You shouldn’t even be peaking a widow in the first place. Once you start playing against better widows you’re going to be punished 9 times out of 10.
You just highlighted her weakness to being dived. The 3 biggest weaknesses of widow are being susceptible to dive. !!!
Not a video but you just dash/blink into the staircase room from main, walk up the stairs, and then blink/dash again onto the widow. I really don’t know why you think it’s so hard to contest widow. Good widowmaker players actually play closer to their team if the enemy is running dive tanks/dps. If you really do need a visual I suppose I could do it but I don’t feel like it’s necessary.
I peek in one position then reposition to fire. Movement ability helps.
As long as you can cross enemy territory, sure. Her 3 biggest weaknesses are all close combat weaknesses. If I’m playing Support, the easiest for me is Lucio, because I can cross enemy territory fast at height. Next best is Zen, followed by Ana, and against lesser Widows (like all of them below Plat) I can usually take her out, or at least force her to displace with Bap. Note that of those 4, 3 are projectile weapons.
For tank, my first choice would be Sigma, it’s easier to shut down her LOS with barrier than to dive, because you don’t need to go deep into enemy territory to do so. Sure you can dive with ball, but you will probably need to use adaptive and hook to get out. DVa is even more isolated and out of position. Dive is a medium range tactic, in between brawl and hitscan. Diving Widows is a recipe for being out of position. If the enemy has CC, you are a long way from your team, and usually feeding.
Sure, you just do that. Except I’ve never seen anyone do that. Have you? Or are you just hand waving to defend a position that we mostly agree on, but you have already tilted?
I really don’t think it is hard. I just don’t think dive is the easiest way to contest (with the exception of Lucio, he’s a Widowmaker of Widowmakers).
Right now the hardest to contest solo is Pharmercy. Maybe that was the intention of the overbuff, to force team coordination to deal with it. Mercy pocketing Hanzo is very effective if left uncontested, but it’s easy to separate them, and Hanzo isn’t great for very close quarters combat. But try booping a Mercy who is a hundred feet above you. Not easy.
It’s not necessarily wrong to do this but it still is a risk as widow can one tap you with even the slightest peak.
I think in regards to contesting a widow, support players have basically no control over this. If you peak to much, you are asking to get your head blown off, and diving targets as lucio is sub-optimal as you have other things you need to be doing. If you were to say supports have little control over countering targets that needed to be dived, I would completely agree.
It’s weird to me that you think a ball using his hook and shields are a waste when contesting a widow. I mean what else is he going to use those on? One of the best parts about ball is his ability to contest the backline and survive by himself. In a perfect world you never dive solo but you shouldn’t ever expect that in ranked. Same thing for dva, the best part about her is her movement. She can fly to any highground quickly and has the HP and matrix to assure that she can take a good amount of damage.
Have I ever seen somebody contest highground? Yeah, in every game I play. And if nobody on my team is doing it, that it’s going to be me. Not really sure what that second sentence means but contesting highground is a simple thing to do that will cost you games if you ignore it.
I mean I guess we can agree to disagree but I feel like this is a pretty set in stone and universally agreed upon topic. Also if lucio is good at contesting widow, then how are dva, ball, and tracer not? They do his job but much better.
Not high ground, a Widow nest. i.e. a platform that would be too high for Ashe or Bap to jump onto. This is map dependent of course. One of the mistakes that noob Widows make is they pick the wrong map to practice on. Some maps have so little extreme high ground, and so few long sight-lines, that the Widow is forced close to the brawl where she is weakest, or she picks a high ground with poor field of fire, with lots of corridors for cover, and cannot get picks. And then there are strongly shielded teams where she can’t get any value at all, making the rest of the team play 5v6.
Lucio is more dextrous than ball or tracer, he can get anywhere, his movement ability is infinite, it has no cool downs. DVa is next best, but her movement ability has a cool down, and she is a big target that is very slow during that cooldown when caught out of position. Very few tracers have the kind of dexterity or skill needed to get to a Widow nest, but she does have recall to retreat. Still, any CC and and it is high risk. Ball has adaptive and hook for evade and escape, but they have cooldowns, and CC is still high risk. If ball uses hook to get to the Widow, he needs to wait out the cooldown to escape.
Having said all that, I personally have successfully contested Widow with DVa and Ball. I don’t really play tracer or much dps in general, but I’ve observed a lot. A good Ashe will take down a Widow more often than a good Tracer, because it is easier to position and snipe than it is to move through a lot of enemy territory uncontested, then go head to head, then evade and escape.
