I only go into voice if someone else “goes first”. My experience is that if I “go first”, the team tends to “shut down” and throw. But if someone else “goes first”, I know that there is at least one other person on our team who is there to compete.
Those games I tend to win more often than lose, particularly in Bronze. So my Win/Loss tends to be a bit of a lottery on whether or not I get someone else in voice. I find that if you can convince your team to target the turrets first, burn shields or take picks before pushing, stop staggering or inting, you are 80% of the way to a win.
I am most definitely mechanically better than my current rank, but being able to call shots is a lottery, and team mates are a lottery. Yesterday I had a game where the feeding support player left the game, and it made it easy to win 5v6, when we were struggling 6v6. Ultimate charging makes the teammate lottery so dangerous.
More hypotheticals that always against you. It’s confirmation bias and you don’t even realize. You can get carried by a smurf in a dozen matches and you won’t notice but the second that’s the reason you lose a game, it’s a huge problem. The game also tells you the average sr of both teams, and placement matches are rare past the start of the season. I’d love to see an actual screenshot of two teams with the crazy differences you are describing.
Not really sure why streaking is considered bad. If it evens out in the end, it shouldn’t matter. I’ve also found it to be quite rare that somebody ranks up without a big winning streak. It happens to everybody, so you just have to get used to it.
Yeah I just straight up don’t believe you. Again, give a screenshot of your profile. Perhaps if you lost most of the games when losses and gains are more drastic it would be possible but otherwise no.
I am not an expert on bronze players nor gold players. I don’t claim to know the ins and outs of the ladder. However, I will confidently say that good players will climb. It’s no coincidence that everytime a player comes here to complain about teammates and posts a replay, there are about a million mistakes they make in the first 5 minutes. SR gains are so generous in low elo that it’s so easy to tell that your story is fabricated. Thinking rationally will lead you to the conclusion that blizzard has no reason to rig games, nor do they do anything different from the contempary competitive games. The forums are an echo chamber for folk like you, there’s a reason this is the only place where people complain about this stuff.
Look, the basic design of the game and humans means that yes, you will be
you’re absolutely right.
There is a built in workaround for this (LFG), plus the whole thing about having friends to work with that humans have been doing for quite some time now. If you don’t like the MM, then don’t use it. It’s not mandatory, you know.
The reason you use it (likely, most people if not you) is because pressing a button and having a system feed teammates to you is just. so. much. easier.
So, if the game has several ways to find a team, but you do it in the worst available way, who’s fault is it if you don’t like the experience?
You may desire a better way then… but you’ve already said several times that your can’t think of a better way either, you’re just complaining about how it is without realizing that is your own dern fault for your own horrible experience.
But most of us just have the mental fortitude to causally slough off the occasional bad experience because it’s an inevitable result of the combination of game design and ready to use matchmaker.
If we want an accurate skill for ourselves then we know to not do things that create inconsistency, like seeing how far down the tequila bottle we can get, rolling a d20 for heroes, and blasting Tchaikovsky 20dB over the audio cues.
Some people just don’t care, and some people will be more misranked than others.
So again, what the f is your point, other than to scream into the internet about how reality sucks and tell us how you do not like it?
It’s not like you have a better idea of finding 12 people in 5 minutes, do you?
There is a certain point where you have to either accept the flaws as a trade-off for things that you do like, or not accept them and stop playing. This attitude drives me nuts and you’re not the first and it’s not just this game. The things you’re saying that you don’t like are fundamental to the game, the MM is not how it’s meant to be played. It’s there for your convenience. The SR is there for your amusement not for your ego.
Most of us find that with consistent play, the games go from ready to hard in about a 500 SR range, that’s +/- 250. There video above notes that we should expect a 1000 SR advantage to win 75% of the time.
Can you do things to cause your rank to be wrong? Of course, but don’t pee on your own leg and complain that it’s raining.
There are personal factors in LFG that don’t work in my favor, so for me personally MM is really all I have. The pool of OW players are not a random distribution of people from the entire population. They are highly concentrated within specific demographic, which makes systems like LFG exclusionary.My preference would be to form up in clans.
