I may have not said in detail all that you said but I agree that this is how it works. I also know that variance is not good for matchmaking and is partially responsible for elo hell.
I have over 2K hours in competitive. It has never been a problem when i want to climb.
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What’s weird about this game though is that the better I get, the further I drop in rank. Almost as if there is something other than skill that is being measured.
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Dude is literally describing people exactly like you. It’s far more rational to assume that you are either:
- Aren’t improving as much as you think you are
- Improving at the same rate as the playerbase
- Aren’t improving at all
But I anderstand. It is far easier to put on the tin foil hat and say the real reason you can’t climb is because the matchmaker doesn’t want you to!!
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- Don’t you mean getting worse?
- So literally every player in the game, including those that joined last week are improving faster than me? That’s a bold assertion, do you have anything to back that up?
- It’s possible, but objectively and measurably false.
You anderstand? Well, it’s because I won’t play the game the way I’m supposed to. The game punishes recalcitrants, the matchmaker just enforces the unspoken rules. I could grind and grind and grind, select the politically correct heroes and climb, but I don’t want to take that many showers per day.
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Remember that scene from the Maxtrix where Neo meets the Architect, i think it fits the situation here
Until you get to what? Masters? GM? it doesn’t matter who you play. Play whoever you enjoy and whoever matches your skillset. Hell, tear up through Gold on Bastion if you want. You can literally play the worst heroes in every role and rank up through Gold. The only thing being enforced is that you need to be able to win against increasingly tougher competition and that you should not expect to be carried every match- you will need to contribute more on your hero and/or in your role than the average player at your level if you want to climb.
That’s literally it. (And honestly, even if you aren’t contributing more on your hero, you’ll still climb if you can get your team to win- and you can do this pretty much with comms as long as you aren’t dying all the time and can contribute minimally for your role.) Climbing through up into Plat is mostly about dying less than other people while still doing what you are supposed to do on your role.
But one of the major problems in those lower ranks is that people do not even know what they should be doing on their role. Tanks do not know how to take and hold space. They do not know what space they should be taking. And they do not know how to path on the maps to avoid enemy damage. DPS do not know who their primary targets are. They do not know how to make space when their tanks cannot/will not. And they do not know which heroes they will get the most value on, given their level of aim/skill. Supports do not know how to position themselves so they will not die. They do not know who best to support from moment to moment. And they do not know how to get their non-healing value in.
So you have a large number of players who could climb (even with their lower mechanical skill), but they would first need to know what they need to do in order to win matches. Since they do not, they are completely lost in any given match. And that feels terrible. They have no idea what is going on other than that they are losing. And rather than trying to do a deep dive into how the game is played, so they can start to make meaningful progress, they blame their teammates, they blame the matchmaker, they assume there are GM smurfs in every match, etc.
And all this does is further cement the fact that they are not going to do the necessary learning in order to climb. In short, by their inability to recognize that they have a poor understanding of the game, and their willingness instead to invent bizarre theses in an attempt to explain that some other ineffable force is personally holding them back, they ensure that they do not improve, and do not climb.
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Well people can actually make their own matches by themselves without the need for a matchmaker algorithm. I do it all the time
Sure. You can use custom games. (Even if you use lfg, you still have to have a matchmaker to make a match between two groups so constructed.) But if you are interested in a large competitive mode, you need a matchmaker.
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I’m not sure what you mean, but you can’t read the full 9 page paper anyways.
The issues I identified where I came up with the system similar to the one you’re describing is what I called the “Role Hole/Role Duplication” problem and the “Social Memory” problem.
The first was OW’s inherent issue with so many heroes and the fact that there really aren’t 3 roles, there are however many heroes there are, essentially. So while you can match people based on skill, teams are essentially randomly generated in terms of team composition (this was before role queue).
The second issue is that there is no way to remember people you played with and find them again. There’s a friends list, but that gets unwieldy. There’s no way to track how people behave and display that information, nor is there any reason to do so.
I keep trying to say that the issues people see aren’t matchmaker problems. These, I believe, are the core issues with OW and the first is a game design problem and the second is a player problem.
The MM, as is, was essential to the system I ended up designing. The “Team Captain”, as you put it, was given the power to reject people that the MM assigned to them.
