Here it says “Players can earn Competitive Points similar to other competitive mini seasons and qualify for Top 500 Leaderboards during the beta season. However, beta season stats will only be available for a limited time and will not count toward a player’s permanent Competitive Season stats.”
It sounds like it won’t affect the MMR but it could also just be that the beta season just doesn’t show in your profile. If they work like the off-seasons back then it would still affect your MMR, thus your placements.
In Jeff’s interview with Seagull, I didn’t get any impression that the beta season would be a fake season from the standpoint of MMR calculations or SR gains / losses. I think it’s going to be 2 weeks so they can pay close attention to it and tweak things quickly. Not sure how rewards and such will be impacted in the beta season, but my impression is just “Short, and full of tweaks”.
Thanks for linking the post! That’s something I was kinda looking for.
I don’t think it will be fake in terms of MMR and SR gains/ losses either… what I do question though is if the changes in MMR during the beta season will affect the S18 placements or if the S18 placements will basically work off of your S17 stats.
Blizzard has been calculating each player’s role MMR for the past several months (0:08:02), though it hasn’t been used in matchmaking yet. This MMR will be used to seed placements for Season Role-Queue-Beta (00:14:27). If a player hasn’t played recently, or has not played a specific role, things are more difficult (and Jeff didn’t say exactly what they would do).
This however makes me curious where I will place with each role though. I usually play Tank or Support at around 4k SR and while having won a few DPS games too I never really played much of it higher than 3.6k.
This is just my interpretation, but I don’t think Season 18 will start with the same data Season 17 ended with. The 2 week beta season will move MMR and SR for all the roles you play, and Season 18 will just continue like all the other seasons.
I’d like to see justification for placement matches each season for people who have been playing for many seasons. I’m not really sure I understand it, because it just seems like they’re normal games that alert everyone that you haven’t played the first several games this season. SR gains and losses are extremely close to the 24 SR average from what I’ve seen.
I am a little worried about the beta season, though, since the beginning and end of seasons are the worst time for Comp, and a two week season will just merge those together, and the whole season will be full of people who don’t really want to play comp, but are doing it for CP or sprays, or player icons, or whatever motivates people to do just their placements in a season.
I’m more worried about the “off-season” phenomenon where people thought it wouldn’t matter how they play and just threw game after game for the fun of it.
I only have the first 5 days to play anyways since i’ll be travelling after. Gotta finish the placements and see where it puts me.
To be fair… i’m more at peace with not being GM when the roles are split since I am usually only doing the placements and if I don’t place GM I play some more til i’m back. With 3 roles however, one will do… if I even want to put in the energy. I mostly do it for the gold weapon points and because it looks cool by now.
I prefer playing QP and Arcade with friends… which is why i’m so curious about the placements as they usually dictate my rank for the season. But who knows… maybe I feel like getting back into competitive again with the changes.
Oh, I just thought of something that is completely irrelevant to my low station (I just climbed from Bronze to Gold this season)… Maybe placements erase decay, and are very useful for high tier people. We’ll see where they land with placements and decay after season 18, since decay is gone for now.
That makes sense actually. Decayed players such as myself don’t always manage to maintain the same skill level so those 10 games would serve as a trial phase to determine where we belong. That being said, for the majority of players (and now especially) I don’t really see a purpose, unless they’re used for MMR recalibration.
confirmed by scott mercer yesterday that they DO in fact count (see post from him) and watch Jeff lie to your face. I think it went so bad they dont want to have to try and rework the sr system and are counting on next season bringing everyone back in line to where they should be.
I went YOLO for placements and the place the wrong way around… now with 4 days left I have to fix it.
Played 5 tank games in beta, and lost all 5 with some 300 plus points. Had double snipers who were afraid to touch point for two games and had people leave for three games. Doesn’t matter what you do in Comp (RQ or not) you get penalized for other people’s crappy playing and horrid matchmaking. Unless you have a regular group of competent players, good luck with soloq. Been playing since the game started and can’t get out of silver solo q. Start of second year there was a reset, then they decided to never reset. Not sure what good placement matches are when chance of leaving your level are next to zero.
None of the other Blizzard games have such a backwards placement system. Having a reset on a whole new system would make sense. People were playing beta like crap because they didn’t think it would count once the new season started. Now they’re saying it will count while recognizing it has serious problems? How does that make any professional sense. That’s like saying “I know the food I served that you paid for is poisonous and you’re unhappy with it, but whatever.”
If I had know this, I wouldn’t have touched beta comp. Plus a bunch of people who haven’t played for months or years came back (which is what they wanted) just for RQ and had no idea about new characters and balance changes.
How many years it gonna take before they find a competent system that doesn’t penalize average players for questionable matchmaking and teammates?
Maybe I should just pony up for a new account right? Wonder how many people have done that just out of sheer frustration of being locked into leagues they can’t really get out of as casual players?
All all good… wasn’t too hard to fix. I’m one those very rare flex players that can play any role to almost 4.4 and I worked hard to makes sure this was possible. With the old system you had to learn to play a large hero pool because you needed to be able to play what your team needed to win (win conditions). There was no real choice, its the same now but you have DPS queuing as healers (Moira, Lucio are the worst Ana and Baptiste not quite so bad and Bridge and Mercy are terrible mid fight. Zen can output a lot of damage because he heals via orbs and discords via orbs, hes like mercy if she could shoot at the same time)…
Someone asked me a few seasons back who was my favorite hero to play… what took me by surprise is I dont have one, I play the hero my team needs to win.
Now i have to play 75 games of comp, 25 per class where im sitting at 4.4 average on 150 ping because our servers don’t go up beyond 4.2… fun times. So I can earn a spray that diamonds will also get for hitting top 500 in any class… no incentive in that, they are meaningless now. Top500 is meaningless UNLESS its main board top500. They really need to differentiate those sprays.
Oh i know they removed they removed the beta board, interesting move. I did however notice that there were very limited OWL players on there… curious
