Why are brand new players put in gold games?

Competitive Discussion
42

The main reasons the hearthstone system works are

  1. They reset your rank but not the matchmaker rating so you still play people who are engaging at your previous level, you just get bonuses for winning up to a point close to your old rank to get you back with decent competition.

  2. Those bonuses to your gains early on make it tolerable to grind the low ranks each season since it takes less games the higher you made it the previous season.

  3. The “checkpoints” only really work because of the season resets combined with the other factors. Without those the checkpoints being in OW would only really encourage boosting since you could pay someone to get you to gm and you’d never be able to drop out of it.

  4. And this is the most important one, it’s only a 1v1 game, so it doesn’t matter if you’re not at your rank or MMR is not yet accurate as you can rely on yourself to win your way there. There’s no teammates as a variable for you and if you get lucky or (more frequently) take advantage of a broken deck before it gets nerfed, then you can’t become a liability at the higher rank. Not to mention it’s a lot easier to translate systems based on the ELO system for chess to 1v1 games like chess where your performance means win or loss alone, there’s no (or at least less) “do well on a loss or did poorly but won anyway”.

Different games can take advantage of different systems, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that they can borrow from each other.

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43

Just going to point out… we have placement games… and everybody new starts in Gold or Plat. Why have placement games then? Something has to give, either start everyone in Gold, or place them where they belong using said placement games. OR reset ranks every season, and make each season longer. Performance based SR for placements only, Win based for competitive, can people still tank their placements… sure, but it shouldn’t affect your performance, right? And if your performance was bad, you should know it too, right?

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44

I gotta stop you there Zeus. As someone who would avidly pursue halo forums no one complained about the MM itself.

The majority of posts were about lag switch, cheaters/modders, and manipulators.

The manipulation could be attributed to the MM though. You used to be able to throw 100s of games by going afk then using that account to boost someone.

But I think homie is right that the actual algorithm that was used to ship games was never a matter of concern and the outcry in OW forums is exponentially pronounced. Relatively it is not a stretch to say no one complained about MM used to ship matches in halo 2 was never a concern.

45

I wish you were wrong on this but ur not. We bleed out like christ on the cross for a win in the bot5. Probably bcuz rigged.

46

I agree You could get carried through your placements or drops through your placements either way. I remember when no limits competitive came out, My first game consisted of all Winston’s except for me and the whole team was just picking the same character and losing because of it. And then after that it was all downhill because once you lose one game in the placements it starts putting you with crappy players and crappy players just tend to do crappy things in the point is at the end of it I couldn’t even win a single game. Which demonstrates how pointless placements are anyways because the whole team can bog you down and make you play slower than you really are or they can make you place a lot higher than you really are. Placements would only work and be accurate if this was a game where you were the only player accountable for yourself.

Perhaps if there was a lot more placement matches but I doubt anybody would want that many placement matches. So it’s pretty pointless if they insist on starting people in the middle of the ranks and then might as well just start everyone at 2000 SR and call it a day. Realistically I’m pretty sure this is already what happens in the beginning of placements everyone has started at 2000 SR and these placement matches only serve as matches with huge losses or gains been an attempt to get you to the right rank faster but ultimately it’s the same thing.

25 placements should just be dropped in general. Everyone should start to zero just like they do in real life and prove themselves to be the level they’re at, that is natural competition.

47

Except, history has proven it really makes for crappy games. Not sure it is “average” though, that has moved up to just into Plat.

48

I will tell you exactly why, blizzard has no idea what they are doing or do they ? they know that people will keep getting placed in gold and so they will buy the game again and repeat the cycle instead of staying on one account and climbing the ladder. New accounts should start in bronze but if they did that nobody would buy multiple accounts aka less money ( let’s be real here almost every overwatch player has more then 1 or even 2 accounts. Smurfs will enjoy this of course and crush bronze and silver players because that is the only way smurfs can feel good about themselves. They don’t like competition they like to tilt people in the lower levels and when the account gets to high they would just buy another. That would make blizzard far less money then the system they have now. This is all about money not the game. They don’t give a #@#! about what you think, in fact blizzard doesn’t even read these discussions because they are to busy counting their money or with the current lawsuit. overwatch 2 will be the same thing. A system based on if you don’t play with people you know that play as a team you will never climb as a solo player especially as a dps solo player you can forget it. This is a team game with zero system put in place for solo Q. The game only rewards if you win and punishes if you lose. forget your performance it has nothing to do with your sr. The system they have is the worst SR system of any competitive game.

