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

Competitive Discussion
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People can definitely overestimate their own abilities, so do you think it’s a good idea to discount and ignore the overwhelming complaints of matchmakers on the assumption that they’re all just not evaluating themselves correctly? What if a real problem (by your standards) ever does exist? You won’t ever believe it because “they must have dunning kruger.” But let’s go with that assumption that dunning kruger is the cause of all this, if that’s true then do we get to apply it to the matchmakers creators and assume that they think their matchmaker is better than it really is? Or does this only apply to people when it helps your opinion be correct?

To me it all comes down to one thing real life experience and what I see in front of my eyes. I factually, objectively, have solo queued to masters on multiple occasions on DPS, and Tank, so my evaluation of myself is accurate by YOUR standards, I am a masters player. So dunning kruger can’t apply to me yet I’m saying the same thing, the matchmaker is bad, and broken.

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There are plenty of critiques that I do not discount. It’s just that some critiques (even widespread ones) are based on fundamentally flawed perceptions. And it does no one any good to accept such critiques on their face.

Do you have any vods of Masters players struggling in Bronze?

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265

The “masters player in bronze” scenarios was brought up to illustrate an “imagine this” type of point. I’ve never even seen bronze tier. I’ve experienced what I described in high gold tier and plat, epic struggles to rank up even though I can hold a high diamond and masters level on multiple other accounts.

I do know there are videos of an overwatch league player/top 100 player having loss streaks down to Masters which makes no sense in a respectable matchmaker, unless we’re saying that deviations of +1000SR are a good thing.

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That’s cool. So I was just interested in your actual claim. Your claim is that you are a Masters player who has struggled in Gold and Plat matches. Do you have any of those vods- of a Masters players struggling in Gold or in Plat?

As for top tier players ranking down to Masters- that is entirely plausible. It happens sometimes when the meta switches or when someone hasn’t played in a while, or when someone is trying to work on a particular hero (so they are one-tricking on someone who is not their best hero), or when someone is memeing (sleepy was pretty notorious for this), or off-roleing, or simply is no longer grinding at a professional or top tier level.

And it doesn’t have to be a deviation of 1000SR. Someone can be top 100 at 4300- ish SR (it’s probably less than that currently). If that is their peak, they could plausibly play at around 4100 SR much of the time. Ranking down to Masters isn’t much of a stretch.

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Most of the problems you are experiencing do exist. They’re just not matchmaker problems.

They’re people problems and there are exactly zero changes or improvements to the matchmaker that can solve them within the game design of Overwatch.

For instance, your issues with ranking individuals in a team game. You’d need to make it not a team game to solve this problem.

Your issues with skills being widely variant on teams. People not only have and value different sets of skills, but people also have good days and bad days, and sometimes your team just syncs better as you happen to have similar ideas of how to play. There’s nothing that a solo-queue, automatic matchmaker can fix.

But, and this is important, the tools are there to not have this happen, so if you’re experiencing this it’s quite specifically you’re own fault for not using the tools available.

Your issues of GM level players being stuck in Bronze? That’s obviously BS. It’s not a problem. Will a Gold player win a few games in Platinum? Sure. If you watched your own video, you’d know that would be expected to happen about 25% of the time. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if a Bronzer played in GM and won a game or even two, they’re only 1/12 of the outcome.

GM level players not instantly being brought up to GM from Bronze, well, they could increase PBSR but that has residual effects that have been shown that people don’t like.

The issue of too wide a variance on teams? They could increase the queue time but again, it’s a tradeoff that people don’t like.

There are others I mentioned above, too.

Are you seeing a pattern here? It’s not that all the complaints that are false, it’s the proposed solutions that make zero sense at all, blaming the wrong thing, or if the solutions do actually make sense, they cause more problems than they solve.

ETA: I’ll even go so far as to say that I can imagine that there are certain playstyle/character combinations that will fit well in a broad range of tiers, so that the same person could actually fit well in Diamond or Gold. If this were to happen, it wouldn’t be a problem with the matchmaker, it would be a problem with game design that makes a character’s skill floor and ceiling too close together and thus impossible to measure with accuracy. Could also be someone who can’t learn to be effective in a lower level but has the mechanics that will suffice in a higher level and happened upon the right strategy. Again, not a MM problem, it’s a combination design/player problem.

