Same here. And support role too.
5 wins in a row: bronze 3
5 wins 2 loss: bronze 4
5 wins 1 loss: bronze 4
5 wins in a row: bronze 3 again.
And all (only not: damage) stats in top 1-3 of the game (with moria and Kiriko)
Yeah, that’s exactly how it’s been for me. I just wants to keep me in bronze 4. I don’t get it.
I am Bronze 5 as support currently. Was Bronze 2 max. I think since I placed Bronze in OW1, and never played competitive after that, that caused me to get placed low.
But I have played with Gold players, and some have been surprised that I was only in Bronze. Said I was better than a lot of Gold supports they have had.
I often win multiple games in a row, with maybe 1 or 2 losses…and I cannot get out of Bronze.
It just easier to climb in premade
That’s why people ask for solo separate from premade queue…
Still nothing from blizzard they just hide grp in UI so people complain less
The game is a total mess because the ladder itself is still a total mess. Skill variance is still a major issue. You can be in silver 3-5 and face people who either cant hit turrets vs people who literally never miss on a hit scan.
Blizzard had 5 + years to deal with a growing smurf problem and still hasn’t addressed it. What do you think is going to happen in lower ranks when people get thrown around like rag dolls vs some random low level player?
Congratulations on your success, I’m sure it’s well earned.
Unfortunately, this claim is demonstrably false in the general case:
The reason why that is false is:
Win rates are measurably worse in bad matches, and there is an observably high rate of bad matches.
Let’s grant for a moment that the Developer Blog said something to this effect your own contention in Part 2 of their write-up of the matchmaker, specifically:
A player’s visible rank will move towards their rating over time as they continue to play during a season.
The same write-up says:
Your ranked games are formed based on your internal matchmaking rating (MMR), regardless of your displayed skill tier. MMR changes based on the result of each match.
and
Ultimately, the only way you can increase your rating is to win more matches than you lose.
So, just win more matches right? That seems to be what you’re proposing. It’s not an outrageous claim by itself, but it’s only actionable advice if all of the following hold:
- Matches are even enough that an individual player’s performance can lift game outcome.
- The increased win rate is sufficient to increase an individual player’s rating within a reasonable interval of time.
To Point 1:
I’ve heard many people espouse the position your original starts post with, and I take it seriously. I take it so seriously that, this past season, I set about to actually test the claim against my own observations. The full write-up is posted elsewhere for those who want to see the details, but my biggest finding was that getting matched with just one ineffective teammate predicts a loss 90 percent of the time.
A lot of people solo queue, and if you solo queue the probability of getting a poor teammate seems to be quite high. If a single teammate’s performance can swing the game, and if that influence appears in a large portion of your matches, it’s going to be difficult for your own in-game contributions to stand apart from the negative contributions by others.
To Point 2:
The matchmaker very obviously struggles to determine the correct MMR for many players, as evidenced by the frequent and persistent appearance of long streaks of losing and winning. If a player isn’t placed in reasonably balanced matches at a consistent rate, their individual contribution to match outcome is going to be drowned out by a host of other influences. It may be that, given a large enough sample, the matchmaker can eventually figure out the “correct” rating, and start to make better placements for a given player. To the best of my knowledge, though, there has been no official statement as to how long that should take on average, and there are numerous reports of people playing all season long with the streaks never abating. How many games should it take for someone’s MMR to stabilize? 20 games? 200 games? 2000? No one knows, yet people still talk about the value “eventually” converging, as if 20 games is no different from 2000.
To be quite candid, when someone tries to tell the inspirational story of how they climbed the ranks, they should include the relevant practical details of how many games and/or hours it took. Without those details, it is impossible not only to gauge the credibility of the claim (e.g. it would stretch credulity to claim that someone climbed from Bronze to Platinum in 10 games), but also to give a sense of just how much work someone should expect to put in. One reason that so many people have become so frustrated with ranks is that it is utterly obscure how hard or easy it should be to climb them, and individual reports are vague, unsubstantiated, and wildly variable.
