I listened to the youtuber GREED sharing his experience with ranked in Overwatch 2 over several separate accounts. The video is about three weeks old so quite recent and I decided to transcribe a short part of it just because I find it kind of interesting:
So, what’s the point of ranked? To endlessly grind towards a movable personal target set for you arbitrarily by Blizzard?
Just the fact that the rank resets at the start of the season seems to be a function of your played hours says pretty much everything about what Blizzards intention is.
Very occasional players gets a tiny reset while players that played a lot during the previous season can get a reset equivalent of about 1000 SR. Just to keep you hamster-wheeling and wasting time on artificially grinding towards nothing.
I always suspected there is a weighted MMR history to your account.
I’ve explained this example before so I’ll keep this short but years ago my buddy was same rank as me. In between jobs he was drinking and playing games a lot, well he went from low diamond to silver and he could no longer play queue up in competitive.
His bender ended when starting a new job and he could not get out of low gold. He said his account was cursed and I called BS.
We swapped accounts and games were fulls of trolls, leavers, and it was impossible to consistently rank up. I got him maybe around 50-100 SR but he ranked my account up by a couple hundred SR.
Anyways, he made a new account in OW2 and hes now a masters or something while his OW1 account is now stuck in bronze.
there are too many players who have found themselves stuck in a rank indefinitely without being able to get out of it regardless of the efforts made, then have created a new account, and by playing exactly the same way they go up 2 ranks in 3 days whereas they had been blocked for months in the old account.
there is something wrong going on, especially with old accounts, and the only way out is to start from scratch with a new account.
but don’t worry, they must surely know, and will improve the system, as for the matchmaker.
Suffice to say that it is better to start on a new account than to wait for an improvement from this dev team.
This is why buying new accounts in OW1 was the way to get out of Bronze, and many players never touched it again after doing it.
They were bad when they first started playing the game (probably was the first FPS), and because of that they always had that baggage profile associated with them. They had to perform above and beyond their current skill level to get to their current skill level, while playing with worse teammates.
The easiest way to decouple yourself form that, was to buy a new account, place in Silver/Gold and then go from there. If you were better, you went up, if you were actually worse, you stayed the same or went down. But the matches got more balanced after that… and it was easy to notice that you actually got matched against/with a lot of different players in Comp on a fresh account vs. your older account (where you often saw the same people in game, even in Silver and Gold - pretty huge ranks within a geographical region)…
This is why the SR system is gone, placements are gone, performance based SR is gone, etc.
The system is now designed to be a hamster wheel. You no longer have agency. The agency falls fully and completely with the matchmaker.
He removed the number from his primary account. You can basically swap numbers from accounts, its not instant but it works. His old primary account does not need a number to play OW since you only need a number for brand new accounts.
Well well what do you know. This is the EXACT story I’ve been telling on this forum for a long time now. Having multiple multiple accounts above masters, but then have 1 or 2 accounts that, when I try, are extremely difficult to even get to diamond. Start a new account, get to masters easily. The matchmaker is broken and stupid.
I know this is happening to more than just me and Greed, more people need to talk about this. They don’t want to because maybe they’re afraid of being bullied by people saying “wow you can’t get your account out of plat/diamond?” ignoring the fact that you have multiple accounts that are far beyond those tiers. The only people defending the matchmaker are shills and freaks.
yeah I remember that in Overwatch 1, but you’d be called a conspiracist back in the days if you ever mentioned elo hell. Which wasn’t really elo hell, but the result are the same.