I had won 4 matches in a row. Then I got a Draw, after than I started losing again.
As if “matchmaker” said, "Oh you didn’t do well. Let me give you awful teammates and good enemies.
I cannot explain this. I was doing fine already. I lost all the SR I won in hours!
Well firstly, the nature of the game is to throw you around “randomly” if you aren’t making much impact in the game. IMO this is the biggest flaw of the game; it can feel awful to play if you are near where you belong.
That said, nomatter where you are it can still feel this way, just less likely the farther you get from your true SR. For example, I was watching unkoe play in plat on his new account, and he wasn’t winning ALL his games; like you would think from a t500 pro player. OW is PARTIALLY rng.
I don’t think the game purposefully puts you on a losing streak after a winning streak. I used to think this, but after over 1000 hours I can’t really agree anymore. I have gone on long winning streaks and not had a losing streak after, and I have also gone on long losing streaks without having a winning streak after. These happen more frequently than a consecutive winning-to-losing streak.
I know the feeling, I hate it, but its PROBABLY not part of the system, based on my personal experiences… I know some people (including myself 2 years ago) would say it IS part of the system, but lately I’ve had a ton of one-way streaks and dont have another streak for days/weeks.
This is in relation to my experience in diamond. I cannot speak for gold.
I think the matchmaker works the same in placements / demotion matches (where you drop below the rank threshold and have 5 matches to claw your way back before being deranked) as it does in normal ranked play.
Basically it makes a bet that you’re 100 SR higher than current, and it gives you a chunk of 5 similar games to prove it. If conditions are unfavorable, you can lose all 5 of those games. Maybe it can happen a second time, by force of bad luck. If you go through a third or fourth, it starts to think “this isn’t bad luck, you’re ranked too high” and you start losing bigger amounts of SR and winning lower amounts.
Eventually you reach a point where you’ve dropped low enough that the bets end up being favorable again. I rubber-banded between 2500 and 1800 several times over the past year, and it looks like that’s happening yet again this season. Stomp up higher than ever, maintain, lose a little, lose a little, gain a little, stomp down, win a little, win a little, stomp up again.
Yes rubberbanding is unfortunately an unavoidable thing in OW. And although this sucks weiners, I don’t think the rubberband is much larger than 500sr (total; about 250 - 300 in each direction of your “true” rank). This seems awful, but the saving grace is improving over time and seeing your average SR climb. So personally I believe the ladder is reasonably affective at ranking given the nature and difficulty of the game in distinguishing skilled players.
At the end of the day, you gotta win the game. There are many ways to do this, but if you complain about the system and teammates, you technically are rightfully doing so haha, but that won’t improve your own SR or skill. Instead, either quit OW (reasonable choice) or stop thinking about the system and teammates and work on improving your personal impact on each game; which will in turn increase the number of games you win.
Personally, I have found a way to not be bothered by the SR rubberbanding, I’ll briefly explain. This is easier said than done though, lol.
When I feel like I’ve gone on a winning streak and am getting higher in SR, I can tell players are better than before, even outplaying me more often, so I really enjoy using this opportunity to get punished harder for my mistakes and get also get complimented better by teammates for my strengths. This is the time of fastest self growth; the higher SR you play against, the faster you will get better.
This is why I often queue late at night where I can get in masters games and go up against people 400sr higher than me; and its a blast even if I get powned.
Now the other way; when I rubberband low, I really notice a difference in awareness of teammates and skill of teammates, and I have to fight to not let this make me tilt. I honestly don’t care about my SR number, what bothers me is when I drop, my teammate’s intelligence noticeably decreases. But if you can manage to get over this hump, then you have truly beaten the system; now you can really focus on punishing enemy idiots WHILE simultaneously proving that you belong higher by outplaying the enemy roll that equals your own; even if you lose the game. You will eventually climb back up, as long as you consistently outplay the enemy. When I drop to high plat/low diamond, I can really feel my affectiveness skyrocket, and I dont stay that low for long. But while I am there, I try to focus on myself and what I can do to NOT FEED (its easy to feed when your tilted and try to 1v6 the enemy because you are lower SR than before which leads to losing more SR xD), and enabling teammates to thrive (peeling) and punishing mistakes you’ve learned to notice more than your current SR teammates.