I think if I have the mental fortitude to read the endless chest-thumping waffle on this forum I have the mental fortitude to slough off the occasional tilt. Like the whole “git gud” argument is an attempt to tilt rather than address any particular issue raised.
Well, informed discussion, even argument is a sub-goal of mine always. Taleswapper has been good enough to provide that. What’s your point in replying? Did I upset your little bubble?
Sure, but what has that got to do with discussing those flaws in a forum? Are they inextricably linked in your mind?
Really? Like what specifically? What specifically is fundamental to the game that I have said I don’t like?
I’m not being facetious here, I’m trying to understand your understanding of what I have written.
Actually I’m rather enjoying “smurfing” in low bronze. Full of hilarious C9s, funny boops, solo team kills, gold medals for that sweet sweet dopamine rush. I’m starting to wonder why anyone would want to rank up when they have it this good in Bronze. It makes games miserable for 6 other people, but why should I care about them? I’ve got mine.
From what you said here, I’m guessing you don’t like playing well with other people, which is fundamental to a team game like this.
For non-trolls, I try to understand the argument and then either explain to the person or catalog, depending on whether the person is asking a question or ranting about a conspiracy theory.
I feel I’ve completely understood your argument here. You can’t possibly believe that the skill ranking is impossible if you also feel like you’re smurfing in bronze.
Just in case neither of you have read this thread, I think you should.
It’s endorsed by WyomingMyst (not that, that carries a lot of weight) but the point is, Wyoming is more affiliated with Blizzard than any of the players who don’t understand how the ranking system works.
Sorry if I have not responded to a post. I mostly try to respond to people when I see some misunderstanding I think I might be able to clarify. In any case, thanks for the link. That’s pretty exhaustive. The more I dig into some of the older posts, the more I discover that this really has all been explained (and quite well) before.
While I recognize that some posters may simply have never read one of the very many good explanations of how the matchmaker works, I think most of the long-term “matchmaker is broken” crowd must have read one or more of these explanations.
I think, in those cases, there is a lot of willful ignorance. And that sort of weaponized proliferation of ignorance sort of pains my educator’s soul.
Bro, you’re over here doing Gods work!! Please continue (for as long as your fortitude holds out). You’ve clearly seen I’ve lost most of my patience with the subject.
Believe me when I say, you’ve provided a different perspective that I learned something different from that I hadn’t even thought of previously (implicitly perhaps but not explicitly).
Its either that, or they understand the system and are just intentionally trying to misguide other players out of frustration (the former being the most likely result).
I think your list does a good job of explaining most of the people I’ve seen opine about forced win rates. I’m not sure it describes everything I’ve seen though, in that the people who seem to have thought about this the most have some really complex Rube Goldbergian matchmakers that they’ve constructed in their head to attempt to explain the following contradiction:
They believe the best players get dropped down to the lowest ranks. So better players lose more matches and derank further and further.
Yet streamers consistently rank up from the lowest ranks with crazy win rates.
I’ve seen Rigged literally suggest that the matchmaker somehow whitelists these streamers and that they get treated differently by the matchmaker than others. Rigged has also suggested that he is blacklisted by the matchmaker.
And he will sometimes suggest that the game will literally adjust things like hitboxes in real time in order to ensure that he (and presumably others who are blacklisted) lose matches and to ensure that streamers (and presumably others who are whitelisted) win matches.
I think there was someone in this thread above who mentioned something similar about the behavior of the game literally changing for streamers who are in bronze.
And I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that it reminds me of the extreme lengths that some went to in order to continue to assert that the universe was geocentric. I sort of think of these bizarrely complex matchmaker conspiracy theories as “sphere” theories, they begin simple enough:
I think I am better than my peers and should be ranked higher.
Therefore, something other than my skill [the matchmaker] is holding me back.
But they quickly run into problems.
Others are able to rank up
And every time they encounter a problem, they add another sphere (just as those who tried to justify a geocentric model of the universe did.) And, at some point, you find yourself adding so many spheres you get to the point that Rigged is at, where you essentially throw your hands up in disgust at how complex your model has become and just assert that the game literally shifts things like hit box size depending on whether it likes you or not.
