They do. They’re just normal games where you can’t see your SR and get matched more likely with others doing placements.
EDIT: Since some people misunderstood, I’m not talking about the usefulness of placement matches at the start of a season. I honestly don’t care if they exist or not.
I’m talking about people who think they can just go into placements not caring at all because it doesn’t matter how you play. Which is not true. You earn and lose SR in them, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
And for all the nitpickers, it doesn’t matter if you gain exactly the same SR as in normal comp games.
People throwing placements is still stupid.
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well if I lose all 10 of my placements I’m still going to be within 100 SR or so of my previous rank
if I lose 10 games during the regular season, that’s a minimum 200-250 SR drop
I’ve even lost more games than won and ended up a bit higher than where I ended last season. That doesn’t happen in regular games, if you go negative W/L in any given play session, you’re almost guaranteed to be lower SR than you started
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not my experience, i end up pretty much with 25-30 SR for those games, i went 8-2 went up ~150 SR
went 4-6 lost ~60 SR
maybe performance based SR is more impactful during placements
either way, all these threads calling them useless and pointless make people just play like idiots and nobody can want that right?
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I’ve lost all 10 of my placement games (high bronze) and still been 100 SR of my previous season rank. So yeah, in that sense they matter, but nowhere near what 10 normal games would be.
Make them just normal comp games and people will try harder anyway.
If you want rewards, just make them play 10 normal games.
I think it is, I’ve heard that it’s the only thing that matters during placements but I don’t know how true that is. my experience is that it certainly seems like it matters much more than W/L rate for sure.
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Maybe, but in my 10 placement matches in previous seasons I wasn’t playing that differently, since it was like an hour before the season ended lol. In fact, I might have played worse than usual because I knew they were placement games. Yet my rank barely dropped.
Of course, just my personal experience over the past seasons.
naa placements are pretty usless bout every time i land in the ± 20 sr range of last season ive won 8 an lost 2 to gain 15 sr
OP is pretty spot on. Though I am not sure how much performance does matter really. Back when I was sitting at 2.4 I inherited an account that was sitting at 1550 end of previous season and after going 10-0 for the new season it was placed 1980 or 1990 - and I also got 60SR for my first win after that. That’s over 400SR from placements alone and pretty much a whole tier bracket in 11 games…
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If they are just normal games then winning is wasted effort. Why should I try and win when I don’t gain anything. Especially since if I lose I’m not going to lose anything. It’s just 10 wasted games that I don’t want to go through.
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Placement matches dont mean anything, 100Sr difference is not worth 10 games spent. I personally just try to get over with them as fast as i can and go from there. I have nevere been placed more than 100sr off from where i have finished my season
If they are rated the same as normal games, then placements literally don’t matter. Nothing has changed from normal games except hiding your SR.
If they are rated less significantly than normal games (as many people seem to think) then they’re WORSE than not mattering, they’re actively wasting your time.
If we’re going to have placements at all, they should have more significance than normal games, not the same or less. If it’s the same or less, just give us normal games.
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that makes no sense whatsoever
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You gain nothing by winning placement games. Like you get 15 comp points for golden guns. The most pointless thing in the game. I want to climb and improve not get points to make my heroes look worse.
Except that’s not true.
With normal games, if I’m in the hole 6 games, that’s at least 100 SR gone. But with placements? That’s maybe -40 (speaking from experience), and even some people hit gains while losing more than the win.
If they were treated like normal games, then there’d be a lot fewer complaints. But for now? Yea, they practically are useless.
Yup, if you want placements to really matter, double the amount of SR gain/loss than usual. Otherwise just time wasted.
What was your record in the placements? I went 3-7 and lost 95 SR. So -4 overall. Averaging about -24 per loss so it seems about exactly how much I would expect to drop going 3-7 in normal games.
It would be nice if after every season started your elo was given more uncertainty and the first 10-20 wins/losses were valued at a higher SR change. Yeah you could get lucky/unlucky but you always can. If gains/losses were exaggerated briefly it would definitely mean people would be trying their best and it would give you an opportunity to break out of a rut. If they matter less (as people are implying) they’re even less valuable than an average gain AND you can’t see the progress per match. Of course people won’t care about the game outcome if that’s the case.
If they’re just ‘normal games where you can’t see your SR’ then why do they matter at all?
I have no illusions about my ability as a player. I’ve seen the top performers and their magnetized aiming and know I’ll probably never get there but I have hundreds of hours into this game and feel I can play it well for the most part and be a valuable team member.
So up until very recently it was a bit dispiriting to always be in basically high Bronze/Low Silver. Just by virtue of the distribution that’s the “bottom” of people even attempting to play competitive so naturally if you are playing “competitively” you don’t want to or think you deserve to be at the bottom.
The point though - and it’s taking me too long to get to it - is that when I played to hopefully rank up it hasn’t been to show off or have a better ranking - it was chasing the belief that if I could somehow just get into higher ranks the quality of teammates and matches would be more consistently better? Fewer leavers, throwers, smurfs, what have you. More people kind of playing for the same reasons, using mics, etc… You build up in your head how much better it must be at Gold or Platinum, etc. but I think I’ve come to realize it’s pretty much the same at every tier so I ended up playing a lot more QP last season and it definitely felt more fun.
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