I actually did watch this video like years ago, in fact, I’m pretty sure this is the video that made me realize not to OTP (surprise surprise I hit masters after I diversified my hero pool).
Personally I think hard counters are (not unique to) important in Overwatch. And the game was always effectively designed around them. What makes it problematic is when one character counters everybody else.
In this video, Seagull is crying about Brig. And GOATS. And many high level players complained about GOATS.
In general, while I think current brig is “okay”, she’s still a problem for the game.
Being able to run a variety of different team compositions based on the map is what makes Overwatch fun for me. One game I’m playing Hanzo with Rien/Zar, next game I’m playing Pharah or Tracer in Dive, and the next game I’m playing Ashe with Sig/Ball.
Being able to play a variety of heroes and flex between team compositions based on map geometry is honestly the only thing I think makes Overwatch enjoyable for me (between all 3 roles). The fact that your tank player insists on running Sigma into Monkey and is tilting at his DPS just shows he doesn’t understand the game and isn’t ready for his rank.
The “current” active player counts of either of those games is for certain higher than Overwatch. Valorant sits somewhere around 15 million active monthy. I’d guess that Overwatch maybe has 1 million active monthy (not including alt accounts for either but there’s no stat for that).
There is some validity to this. But Also:
Stale META
2-2-2 (though a lot of the community and content creators heavily supported this)
Content Drought (arguably just as big as brig)
Bad hero balance
Lack of empathy from Blizz Devs (can’t blame em though. Most players who complain are not worth listening to).
At their peek, weren’t they only like a 50 man team or something? That’s not a lot of people to actively manage a game as large as Overwatch.
Factually incorrect.
This entire sentence together, I couldn’t agree more. And I think you have a decent understanding of the problem.
However, people should feel free to play whatever heroes they want to play. And if they don’t want to play for their team, then they probably shouldn’t be in competitive.
But that perspective has been overruled I’m afraid.
Can’t speak for tank or support players, but when I would queue for DPS, I’d usually wait for both tanks to choose their heroes and I’d choose my DPS pick based off of their pick and the map type.
I don’t think they rely on cooperation from your team in the lower ranks, no. I’m not trying to suggest this will work vs Diamond players. I’m just saying that getting through Gold you aren’t likely to run into Diamond players. One of the nice things about projectile heroes like Zen and Lucio is that the projectiles are large. But each has other advantages, too.
Zen has wall hacks, and Lucio has wall riding.
Which means that Zen can either get prediction shots off that the other player is not expecting or (if the other player realizes that they have been wall hacked, which is rarer than you might think in the lower ranks), they will back off and Zen has effectively zoned them. And Lucio needs to have decent wall riding in order to do a good job contesting someone in the sky or with good positioning. But if your wall riding is decent you can get several good shots off against an airborne target before they are aware of you.
None of that requires coordination from teammates.
You might see an average team difference of around 400 points (which I think, given your example SR numbers from before, is what you mean when you say 2000-3000 SR difference), but it would be rare and it would require at least a couple of things to be true:
People are grouped up (so the matchmaker is prevented from allocating these players to the teams- the two groups of players have decided themselves to create their own teams)
There are not very many teams at that level queueing at that time. So the matchmaker is prevented from finding more appropriate teams to match against these two teams.
Given these constraints you might get the matchmaker to make a match like the one you selected wherein one team is an average of 400 or so SR lower than the other team. In that case, the lower SR team would win much more SR on a win and lose much less SR on a loss than the other team.
But the weird thing about this complaint is that this is the very thing the current version of the matchmaker exists to prevent. So it’s a bit weird to see someone complaining about the matchmaker and saying they want more balanced matches. Usually the people complaining about the matchmaker call for less balanced matches, and specifically want something like the scenario you describe to be possible. The usual complaint from people arguing the current matchmaker is a problem is that it specifically prevents the scenario you describe.
I thought the complaint was about the monumental failure of the MM to achieve this. It’s certainly not my complaint. My complaint is that (a) a team difference of 2000 SR is not a balanced game, and never would be in any game and (b) the complexity that arises from having so many heroes with so many abilities makes it almost impossible to generate an ELO anyway, so the current version is just some brain-dead A/B test on independent events (different teams), which is biased towards grouping up. And fair enough, it’s always been promoted as a “team game” (like any other online FPS or RPG isn’t a team game), but don’t try and sell me the idea that SR is a measure of skill, because it’s not.