I suppose the second reason I find this fascinating is tied to the first- it becomes increasingly clear as people construct more and more bizarrely complex models that the only methodology involved is the following:
I will do whatever I have to in order to believe that my rank is not tied to my skill as a player.
And that is a very poor methodology indeed. If one is not careful, it will inform one’s other intellectual inquiries. There’s a decent amount of evidence that people who believe one conspiracy theory will tend to believe other, unrelated conspiracy theories.
This whole “rigged matchmaker” thing is a pernicious intellectual virus that sickens none more than those who espouse it.
The post was from 4 years ago. I can update it to account for the “literally rigged” argument. If you can think of any others I’d appreciate it. I kinda caught whiff of that one, but it’s so outlandish that I wasn’t really sure if it was actually meant.
I think Rigged means it. There’s a post somewhere (I apologize that I don’t remember which thread) in which Rigged suggests that he can literally see the game adjusting things as he plays matches (because he’s really good at computers and runs diagnostics in real time or something).
He “knows” that the game changes its ruleset for him as he plays.
The rigged theory, word, and person weren’t around last time I was active. I took it to be just another way of saying “forced” or “handicapped”, which you know are just nebulous terms to describe a variety of things. This is the 3rd time in my life I’ve been wrong.
I really do think you did a good job, though, of describing something like 95+% of what I’ve seen. And a lot of people believe combinations of those things. At it’s core, it’s something like:
Sometimes I feel like I cannot lose a match, but sometimes I feel like I cannot win a match.
And for whatever reason, people seem really reluctant to recognize that there are a lot of player behaviors that explain a great deal of that. (So they start constructing their theories about how the game is rigged. But they’ll latch onto multiple of them, because they really just want to believe that player behaviors and skill are a small part of what causes a match to be won/lost.) And part of what really gets me about that is that I think the more the “rigged matchmaker” theory is taken up by the community, the more problematic player behaviors seem reasonable to people. (Why shouldn’t I give up after one lost team fight? The whole thing is rigged anyway.)
So people are actively causing the issues that are making their matches worse.
Yes, I’ve seen him make these outlandish claims as well.
He once posted a YouTube video of himself playing Lucio (doppelganging as a torb turret btw) where he claimed the game automatically changed how much Heals/sec was being provided by the aura.
I’ll ask Abdullah if he can find it. If I recall correctly, he was using the amplification ability which changes Lucio’s healing output from 12 (or 16 ) H/s to 50 H/s for a short duration. As expected, the ability timer ran out and the ability went on cooldown which resulted in the healing aura returning to the original 12 (or 16) H/s.
I would never have imagined that people could be so egotistical to not accept that (while playing a game against other human beings) that they could be so much less capable than others.
I mean. I get it. I was super pissed off when I first ranked down to Silver. Hell, I was mad in the first couple of seasons when almost everyone I had been playing Quickplay with ranked higher than me when Comp was released.
But I had to get over that.
And I had to do some honest self-assessments. I basically did what I tell my students to do after they get slapped in the face by their first practice test score. Step one is always, always an honest self-assessment:
Where am I now? (In my case, it was “pretty bad at OW”)
Where do I realistically want to go? (My goal was Diamond. I’m older than most players and have some issues with things like vision and fine motor skills [not to mention the fact that I’ve often got kids climbing on me when I play], so Masters/GM seemed like an unreasonable goal to me.
How do I get there? (Begin with lots of deep dives into what players better than me are doing and try to find 2-3 things I can begin implementing into my games. Remind myself of these things while in spawn and between teamfights.)
Repeat as I improve.
But it seems like a lot of players short-circuit this whole process by immediately answering the self-assessment with something like “I am a god gamer and have little or nothing to improve. The only reasons I am not climbing are things beyond my ability to control. The universe is profoundly unfair, and OW is simply a microcosm of this cruel reality that seeks nothing more than my personal destruction.”
Preaching to the choir here, I was hard stuck gold for 5 seasons and HARD STUCK platinum for 6. I did finally push into Diamond with a tank and support player but after that I climbed my other 2 accounts (which I had made expecting to escape elo hell) to Diamond with relative ease.
) H/s to 50 H/s for a short duration. As expected, the ability timer ran out and the ability went on cooldown which resulted in the healing aura returning to the original 12 (or 16) H/s.