Why cant I play with my friend?

General Discussion
#1

My friend recently joined Overwatch. I spent hours helping him reach lvl 25 so we can play competitive together. Tonight, he hit 25… so we began queuing for competitive… after completing our 4th game. We got a message stating we cannot que together since our skill level is too far apart. What is up with this? Why cant I play with my friend that I got to join this game, with the soul purpose of playing with him. Extremely frustrating, and really making me feel strong resentment towards this game’s rating system when grouping with friends.

EDIT: We are both unranked in the current season. This happened after placement match 4/10. My highest rank ever is 1900~

1 Like
#2

Friend will have to do placement matches first I think

Or your SR is too big a gap

#3

We are both in placement matching… Both at 4/10

#4

There is a limit how far your SR can be apart when you join ranked as a group. He has to get higher or you have to go lower.

Than the system already seperated your mmr … that’s unusual.

6 Likes
#5

If you’re both unranked, you should still be able to queue together. If one of you has finished your placements and is at Diamond or higher, you can’t queue with unranked players. You might want to make sure you didn’t finish your placements ahead of your friend and got ranked at that level. Otherwise, this sounds like a weird bug, and you might want to file it in a more appropriate place.

#6

placement system probably decided that you and your friend are on too different skill level. I don’t know what your rank is but if you are idk diamond and your friend is so far eg ~bronze-ish then you can’t play together (or otherwise). It’s a fairly new mechanism and i think it is to prevent situations such as grandmasters playing with slivers during placements causing your team to underperform (essentially playing 5vs6) or purposely throwing.

#7

Maybe this is something new they added to prevent high rank players from grouping with low ranks during placements to try and prevent boosting?

2 Likes
#8

If you are above Gold you are probs too high, most start off in Gold or Silver

#9

My highest rank of all time is 1900

#10

He placed above you then lol

#11

I can see this happening. Specially after I’ve saw a few times people “selling” a boost.

#12

Either your friend is playing incredibly bad and will be Bronze, or - I suspect - the system has him marked to be Plat or higher…

Does he have previous FPS experience? Does he seem to be doing well in your games?

#13

Not a bug. They changed the system during placements to take into account MMR rather than rating. Now you can queue with anyone during your placements, even if they are placed; as long as you are within a reasonable MMR threshold.

#14

something to do with the mmr, same thing happened with me. i got a friend to play the game and used one of my throw away accounts (with zero comp history) to do placements with him, after 5 games we couldn’t queue together anymore because our skill was too far apart.

#15

Didn’t know this! Thank you for the info~

#16

The matchamaking takes mmr in consideration when doing placements, that’s how the game defines if you can q and do placements with a friend, if you played the season before then it takes your final rank.

If you’re grandmaster then you can q with someone who finished 350 below or above you, not including decay.

In your case I think the matchmaking defined your friend’s mmr to be way above yours or way below you (1000sr difference below diamond) even if you’re unranked it takes that in consideration to not get unfair games, you can place near masters for a new account (Happened to me on a new account) so the difference regarding mmr can be huge.

Either your friend is high plat and above or he’s low bronze.

Anyway it’s really surprising that they figured out his mmr that quick.

#17

When deathmatch was competitive I played with a friend and we went all through placements and I ended up 29something and he got silver.

After we placed I couldn’t play with him, but during it was ok. I only played placements anyway.

#18

Basically where the system thinks he is (based on your 4 matches) is 1K above or below 1.9K