I really think they were trying to do something good with it. They just didn’t expect (or didn’t want to admit) that players would quickly see through the system and use it to their advantage.
Blizzard also knows that competitive doesn’t mean that only hardcore players compete here. Even normal players may want to play for an hour, which is about 2-4 matches.
And for these players it would be better (in theory) if they are not completely run into the ground the first 100 matches and have a completely demotivating gaming experience every evening. Overwatch is not Quake, where you can hop in and out quickly and the rounds last 10 minutes at most. An Overwatch match can last 30 minutes and leaving early punishes you.
So the idea is to give every game a 50% chance of winning, so that even regular players can win and not feel like their time was completely wasted. We already know this principle from elementary school, where the teachers often divided the teams into halfway fair teams.
The problem is that this is okay for one or two games, but if you really want to progress intensively, you notice how much you are dragged down by unmotivated or simply untalented players. How can you tell? Stupid one tricking, feeding, staggering, not grouping up, not countering etc. These are principles that - as a team - become extremely important from gold onwards. If you don’t value them as an individual, you lose the victory for the whole team.
And if the matchmaking data is diluted by trolls, throwers and smurfs, the matchmaker simply cannot put together fair matches. Even IF the matchmaker can recognize two Smurfs, it does not mean that they come from the same SR / MMR area. One could be Diamond, the other Masters, just because both have very young accounts, the level of uncertainty here is very high.
The difficulty, thanks to MMR, is only roughly based on your SR range, because if you’re just really good, you usually get a really good opponent (or worse team mates). At least as a solo player, that’s very hard to counter.
Therefore, the difficulty is absolutely relative and refers to your basic performance (MMR), not to your SR range. If you play like a Plat in Gold, you will also get opponents who play like Plat in Gold. Due to SR range restrictions, you will rarely encounter “natural” players from the appropriate rank.
The match then feels more like a match in the Plat range. Which is not a BAD THING. The challenge here is not the actual point. The problem is that you don’t really get rewarded or compensated for it. You don’t get an award or extra SR points just because your match is much harder than it technically should be (gold easier than plat). And PBSR only kicks in when you manage an outstanding performance and don’t get countered.
MMR matchmaking creates an uncanny dissonance, as a match in a given SR range can be at very different difficulty levels. We would expect a particular rank to have a stable difficulty level that makes it clearly distinguishable from other ranks. This may be the case on a large scale, but it is not noticeable to the individual within a range of 500 SR. We also expect to be labeled correctly, if we manage to beat players from a certain MMR range. If I can stand my ground against diamond smurfs in gold, why am I still gold for dozens of matches, and still have to work through the whole plat range?
That doesn’t mean that you can’t climb. It just gives you progressively harder matches in low ranks that are only slightly related and mirrored by your SR rating. And it prolongs the climb exponentially. Your SR chases your MMR … very slowly, with a lot of back and forth. So Blizzard’s own statement is correct here.
Summary: SR mainly represents your EFFORT, less your actual skill level.
One big question remains: Does MMR matchmaking work, or not? On the one hand yes, it tries to even out the matches, or the players and you can already say that individual players are identified and faced with similarly good opponents.
Can it fulfill its intended task satisfactorily? No, it’s easy to undermine, because the identified players are often only statistically close to each other. Young smurf accounts and throwers introduce so many inconsistencies that matches become steamrolls despite MMR matchmaking.
MMR can therefore never work for fundamental reasons, because in a game like Overwatch there is no ultimate score to statistically match skill against skill every time. Skill is a meta term here that can completely flip from one situation to another.
So if MMR matchmaking doesn’t work because players (smurfs) can easily leverage and exploit it, why would you want to continue to use it frantically? Let MMR go.
This leads to the fact that the “good intentions” with the manufactured 50% winchance simply do not work in practice. Let it sort out naturally. Therefore, ironically, it still feels like most of the time in competitive is somehow wasted.
I still think that the “addictive” side effect is also highly interesting for Blizzard. Because of the arbitrariness and randomness in the OUTCOME of matchmaking (not the composition), we get a similar effect as with a slot machine. When we win, we are flooded with dopamine, but often we also lose and try to pick up where we left off. Or we try to gamble lost SR back in, like a gambling addict who gambles away his last cents.
From the description it becomes clear that the same system can have two opposite sides. On the one hand, the “well-intentioned”, in favor of casual players, and on the other hand, the “harmful”, that binds especially intensive long-term players.
To what extent the whole thing was 100% intentionally constructed, we can only speculate. In today’s business world, however, we should assume that a lot of psychologists are involved in such systems.
The other approach would be a completely naive and highly negligent understanding on Blizzard’s part of how games are played today. Or complete arrogance in presuming to know how games should be played.
