KUnless youre in high diamond or up, theres no such thing as a game thats “unwinnable at hero select.” Unless you tilt over your teammates’ hero choices, that is.
Also, what you define as matchmaker being confident in your MMR (which is what people allude to when they claim accounts can be stuck) is bunk.
Youre not being locked in anywhere. Its just as possible to climb on a plat border account, it just takes longer. Not because old accounts have diminished gains, but because new accounts have exaggerated ones. Its like saying a person running at normal speeds is a slow runner, just because youre comparing them to someone on Angel dust
No, it isn’t, it’s a real value that’s part of the matchmaking system. Your MMR is broken into 2 values and one of them is confidence. It impacts how fast you can move. New accounts have low confidence and thus move very quickly for the first 20-30 games. It’s not made up at all, the devs have told us about it.
I don’t believe I am and have never insinuated anything like that. I know exactly why I am the rank that I am, and it’s because I simply don’t play enough comp to climb. I have maintained a 75+% winrate for the last 3 seasons… but that’s only 50 games.
This is the misconception. There are matches at 800sr where 4 peolpe link their main accounts and they are high diamond low masters, for example.
I really encourage you to come down to late-night 900sr, where the challenge begins. Pick up enough smurf /flags/reports and see how you get pooled. Its 100 hours of grind to get out of that wormhole on any established account.
You’re going to rank up at 55% win ratio unless you literally just dodge other smurfs, avoid 222 comps and just frag out on e.g. typically a genji or widow.
In doing so…literally nothing supporting ladder integrity has been validated.
it just makes the games annoying. As even with the issues the basic hierarchy of the system still works.
It’s not like a plat smurf (very few low SR smurfs are GM/masters, too few of them) is stopping a random 1200SR player from reaching lets say high gold.
Even less so if that 1200SR player isn’t throwing down the 65+ hours it would take to go from 1200SR to high gold in the first place
again, in no way am I defending smurfs being a cool thing to do and clearly as a level 1700+ player I don’t even bother to have an alt account.
my point is just that as annoying as they might be in the over all grand picture it’s not even making a dent in why players can or can’t rank up.
1200SR player with gold SR goals? Ok that’s about 250 games played. Even if they win at 60% that’s 150w/100L… for around +900 to +1100 SR depending on PSR.
Does THAT level of grind to get from 1200 to just mid gold at 2300SR really effected by a handful of smurf games?
Alt accounts should be reduced (probably not eliminated) by the role queue because of the separate SR per role. Many people create alt accounts to not damage their SR when playing off-roles.
They are whipping out the ban hammer soon after role queue, and they have a whole team doing data analysis to catch bad actors.
Just because the gameplay is truly fair and balanced, doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable.
It’s truly disheartening how many people, both devs and gamers, just cannot grasp such a simple concept. What happened to playing games because they’re actually fun?
That is actually a very fresh take, definitely those have high confidence score with way higher skill than their SR are probably causing the invariance the most
It strikes me as a lot of effort to ‘reveal’ where you truly belong. Imagine all that exertion, beating the matches over and over and over, to finally ‘reaveal’ your true skill, where you converge at 50/50 win rate over the long run and actually put in the 1/6th of team equity.
Theres also the matchmaking back-pressure to arrest climbers/boosters that grind up too quickly. Seems like after a cancelled match you’re repooled with smurfs/leavers/trolls. Even my own post-match data logs support this with loss streaks (4+) occuring 60/40 vs. win streaks (4+). Its like the matchmaker abhors grinders in the lower ranks.
And 60% of my matches have solo smurfs, 20-25% have leavers, a good 33.3% have 2+ stack with at least one smurf.
Most of the time if I’m at 1200 and win 2-3 games in a row, the matchmaker finds me a match at 900sr - well below where I’m trying to go. It’ll be a total troll match with a bunch of weird font people (like my name is). Guess what? Its not 900 calibre play…at all. Woops lost that one guess we’ll go again and lose 2-3 more like that. Now the matchmaker thinks I’m throwing, or belong at 1000 again cause im losing to 700sr dudes. The next matches I’m pooled with derankers. Its a broken cycle and just not worth my time to try and grind out of.
Thats why we need a reset, or offered more periodic recalibration matches. If I’m winning at 1200 offer me an 1800 match (not one at 699sr) and if I win/carry that one then bump my sr wayyy up. Let people escape out of the very real elo hell without all the struggle.
To anyone who thinks smurfing is “not a big issue,” just check out Kabaji’s unranked to GM Tracer only stream.
Anyone who thinks that letting a multi-season top 500 Tracer run amok in games that are two and three ranks below him is ok doesn’t understand how detrimental smurfing can be.
I would go even further to say we should just stop watching those content altogether, the viewships is part of what encourage them to do it. It make them feel it’s alright because there are profit to be made making those kind of content, youtube/twitch money.
Its not enough. They need a massive reset. People enterring the new system with 3500 sr start placements centered around 3500. Same for 1000sr. Some friends and I tested it. Then we got several discord servers to test it, for science.
We had a smurf widow in our discord stream her placements where she obviously won with complete dominance. She went in at 1100 sr or something and came out 1410 like hello? I can hear some annoying middle aged female voice saying “if you work hard enough you can be good enough for silver…keep grinding honey!”.
They need to reset everyone and everything since its a new ladder format entirely. No more grandfathering and anchor stat/season bias. Its more disruptive initially but will create much better ladder integrity, fairness, and inclusion after 30 games or so.
My anchor stats always place me around 2600 to start on new accounts.
When I placed on PTR, I obviously placed maybe 15 SR shy of 2600, but each win was netting me 120-150 SR until I got to very high Platinum, where it dropped off to +- 50 per game