Why the Match Maker is hidden?

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.

5 Likes

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.

3 Likes

Or what if it doesn’t even exist and we randomly just get matched with players who have same SR amount ?

2 Likes

why would a company publicly list their code for an IP that they own? THAT makes zero business sense

2 Likes

imagine if sr was just your MMR imagine how many problems that would solve SOOO MUCH

6 Likes

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:

6 Likes

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.

1 Like

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.

4 Likes

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.

1 Like

Stop worrying about it. Just play the game, imho.

4 Likes

This is the best (and to me, the most likely) explanation of how the system actually works.

2 Likes

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>

5 Likes

Top Comment :point_up_2:t4:

1 Like

I loled. That was literally what they did. Then a few of our team decided to help him out.

3 Likes

You’re looking at this wrong. If you want to compare Overwatch to other competitive sports then you need to compare them to Overwatch League. Yes, the ladder is called competitive mode, but it’s really not. Half the people playing don’t take it seriously. When’s the last time you saw a player actively hinder their own team in a real competitive sport?

4 Likes

System is broken at first place, smurfs just confirmes that. When you smurf you get the most braindead players in your team as soon as you reach high winrate (65-90%). System should push better players upwards, but instead it handicaps them with throwers, derankers, golden+ border players and now new feature : “flex quers” Not even talking about skill difference between “ok” players in a range of one skill bracket.

4 Likes

Yes that is one of the main problems.
This type of matchmaking was probably not just built for Overwatch.
More than 2 years of development time went into matchmaking.

Seriously think about what you can develop in this industry in two years if you have the resources.

You don’t see a player hinder their own team in a real competition but that doesn’t mean that I’m looking at it wrong, that means that the throwers are playing it wrong because it’s called competitive, and that’s why there’s a report button for such behaviors. If Blizzard isnt going to even try to make it competitive then there’s no point in a competitive mode. Sure it isnt OWL, but the doesn’t mean its a license to tarnish competitive integrity

1 Like

I don’t think this is a software problem. It could be. After all, the game black screens, stutters, fails to register keypresses, fails to register hits, has black holes on maps that things disappear into. So it could be a software competence issue. But I don’t think so.

I think this is an optimisation problem. You have 276,369,408 possible interactions, and very little data for a player on every possible hero. There is probably no way to balance that, so it probably uses some kind of A/B convergence, which is highly volatile and error prone.

The reason you don’t see such a big difference in teams in OWL is that the players are also optimizing. There will be meta compositions, tactics and strategies known, rehearsed and war-gamed by all teams. Any composition, strategy or tactic outside of that small well tested set will simply be discarded. So you will see mean reversion in the capabilities of teams.

If a team discovers a new meta comp/tactic/strategy, they will gain a small advantage for a short time, but it will quickly dilute as other teams either mimic it or discover a counter to it. Like chess grand masters.

I mean…. People “take a dive” in real sports. Though agreeably it’s terribly uncommon.

But, just as in Overwatch, other sports players have good days, bad days and great days.

It’s not so much that it’s not “competitive,” it’s more that there isn’t any stimulation for casual game players.

Some of these casual game players are exceptional (the naturally gifted). A majority of people are not.

Regardless, the general population of video game players aren’t capable of playing at a “truly competitive” level.

So they find other ways to occupy their time. Playing competitive mode casually (not taking it too seriously), trolling, trying to improve, playing new heroes they generally wouldn’t (for fun/ or because it tilts someone).

Once PvE comes out, I think “in general” competitive will become a little tougher ground up with more players, who don’t enjoy the pressure of competitive, opting to replay campaign content.

Just my guess. Could be wrong.

This is a community issue. People choose how they want to act irl, online, etc. You can’t control people who troll/throw.

They could certainly patrol the games more stringently but I think you’ll still see people complaining (but I paid muh monies so im gunna play muh game how I wanna).

2 Likes