is to become a better player. The win/loss patterns and streaks are fully consistent (in the mathematical sense) with the system as Blizzard describes it, and are not consistent with a system in which Blizzard forces wins and losses34.
Matchmaking takes into account win percentage
It explicitly does not. “At no point in MMR calculations do we look at your win/loss ratio and win/loss ratio is never used to determine who to match you with or against. We are not trying to drive your win/loss percentage toward a certain number” – Jeff Kaplan (32). However, probability of winning depends the difference between MMR and a player’s skill level, and MMR does depend on how much a player has won or lost lately, so in this way there is an indirect dependence of win probability on win/loss history. This leads to (correct) statements that “Whenever I reach, or am near, my career high, I start losing and fall back down”. This corresponds to a player reaching his skill cap. The only way to break out of an MMR/SR range is to improve as a player and play a sufficient number of games.
Oh, crap, sorry. It’s a real bummer when evidence ruin’s people’s good old conspiracy theories.
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I think one of the problems for ranks is that it is not for the casual player. By casual, I don’t mean “quick play” but rather those who do not have 100s of hours to invest in a season.
The saying has been where 1/3 of your games are automatic losses, another 1/3 are automatic wins and the final third is where you can make a difference. That’s a lot of “don’t matter” games sandwiched between games that matter in terms of improving your rank.
Of course, you can argue saying look at those “Bronze to Top 500” challenges. Well of course, those are Top 500 players playing down at lower levels. But if you are in “Elo Hell” and trying to improve to get to the next level, it can be done… it just takes a lot of time.
I think that is the where the frustration lies. People do get hard stuck. But they can improve. There’s just a lot of noise that you have to play through to improve and rank up. If you can only play 5 comp games a night, it gets a frustrating when 4 of those matches are “out of your hands”. The randomness of quality matches is what makes it frustrating. You have to weed through the stomps and BS games to enjoy those quality games - the games where it is so fun that you don’t care if you won or lose.
It is not really Blizzard’s fault since they can’t predict that Mei purposely walling off their own teammate or that Masters player boosting his Bronze friend.
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Once you get to 1800 aim starts to get decent here and there. It’;s just that those people there with good aim have zero game sense.
I’ve played from gold to masters and there’s a SIGNIFICANT difference the higher your go. There might not be too much difference between bronze and silver, but I can literally just chill in the backlines of a gold team and wipe them all. This gets harder to do at plat and borderline impossible at diamond. There’s a clear difference even within the ranks. Low and high diamond and clearly different skill levels.
Then why do you care so much about a dead game?
Smurfs and alts made ranked and MMR lose their meaning.
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alt account no doubt contributed to overwatches demise. But I would say private profiles did their part too.
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I play at ~2200 and ~2700 on two different accounts (one I play tank and support the other I play DPS). I can clearly tell the difference between those two ranks.
I play on PC so as you said it could be a console problem?
Going to be honest, I don’t think it has to do anything with being casual.
I think it has to do with that what it takes to raise in ranks in Overwatch is just not that interesting to the casual player, of which I surely am one. I mean, when this all began, I was serious, but then I figured out who was at the top ranks, what kinds of people they generally behaved like, how much of the game they actually played versus all the options available, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out raising rank was not a good way to try and play Overwatch.
And then I discovered the lowest ranks are the only way to actually play the entire game offered to you, without, you know, being reported by someone else who thinks you shouldn’t be doing what is completely allowed in the game.
I can’t stand to spectate the esport the League is, but that’s because the game is atrocious to watch, as the core game it is. The OWL, however, has definitely served to confirm one thing everyone should know - no one cares about you unless you are on one of those teams. So if you think you are getting any recognition for your rank, you are sorely mistaken.
To those who like to play raise the number, that’s nice. I mean, do what entertains you. But really, no one will care, nor should they, because it’s a regular game. ‘Competition’ mode was always a commercial. Comp mode is OWL, or you are in a standard game you play just like any other over the internet, with a hidden matchmaking system.
Nothing wrong with that. It should just be called what it is.
Completely disagree, I’d argue the game even feels different at the ends of different ranks. I find it way easier to climb up through Diamond than up through Platinum because I just don’t understand the way people play in Platinum.
The difference between losing a diamond match and losing a plat match is simple
Lose in plat you think “oh my team sucks”
Lose in diamond “oh my team sucks but wow that so and so on their team was pretty good!!”
Plat is the worst to be stuck because mostly everyone is so angry and frustrated to be stuck in the middle.
Really?? For me on PS4 bronze is utterly terrible, like stand next to someone shoot them in the back till they die. Silver through mid gold is a gigantic mess. Up through plat everyone is REALLY stupid even if they can play the game somewhat well compated to the rest of the playerbase they do and believe a lot of dumb stuff but at least team fights happen. Diamond players are decemt at not getting picked right away and fights are slower and as you approach Masters there is actually ult econ. Some of the perma diamonds sound like they gave their soul to OW and are really robotic sounding so that’s a difference lol.
But it brought in a HUGE amount of extra income for Blizz…1 person buying multiple accounts for the SAME game…it’s genius from a business standpoint…but yeah, it created Smurfs, more throwers…and then they created Locked Profiles which allowed for people to hide what they were doing…this game’s demise has always been about squeezing that extra dollar from the consumer/player.
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