Measuring physical data is really, really hard. And this data is moving around.

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268

Absolutely, I can create a VOD of me playing in masters and winning and me using the same hero playing in high gold and plat and losing. See you think I must be lying because “that can’t possibly be true” but it absolutely is true. But here’s what happens, I post videos and the following excuses are made:

  • You were throwing the plat/gold tier games
  • That was just a few matches, we need you to play 100+ matches and record and post them for us (not feasible)
  • How do we know the masters player and the plat player were the same person, could be different people
  • Other excuses

I’ll be happy to post videos of me playing in masters and plat/gold if you will concede that matchmaking is broken when you see me winning in masters and losing in plat. Then you will need to stop posting defending a matchmaker that you have little experience on

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It’s not that I think it’s obviously lying, it’s that it would be instructive. We’d see what is actually happening in those cases.

Like, could a GM player lose in Plat- sure. There are lots of ways that could happen. Maybe they have 2 or more leavers on their team for an obvious example. But that doesn’t mean the matchmaker is broken. That is a very specific claim to make.

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270

Can you do one continuous stream of 5 games each, starting with the lower account?

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My guy if they are where they belong then they shouldn’t be climbing lmao

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272

Maybe in OW2 they’ll just give everyone 100 SR per day they play so everyone goes up.

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273

Sounds like socialist gameplay

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274

There are a lot of games where progression isn’t really skill based. OW obviously isn’t one of them, but there are still a TON of threads about how hard it is to rank up. I really do believe that at the core of these complaints is the not-unreasonable assumption that one should rank up.

Which is just wrong. There is no progression in OW. Never was, never will be, never meant to be. It’s a game design, not a matchmaker error.

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I could see that being valid in a game that doesn’t have a “Player vs. Player” competitive mode.

A tank player who’s been gold for 3 years and isn’t really able to process the game mentally at the speed of Diamond players do, isn’t going to perform in diamond off of golden game sense.

I don’t think people remember that they’re playing against other people.

:woman_facepalming:t2:

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276

I never really played any other competitive games because I hate them. I hate them because I get put into a match with people that I can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t get to because I die instantly. Honestly, how anyone got started playing these games is beyond me, but maybe if I had been introduced rather than finding them on my own I would have seen the appeal. Ahem…to the point:

People like me, who come in, play a short period of time, then leave are ESSENTIAL to the game if it uses only a W/L ratio to rank players. In this case, it actually becomes true that you can have a >50% win rate for all the concurrent players, because you just killed me 20 times, I killed no one, and then I left to play Fallout 4 where my poor reaction time doesn’t matter.

I’m guessing that you don’t hate these kinds of games. I’m incidentally curious how one becomes good at games where you die instantly and then sit in a lobby for 30 minutes, but that’s really beside the point. The point is, there are downsides of SBMM for players who aren’t horrible and who aren’t great. Which, to be fair, are most players.

If you’re not horrible, you can progress in a non-SBMM system, too. In SBMM, though, you really don’t and OW is specifically designed for people to not progress without significant changes to skill.

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I know how convergence algorithms work. My point is that OW’s doesn’t. If you had clans, with regularly constant teams, it would work. It cannot possibly work with independent events (new teams every game).

At any rate, my win rate is consistently below 50%, however for it to hover near 50% I get games that are slaughters, one way or the other.

Last night I got put into a game where both team averages were 500 above my current SR. We won easily and convincingly. SR bump was 27. So even though I can play easily and win easily in a game with 11 other players who have an SR 500 above me, my SR is still 500 lower. On the face of it, that seems like an error.

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It’s already socialist gameplay. Socialism is rewarded by the game and individualism is punished.

If you have a different view to the party line, or if you take advantage of a game loophole caused by an unexpected consequence, the game is changed to match the party line much like all mistakes caused by central planning.

