The forced 50% w/r does exist on paper in solo comp

Competitive Discussion
395

Those barely even exist. I can’t even think of a practical highground that a baptiste wouldn’t be able to get to. Her best maps surely don’t have any, havana and junkertown. And usually spots very high up on the map have little cover, so you can effectively spam them out.

You shouldn’t need infinite movement to execute a dive or escape after one. All the characters I listed have either effective HP and abilities to tank, or can just dip, like with blink and recall. The point of adaptive shields is so you can go for dives while tanking a lot of damage and surviving. You aren’t wasting shields if you have to use them on a dive. It all seems you forgot that you are solo contesting a widow on highground. So you aren’t getting to be 1v6ing in front of the whole enemy team unless you overcommit for the widow. In which case, if she does return to her team it is still a victory.

Ashe will win in the case that the ashe is just a better player. Though in the case of pro play, which we use to gauge the power level of things, or an even playing field widow will win everytime. But yes tracer is not able to contest every highground so that’s why characters like dva exist.

Yeah but why should blizzard work the game around one tricks in ranked games. It sucks to have but it’s no where near a big enough problem as you are making it out to be. Again, low rank players do not even play counters correctly for it to matter. A gold player will rarely hit the shots to counter a pharah.

Yeah so I did take some time to watch it and he makes great points, but he is talking from the perspective of a pro and t500 player. I’ve said it multiple times, but hard counters in low elo don’t exist because players do not know how to play the character correctly, and how to play match ups correctly. A gold player picking brig to counter a tracer is probably going to sit at the front line all game and then wonder why her backline is dying so quickly.

I don’t even like how he uses doomfist ult as an example of something that you can’t counter. There are a million ults in the game that an ana is helpless against, a lot being in the game from day 1. What does an ana do if a rein is in front of her with shatter? What does she do if she gets grav’d? These things have always existed. The brig comparison also no longer exists. She was strictly way too broken and easy to play. Blizzard dropped the ball there, but also moved brig to a much better spot for the game.

It’s really important to understand where the game was when seagull made this video. GOATs had been broken for a very long time, brig was nerfed a dozen times and was still way too good, dps was an essentially dead role. All these problems have been fixed and overwatch is actually in a great spot meta wise. That makes it all the more confusing as to why go to 5v5 but that’s a different topic. His main gripe is that certain characters are dominant no matter what the situation. GOATs and dive were superior on every map. The 2021 OWL grand finals is actually a great example of two different playstyles clashing. They were the two best teams that played a completely different game. Shanghai with the ball comp, Atlanta on rush.

I don’t really get his point on relying on teammates either. Needing help from your team has been in the game since day 1, and it will always exist. If you are on zen vs a good tracer, you barely even have a chance to shoot back because they are able to one clip you. That is a day 1 interaction. Doom and ball just do this in a unique way. Those are also weaknesses of a character. Zen is very potent, has a great ult, and discord is one of the best abilities in the game, but in turn he is very vulnurable. All this stuff has been in the game, but players just weren’t good enough to exploit it back then. That’s just how it is, and it sucks but it’s an impossible problem to fix without ruining so many other parts of the game.

So to put it into simpler terms, I agree with seagull here, but what he wants has actually happened. It’s just that overwatch had a completely different problem since 3-4 years ago, just no content. We also shouldn’t sacrifice fun characters like ball in favor of a more balanced game. It may make the game more competitive but at the end of the day, if people aren’t having fun, none of that matters.

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396

Relying on teammates is just part of Overwatch, but minimizing the number of losses on character select is a good thing. I think half the reason why people behave so poorly towards other players in games like Overwatch and LoL is because it’s really easy to become frustrated when you feel like your teammates control your wins/losses.

I think a majority of characters in the game have mostly even matchups. I’m just making my case for why “Rock-Paper-Scissors” balancing isn’t good and makes the game frustrating.

I also don’t want to sacrifice the uniqueness of the heroes in the game. It’s a balancing act where you have to make heroes that are different, but equal. It would be unrealistic to expect Blizzard to not make mistakes, but a lot of the characters added post-launch had very uneven matchups compared to the launch roster.

397

Probably more than half. If these people don’t like the game then they shouldn’t play it. If they do play it, they shouldn’t come into the forums and complain. If they do come to complain, they should at least have the common decency to be upfront about their complaint rather than claim that losses are created by the system on purpose. (see title of thread).

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398

If everybody who gets frustrated at Overwatch decided not to play there would be no players.

399

I’m pretty sure you are making that up, here are some quotes from recent threads on this very forum.

Doesn’t sound like the complaint is about the matchmaker doing it’s job. In fact, it sounds like the complaint that the MM is dogsh!t, that the team SR difference is indeed above 1000, maybe above 2000, that the MM is placing dogsh!t players in teams against much higher ranked players, essentially forcing the loss.