I cannot help myself. I tell DPS players to choose counter heroes, I BEG HEALERS TO HEAL ME, I pick the optimal heroes… I am already doing my best.
check my edit to Valour
Also this may be controversial news, but I believe it completely:
You DEFINITELY do not belong 2 ranks higher if you can’t swing your games heavily in your favor. For example, my gold account I can climb VERY easily in. But in mid-high plat, it becomes much harder for me to carry, and the climb slows dramatically. Personally, I do believe I belong in low diamond. I get outplayed less than 50% of the time by my counterpart, and I have been here for a long time. Back when I was in plat, it was harder for me to have an affect in my gold games. But now, gold feels like childs play to me, and I can climb though it in a day (have done so several times for undisclosed reasons, NOT boosting tho, personal reasons). Long ago I thought it was rng, but now seeing my change in affectiveness in a rank over time after improving, I fully believe in my argument.
That’s how it used to be. Role queue changed that. SR is no longer a (bad) measure of a player’s overall skill; it’s now a measure of a player’s winrate while locked into a certain role. The number of hopelessly unwinnable matches has skyrocketed for tanks and healers. Consequently, not enough people want to suffer through tanking and healing under these conditions, and we have a long queue time for the one role where we have the most amount of agency: Damage.
I don’t know how the MM works, but there are several known “features” of it. The first one is that SR is fake.
Yes. The SR is fake. It’s just a made-up number until you hit Diamond.
Instead the game tries to gauge your “mechanical” skill by using a hidden score (they call it “MMR”). The matchmaker will try to put you with players of the roughly same MMR.
The second one is forced losestreaks. If the system decides that your SR is too high for your MMR, it will start putting you into tough games with basically most toxic teammates. The idea is that you need to be able to carry them to “prove” that your SR score is real.
If you’re playing a tank or a support who usually have limited ability to carry games, then prepare to lose. Loss-streaks of 10-20 games are not uncommon. Developers explicitly stated that they DO NOT target the 50% win rate with their adjustments.
For those of you who think “it’s just a chance”, the probability of 10 lost games are 1 in 1024 given the fair game balance.
Eh, I disagree. As a roadhog/zarya main (flexing main tank), I can clearly tell when I lose or win fights for my team based on mechanics, positioning, peeling, ult usage, and more.
Role lock makes complete sense in terms of ranking a player; in my opinion its way more exciting to have people at the TRUE rank of their role; not people who one tricked roadhog to diamond then throw on genji. Now, you CANNOT rank up for the sake of playing other roles at higher SR, and this is a VERY good thing.
I’m not saying role queue is awesome, it has MANY issues. But in this matter, it succeeded.
The system really makes you hate the game and people much more. I feel like I am being toxic because I start arguing with people to play better, move, push.
No offense to anyone here, but a common theme among average ranked players is that they cannot affect their games to win; so they claim the game is RNG. But the majority of diamond/higher SR players can climb through gold no problem; leading to the conclusion that the game is not complete RNG. If you are stuck, its because you don’t know how to enable your team to win; just because you personally don’t see a way doesnt mean there ISN’T any way lol.
That said, I DO think that the game isn’t great because its so hard to tell how to improve sometimes, leading people to feel helpless. I felt helpless for SEASONS before I started learning what I was doing wrong
My tank was almost 2200, didn’t care. A few weeks later I’m almost back up to 3k. Took me a long time to pick up the meta and also Zarya. The less you’re tilted about losing, the more you can continue to focus on the game.