49

Is Gold a ” high rank game ” ?

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50

The real problem is that they use a system built for 1v1 games and have shoehorned it into a 6v6 game, where there is much more randomness built into every game.

Realistically, given they have five years worth of data to look at and see how it’s failed miserably to provide a good experience, they should have already started planning massive changes to the system to improve it.

For myself, the first thing you need to do is eliminate results based placement and greatly reduce the SR gain/loss based on wins/losses, since your individual play is not what’s being measured by SR, but the performance of the entire team of randoms as a whole.

Placements should reflect skill level, not random factors of team composition.

Secondly, they should implement provisional ratings. I come from a background in chess, and what happens with a new player with no rating is, they have to play so many games to obtain their initial ranking. (Unsure if they’ve changed it, but back in my day it was 25 ranked games.) The second part of it was, if you played against an unranked player, rating points were not distributed until after they obtained their official rating.

This serves two purposes. The first is that there would be less toxicity towards alts, because games with them would feature no immediate SR loss or gain for people to stress over. Secondly, it allows the rating system to accurately reflect that a team facing the alt account of a GM player should have a much lower chance of winning than the team facing the alt account of a Silver player, and the gains or losses afterwards could accurately reflect the correct level of the game.

I will note that that’s the United States Chess Federation’s solution. In the international system, games played with unranked players simply don’t change ratings. No one stresses about factors besides the game because of it, but I understand this doesn’t give players the dopamine hit that a quick win and SR gain provides.

Lastly, they should implement seasonal rank resets, although not the drastic one of setting everyone to zero. Instead, they should take a tip from Magic and drop everyone two or three ranks at the start of the season and then let them climb out. This provides people a reason to play their main accounts more, so they can climb back up to the correct level. This slows the rate of smurfing and avoids wrecking matches for longer periods of time.

51

For a genuinely new player at this stage of the game? Yes.

Starting player in Gold on release day made some sense, it makes little sense now.

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52

So you suggest that everyone who buy a game now should start at bronze or ?

53

Yes, they should start in Bronze now.

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54

In terms of numbers relative to performance, team based performance is not a bell curve. Its a pyramid. New players in any sport always start in the equivalent of “bronze”

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55

Reference? I’ve never heard this before, but it sounds interesting.

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56

Sports. Little league has the most players. Skill determines how much they carry on until pro. Around the middle people still play for fun with college and adult leagues

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57

Well gold is average, therefore the average player is gonna player gold. Statistics are fun

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58

Like most of the issues with Overwatch there’s a simple solution that for some reason they’re unwilling, unable or just too damn lazy to implement.

Take player level into account when creating matches. It doesn’t have to be as strict as SR or MMR grouping. But for gods sake don’t put a level 30 player in a game with level 500+ players. I don’t care how “skilled” the game thinks they are, they have zero map and hero knowledge. It’s not a good experience for them, nor the other players. Why? Why do it? It’s insane.

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59

Beg to differ. Bronze is rolling the dice if the team will show up or a 6-stack of smurfs crushing. Its throw or lose at this point

60

Better way would be hide boarders / levels and just show a ” face of a hero ” and ultimate status when pressing TAB button. Also medals should be hidden and whole ” stats ” system should be changed to either basic scoreboard or change meaning of stats to something like ” health recived / ultimate status feeded / solo ulted / time spend for typing / ” and so on for reduce toxicity of this game. Reason why i think like this is that playerbase of this game is so selfish that opening players eyes somehow should be done, everyone blame everthing else and ignoring facts that they maybe are just bad at this game, like i do but im fine with that :grin:

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61

That won’t solve the issue though. In one game where we had a lev 30 player they even know there was going to be a second round and they didn’t realise you had to contest the payload in overtime. Hiding borders isn’t going to change that.

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