I DON’T think it would not have worked. I think what would have happened is that you’d have players trying to build their perfect team and never actually playing because they were too picky. Though, it may have changed the nature of these complaints, because it would all be “it takes forever to find a team and they never stick together” because all the players that just are chill and take it appropriately seriously are going to just jump in, and all the people in these threads that complain about the MM wouldn’t have the self-awareness to realize that they’re being too picky.
Because fundamentally, the issue isn’t the RH/RD problem. The MM can’t account for that, but it’s the same problem for everyone so it evens out regarding SR, plus they implemented role queue. It makes games less fun, but
The matchmaker issues that people recognize is fundamentally a player problem. There is literally no system that can solve it, because no matter what you use players as inputs.
If you accept and understand the variability of the inputs, the outputs of the matchmaker makes perfect sense. The matchmaker isn’t broken, players are broken.
Always the intellect 
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No, it really matters who you play. Two of the healers are so easy they are a cure for insomnia. I could play them and rank up to, idk, easily Plat, maybe even Diamond if I found 2 other people I could regularly group up with. I know this, because they are in every winning meta you see at higher ranks. (Side note, if there is a META, then the game isn’t balanced. And Blizz doesn’t want the game to be balanced, it wants people behaving in the way they’re expected to behave.)
No, with solo queue the only thing to expect is to be placed on teams with the absolute worst players at any rank, and have the total SR difference between teams be about 2000-3000 (about 500 per team member). If you will not or do not group up, you will NEVER win > 50% of your games. The game is literally designed this way.
Actually, it’s about a very specialist kind of sociopathy. I see people who are able to convince Ana’s to Nano them, Mercy’s to Rez them, Reins to babysit them, and all of their stats get a boost from this, so if they win, they get a bigger SR bump, and when they lose they get a smaller one.
Well, that certainly was a more eloquent ad hominem than “git gud”. There is no ineffeable force. There is a philosophy on how the game should be played, who should be playing it, and a mechanism for enforcing that philosophy. This is how we got role queue after GOATS. That team found an error in the game balance and exploited it, and changed the way the game was played.
Complaints were made, princesses were upset, bottom lines were fretted over by management, and the game was changed to enforce the philosophy of the game developer over the players.
The same is true of the matchmaker. It enforces a philosophy to discourage certain types of people and encourage other types. It is a philosophy born from the genesis of Blizzard, the games it started on, and the people who played them.
Some online arena FPS are pure meritocracies, and the people who rise to the top are all of a certain personality, and this eventually decimates the player base, but everything about team balance and team formation is transparent. Some of those games even let a vote be called to re-shuffle teams based on an estimated ELO for each player.
There are games in OW Comp where you know within 10 seconds of the first fight that you are going to be stomped, that the SR difference between teams is at least 2000. It would be better for the whole team to just leave than participate in what is obviously bullsh!t, I guess that’s why they had to add extra penalties for leaving. This is the great thing about being in bronze, it’s such a clusterfk anyway, it doesn’t matter. But I still see people using aimbots, even in lower bronze, which I find completely bizarre. Some people are just weird.
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This simply is not true though. You can rank up into Plat on any hero. And the only way to avoid a meta is to ensure that things like team compositions or different hero abilities or map variations do not exist- so everyone plays Soldier and there’s only one map; Bam! No meta. Easy! Except even then a meta would develop involving things like map positions (which points to hold, which rotations to take, etc) unless you only played on a single map with no positions (so just a wide open space with no cover and no high ground.)
Otherwise there will be a meta. There always is. This is true in sports. It’s true in board games. It’s true in card games. It’s true in video games. If you do not want a meta you need to reduce the complexity of the game down to a point where players do not have a variety of tools available to them.
This is patently false. I have won more than 50% of my games in solo queue during seasons. That’s how I ranked up from silver to plat. And, just so I’m understanding you correctly: Are you really suggesting that on any given OW team there is a range of 2000-3000 SR worth of skill difference? That a given team might look like the following (if one were actually accounting for real differences of skill): 500 SR, 1000 SR, 1500 SR, 2000 SR, 2500 SR, 3000 SR? For a skill gap of something like 2500 between the worst and the best player on the team?
