Why ranks are inaccurate, IMHO

This is going to sound like a rant, but I swear I’m just genuinely confused.

I don’t understand why my team mates seem so… clueless.

Some back ground: I am a Junkrat main who has peeked 3450, then I dropped, and now I am sitting at 2750, I obviously make mistakes, but when I watch my replays I have to REALLY nit pick to find mistakes that would actually help me win those lost games (things like “oh I need to work on my close rang flicks” or “I need to remember not to jump against a smurf widow” etc.), so then I decide to spectate my teammates… Oh boy, was that a mistake.

My supports are frontlining and dying first, my tanks REFUSE to take highground (even after I’ve politely asked them to in voice) then proceed to blame me for dying to the damage boosted solider 76 across the map, and my other dps doesn’t know what to do once they’re on highground.

So how come, me, someone who has almost hit masters, understands the concepts of space/highground/rotations/etc, is playing with a rein who can’t even find the stairs to highground on King’s Row.

I seriously think Blizzard (or Microsoft now) needs to reevaluate how sr is determined and how much you gain/lose in a victory/defeat. It should be based more around K/D and stats per 10min etc… Teammates seem to barely know how to play strategically and think UngaBunga swing hammer works against every team comp.

What are your thoughts?

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I agree that something needs to change

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That’s just the universal rule of pvp games. Your teammates always suck. It doesn’t matter what game you’re playing, your teammates suck and are always less intelligent and undeserving of their rank.

that’s sarcasm, if it isn’t coming across via text

Ranks are definitely not accurate though. I don’t even think they can be accurate with how inconsistent people are and how many different and incompatible playstyles are viable. SR swings and ranging is the norm as is the difference between someone who can carry and someone who can “hang” at an sr. This game’s just volatile unless you’re playing in controlled environments like scrims.

The “my teammates suck” mindset only becomes worse as you fall in rank, because suddenly your eyes open to so many more types of shortcomings and mistakes.

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If you’re still losing then you’re still making mistakes and not seeing them. It sounds to me like you’re not even trying to work with your teammates and are just immediately dismissing them as a lost cause. Based on some of your complaints it also sounds like you need to work on your positioning as well if you’re getting caught out by plat hitscan players.

The system can be frustrating but I don’t think that a consistent drop of 500+ SR can be attributed to it. Maybe you’re just not improving enough to maintain a near-Masters rank.

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I don’t know if you are wrong, he is wrong or i am the one who is wrong; but he is talking about quality not about climbing.

What you are saying he is bronze, he becomes gold and all is solve?
R:according to me he can become plat and he will have the same boosted players and the same smurfs. Just faster games, but what about quality?

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I feel like a more effective line would be to watch your own replays and see where you messed up. There is a lot to unpack with those, and you’ll find yourself seeing a lot more than you did in game.

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Alt accounts screw up the matchmaker. Also, as someone who has been from silver to diamond, I am wildly inconsistent.

Sometimes I’m on it, directing my team, making good callouts, peeling, rotating, and have great awareness. Sometimes, I have a “if it’s red it’s dead” mentality, end up ulting into lost fights, can’t aim, and forget the fundamentals of the game.

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Uh… it’s based almost entirely on the per/10mins stats. So I’m not sure what you are going on about.

If anything… they should simply disable MMR, use SR only, bring back win/loss streaks to get people where they belong faster.

The reason that games are a mess are the very fact that mmr is HEAVILY mechanics based. You get more all aim / no brain bottleneck around diamond because of that.

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I think the incompatible playstyles thing is HUGE and not mentioned enough.

The way to play the game lacks consistency. Which with many different players mixed produces stomps unless the team playstyle among teammates lines up.

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I find it frustrating too. I usually play Mercy so it’s my job to keep an eye on what everyone is up to, and the amount of dumb sh*t I see you would not believe. Most of the time I feel like I’m supervising the local special needs school outing.

I’ve kinda stopped trying really. Not to say I’m throwing or anything; I’ll support the team and do my job. But if they won’t push the point, group up or counter then I’m just wasting my energy trying to do anything about it really.

At least as a support player I can take a back seat and still have value. It must be even more frustrating for tanks and DPS players.

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In my experience it can if not more so. I was 2.3 at the start of this season, dropped to 1.7, couldn’t win a game no matter what I did, then started climbing again and now I’m back at almost 2.1.

Checked my stats throughout and they were the same. No change. So who else can I attribute a 500 plus SR swing to if not my team mates?

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Somehow i belive you are at least at rank where you belong, maybe bit too high.

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Reminds me of a vod of me I asked folks to watch. And sure I made plenty of mistakes. A panic Bob which missed the point, some other bad ults, even laughed at for the char I picked. Then I was told I was the worst player on my team in that vod and I was like oh reeeally? By all means let me see how I failed my dps partner - this dude did no killing blows all game. Kept switching and zero ults, alllll game - but they play with friends… and I believe that’s why he was even at the rank I was at.

I’ve been trying to say this for awhile now but people think I’m crazy and blame the system, but somehow someway, a small minority of people in ALL ranks do not belong there. It’s like a tale of two games. You got the casual gamers who barely play and don’t know the map then you have folks who aim train get vods and seek out out coaching.

There has to be more emphasis on individual contributions towards the goal. I recognize it’s a hard problem to measure a subjective metric, but… nothing is impossible and if we don’t stop complaining about it, and recognizing that the current system is failing ALL OF US, it won’t get fixed or attempted at finding a better way.