So, please stop and consider why you are giving this advice. Do you really think it is actionable? What have you done to test the theory it is based upon? Have you considered alternate explanations? How widely do you think your situation applies across the player base? There’s a lot of frustration and anxiety in the player base right now, and it’s only exacerbated by breezy exhortations about how “easy” it is to climb the ranks, and how everyone struggling just needs to “git gud”. It’s a bad vibe, and we don’t need it.
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First let me start off by saying thank you for the congratulations and even taking the time to write this and actually make a legit argument and not just say “no you’re wrong.”
So yes I do believe that ultimately winning more games is the true answer to climbing. Of course I don’t know how MMR works fully. But to the things you said 1. I feel matches are even enough to the point that one’s individual performance can definitely matter. Now of course this isnt the case for every game you will play. Some are just lost causes but I feel what a lot of people don’t realize is that just their own better playing can heavily effect the game. I also think it’s even because while yes you can get a thrower and bad team mates, but so is literally everyone else. Nobody is getting special treat meant in that regards even your enemies.
Because that’s my thing and I’ll read your write up on it after this post. But if one bad team maté guarantees a 90% lost, but both teams have one bad player. Doesn’t that bring them both to a 90% lost? Thus making it even?
And point 2. Of course this isn’t going to happen over night for most people. I’ve been playing since season 30 of ow1 and just hit diamond. I have well over 1000 games in.
I’m half sleep so please forgive me if this ain’t making sense. But yes you’re correct I should of gave you more info about the.
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The web is a nicer place when people talk to one another, instead of to their own inflamed sense of outrage. Which is to say: I genuinely appreciate your appreciation.
I don’t disagree – but only in the sense that this is basically a tautology, along the lines of: “The best way to get rich is to get more money.” By definition of the ranks, you will climb if you win more. Certainly. The questions then become: What does that take, and how hard could it be? I tend to agree that, given infinite time, everyone would settle in to something like a “stable” and “meaningful” rank. By the same token, a small improvement to your skill should also translate into a higher rank, given infinite time for the MMR to converge. The trouble is, infinity is big enough to hold a lot of possibilities, many of them unpalatable. In Season 2, I came just within reach of my very modest goal of climbing from Bronze 5 Support to any division of Gold – and very nearly made it (I peaked at Silver 1), only to have my rating destroyed by a string of bitter losses when I made the “mistake” of playing matches toward the end of the season, when many people were throwing, leaving, and generally making a mess of games. (For the record: nearly all of these games were solo queues.) The issue, for me, wasn’t whether I could climb, given enough time. By all appearances, I could climb, because I did it once, and so could probably do it again. The problem is the intense frustration of being dealt setback after setback, and seeing weeks worth of effort destroyed by a few bad days. While I love a good challenge, there’s a marked distinction between a challenge and an ordeal, and I’m sorry to say that OW2’s matches have started to feel much more like an ordeal that OW1’s ever did. Maybe I could climb back up, or even higher, but it has increasingly become a question of whether I consider that a reasonable investment of time and effort for myself.
You’re absolutely right, and one of the reasons that I haven’t quit Overwatch and found a different game is that I can still see when this happens, and it gives me great satisfaction. Though I’ve got a lot of dismal things to say about the system, I wholeheartedly endorse the principle that people should still focus on their own performance, and play as if they can make the difference – that really is the only viable way to get ahead. It’s something of a paradox, though, as both these can be true: the onus is on the individual player to do the right things, and that remains true even if the system leans unfairly against them.
Personally, I’ve given up on polishing my rating. It would be nice to have a higher one, but I don’t. I still play Comp, but purely for the intensity and the structure of the games. If I win, that’s great! And if I lose, hopefully I can learn something more than I would from the chaos that often unfolds in Unranked or Arcade.
This is an intelligent question, and though there is an answer implied in the longer write-up, I think it deserves an answer here. In short: Yes, that is what happens, but that still creates problems.
