I have been saying this for over 2 years.
The problem becomes more obvious when the player base shrinks.
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It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Blizzard has ONE goal and one goal only with its matchmaking: to balance player base retention and playtime with profitability. To keep as many people playing for as long as they possibly can. That’s it. Fairness. Quality of play. Fun factor. Ensuring that improvement is rewarded. All of that is incidental. They’ve discovered the perfect balance between making the matchmaker grindy and horrible and losing players to that matchmaking system, and THAT is what we currently have. The naivete of people who are basically like “Well Blizzard wouldn’t do that! They’re fluffy and friendly, just look at how warm and cuddly Jeff Kaplan is. He is Papa Jeff!” Yeah. Right. They’re a business, plain and simple. The reason why you and millions of other people are like “This can’t POSSIBLY be the best system” is because it isn’t. But it works for Blizzard, and so here we are.
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And that’s no accident. If Blizzard wanted to clean up that grindy, messy, sloppy Elo hell pit, they could do it. But they don’t want to. As someone said the other day: the matchmaker has ONE goal: to keep as many people playing for as long as possible. That’s IT.
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The Matchmaker is clearly a critical factor for the flow experience.
Consequently, it was also designed with this in mind.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander_Voiskounsky3/publication/220168900_Playing_Online_Games_Flow_Experience/links/5cfbf2c94585157d159dff90/Playing-Online-Games-Flow-Experience.pdf
Yes indeed because the point of competitive is not so you could win against better players than you are, and the point is not so you could grow as a player and getter better, no sir, the point of competitive is for you to be stagnant. Because the word competitive in OW does not actually mean competitive in blatant sense of the word, but it means you never going up against better players but you ranking up doing whatever is you are doing every single match without ever having to self reflect ever. Indeed competitive is broken.
You’re missing the point entirely. I’d wager that not a single person here or anywhere is suggesting or has ever suggested that they should never have difficult matches, or never lose, or never be challenged. To present this as their argument is ridiculous
Now that I think about it, these conversations mainly come down to two camps. One camp, apparently your camp, believes that Blizzard has designed a matchmaking system purely around fairness and enjoyment above everything else – even Blizzard’s own business interests.
The other camp believes that the matchmaker exists as it does – because of – Blizzard’s business interests. That it exists as it does for the same reasons you find grind in ANY game: to find a balance between keeping people playing as much as humanly possible and people moving on from that game in frustration or disinterest.
Among others, there are two main currencies in gaming that matter to developers from a business perspective: how long people play your game per session, and how often they play your game. And the people in the second camp believe that the matchmaking system is NOT designed around fairness and enjoyment, but is designed around maximizing those two currencies.
And that’s it, it’s really that simple. I think people in the second camp may even understand that Blizzard is a business and has completely or primarily selfish business interests, but the end result is the same: a game they love to play is wrought with frustration and unsatisfying experiences because of those business interests, or more superficially, a gaming experience that seems heavily optimized for things other than fun, fairness, and rewarding dedication and commitment.
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I do not deny that the System needs changing. It is the nature of things, things need to change eventually. I understand that and I agree with that.
Apropo camps, I honestly do not belong in any. I just realize the fact that I messed up when I lose, no more no less .If I cannot beat a smurf who is above me then how can I expect to get to his level if I cannot even beat him? How can you get to Gold/Plat/Diamond if you cannot even beat Gold/Plat/Diamond?
You blame matchmaking for giving you Silver/Gold/Plat/Diamond players while you play in Silver/PLat/Gold/Diamond and expect them to play above their level?
How is that bad matchmaking? How and most seriously why would you expect a Gold to play like Plat or Diamond? If they would they would not even be Gold in the first place?
The only reason why I would understand you predicament is if you are actually Maaters + player smurfing in low elo and complaining how bad low elos are, they I would understand.
But if you are the same elo as them you must be doing something wrong for you to be stuck in that certain elo, unless you are one of those who believe that they belong way higher than they are and their stupid teammates are keeping them where they are.
