I think you’ve misunderstood it.
Volatile is part of the demotion protection, in effect it works the other way around than what you’re describing:
Your are not penalized for ranking up. You are protected from ranking down for one match if you have just ranked up. If you then do lose another match, you will get the screen where you lose SR for the two matches combined with the “volatile” indicator.
Anyway, they’ve done bad job at describing it and the ui bugs occur with it, so it’s understandable people misunderstand it.
The main point for the demotion protection (when the volatile modifier occurs) is to prevent a “ping pong” effect of you gaining rank, losing rank, gaining rank if you win-lose-win-lose on a threshold of two ranks.
You’re right, this volatile nonsense has been around since OW1. Play too well and you’re given potatoes to carry to “prove” you deserve your rank. Except it doesn’t work because one person can’t carry 4 others, not unless you’re way below the rank you’re supposed to be, and even then it’s not guaranteed.
You could try throwing a game if you’re winning too much. So win three in a row and throw the 4th. It would be better than triggering hard mode and losing 2-3 along with 5 games worth of rank.
It isn’t. It’s been around. It was very evident that the “new” ranked system was purely cosmetic. The purpose, to be more transparent. Transparency gave us proof that we needed to confirm why we hate the Ranked system.
This game can be fun, but this ranked system is dog poo
Well, look at the linked video and you have Gavin saying that it is a new thing.
OW has not had demotion protection before this season, which the volatile is part of.
Youre saying that because it looks different it is different.
I’m saying that your demotion match is stacked way harder against you forcing a loss (which is what has always happened). That hasnt changed. It literally just looks different.
This was literally part of the SR system, which the “new” system is no different from, just presented in a worse way. In OW1 you wouldn’t rank down if you could get your SR back within 3 games.
I think I’ve come up with a Solution to the issue.
If the matchmaker is doing this, it’s checking itself by saying… “hmm, the player I moved up to platinum 2 against platinum 1 ranged players, but the game was offset by providing the P1 team with a P4 or P5 teammate lost. So maybe I was wrong the performance is more like Platinum 4. What I will do to test this theory is put a full team much closer to the next rank against them, they should still do well. But if they don’t, this will drop them down to the Rank Ive just determined which is P4.”
The problem comes in with, if you overcome this, the MM is not confused, and gives you fluke points for a couple of games until it does the first process in the other direction.
If you don’t overcome this you lose more points because it “wants” to get you back to where you belong.
The solution I think that solves most of the toxicity and keeps the MM is simply have the MM over correct in the opposite direction on that initial uncertain match.
So we change from, lets give them harder opponents to confirm, to lets give them identical/very close to the same skill range opponents or even slightly better teammates to help confirm.
Before I get, oh thats so easy to abuse, it is able to be countered by truly good players still being able to beat “boosted” players.
If a player is in P1 because they are p1 or better and someone was given that readjustment match where they were in favor of winning due to gaming the system or even getting lucky, all it takes is playing against players where they land to get demoted again.
It solves the “why does this grt HARDER for me after I got rolled” and it doesn’t affect anything else.
No you dont understand it, It’s when you rank up, not down. Also, why would the game punish you with volatile for ranking down into a rank you’ve essentially already proven long term that higher skill than? There is no positive benefit for winning a “volatile” match, Only negative. These are the reasons why going 5-5 in the old system almost always made you lose 6-10%
To even remotely climb you need 56-60 winrate, when everyones at 48-52 constantly because volatile is chunking us 6-10% with no positive counterpart mod or positive benefit for winning a volatile match… just remove it its dumb.
Well, listen to what they say. It’s when the demotion protection happens, so its tied to when you flip flop between ranks.
There’s no magical sr lose/gain barrier between tiers.
Anyway, hopefully they make the ui better, as they said its both buggy, and not clear.
The volatile is showing you the total of two previous lost games if that happens.
Blizzard gets away with this, because there really is no true transparency in the matchmaking. Giving the UI a paint job with some blinking lights (that appear to have no real use) does not equate to ‘transparency’.
Transparency is allowing players to see the rank/tier of their opponents, with a clear explanation of why rank goes up or down by X %.
I do not know anyone who is playing in the ‘metal’ ranks that have not been experiencing hard roll games after winning a few and approaching the next tier. And if you are solo queuing, you can almost predict when your next hard roll is going to happen. ( Hard Roll = a game where one team will have an excessive amount of kills compared to the team that can barely make it out of the spawn point)
Transparency would let you know if you are playing a match with your JV, Jr High team against a college/pro team, (or a team with 1 or more high ranked player).