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I’ve said for years they should take the time you’ve put into the game into account when matchmaking. I realise some players are just going to be more mechanically skilled than others, and this isn’t really dependent on game time, but Overwatch isn’t just about clicking heads.

I often see players with 30 hours in the game and very little hero or map knowledge matched with players with 3,000 hours under their belt and it never ends well.

Make it stat based and two things happen. One, people stop playing for objectives and start stat padding. That’s bad for obvious reasons. Second, everyone gets judged in their rank against all the alt accounts that climbed out of their rank. Didn’t play better than some Diamond player on his fifth account last month? No SR for you. Sounds great, don’t it?

No, what’s needed is a new, dedicated community and not what you have now.

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This has happened to a number of people recently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OverwatchUniversity/comments/smvxvt/sudden_and_consistant_derank

Lots of posts on Overwatch University about high rankers dropping 500 - 700 SR.

Perhaps Blizz tinkered with the matchmaker in some way without telling us.

My alt has also dropped about 700 SR.

I had to change my playstyle because something felt “off” about the way teams are playing the game since Christmas.

Had to adapt & was able to get back to Diamond recently.

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The game is rigged to oblivion. If you overperform, you get crappy team mates to balance out your matches. It’s easy to stop solo players with it.

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I think society cares to much about society and too little about themselves not realizing that they are inherently one in the same. Some people on here don’t even read what you post, and have “enemy topics” and instantly retaliate like automated message.

My though personal thoughts is that, what you present isn’t unreasonable, fortunately for me I have already verified the things you’ve said because I’ve done them myself. I started watching other people on my team for the sake of fairness because I should not immediately blame others and should try my best to take responsibility for my own faults but that truth applies to them as much as it applies to me, if I am going to give myself the beat down on the lessons I deserve they at least deserve the blame for what is truly theirs as well. Some would say that it doesn’t do you any good to blame them anyway since it is largely out of your control, I personally think it makes no difference, you don’t need a phony lesson of how you could have made that particular situation better, you’re always learning to deal with the situations and our better ways to prioritize.

Anyway I have watched replays and I have been wrong sometimes on my assumptions on other people’s game play, but I have also been right.

Ironically I once posted a replay specifically because I was trying to learn how to not have bias and identify if I did have them. So I posted a replay and asked to know if compared to my teammates, do i play at a higher level (more skillfully) then they do on average and also if the enemy team was better than my team in their opinion. All i got in return would pointing out my mistakes and complementing my teammates and advice on how I could have better enabled my team. Apparently assuming im in need of some humility or help for a problems they assume i had was assumed to be the help i needed and the help i actually did need and was asking for went completely ignored.

As for the last part of what can be done, i’d suggest perhaps considering a new form of matchmaking or a more strict competitive mode. I haven’t really thought about much on how they can make matchmaking better and neither have they released the details for me to be able to completely criticize it.

Off the top of my head one suggestion I would say is match people based off the reliability as well. If they are the type of person who queues the Matchmaker and then goes and does something else and tends to get kicked out for inactivity, or if they are the type who tends to disconnect during the games whether it be for legitimate purposes or not, they should be all matched together so they see the effects of what they do in their own games more often and it also serves to match more serious players with more serious players and hopefully returns to you the quality of matches that you expect.

Another would be cracking down harder on people who just generally break rules or have alt accounts, the reason I say alt accounts is because although it’s seen as simply having another account and their are some valid justifications, it also makes the enforcement of any rules pointless because they are the primary way in which you circumvent anything which blizzard enforces. No punishment could be taken seriously or has any serious effects they may as well not exist because you could simply just go play on your alt, this is part of why people don’t try, because its not their main.

Personally your suggestion on reevaluating how SR is determined I am against. AI is not sufficiently developed enough to where it can accurately measure strategy and what we call value. The system we use now is based on statistics and is an imperfect system but a good enough system you could say. But until we can easily have AI understand abstract concepts it will never be the system that you want it to be, just a different version of the system we already have which you already don’t like. I think it’s better to have no system at all and standard 25SR gains and losses because it’s better to have no system manipulating these variables in ways they can potentially be wrong every game and instead let them pan out naturally in ways that theoretically would eventually reflect the reality even better than any man or ai man makes since it is based of your performance and not what anything thinks your performance is.

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hahaha I liked it
“if it is red it’s dead”.
I think that is what keeps me away from climbing too.

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Honestly, there’s something inherently more tilting when losing games in Overwatch compared to other games like Valorant. While it’s true that it’s always partially your fault that you lost a game. It’s not as easy to forcefully win almost unwinnable games by clutching in Overwatch unlike in Valorant.

A better team just leads to too much steamroll that a single exeptional player can’t do much about in Overwatch, no matter how much they change their strategy (but in Valorant it’s possible). So this feeling of helplessness is partially the reason why I stopped playing Overwatch as often. I still play it for fun, but not as much as I used to because it just feels unrewarding.

I’m mostly talking about quickplay matches though, which usually tends to have unfair match-ups. In competitive, the matches are largely fair for both sides. So you could argue that I just lost interest in Overwatch since you still get balanced matches in competitive. But it would be nice if I could have enough solo carry potential to carry games in quickplay too. Since that’s primarily the game mode that I play the most now.

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