I could also focus on how I’m less than 3 matches away from Diamond and then just be obsessed over that and lose focus on the match. That’s an easy one way street back down to gold. But instead, I just play the game. My SR isn’t a representation of who I am as a player. It’s what I do in game that counts.
I’m confused, why is SR not made up in diamond? You piqued my interest. I thought SR was “fake” everywhere
note: “fake” doesnt mean its a bad representation. It just means its a buffer between your real MMR and your displayed rank to the world. SR probably lags behind MMR; I’d imagine MMR fluctuates more seperately from winning and losing than SR does.
For this to be true, the system would have to choose our role for us based on past performance across all heroes. I’m not at all against that. I don’t agree that the system knows how good/bad a tank I am based on the success of 4 other people in separate roles. This is particularly true for healers. You can be literally the best healer in the world, and role lock makes it so that you’re not substantially more likely to win a match in low ELO than if you had less skill.
The system has very bad ideas about what makes someone good at a role at a certain rank. What it thinks is a 2500-ranked tank, healer, and DPS is not even close to equitable.
Maybe I’m stupid, but your argument makes no sense to me…
The game still usually had structure (put aside all the 5dps memes) before role queue… It was just generalized and assumed that people where playing their best roles; which led to problems when people didnt.
Your argument doesn’t differentiate from the old system… The system was still determining how good/bad of a tank player you were based on the success of 4 people in seperate roles lol. They just weren’t LOCKED to their roles.
If you are the best healer in the world in role lock at low SR, you will destroy just like before lol; if you argument is that you used to be able to play DPS at low ranks to have greater affects, you prove my point that there was a problem with people boosting themselves with different roles and deciding where they wanted to start playing support lol.
You can DEFINITELY carry your games nomatter what role you queue in…
You may have to pick something with more carry potential, like ana or zen or some crap, but you can definitely climb the same way you could have before role lock
My friends, I will give you the real reason why if you lose match during win streak then you get loss streak but I will warn you now some will not believe, others will believe, and others will know it is true and it will make them almost crazy.
When you are given a win streak it is because the matchmaker is believing that you should be at some higher ranks based on performance of approx 15-20 matches previous to the win streak.
The matchmaker at this point is giving you matches it has calculated as “should be easy to win”.
Once you lose one of these matches or draw, the matchmaker determines that this must be approx the rank you should be at since you lost an easy match. Then it will cause you to lose some matches to compensate, sometimes 2-3 matches, sometimes more. After the matches are then lost you will be given matches, where teams are supposed to be matched evenly.
At this point the matchmaker believes it has found your correct rank. If you begin to get poor stats over next 15-20 matches you will get loss streak, if you get good stats then win streak.
It is a big cycle, it is always happening, pay attention and you will see it clearly. Now you know the truth as I believe it.
Shalom
I was 2533 on Tank. That was weeks ago. Now I am below 2300.
If I am getting better, why do I keep losing and go even lower? What’s the point of spending hours for this?
Again, your assuming that your highest achieved SR is your true rank lol. One time I rubber banded to 3460, but I definitely am not a masters player yet. Your gunna hate me, but perhaps gold is your current skill level, and you had just climbed a bit because you popped off or got lucky for a period of time.
If you belong higher, you will notice that you consistently outplay the enemy team and dont feed at ALL almost every game. If not, you don’t belong higher.
Note: if you find yourself dying first or second often, this is a sign that you are higher than you belong in SR. I discovered this in my own experience.
If you blame your tanks and healers, you are just an idiot; a good player knows to adjust their style based on their teammates performance instead of screaming HEAL ME and dying over and over.
It’s like coach Jayne mentioned one time; high level reinhardts/tank mains can oftenplay well with little healing.
Lose streaks, win streaks… It’s like running around circles. You can’t go up or down. It’s frustrating.
I don’t know what differs me from a platinum player and keeps me stuck in gold.
This sounds like another case of: When I when it’s because I’m amazing and I carried. When I lose it’s because Blizzard rigged it.