Why won't Blizzard reveal how matchmaking works?

I’m curious… Why don’t they? If they have nothing to hide, what’s the problem? People have speculated about how the matchmaker works for 10 seasons now, with some pretty sound theories that you are put on purposefully bad teams to help “even out” teams.

To kill all speculation, why don’t they just reveal exactly WHAT is being done when the matchmaker places you in a game? Are they afraid that we’ll finally know that they are skewing matches or forcing 50% win rate (or forcing you to carry, I should say)?

I don’t see why they don’t just reveal the system…

They already told everyone how the matchmaking works. You can see it here.

Please read over it extremely carefully as the information is extremely detailed. It’s best to do ANY type of research before making a forum post in order to allow unanswered questions to rise towards the top.

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And if that is not enough, members of our community has done even more research and created helpful guides like this one here:

I think that is actually part of the problem. They have nothing to hide (or show for that matter).

The Competitive system at least works somewhat well. You get a ranking based on your skills (that system in itself may be wonky though) and it attempts to place you or your team with/against other players who are also around that skill rating. It’s far from perfect, and has its flaws but it tends to work reasonably well.

On the other hand it’s long been speculated and rumoured that matchmaking in both Arcade and Quick Play simply doesn’t exist. Blizzard feels that it’s more important to find games quickly than find games that are fun. This is why these forums consistently have one or two threads highlighting the extremely large SR or skill gaps between players in those modes (if you spend any time in MH you’ll regularly see teams of 2k or lower ranked players up against 3.5k or sometimes higher).

The thing is, we’ve spent 2 years waiting for some sort of clarification. We don’t know if there is a matchmaking system. We don’t know if it uses any form of MMR (hidden or otherwise). We don’t know if Blizzard even cares about players having fun anymore.

I had a good read. It mentions comp. It mentions how groups are placed using the matchmaking system in comp. It actually says very little about the matchmaking system (and no mention of it outside of comp) or how it works, instead choosing to focus more on how LFG and grouping affects it. The one interesting thing it does mention though is:

This alone is practically the closest thing we have had to confirmation that QP and Arcade doesn’t use any matchmaking. The fact that extremely one-sided and horrifically balanced matches are still being created in both those modes is evidence that matchmaking does not exist there.

Thank you for replying. I’m surprised by the high quality posts from the lot of you. I’ll spend some time reading through it all, and see if I can make sense of it.

EDIT:
Well, here’s an interesting part; Whenever it wants to make a game, it calculates an expected win percentage for each team based on the SR of all the players.

I think this is part of the problem. Imagine for a second that you get several Mercy mains on your team. Sure the SR will seem OK, but in reality you have multiple players who have perfected a no-aim hero that will now fight over the same slot. This results in either people being terrible at their second, and third best hero or simply being salty for not being able to play their “main”.

Another part of it might be that I exclusively (up until this latest patch) queued as a solo player.

THIS POSTS are obsolete since yesterday

I think to WIN OR LOOSE SR will be extremely more difficult in LFG

I only play LFG for the last 2 days and when I LOOSE e.g. 3 matches

I will loose -5 SR each and vice versa