WHY it does this is the point of contention.

  • Is it some kind of failure of the algorithm (probably, people are pretty crap at building these types of things, and tend to rely on blunt heuristics).
  • Is it just RNG?
  • Is it because the game is basically dead and there aren’t enough players to make a balanced game (and has been for years)?
  • Or is it deliberate (putting on tin foil hat), to punish a certain category of players?
  • Or is it a commercial decision (putting on second tin foil hat) to drive sales of alt accounts after complete and utter incompetence in introducing new heroes and overbuffing (and nerfing) decimated the player base?
400

There are a ton of these. I can find more if you want, but the main thrust of the “rigged matchmaker” complaint has been for 4 years that the matchmaker trying to balance matches is wrong.

Here’s Cuthbert (the dude who started most of the anti-matchmaker threads and made the anti-matchmaker video, etc.) explaining that what he wants is random matchmaking, because that would allow the best player in the match to get the best teammates. It’s precisely the thing that you think is already happening (to some degree) and want a stronger matchmaker in order to prevent it.

I’m sure there are more people like you, as well, who want a stronger matchmaker. It’s just that people don’t realize when they complain about the matchmaker that they are actually arguing on the opposite side of the issue as the main “matchmaker is broken” proponents, because those guys (for the most part) do not argue in good faith, so you get weird threads like this one where people who think they agree with the “broken matchmaker” crowd are actually arguing on opposite sides.

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401

But also, note what you have quoted here. Your complaint was that the SR differential in the matches was lopsided. That is, one team would have all the best players and the other team would have all the worst players.

I asked you for what the scenario you were imagining was and you gave me these numbers:

In your scenario, the first team has all the worst players in the lobby (with one exception), while the second team has all the best players in the lobby (with that same exception).

But now go back and look at the quotes you gave me. People are complaining that if they are the best player in the lobby, they get the worst teammates. That’s the opposite of your complaint. In your scenario, the problem is that the best players in the lobby are all distributed on the same team (so it’s not that the best players get the worst teammates- it’s that the best players get the best teammates.) You are complaining that the matchmaker is not attempting to balance matches (or at least not hard enough), but they are complaining that the matchmaker is attempting to balance matches.

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402

No, I think you misunderstand what he is saying. e.g.

Being handicapped is exactly what we are talking about here. Having a difference of 2000 SR between teams IS A HANDICAP.

And this is what MOST online games do, except in the case where the community controls the servers, and players “clan up”. But in the past, nearly all games allowed the reshuffling of teams to rebalance them, according to the estimated ELO. (With the exception of periodic tournaments where fixed teams would compete.)

But the key difference here is that in most games, estimating an ELO is relatively easy. They usually have a small roster of player class, with a limited number of weapons, without outsize synergies between “ultimates” or CC combos. In OW, it is nearly impossible to estimate ELO. Just look at the performance difference of certain DPS between pre-match FFA and in-game. It’s like two opposite ends of the spectrum. Doomfists that pwn in FFA are regularly and continuously shutdown in team play. Widow is the opposite, often failing to get a single kill in FFA (where the map design and the lack of objective allows almost anyone to kill her), but can pwn in-game.

The games that invented the concept of ELO did not exhibit this discrepancy. Players who were good in duel/FFA were also good at CTF or TDM. And ELO was a fairly accurate approximation of outcome.

Given the inability to measure individual ELO, it makes no sense to rank players based on whether they win or lose in a pool of randomly selected players, or even if one team is self-selected and the other is randomly selected.

The only way to really test skill in Overwatch is to have tournaments with fixed teams. The competitive ladder controlled by Blizzard is just a popularity contest, biased toward sociability.

As for wanting a stronger matchmaker, I don’t believe that it’s possible, given the inherent problems with estimating ELO. I think if a community were allowed to develop, you could organise tournaments, or even see the formation of clans who would compete with each other regularly.

But trying to estimate outcome when there are 4.5 billion permutations of 3 roles, 31 heroes with 4-5 abilities each, with varying degrees of co-ordination and synergy between abilities, would take billions upon billions of simulation trials to build a predictive model. It’s just easier just to throw in 4-5 players 500 SR lower or higher into one team or the other to skew the outcome towards some kind of volatile homeostasis, and rely on sociability for grouping up to push the team players to the top.

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403

The junkrat vs Pharah matchup is especially frustrating because often times the Pharah will completely ignore junkrat, because the junkrat is no threat to her. And then Pharah will just sit above the supports and just kill them over and over. And when you tell junkrat to swap because of pharah, they will say “why? I’m doing good. Pharah’s not a problem for me”. :rage:

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404

But by “handicapped,” Cuthbert means that if there is a really strong player in the lobby, they are given worse teammates in order to balance the match.

