I think that most people would agree that comp matchmaking leaves a little to be desired. I don’t know about you guys, but from personal experience as well as forum consensus, about 80% of games are one sided stomp fests.
There’s obviously a few outliers that affect matchmaking.
The Smurf. I have a GM friend that has a plat smurf for off heroes. But nothing stopping him from playing his GM hero if enemy disrespects him/ teabags too much, right? Another plat friend of mine has a bronze smurf he plays when he just wants to “smash some b1tches”. With free account set up on PS4 this is pretty much endemic.
Throwers. Scumbags that just love the salty tears of their teams as they ruin game after game. They’re so brazen they even roam in 3 stacks with user names such as “Throw4pron”, etc. They know that reporting them does nothing, so they just carry on.
Newly Placed Players. A big problem in lower ELOs. New players that don’t know what the heck they’re doing being placed in gold and crashing down 1000+ SR in short order, dragging many teams down with them. 25 QP levels really not enough to gauge a player’s skill?
Leavers. Be it a dodgy connection or they’re salty and turn tail as soon as the match looks hard, these scumbags are a menace for whatever team they’re on.
The Donkey. A player that isn’t good enough for the SR he’s at, but somehow keeps on winning games. Does just enough so that his MMR doesn’t fall, so matchmaker keeps on giving him good team mates as part of “fair” matchmaking. This could describe me for several seasons as I was at a higher SR than a friend of mine who was miles better than me at this game. Whenever we played together he was better than me in every single way. But for 4 seasons we were around same SR.
The Trapped. A player that’s clearly better than his SR, but not godlike enough to 1v6 his way out. Great example was watching the Kabaji flex to GM challenge. He was playing support, to a very high standard and trying to win that way. He had a leaver on his team, got frustrated with his team feeding onto point B, so just whipped out Tracer to 1v6 the enemy team. He rationalised it as “fair” as it was a 5v6. Welcome to the club matey… Trouble is most people aren’t top 500 Tracer mains that can just destroy teams 1v6.
Assuming that there’s at least 1% of the player population in each of those 6 categories. Odds of not having a major disruption to your team is 69% (0.94^6).
Now, consider if the enemy team has similar issues, be it a boon via smurf, or bane via a thrower. 69% chance that their team is all appropriate for their SR. That’s a 47% chance that both teams fair.
Now, imagine 2% in each of the above categories. That’s a 46.4% chance that a team is “fair” and a 21.5% chance that both teams are “fair”.
And that matches up pretty well with the reported ratio of stomps being around 80% of games.
Makes a lot of sense now I think, as only 2% of players per category isn’t that outrageous is it?
EDIT: And this is without the massive cluster f*ck of MMR based matchmaking where the game determines “where you belong” and speeds you there as quickly as possible. -650Sr loss streak. Great. Farm my MMR a bit. 300 Sr win streak back up. But, I’ve not suddenly gotten 10x better in a few days? Ah, right, I’ve farmed my MMR so the matchmaker is making sure that I go up. Gotcha…
I had a really bad run of losses and bizarrely games kept on getting harder as I dropped, not easier. And I came to the conclusion that my team mates were getting worse and worse. Constantly running in front of barriers to be murdered, running in 1v6 all the time, etc.
So I stopped trying super hard to win and play for the team. I just played heroes that were easy to get good kd ratios on, whatever my team were doing. This included a sweet 39 kill streak with Moira. Then, after 3 or 4 games I started getting godly team mates and was just crushing the opposition. Circa 80% win rate through SRs that were impossible to win at on my crash down.
I remember the final game of my upsurge and, despite being 5v6 due to a DC, we won what turned out to be a close match. A match that would have been a 3-0 stomp as a 6v6.
Ah, guess that’s good. Was worried I’d cocked up the probabilities. Is actually more advanced than a lot of stuff I do as a finance analyst. “Why are sales down?” “Because our product is sh1tty”, etc
Glad you’ve had a better experience.
point of the post was kind of that many people aren’t due to massive “noise” in match making. nobody’s grossly out. Kabaji would never lose a low ELO game. Ah, wait, he nearly did due to a leaver and his super disorganised team. Luckily he had his top 500 Tracer skillz to call on to 1v6 the enemy team and carry with around 70% kp…
Because there is no ping-time mechanics or MMR to group players of similar ping-times and skill. It becomes a roll of the dice on both counts. I win significantly more in random comp them LFG comp.
