Blizzard’s silence on this subject has been deafening. They seem to have a policy against developer-player interaction, because I have never seen them reply to forum users like us. But that’s okay, because my message is as much for the players as it is for Blizzard.
So sad that those of us who understand the system are being ignored. It seems we’ll never see a true version of Competitive Overwatch.
If you disagree with the post, please tell us why instead of just negging it
Well I can say as someone who appreciates great writing, I thought your essay on this was terrific: great and stylized prose, strong ideas, thoroughness, fantastic analogies, addressed from many different angles. Overwatch aside, the essay could be appreciated on a number of levels. I passed the link on to many of my Overwatch playing friends (people who’ve ALL quit the game by the way – and your post was part of the final straw for some of them).
I really struggled to understand the counterarguments to your argument, to see the other side of it, but there is no other tenable side, really. You either let people sort themselves out – the fairest methodology, or you put your thumb on the scale. It really is that simple.
Kudos on what is probably the most read and talked about post on these forums – among tens if not hundreds of thousands of posts, that’s quite the accomplishment.
No im just wondering because the original post said something about a like to dislike ratio.
Thank you so much, for your kind words! On a day when I really needed some encouragement, incidentally.
It is gratifying to hear that you thought my post was worth sharing, and that it influenced friends of yours to make the same decision I made, which I think is a good one. Time is such an extremely precious resource in our lives, and if I have saved some people from wasting time on a rigged game, then it has been worth my time posting here and persistently promoting the discussion.
I have also tried to listen and engage with counterarguments against the original post. But like you I have found all of them untenable, because they are all based on denial of fact, or benefit of the doubt at best. I think the public needs to be much more critical of tech corporations like Blizzard, who rely on our ignorance to skirt the regulation of their activities.
Thanks again for your feedback and support 
Oh, sorry for misunderstanding you! Yes the old (Battlenet) Competitive Overwatch forum had an upvote/downvote feature. It was a much better way to gauge support for a thread, more democratic than a simple ‘Like’ counter. The results of several threads on this subject indicated the action that Blizzard should have taken years ago, to remove Match Making Rating from Competitive Overwatch.
Oh i see
Ha! I just wrote a short essay on this a few days ago. Consider the costs of ranking up and whether it's even worth it
Hope your day, gets better. Sometimes life itself is the matchmaking system, and it can pack a wallop. Hang in there 
That’s the thing, there is a wide range of experiences, but we are all having handicapped matches
It really is not a conspiracy, it’s straight up handicapping
Thank you!
Good essay!
Doing much better now, thanks again.
I just made my first major edit to the original post in over a year. I’ll repost it here because it’s a crux of the argument that I was struggling with for a long time:
Fighting your own shadow
Every player has to ‘fight at their weight’ under MMR, even if that is the combined weight of the next five most-skilled players in the match. Handicapping/MMR ensures that every standout player finds a doppelganger or a set of players on the enemy team who are able to counteract them.
I had a lot of trouble expressing this thought, but I think it’s good enough now. That’s what I love about writing, it’s never perfect. Several years after I made this argument against handicapping in Competitive Overwatch, I find that it still holds up, and I’m happy to hear from the remaining Overwatch players that it holds up.
I’ll keep pushing this subject of discussion until the end of time, until Blizzard responds, or until the government regulates their toxic enterprise.
I dont, I have fair matches most of the time. I am not handicaped there anyhow just like my team is not, so why do you keep calling it handicapped?
Because of Match Making Rating. What do you think MMR is, if not a handicapping system?
Because making fair games is not handicapping for me. MMR is there to create balanced games based on true skill which is reflected in MMR. Using SR for matchmaking would not be effective as it can be easily influenced without changing of actual skill.
Balancing games based on skill metrics is handicapping, not just for you, for everybody.
The matchmaker is almost quite literally a handicapping mechanism.
Anyone that has ever “smurfed” for more than 3 games in a row has experienced this.
It is what MMR is supposed to do. The problem is that rampant smurfing and throwing has made the middle ranks a complete mess of meaningless “ranking”.
And the game throwing every new player and new account right into the middle never helps either.
That said, their system does work over time (and many many games) to get people sorted.
BUT the problem there is that between balance changes, hero additions, and the lack of crossover skillsets (especially in the DPS role…playing Junkrat vs playing Widow for example), has undermined the accuracy of ratings to a great degree.