You don’t have to do any of this. One of the things I decided early on was that if I aspired to play at a high Plat or Diamond level, I should be able to hard carry through Silver and low Gold- that is, I shouldn’t really need my teammates to play at even an average level for Silver players if I were on their team. We should still win because I was on their team and I was skilled enough to hard carry them. No matter what was going on in a Silver or low Gold match, I should be able to deal with it regardless of my role.
And that’s what I ended up doing. You can counter Widow, Pharmercy, pocketed Soldiers/Ashes and whatever else you face at those levels if you are a decent Plat player. You do not need to be pocketed or get Nanos or whatever else. You just have to get good value on your heroes (because the other players at that level will not get good value on theirs) while not dying. For the other team it will feel like you are a smurf, because you are playing at a level a tier or two above the other players in the match.
This sort of thinking, though, is what holds people back. If you know within 10 seconds of the match that you are going to lose with anything like regularity- that is, if that is the norm when you play (or even a particularly common experience) you will lose. And you will make it harder for your teammates to win.
I can’t really recall the last time I was in a match like that. Sure I end up losing. But I think I’ve been in matches where the other team clearly outclassed us… what? a handful of times. Maybe a dozen or so. Out of 2100 hours or so playing the game. And most of those were early in time playing the game when I still didn’t know how the game worked.
I just don’t get unwinnable matches any more.
Unless you are talking about playing down one or more members (so leavers), or when your teammates start insisting the game is unwinnable, or when you have a Sym setting up a TP at the edge of the map so your teammates fall off the ledge, or whatever.
But those aren’t problems with the game. Those are player problems. If you allow people to play your game those will happen.
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Not counting literal throwing or impaired players, this just makes the matchmaker sound incompetent when it comes to creating balanced Overwatch matches.
Be that because of the game’s design or not, it doesn’t change match quality being terrible.
Do I have anything to back up my statement? You’re the guy using a pattern of wins and losses to justify a matchmaker being rigged. That is far more of a jump that needs a credible source than what I am saying.
Actually the measure is your SR. So you actually aren’t improving at all. How convenient. It’s also completely false that you need to play specific heros to climb. There are literally symettra one tricks in the top 100 consistently. Getting to top 500 one tricking any character is not uncommon.
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Incompetent how? Because it cannot overcome people making poor choices? How should it be able to do that?
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No further explanation needed
This would show in someone’s stats. Maybe at the hero level there’s not much the matchmaker can do, but we have role SR now. Someone playing a role they don’t usually play isn’t an excuse for consistently poor matches.
I’ll give you that, but it’s definitely not good game design when two equally skilled players can be placed at a massive (dis)advantage because of character choice.
Almost every competitive game in this day and age is character based, and therefore, depending on the situation, one character will always be better than another. So you are saying that LoL, Valorant, Overwatch, R6, Apex Legends, etc are all bad game design because they are character based? Perhaps that argument would have a bit more merit in a game where two players cannot play the same character, but that isn’t the case here. I’m not sure what your argument is.
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Yes, I hate all of those games.
Seriously though, Rock-Paper-Scissors design is bad and happens as a consequence of poor balance. If I have to mirror you or pick a character designed to automatically beat yours then there’s something wrong.
Characters like Brig, Doom, Sombra, and Pharah are the embodiment of this. They force you to play characters capable of dealing with them or lose.
You can control your own character, but you can’t control what the other 5 people on your team play. I would rather every character have a fair shot at winning because otherwise I’m going to lose/win matches entirely because of which characters my team picked (or didn’t pick).
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I mean you just can’t be serious. Overwatch more so than any other game was advertised to be a counter based and competitive. As in you can swap characters mid game to counter the other team. Perhaps you didn’t get that memo at launch or whenevery you started playing. But to say that specialist characters are bad game design is just straight up wrong and shows that you are wildly misinformed. Those kinds of characters are quite literally the best kinds, and are executing the vision Overwatch was created off of. One size fits all is terrible design.
It sounds like you want every character to become a ground based soldier 76, which is so boring. Some of the most unique and fun characters in the game break the norms for a hero. Ball, doom, echo, tracer are all completely new designs in any game, but because they need to be countered to be beaten, we shouldn’t have them??? It’s also dumb to assume that character choices even matter unless you are in higher elo. A gold brig player isn’t even playing remotely correctly to counter a ball or tracer. So instead of calling Overwatch’s design poor, the same kind of design all the biggest and best competitive games use, just go play something else, because what you want isn’t happening.
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