Recently I have taken the time to see how team queue affects my rank, but the latest results convince me more than ever that team queue completely destroys matchmaking.
Despite the overwhelming evidence for this, it is not my intent to advise blizzard devs on what course of action is best.
I know that there is a queue time tradeoff when splitting solo queue and team queue.
However, I have two major experiences that demonstrate just how much damage team queue causes to the matchmaking in OW.
Anecdote 1:
I play with my brother on chars I do not know on off account #6. All 5 other accounts are plat+ on every role, diamond+ on tank/most supports.
I play dps, and carry my brother up from bronze 5 to gold 2. He then queues by himself, losing roughly 40/45 games and dropping a bazillion ranks. At no point was he ever able to even do one person’s worth without me telling him where to engage and when to use ult. His average performance was around 20% of one person. All of his teammates were forced to lose.
Anecdote #2:
Recently I played with his dps which is in silver 3. I am plat 5 on my worst char in the game, but would definitely not drop below gold 3 by myself ever. But with him on my team he continuously got zero output, as in no kills, only trash damage, and no useful ults for 11 games. I then get a 2 rank derank, despite having not lost a single duel to anyone and massive stats for over 16 games in a row (5 wins / 11 losses).
The worst part is that right after getting done queueing with my brother, I queue by myself. Immediately 32 kills 1 death. Next game 30+ kills 0 death.
I spawn-trapped the enemy team successfully for 3 min as well.
But all of this is just a sign that duo queues have no competitive validity.
One option is to split queues. The other one that I like is to weight performance, but most of the casuals are against it, and democracy rules that we should base things on win rate.
I feel you should heavily weight performance when queueing in a group, so that the higher rank player doesn’t drop too much from failing to carry the lower rank player and the lower rank player doesn’t climb when it is unwarranted.
the damage to successive games caused by poor ranking during groups is kind of ridiculous. I probably hard carried two low rank players up 2 ranks today as well. The pain of their fall will be affecting their teammates today or tomorrow.
Everyone wants to play with their friends. but taking only win rate into account when players are clearly performing at less than 1/5 of normal output for the char and have no finishing blows or majority damage to a killing blow over 15 min is not working well.
edited for bad grammar. kind of wrote it quickly before dinner