Quick play on the other hand has been VASTLY improved by LFG.
Not bothered with LFG for quickplay. If team mates are throwing (Feeding 1v6 all game, or emoting in spawn or chatting with enemies like some crappy version of 2nd life), I just quit out. Saves a lot of time.
I understand the frustration of throwers and leavers for sure. Maybe I’m lucky, but I’ve only had one blatant thrower in my last dozen games. In LFG, on the other hand, I’ve had Ana mains with 300+ ping times, casual players with only 4 hours of comp in the last 3 seasons and just a lot more overall losses. I’ll give it another try once they refine it a bit and add ping monitoring. I WANT it to work for me!
If I win, give all teammates 1 point.
If I loose, give all my teammates negative one point.
When queueing prefer people with more points.
After 5 minutes in queue, disregard all points and just get me a match ASAP.
You can toggle this option off if you want, but it won’t stop people from tabulating points on you.
I like LFG. If my group is strong, I’ll happily keep playing with them for a bit. If it’s weak, I leave after the match and find another group. When I DO meet other decent players I friend them and pair up with them to duo queue later. As I’ve built up a stable of reliable players to duo with, I’ve had to use LFG less and less, but it’s still a handy starting place when no one else is online, especially since I main support.
Yeah I get that. Another issue I have is that I have very little personal time to play. Trying to find a good group in LFG is time consuming. I do better grinding out fast matches in solo. Each to their own.
True, not played much comp, for many reasons outlined in my original post.
Playing loads of quickplay though, trying to get better that way. Am also considering making an alt and seeing if I can hit gold with it. Going to be easier than grinding through constant feeders and throwers on my team.
But I don’t want to be one of these rubbish over placed players as mentioned above.
I’m going up vs. plats and golds in QP, so guess I’m on the right track. Obviously not an indicator of actual comp skill, but at least I’m not playing vs. bronzes/ silvers…
EDIT: Interesting that QP often gives closer games than comp, even though QP just throws silvers in with GMs whereas comp is “finely tuned” around SR skill levels.
Comp matchmaking is hot garbage because they way they pretend to measure skill doesn’t actually measure the skills required in a game. You stat pad to the max and you’ll get a high SR, you make the right decisions by not being an idiot going in 1v6 situations and wait for your team or you counterpick and flex mid-match to secure your team a win then your stats will be lower according to the “skill measurement system” and you’ll get a lower SR.
Things like:
Waiting to regroup for your team
Not dealing damage anymore when you have your ult already up (else you just feed the enemy support ults) whilst waiting for your team
Holding onto your ult when you realize the fight is already lost
Forcing out enemy ults first before using your own
Making sure you leave enough shield HP up on Rein because you know you need to block an enemy visor/selfdestruct etc. soon
Making sure the enemy Rein/Orisa shield or D.VA matrix are out of the way before you use an ult like tac visor (the amount of tac visors and other ults for that matter you see shot into full Rein shields just makes me cry )
Just as an example those are all required skills in a game of Overwatch that net you not much in terms of stats but are essential if you want to actually win a game.
These are all essential skills that cannot and never will be able to be properly measured by an arbitrary algorithm so the only thing Blizzard can do is calculate SR/MMR based on stats which leads to extremely heavily skewed results because you might get someone with amazing aim on your team but he has no awareness, game sense and his positioning is just crap every game he turns up to and vice-versa (altho that’s usually the better alternative tbh).
The lack of understanding even the most basic of basic concepts like grouping up first after a lost teamfight is something I’m convinced 95% of the playerbase at all ranks still doesn’t understand.
Just came out of a lovely lost game where our McCree would just walk into the enemy team on his own over and over again leading to us getting roflstomped 5v6 stupendously fast but hey “HE HAD GOLD DAMAGE” so it was perfectly ok for him to have crap positioning, gamesense and awareness that cost us the game.
Then he also started blaming me for being a Junkrat one-trick which is hilarious since my profile is public and Junk is one of my least played heroes meanwhile he himself ofcourse is sitting behind a private profile.
And as if that’s not enough there’s also a massive problem with alts/smurfs/throwers and boosters on top of that which doesn’t really help the situation at all.
