I was reading a lot of posts about people demanding the way the Match Maker works be made public, (Even people suggesting they have a legal team behind it), and it got me thinking…
What if the Match Maker is hidden to keep all of the complainers still playing Overwatch?
Imagine the shock if the bare truth of why we are ranked becomes known…
the shocking truth is probably that they themselves don’t know exactly how it works.
they certainly know how each of the systems involved works, but the exact nature of the interaction and the impact on real game data may be unknown to them.
there was a testing/learning phase at the very beginning to collect player data, and i don’t think that testing phase ever ended.
I believe that this type of matchmaker is a failed experiment.
an overengineered system that can do way too much to meet defined goals, leaving out a very important point - a large part of the players do not want to win at all costs.
it works in theory, it works in their internal testing and on the PTR but it doesn’t work with real world data.
As I have been bouncing continuously between bronze and silver recently, a pattern has emerged. I know what it is trying to do, but smurfs and derankers break the system.
The MMR sort of works like a bi-section. You get placed hard/easy matches, and your rank converges toward the middle of where the algorithm thinks you should be. If the ceiling is too easy for you, the bi-section resets, with the old ceiling being the new floor, and a new ceiling slightly above it’s estimated skill.
The problem is when a GM smurf gets placed on either team. If on my team, it overestimates my skill. If on the enemy team, it over penalizes. In theory it will average out over dozens or hundreds of games, but playing Stomp/Get Stomped over and over again is about as much fun as going to the dentist.
9 out of 10 that GM smurf in silver is diamondish hard stuck. Gm players smurf in plat and diamond and maybe just maybe in gold.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. It’s still broken comp though.
So far this season I’ve gained 200SR with easy games (80% WR), then dropped 500SR with impossible games (20% WR) and now I’ve just hit a 10 game easy win streak and gained almost 300SR and I’m back to where I started.
In my last game I literally did nothing to see what would happen. We still won. I can’t remember the last time I had a match where the teams felt even in any way whatsoever.
I think in lower ranks there’s so many smurfs now that even when you get a match where there isn’t, nobody is equal skill anymore - due to being stomped or carried in their previous matches. For anyone under diamond (which is like 90% of players?) the entire system is just broken.
I’m not sure how they can even fix it, and I don’t think they’ll bother trying for OW1 now. Hopefully in OW2 they can put some system in place where it can identify throwers or smurfs, but I doubt it. I fully expect it to be even worse in OW2, comp will likely go free to play and you’re going to have experienced players from OW1 mixed in with new or returning players who picked up OW2. It’s going to be chaos.
I had one game today in silver, we had a high ranked smurf on our team. Three of us basically sat on the cart and went for a ride while he almost won the game on his own.
He took the first two points almost by himself without dying. When they finally killed him someone on their team wrote in chat “He dies!”
It is now completely broken. There is no OW2. Blizz would need to release OW2 next week to save the game now.
I’m hoping OW2 is more like destiny in that the focus is on COOP PvE.
I’ve also been in games where I felt like I’m the smurf. I’m usually hammond and I went up to kill a widow and was able to melee her to death. She didn’t even notice and stayed scoped in the entire time. This was in games where I had fallen 500sr and it was turning back to win streaks.
Or what if it doesn’t even exist and we randomly just get matched with players who have same SR amount ?
why would a company publicly list their code for an IP that they own? THAT makes zero business sense
imagine if sr was just your MMR imagine how many problems that would solve SOOO MUCH
Video game companies hide their game code including matchmaker algorithms because it is their intellectual property. That being said, we know a lot of things about the matchmaker as it currently stands already based on past developer responses. If you need the text book version, just check this guide:
Most likely the code is very simple this isn’t very difficult to do they don’t even have give us the exact code, they could just explain how it works and we could test it out ourselves and see it corroborates to confirm it.
Also listing our MMR, maybe a history of our SR gains as well, maybe even vetter would be able to look at our match history along with the stats we go so we can see what’s wrong and we could work on improving those too because pbsr will bite you in the behind.
As a side note, maybe the ability to save our replays so they dont get rendered useless each patch would also be nice.
Yet a lot of things still remain a mystery. When I was tracking my SR for example there were some games where for I would only lose 8 Sr or or gain something like 34, a lot of these times I thought I performed a lot better other games yet was being punished/Rewarded for reasons I wasn’t too sure of everything we know is just a weird guess.
Also the more that we know the less we have to guess that and the less suspicious we become. Because the more that’s put out in the open the more obvious why we belong in certain ranks and if it was so obvious to the point where we can’t deny it then really there would be no complaints.
However on the flip side if the company is doing something which may not be accurate or a good way to measure we would know that too. But it wouldn’t take more than the company just fixing it.
Just that there’s no competitive sport which I can think of which has hidden rules which you don’t completely understand, and if they did people would eventually say there’s some kind of foul Play going on. As it stands even when fans don’t agree with the referee call things could get pretty hectic even with as many cameras and the clearness of the rules. If something like what blizzard does was introduced into a real competition fans would go ballistic.
The only way this could be true is if a large part of the system is controlled by semi-autonomous AI . Otherwise the people who created the algorithm know it and understand how it works.
Stop worrying about it. Just play the game, imho.
This is the best (and to me, the most likely) explanation of how the system actually works.
I like the spunky attitude on that guy. lol
I can just imagine this convo:
“He bleeds!”
“If it bleeds, we can kill it. CHAAARGE!!!”
<the Predator roars in pain as a bunch of Silvers gang up on it like feisty little wasps>
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I loled. That was literally what they did. Then a few of our team decided to help him out.