No, I think that take is wrong on the complaint about the matchmaker. The complaint is the the lack of balance between teams.
Given the region I usually play in, I used to put it down to just a lack of players to fill a team of roughly equal SR, when you have to match against a group. But seeing people from NA or EU complaining about the same issue leads me to believe that something is either truly broken in the matchmaking system, or their is an unspoken rule it is enforcing that has unintended consequences.
Well, I can only speak from experience and the region I play in, but it is NOT rare, but it IS highly variable. Sometimes it’s 10% of matches, other times it’s 40% of matches. I assume it has something to do with what type of players play at what times. For example, I’ve noticed that there is a “golden hour” in the evening where it is closer to 10% than 40% of matches, presumably because people get into routines and schedules, and that affects who is available to place in matches at different times of day.
Yes that’s true, but it’s also very rare, so the bump does not compensate for the additional losses (of games). I’ve experienced it myself only under certain conditions.
Our team co-ordination trumped individual differences. It’s difficult for a Genji or Tracer to defeat all 6 players.
Some of the players on the enemy team were deliberately de-ranking, so they stomped us for 60% of the game, then threw the game to avoid the win.
I got angry then dropped into the flow state and started playing better and much more aggressively, which rallied my team and we won through persistence and tenacity. Not everyone wants to get sweaty every day for every game, and sometimes the stronger team just cbf to put the effort in.
I mean, the complaint from the “rigged matchmaker” crowd is that teams are balanced, rather than allowing the best player in the lobby to get the best teammates and have an unbalanced match.
The complaint is that someone who is the best player in the lobby should be able to have the best teammates on their team rather than having the matchmaker even try to balance the lobby.
Your complaint is the opposite of that.
You want better matchmaker balancing of teams, rather than not having the matchmaker even attempt to balance the teams (which is what the “rigged matchmaker” crowd want.) If we gave these numerical ratings where the “rigged matchmaker” people think the matchmaker should be at a 0, and the matchmaker is currently sitting at a 5, say, you want the matchmaker to be at a 7, maybe.
And, I’ve gone on the record stating my preference for at least the option of a stronger matchmaker (so, a toggle wherein someone could opt in for longer queue times and tighter matchmaking).
And the time of day thing is the second point I mentioned above. The fewer the players of any given rank who are queueing at a given time, the harder it is for the matchmaker to balance the lobbies. This relates to both time of day and region, as some regions and some times of day will have fewer players queueing than other regions and other times of day. Rank is also a factor here as there are fewer people at either the top or the bottom of the ladder, so there will be a wider variance of skill present in those matches.
Match maker is mostly fine. 99% of my games in a season will be pretty evenly matched with a fair chance for either side to win if they play well / make less mistakes.
Anytime a game looks one-sided is because peotelel have made mistakes. Poor positions, misused cooldown.
The problem with all these complaints is that there are a myriad of issues that people are in fact experiencing, but for some reason everyone wants to blame it on the matchmaker rather than the wide variety of things that it could possibly be.
It commonly feels like the plot is lost in these threads because every time we dispute one common but incorrect view of the matchmaker, another one pops up in its place and the argument moves on to something completely different with no resolution.
If you get a teammate who refuses to swap off their character while being countered then you’re put at a disadvantage. How badly disadvantaged you are depends on how badly countered your teammate is. The fewer opportunities there are for someone on your team to be hard countered the less important it is that they play the correct character.
I’m aware, and thank god they aren’t. Playing 3v3s in arcade gives a really good perspective on which matchups are good, bad, and unwinnable.
Most matchups aren’t overwhelming in either direction, but some are unwinnable unless your opponent falls asleep at the keyboard. Take Junk VS Pharah as an example: Unless the Pharah player is terrible or goes AFK, Junkrat has pretty much lost by default.
Situations like that are why it’s so common for people to see their team composition and then decide that the match isn’t worth playing. That’s not good for the game and it’s not fun to experience. Seriously, watch the video I sent you. Seagull puts it into words way better than I can (and his experience as a pro gives him more credit than me as well).
(Also, I’m aware that in an actual 6v6 match you have teammates there to help you, but 6v6 can easily become 5v6 if someone is getting deleted just by another character existing)
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”.