Newsflas, if you actually did belong higher you would have no problems getting out of the elo you are stuck in. Do you want to know why? Because you would be smart enough to know and predict everything the enemy is about to do before they do it and you will know how to counter it. You might lose one or 2 games due to the team actually not being able to play properly, but you most definitely would not be stuck there for eternity.
I sincerely understand the frustration, the lack of will, demotivation to push forward and the comp mode itself killing your will to grind and enjoy this game, I get it, I felt like that way too many times, but it actually has nothing to do with the system.
Why? Because you are going to get paired up with a Gold border hardstuck Gold player who has the same views as you do, and he gave up on trying to improve and grind, so now he’s going to troll because in his mind he thinks if he trolls enough Blizzard will fix matchmaking. He is doing it out of protest. He gets a couple of his friends to Q up with and you get a match that makes you frustrated enough to post a topic like this.
The System is AI in some sort, and AI’s always need improvement, one way or the other, but even if the System would improve the way you wanted it to improve and you start ranking up, you would face people better than you, so much better, and you would not be prepared for it, because you decided to waste your time complaining instead of improving that in the end you would end up where you are now, complaining how everything is unfair.
Round and around we go.
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when i tell them what they are doing wrong, they take it personaly, insult me and then false report me for abusive chat. i got suspended like 5 times. the game simply encourages you to not comunicate.
also they say " we manually aplied bans "
dont believe that.
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You really are conflating two different topics. The matchmaker and improving in Overwatch are two completely different topics. I’m not talking about my progress, climbing, or what have you. I’m ONLY talking about about the matchmaker and what it seems optimized for.
the game doesnt place based on your skill, it places you based on how much you win and how likely you are to. if youre likely to win, you get almost no sr and lose tons more if you lose. the problem is you will be likely to win because you as an individual play well, and your team mates tend to be potatoes to “balance” it out. its why smurfs dont play solo so they already balance with a bronze team mate and get a more balanced group of golds, though most times they will still play like silvers at best. because of this, whoever is playing well will get shafted super hard with crappy team mates while having a “high winning probability” and lose 30 sr as opposed to the 15 they would gain on a win. its one of the reason dps players in gold are either ungodly or the absolute worst bricks and tanks/ supports are the carry. that is untill a dps main decides to play tank/support and throw the match playing rein like a soldier and lucio like a tracer. dps is arguably the easiest to play and most played because it requires much less and mostly depends on being good at fps skill. i got sidetracked there, sorry.
basically, the whole you have to be two ranks higher to climb myth is based on the experience new players have that really do deserve to place higher, but are shafted by this crooked sr system that rewards not based on performance in that game but “likelyhood” you will win at the start of the match, and for that will decide you as a player for example are a big fat tracer smurf, getting 90 ez kills so you lose 50sr or something if you do lose, which you will becasue the rest of the team will be absolutely useless because you are playing so much better and the game balanced you with them. so you either have to carry so hard its essentially a 1v6, which realistically only people two ranks higher would be able to do. so its not made up bs, its based on this system that doesnt make any sense.
The likelihood that you will win is, generally, what the MMR system is going for. This is called “predicted performance”. What actually ends up happening (win, lose, or draw) is “actual performance”. It does measure your performance, that’s all it measures.
This is not true. If the system predicts that someone will win based off of their performance, it will not immediately deduct a major amount of points from them for a loss. This would be entirely counter-intuitive. It would instead increase their rank parameters (μ), and decrease their confidence interval (σ).
It’s worth noting that performing well consistently does not mean you are expected to win. The system will put you into matches that you’re expected to lose, and matches you’re expected to draw. This is to increase the amount of data they have over your performance, and to gain what TrueSkill refers to as “bits of data”.
A player winning a match they were expected to win tells almost nothing to the matchmaker except “They’re better”. It doesn’t say how much better though, or how consistently better. Losing a game you were expected to win does though, because it tells the matchmaker it didn’t know as much as it thought it did.
This is not strictly how MMR balancing works. It is entirely possible that you will be on the bottom end of a match’s MMR disparity even if you’re winning. As a matter of fact, it’s more likely that if you’ve been winning then you are the match’s “potato”, because the system wants to test the waters on how you’ll perform when you’re the thing expected to hold the team back.