They need to stop dumping new accounts in the middle. Either do more accurate placements (15+ games) or dump them near the bottom of the ladder, so that ladder stability will increase as you go up. As opposed to now where stability seems to start in Diamond.
I agree when I pop off a few games in a row my teammates are worse despite having higher SR than my previous teammates.
Like when I play support and a Sombra is farming my dps outside LOS I go Moira to dodge the emp at least I can be useful. Something I could never expect of the supports on my rating heck when I get chased by a Nano Primal Winston as Moira my Ana won’t sleep him, heal me or even throw a nade at me so I can self heal instead she runs away with full hp.
Or like dps when my Ana lands a sleep on flanker I get to her and kill them but when I do it my Ashe won’t even react the only one to listen was my Lucio but too bad he can’t one-shot a Tracer so she got away.
Like imagine playing a counter because the enemy dps carries their team and not even going for them. That’s like picking Ana and not throwing nades at the enemy Hog who gets away every single time.
Making fair games is not hadicapping for me and never will be. I want it like this.
I want to have fair chance to win based on same team average MMR.
Experience what exactly? having bad team mates on my teams when I play exceptionaly well? I played hundreds of games on lower ranked alts and never had anything like this. Yes occasionaly I had bad team but thats normal, just random players will sometimes make interesting results. But I definitely cannot say that I was having worse or better team mates when I was hard carrying. Not at all. They were normal.
I do agree with this.
Its not about bad teammates. Its about the matchmaker trolling for other smurfs to match against you…to make a fair match.
It does do this. It is very easy to recreate as long as the smurf isn’t GM or something like that.
Well it doesnt do it to me. I played plenty of games on lower ranked alts to know how it is. Even when I absolutly dominate my games, I am not playing against more smurf than I do on my main in my elo. I dont understand why people still think that matchmaker will give you worse team mates or place smurfs on enemy team if you play well. If matchmaker would be placing smurfs vs smurfs, they would not be moving up as they do so easily now. And it would not be really good for the whole comp system to place smurfs vs smurf.
System cannot do that anyway as matchmaker doesnt know who is smurf and who not. If you go smurfing as plat to silver, matchmaker has no idea where you belong. Your MMR is not much higher than your SR anyway. How can system know you are plat smurf when you play against silvers? It cant…
Elo based matchmaking is not the problem Cuthbert. Years have passed and you still can’t wrap your head around the system. This is quite saddening, really.
The problem is, that Elo based matchmaking only works when handling units. As in 1v1. It’s good for finding opponents, but not for finding allies.
For the system to work adequately, the game must be restricted and restructured, so that the only playable competitive mode is full premade vs full premade.
Then the system would be able to adequately handle two units, as in the two teams. Then it would be 1v1, where an entire team is treated as a unit.
As to what you’re saying about skill metrics, Blizzard’s personal performance factor is pretty bad, I agree, but is not the main problem with the system. It never has been.
Ultimately, for the game to be fair, the solution is for Competitive to be restructed, so you can only queue as a full team. And not with randoms every time, with the same people.
Or perhaps entirely different system, that has nothing to do with Elo based matchmaking, or personal performance.
I’ve been saying for a while that Competitive Play should be solo-queue only. That’s the only way to make it fair. All this Match Making Rating/ELO nonsense is just handicapping by a different name.
If it’s solo queue only (while the game remains 6v6), then it needs a different matchmaking system, that is not pure Elo or Elo based at all.
If they insist on keeping Elo, they should make it pure elo and restrict the game, so that you can only queue as a full premade (not solo queue) where the rating belongs to the team.
OK, but you only seem to understand this on a subconscious and you ignore the specifics.
Elo matchmaking is not necessarily bad in and of itself. Imagine kinda like a Rocky scenario, where an underdog plays against the world champion. If the underdog wins, obviously he would get a lot of points, and if he were to lose, he would not lose many. That’s what the system is meant to achieve in theory, and I’d say it does that pretty well in games, where it’s properly implemented.
However, in Overwatch I’d say the system is rather poorly implemented, because it doesn’t fit a 6v6 game where you can solo queue, and that combined with the personal performance factor built on top of it is what I would describe as “handicapping”.
Also, please, stop spelling Elo in all capital letters, it’s a name, not an abbreviation. It makes you look foolish.
And less fun too. Players want to play comp together with friends.