Firstly, there’s the UX aspect: It feels lousy to know that one person determined the game for all ten players. It feels disappointing when the enemy team gets dragged down by a low performer, because it dulls the sense of accomplishment that would come from winning a fair fight. It feels demoralizing when your team gets the low performer, because it feels like you sweat through the game and walk away with nothing to show for it. In my observations, poor players did appear regularly on both my own team and the opposing team – a bit more than 30 percent on each side, so that just over 60 percent of games had a “poor DPS” by the definition I used. Being disappointed by 60 percent of your matches, whether wins of losses, makes for a pretty bad game experience. Interestingly, most of these matches had a poor DPS on one team or on the other – but very few (about 3 percent of all matches) had both.
Secondly, there’s the role aspect. While the effect might not appear that strong at first, Damage and Tank players are a kind of limiting factor for Support players. Supports can enhance the performance of the Tank or the DPS, and if they’re good they can make impossible plays into possible plays – but that all depends upon the ability of the players in those roles to recognize and execute on those tactical opportunities. If you’re a Damage player, and if you have at least a basic level of competence, you have a lower probability of being matched to a “doomed” team because there is only one other Damage slot that could be filled by a poor DPS. By contrast, if you play Support or Tank, there are two Damage slots that could, in principle, be filled by anyone. As such you have twice the chance of catching a poor DPS. I didn’t study this particular case but, assuming that the distribution of Damage players is the same across matches, one would expect average-or-better Damage players to encounter this condition only half as often as average-or-better Supports or Tanks.
So, in summary: It is even, depending upon what role you play, but the outcome undesirable, even if it is technically “fair”.
An excellent data point; thank you!
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So me being in mid-lower bronze and constantly pitted against silver and higher is my fault and not the game’s? Good, I was worried it was because I’m somehow bad in nearly every game I play
Also the don’t solo play thing doesn’t work because I can’t even group up with my friends unless I play support
You are not alone. I am stuck at bronze 4, even i got few as potg.
Ya me too, i am at bronze 4 forever…
You play bronze because your level is bronze and not a broken rank. It’s hard to accept, I think, but it’s true.
I was silver last season.
I’m hoping it’s fixed next season.
Right now the matchmaker is allowing mass people to rank up easy, also you’re playing in a group so you can’t attribute your ranking up to your skill.
as a support 90% of those games are: Tank goes one way, Dps runs completely different direction, insta die
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how do they know what the lobby is at?
This is an ignorant post. I’m assuming you’re either a dps or tank main. You should try playing healer and tell me how well that mentality holds up. When your tank is face tanking the whole team with no support/dps and the enemy teams dps is doing double, sometimes triple, the damage of your dps, you kind of have to be the tank, the dps AND the healer.
The reason some people don’t belong in their rank, as you so declare, is because it isn’t based on performance. It’s based around wins. It doesn’t matter how hard I carry, how well I play, how well I keep my team alive, it’s up to the rest of my team to make the right calls and if you lose a certain amount of times, even if you win spectacularly, you still derank or stay the same rank. It’s pure luck to get a team that doesn’t crap the bed.
I’m glad they figured out a way to make things pretty equal and eradicate smurfs, but it still doesn’t take into count that your rank is based around wins and not how well YOU performed as an individual, but as a collective with randoms.
Try playing solo heals and you’ll see the flaws in the system. We’re nothing more than a meat shield to keep games from being like COD.
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Hate to tell you this buddy but you’re wrong and randomly coming on here trying to tell people they’re the problem in a broken system is one of many reasons
THIS GAME WILL NEVER BE FIXED
Your performance does matter though. If you do well consistently for your rank you win more thus gain more rating. However, that does not mean more healing. Playing well in overwatch isn’t something that can always be quantified.
A lot of people believe they “deserve” a higher rank and there is actually a series that tests this by Jay3 where they take people in say silver and place them in plat lobbies or a diamond and place them in GM, unsurprisingly they cannot handle the pace and end up feeding.
So yes assuming you’ve played enough games, you are at the rank you should be.
And yes I’ve played support this season. Started in Silver 2 and now gold 2. 80% win rate one tricking zen after 22 games so far.
I do think the comp rank system is broken, i play better and better every day and i dont rank up even when i win 5 games in a row because matchamaker took me out of loser queue.