And, again, that is the opposite of your complaint. In your scenario, the best players are all on the same team and that results in a lopsided match. Cuthbert specifcally says that he wants lopsided matches to be possible.

You do not want lopsided matches. Do you see how those are opposed stances?

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405

i HaVe GoLd DaMaGe

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Oh, golden Overwatch.

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406

Not just junkrat. I played a game today where the Pharah pretty much ignored everyone except the supports coming out of spawn. The tanks were asking why there were no heals? I told them to turn around and see if they could see the supports anywhere, coz we ded, and will be again soon.
I wish my aim hadn’t got so bad, I could probably kill her with Bap otherwise.

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407

Also, as to your point that the matchmaker does a poor job because OW is essentially too complex for the system to accurately measure player skill, Cuthbert is again opposed to that idea:

Cuthbert thinks the matchmaker measures player skill virtually perfectly. It’s just that he also thinks that it perfectly makes for balanced matches. And this combination thwarts players from climbing because they will always have something close to a 50% win rate. What Cuthbert thinks should happen is what you describe as the problem (lopsided matches), which would allow the best players to have something more like 90% win rates, because he assumes he would be one of those best players.

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408

Yes, that’s stupid. Both teams should be really strong players. Creating teams with wild variance in skill is the issue.

I want both teams to be approximately the same skill. As stated above, I don’t believe that can be done algorithmically in OW. In fact I believe it’s impossible. Not only is it impossible, it’s delusional.

The solution to this is to run an independent competitive ladder, with fixed teams, using round robin for placement in the knockout round, then best-of-five until you get to the grand final. First map pick is by coin toss, then alternate map picks until there is a winner. I’m surprised this is not a thing, but given the OCD of the publisher of this game, it’s probably frowned upon.

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409

I am actually somewhat hopeful that we will get a tournament mode with OW2 once guilds are implemented. And I agree with you that this would be the optimal way to play the game. Everyone should be able to have an organized play experience in OW. Without that, it’s sort of a shadow of what it could be.

Of course, some people don’t want to compete in that way. And that is perfectly fine. OW2 will also have PVE, which should be great for many players. OW1 just sort of lumped everyone into the same few baskets and that was probably not helpful.

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410

The ability to create matches is right there in OW1. I know there have been some independent tournaments organised, but I’m surprised it’s not an ongoing thing. Paying ten bucks to change your handle might be part of the problem. SMH.

Thinking about this some more, I don’t think the matchmaker is broken, in as much as it doesn’t really work at all, and it’s a bad idea in the first place. An interesting experiment perhaps, but ultimately one that ended in failure.

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411

Okay, you are correct then, because I don’t think the MM estimates skill at all. How could it?

How could the matchmaker know which tank you will pick before the match starts? You might pwn like Yeatle on Ball, but play Winston like a Bronzie. You might be a wicked Widow, but place into a map that has almost no long sight lines. You might be a two-trick DPS, and the opposing team has a player who can hard counter both of them, or neither of them. It would literally take 1000s of games against players who have played 1000s of games to estimate your skill level as a single number. And even then, it would still be wrong.

The only way this could not be true is if there is some other factor other than mechanical skill or experience that is an over-bias. One that comes from picking the right hero to play at the right time, or be in a position relative to your team, or something else. I have personally witnessed these inexplicable buffs or nerfs in game. When you can do 500 damage in 3 seconds and not get a single tick off the enemy’s health bar.

There are times when the game seems completely non-deterministic, like Adam Smith’s “unseen hand”, but this time of the game developer, not the cumulative actions of the actors in the game. So maybe “skill” comes from understanding these hidden advantages, which comes from playing the game “the way you’re supposed to”.

I hear a lot of religious dogma in voice chat about certain rituals and methods you are supposed to follow. I used to dismiss this as superstition akin to a pigeon flapping it’s wings to get food. But maybe there is something to it. Maybe there is a real game underneath the surface game. A hidden advantage to be gained from following the dogma and the rituals.

412

If you using cuthbert to justify your statements, you are doing something very wrong. He is either a lunatic or a dedicated troll

Like how can you take this guy seriously.

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413

There is an answer to this question…but yea, it’s not perfect.

The thing is, if people are “complaining” about the fact that they can’t get their win rates above 50%, then it’s working well enough. The fact that people claim to “go on win streaks only to lose” is further evidence that it works as intended.

The issues you noted. Yes. They are issues, but just because skill is a range doesn’t mean it can’t be measured, it just means that the measurement will hold some uncertainty.

It’s accurate…but it’s not precise.

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414

I don’t think it’s either, at least in the context of measuring skill. I agree that it measures something though.