That’s the one advantage in stacks, you can get picky about teamates when it comes to these things. However, if you friendly ask, I often see those kind of cooperations even with randoms. In the end, most players want to win.
I am not talking about the individual SR lost/won for a match, but the adjustements of your MMR when it comes to your performance. Your MMR - even if doesn’t show in performance-based SR - still changes, it might even go up on a loss, because it does get evaluated based on your performance, you just don’t get/lose extra SR for your performance (expect for < 3000).
So if you do really well, your group MMR doesn’t go up as much as it would if you play alone which means you will play versus weaker enemies than you should. The same is true for the opposite direction.
MMR is also the reason why you win/lose different amounts of SR in >3000, despite having the exact same SR before the match ends.
I don’t see a lot more of team coordination in groups. Real team coordination has to be grinded, that’s why many teams have to scrims for some months, before they coordinate nicely.
The game is harder, because people are not only grouping within the allowed margin, but because their friends use smurfs.
Despite 1000SR being already a pretty big range, friends can and often also will be more than that apart.
Also coming to groups, I often get games where my team is full of randoms vs a 6 stack and we kinda stomp the enemy team, I think the matchmaker already makes adjustements here by putting the group versus single players with higher MMR. So yeah, the fair groups will really just end up losing anyways which makes it a “harder Overwatch”.
I also think Blizzard should change something here, because you get essentially punished for playing with friends. Most people in Plat+ I know even say that any group above 3 people is throwing and it shouldn’t be like this…
Can you do something about the bronze players who constantly throw? Should they be in bronze? Who knows for sure they run around as support and choose not to help the team one bit. They do enough to not get kicked for inactivity. Reports seem to fall on deaf ears and blind eyes.
In my experience, the priority pass has created an unpleasant ranked experience because we now have people farming off their preferred (main) role and actively throwing games with little consequence since this isn’t their “main” role/rating. They are just grinding out passes and making a mockery of those games.
So I have been playing a lot of flex. Then after I while I decide to pick Priority. It will say 2-3 min wait time… but I end up waiting over 10 mins. How does that make any sense.
You are absolutely right the matchmaker has some flaws that Blizzard almost knowingly is turning blind eyes to. Instead, they put out band-aid fixes like the priority pass instead of snuffing out the root causes and communicating with us.
Please listen to your OWN MVP HERE. STOP turning a BLIND EYE to the issues your community has been bringing up for YEARS regarding the matchmaker. ITS NOT PERFECT, ADMIT THAT PLEASE.
That’s already how it works when you don’t have recent playtime. I assume, though I don’t think I’ve seen it stated explicitly, that this applies per-role since role queue.
It would be far better to make a loss award a portion of a pass, not a whole pass. Playing to win might get you more, but many think it’s “fine” to just throw or not-try every other game to get their preferred role, with a few lucky carries getting you a nice chunk now and then.
Have a win net you six coins, and a loss earn you one point towards a free pass, requiring 2-3 points per pass. That way, it’s really not cost-effective to throw at all, but losing wouldn’t get you nothing.
Also, I’d like to see the commendation and report system integrated here. Add priority passes as a reward for achieving and maintaining high commendation levels, as well as a reward for utilizing the report system appropriately.
When you commend someone in-game, you’d get progress towards a free pass, like a loss. When a report is found to be legitimate, toss a few passes to the people who reported them. Instead of loot boxes, a bundle of passes would be a great reward for being a team player.
Hello, your post is much appreciated, but understand that this statement is totally false nowadays due to HOW the game is balanced and played.
Except for some Supports… teamwork is absolutely NOT rewarded nearly as much as just racking up kills. If you have a smurf or ringer, put them in a DPS role and they’ll cancel enemies and remove the need for strategy or even much healing. Dead enemies do no damage and powercreep has made it even easier to wipe enemy teams.
The flex-pass system is now rewarding DPS mains for queueing tank/support where they will pick the DPS-heavy ones (Zarya, Ana, Hog, Moira, etc) and… DPS with them! This was a problem before and is even more so now with this mildly enticing reward to queue these up.
The effort is admirable, but it’s not addressing the real problem that needs solving - tanks/supports need to be designed in a way that makes players WANT to play them the way Blizz WANTS them to be played. This flex-pass system has only made it worse.
Great post since it basically sums up nicely all the reasons behind the system that were already kind of obvious to most players I would think, but my biggest question is
Is there going to be some special system or surveillance regarding throwing for tickets? Because it had already been actively happening more or less explicitly ever since the system was implimented and the game quality overall feels considerably worse for everyone I know. Some like the fact that you can now get other roles from the flex queue that didn’t really happen (or happened unconsiderably rarely) when you chose all 3 roles previously, but overall the feedback is rather negative. Matchmaking for unpopular roles remains unchanged, but the game quality is worse overall, which makes the game quite unenjoyable overall and I’m sure that if this keeps going on there’s going to be another massive wave of quitters ahead of us.
Why not make passes for losses very unattractive like put them behind 3 losses? That would actually prevent harmful behavior like you did with Arcade lootboxes, because what you were afraid that would happen if they weren’t is now happening actively elsewhere like in QP. If there’s special surveillance and the player gameplay behavior was punished more harshly, it would fix the issue, but that would also mean that the devs are indirectly encouraging players to get suspensions. If not and you decided to rely on the already existing report system, it unfortunately doesn’t really work properly unless it’s only purpose is to suspend players who are on constant explicit throw streaks. It doesn’t really work with occasional or cunning gameplay sabotage
Hence why we NEED a full rank reset so players like this don’t ruin all their teammates’ games during their gradual decline, which gets cancelled out by players “grandfathered” into lower ranks that actually should be higher. Plez fix
We have issued a manual action wave against players with confirmed instances of gameplay sabotage. We encourage everyone to take this time to review the purpose of the Priority Pass feature and its intended function within Overwatch.
