Skill Decay in Competitive
Our team has also been considering how to approach players who have not played Overwatch recently. Players who haven’t played recently are less likely to maintain their actual prior skill output in a match. To help account for this and make matches fairer, players who haven’t played in a while will find their internal matchmaking rating lowered to help us re-evaluate and determine their current skill level. We’ll also adjust their internal matchmaking rating more quickly, up or down, as they play matches after returning. Returning players will therefore quickly get back to their appropriate skill tier and division as they continue to play.
Blizzard said this back in September. I guess rank decay will exist in future seasons and not just season 1.
Personally I like this change because it removes players who only play comp to do placements, it also makes it harder for players who doesn’t have competitive as their most played gamemode becoming “dead weight” in lobbies they don’t belong in.
In paper it sounds good, but in reality … if those players have been active in QP, they are likely to have the same skill level or just 200SR less, so by doing this blanket thing of putting people 2 Ranks below, they are artificially creating smurfs.
What do you think happens when you put a Diamond 5 player of season 29 in Gold 5 lobbies? … yeah, exactly
It’s not rank decay it’s people thinking they’re a certain rank, but their sr dropped because they lost too many games before getting their next promotion. Another reason why hiding SR is dumb I lost one extra game after reaching my goal and didn’t think about to find out I got deranked out.
Yeah, I was gonna say this. I stopped playing comp. I didn’t stop play the game. So you putting me back into bronze, from gold 5. I’m just gonna stomp them again. With 70% winrate. That’s a smurf dev’s.
Yeah its a positive change. You de-rank one rank from what I have seen (from plat 3 to gold 4). So you need to play every season and go back to where YOU think you should be.
If people did not play for 3+ seasons? They could be starting in bronze. It makes sense because the game has changed. It was needed in OW1 badly, because people could just “sit” on their ranks without any effort.
But than people can go big brain. I know I’m gonna derank X levels. I’ll just stop here. Let the game derank me. And now I can make bronze lives hell. If the game gets harder over time. Than the person sitting would go lower, over time. That’s what happened to me. In OW1 I refused to lower my mouse sens. And barley played comp. By the time I did 6 seasons of placements. I went from high gold to bronze.
Yeah let me stop you right there.
I dont think you have a firm grasp of what the ranks were or are right now.
The game is different sure, but its not suddenly Apex. A dude that was blasting Diamonds in the face 4 seasons ago, is not “magically” losing all their knowledge and mechanical skills. Putting that player vs Bronzes (or anything below Plat) is destroying Competitive integrity 101.
If he was diamond, we would need to wait 8 months to play in bronze at least, and even then the system will put him higher rapidly, if he performs well.
If he was Diamond and is now in bronze again, he seems to be boosted or did not deserved to be there. Simple as that.
That’s still ruining games. I had a 70-75% winrate when I went from Bronze to Gold. That is not fair to those ranks. It took me 60 games to reach Gold.
No.
Again, those 8 months are not a magical pill that make them forget the game lol.
Like I said before:
That is B A D.
Like with capital letters, bold, burning bad.
Again, this doesnt happen unless you artificially force the system to do so.
Hell even Kabaji, a T500 got placed in Plat 2 dude. They are doing BLANKET (no requirements or low threshold) 2+ ranks below where you should be.
Let me spell it for you: Its not working properly (the decay system).
if they are gonna do this system then i think they may as well just reset EVERYONE to 0 every season and just make it a competition on how far you can get in rank every season
of course some matches would be ugly since you mix all skill levels together but it would be cool to see how high people can get and if they can do it consistently season after season