If you’re on a winning streak, then all of a sudden you have a losing streak, it’s because the match put you into games where you were the lowest MMR on your team, so 90% of the players in that match were rated higher than you in the MMR system, and likely had higher confidence in their rating. If you start losing, it means you didn’t belong there, and now the system knows that.
If you start to climb again, it will repeat the process until you break the rank parameters, thus restarting the process over with less confidence and a shifted rank parameter.
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No I am not.
You are saying that the matchmaking is working against you. The matchmaking system is giving you “bad teammates” on purpose. It prevents you from having fun and climbing.
I can bet that if you would post a replay code of any of the matches that you have lost, where you felt like that the matchmaking was working against you, and having people higher than you comment on those matches you would be surprised at how much you still have to learn.ž
The reason why you did not do so in the first place is because you actually do not want to do that, you want to vent and complain. I personally get it. I get those moments too, I can give you a proof of like 4 or so mice that I have broken due to the exact same reason, only difference maybe being I actually rage way too much, that is when I rage.
But nonetheless, none of those complaints or rage change the essence of it all.
And those are not 2 completely different things. You blame the System for your lacking in a certain department. Yu blame the System for giving you “potato teammates”. They are potato for a reason. And they too come here and complain about the same thing you are complaining about. If you have played DPS/Support/Tank then trust me the people who were in your matches on your team came here to complain about the same thing you are complaining about, maybe even complained about you specifically.
We all sometimes lose more than we win. It happens in every elo. It happens to everyone. I have seen Kabaji lose in t500 5, 6 games in a row and his only comment was “we need to popp off more chat, we need to carry more, we need to do better.”
Every single person who has come here to complain about the matchmaking has never, ever said that they need to do better, because they already think that they are doing better than everyone else.
Heck, if you really believe so, go buy a Masters+ account and see how you will do there, if it is really the System or your potato teammates keeping you down. I can assure you even if you would buy such an account, hypothetically and you would get your a*handed to you, you would still complain about bad matchmaking.
That is what I sincerely advise to everyone who complains how they do not belong where they are, how Blizzard is out to get them. I cam even bet that some Master + forum users here would gladly give up some of their alt accounts to all of you so you could prove the System wrong.
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I think its actually the most balanced its been lmao. Loving it.
Except how awful Doom is and how sickeningly OP widow still is (4 years later) of course.
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I play like a plat. I never was in plat but I just know. and now me and my friend were playing comp both as tank we won 4/5 matches he got placed in high gold whilst i got placed in mid silver why does this work like that?
Its unfortunate but the skill disparity can be quite big even if the game thinks its balanced.
Best chance to rank up is to have a reliable tank player as duo imo, in best case he can play Rein, because in most situations u gotta need a Rein in midranks, Winston and Hammond.
Good luck and patience on your journey. PC can be quite an experience but VC and text chat are usually infested with toxicity…
Your feeling that matches are “unbalanced” comes from the fact that ranking is a mess and there is a huge range of difference in player skill within each individual rank, from bronze to diamond. The reason ranking is a mess is that all competitive matches are being handicapped with Match Making Rating.
More information in my thread on the subject:
More important information right here as well
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This isn’t “important information,” it’s just me telling you off for baselessly attacking my character (i.e., ad hominem).
check if you’re not paired/matched against groups
in fact, the matchmaker works pretty well, but it gets random as soon as it has to deal with groups, you will 99% of the time, get the most random balancing in a game with groups
happens a lot when you get groups, sr is all over the place, and the games aren’t fair at all
see… groups, ruining games for solo players
it’s true, he means that if you’re not 2 tier higher than where you are, you’re held hostage in games that make little sense to you, when in fact you should be ranked higher, and have balanced games where you can shine
well, all this just to say, if you guys didn’t find out that this is all because of groups by now… blizzard should implement a button or an option that allows you to decide if you want to play with and against stacks or not, solo players pay the hard prices of never ending headaches
You have no character to attack when all you do is spam your dead thread & then claim you don’t spam your dead thread lol. You’re a disgrace to this forum.
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