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279

No one can be where they belong if people who are better than them are climbing. In a fixed population of players they would be descending. I think this is why Blizz probably turns the algorithm off when you get below 500 SR. At that point it’s just RNG.

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280

I think this is part of the problem. On the face of it, that seems like an error, to you. But it shouldn’t. You are looking at one game out of however many. And you are looking at a game with 11 other people in it. I should expect some weird games to happen.

Hell, I’ve played in at least a couple of games with Masters and GM players that my team won. That doesn’t mean I should be Masters or GM. (I should not.)

One of the reasons I bring up the GMAT is that most of the conversations surrounding the OW algorithm are conversations that I have had repeatedly when discussing the GMAT with my students. And this is one of those conversations, if a student gets one of the hardest questions in the question bank and answers it correctly, what sort of rank/score should they expect:

Where should they be placed on the ladder?

And the answer is that they could be placed at the top of the ladder. Or they could be placed at the bottom of the ladder (though this might be unlikely.) More than likely though, they will be placed somewhere in the middle of the ladder with the majority of test takers.

The fact that you were in a game around 500 SR higher than your then current SR, that your team won the game, and that you were bumped up 27 SR is all very reasonable. This goes back to some of the earlier conversation about how much the matchmaker is allowed to suppose that your skill deviates from your current rank.

A worse system could have immediately bumped you 500 SR, but there would be all sorts of knock-on effects from making that choice. (There would be wild swings in the ladder rankings for one thing- if you think people complain now…)

Instead, you got a more than average bump as the matchmaker learned that you could contribute to your team winning in a game that was 500 SR above your current rank. That 27 SR bump makes a sizeable contribution to a climb on the ladder. If you continue to win, the matchmaker continues to learn more about you and you continue to climb. But if you start losing at some point, the matchmaker also learns more about you- (that even though you won that one game, you lose more than you win above a certain SR.)

Either way, we want the ladder rankings to reflect this increase in knowledge.

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But it’s all relative.

Why can’t people be where they belong if people who are better than them are climbing? That doesn’t even make sense unless you assume that the SR ratings are somehow a fixed measure of skill. They are not. Just as playing basketball at a professional level (or sprinting, or power lifting, or hell chess) means that one is playing at a higher level of skill currently than it did in say the 1950s, but you can still meaningfully compare current players to each other.

Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, Masters, GM, etc are each relative descriptors of skill. They do not purport to be some fixed unchanging measure of skill. If someone plays at a GM level, but they do not improve and end up playing in a later season at a Masters level, that does not mean that they are no longer where they belong on the ladder.

It means that while they did play at a level that was good enough for GM during some number of seasons when compared to the other players on the ladder during those seasons, they are currently playing at a Masters level when compared to the current players on the ladder. In both cases, they were/are placed appropriately for their play at the time.

Also, I’m really curious what you mean by the algorithm being turned off below 500 SR. Are you just talking about the actual SR number being hidden below 500? Because that’s a very different thing than turning the algorithm off. Turning the algorithm off would prevent matches being made for players below 500 SR.

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No, it’s unexpected. It’s half a rank of SR difference. Why would the matchmaker put me in a game with 11 other players of 500 SR greater than me unless it thought I was able to play at that rank? And if I am able to play at that rank, why am I not AT that rank?

The answer is simply that the algorithm doesn’t measure skill in any meaningful way at all. It is a system of reward and punishment, for behaviour not skill. And that’s OK with me. What’s not OK is pretending that it is some kind of skill ranking system, rather than a measure of a willingness to follow unspoken rules.

Because if they are climbing, then they are (a) Winning games and (b) Increasing their SR which means that the people they are winning against are (a) losing games and (b) decreasing their SR. While there are some neutral SR games, they are the very small minority. You are either going up or down, you can’t be doing both, so you cannot be “where you belong”, you are always moving one direction or another.

No, it means using randomly selected teams rather than some kind of matchmaking. People below 500 SR are either so bad that it’s completely irrelevant who you put on what team in any game, or they are there deliberately (yes, it’s easy to do), for the lulz. Either way, the outcome of any game is inconsequential.

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