You're in silver because you're bad, they said

Competitive Discussion
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I’m not expecting anything from the devs and the matchmaker. The game deciding who you play with is %100 a matchmaking problem. New accounts are probably the biggest matchmaking problem i have with the game. Ignore all the 50/50 win/lose. Ignore throwers. Ignore skill disparity. Ignore rank matching skill even remotely close. Ignore boosting. I absolutely hate seeing 3-4 fresh accounts with private profiles in my solo q matches.

Either they’re smurfs (good or bad) or still learning how to play and both cases are miserable to deal with.

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22

That’s the fun in it. There’s not just one skillset determining one rank we absolutely deserve. Just look at scrims. There are people who will wreck you in scrims but can’t carry ranked for their life, and vice versa. I know quite a few people who can perform well in more skilled lobbies, but suck and can’t carry when in noob lobbies. From my experience it’s actually really common. :spiral_notepad:

There’s merit to being able to carry by abusing the lack of teamwork/support in lower ratings, and there’s merit to being able to carry when you yourself are able to rely on that given support in the more predictable ratings. Not being able to carry in silver is a sign of a skill you’re lacking, but while it’s a nice skill to have, you don’t need to know how to carry noobs.

Like for example, I can reliably MTD someone in plat/diamond. Maybe masters on a really good day. But in silver? My MT in silver is a joke. But if I’m in silver, I’m not gonna MT my way out, ya know? I’m just gonna turn it into a deathmatch and lock hog or ball and farm them.

So the question becomes, how am I rated? Better than someone I can MTD in a higher elo, or worse than the team I lose to in lower elo? :wink:

The answer is - it literally does not matter to anybody but you. :+1:

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23

So how do you suppose the enemy team ranks up? I know what you mean, sometimes the enemy team is just OWL and your team is actual Bronze, but ultimately your rank IS dictated by you. If you’re consistently better than at least 10/12 other players in your lobby, you WILL rank up

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24

I suppose not having arguments makes it pretty hard to properly answer back real life examples ence the need to talk about the person putting out said examples to avoid being exposed.

I wish you good luck in the gaming industry! I look forward to see your incredible new title!

Did you not not read the part were I said it took me 3 seasons (much more that “50+ games”) to get back to my main acc SR? I even went up in the first season (probably out of luck).
But I know my skills and I know I’m silver at dps cause I know what my problems are and spent quite a bit of time introspecting to understand why I wasn’t going up.

But I suppose you’re one of those players that blame their teammates cause they are doing nothing wrong and it’s their teammates fault if they cannot rank up.
Just know that as you do that, there could be someone else on your team thinking the same about you.

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25

Now go prove it and climb on your main.

If you’re good enough to play in plat diamond games, you can roll silvers.

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26

Well all of this discussion has made me try playing on US servers, and it turns out that 200 ping is manageable for Winston, Rein and Lucio (what I’ve tried so far), and the experience on US servers is actually quite different to local. So I’m going to go back in with an open mind, and maybe in future I will post a VOD for review.

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27

Update:

My soldier win rate on my alt is now at 85% over a span of 30 games (i.e. my win % is still going higher and higher as I go up in SR). I am now at 2777 SR, one game away from high plat.

I’m starting to think soldier might be overtuned… it’s kind of crazy, when I hit 80% win rate on him, I didn’t think I’d be able to maintain it, but after more hours played my win rate continues to steadily go up. And I feel like I am just completely dominating my opponents with him

But it’s even MORE crazy that I can main soldier in mid-high plat with an 85% win rate on my alt, but doing placements on soldier on this account and putting up incredible stats, the game decides that I belong in silver… and then gives me a series of consecutive matches where my team is so much worse than the enemy team that I end up losing several of them, despite trying my hardest on Soldier.

If this isn’t a sign of a broken matchmaker, I just don’t know what is…

I’m going to try to push to diamond on my alt, because I like the look of that shiny badge, and it would feel nice to know that I can make it back to diamond after so much time off from the game (as I said before, I had previously reached diamond before taking a long break from this game).

Once I do that, I’ll start playing on this account again, maybe just to practice heroes that I suck with (I don’t think I have the motivation to try to hard carry my way through silver/gold again, it’s too stressful to constantly have to put the weight of the entire team on my shoulders in order to win). But it will be depressing, playing in silver again, where the skill variance is so wildly varied that it often feels like you are playing against a team of plat/diamonds while your teammates are all bronzes.

I will say once again, if you are over-performing in silver/gold it VERY much feels like the game tries to push you down by giving you the worst teammates it can find and placing you against the best players it can find on the enemy team. This VERY much made the silver/gold matches feel harder to win than in plat and made the matches not feel good to play in.

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28

Very interesting stuff! I wonder how status quo defenders will explain away this one?

:thinking:

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I absolutely hate seeing 3-4 fresh accounts with private profiles in my solo q matches. Either they’re smurfs (good or bad) or still learning how to play and both cases are miserable to deal with.

100% this

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30

and then gives me a series of consecutive matches where my team is so much worse than the enemy team that I end up losing several of them, despite trying my hardest on Soldier.

This has been the matchmaker since day 1

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31

Absolutely true. I’ve posted videos on the old forum of me winning in diamond and then getting on my low plat account (almost 1000SR lower) and losing, they said I was throwing the plat match when I clearly wasn’t. I’ve found that no matter what amount of evidence you show these flat earthers they will believe the old dogma of “the matchmaker works perfect.”

The matchmakers themselves have said the system is always trying to create a 50/50 match, it doesn’t take a genius to see that this would create an elo hell scenario if wherever you go on the ladder you only have a 50% chance of winning.

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32

That would imply that the placement system is perfect. Ha, ha.

Playing in Bronze is high comedy though. If that’s where the MM wants me, fine.
If I play tank I’m usually 4 gold most of the match. Sometimes I will switch tanks to win the last point and drop to silver for elims. It’s pretty cruisey, and the real Bronze players never cease to provide laughs. Much more relaxed on VC too.

But yeah, I can’t imagine the hell it would be climbing out of silver or gold, plus the toxicity of all the other sweaty aspirationals trying to climb out of silver or gold. I think the key would be to be “outcome independent” and learn to fight like Lerdsila Chumpairtour.

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33

You are right, it should create games were I have 75% of winning cause I deserve GM after putting so many hours in the game.

They should tell the matchmakers to start doing their job and not playing card games/ smoking while they should create ez matches for me.

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34

I think they’re saying they don’t want Blizz to try to create a “fair” match with creative data-mining of player stats… So if you are overperforming for your SR you get countermatched with a similarly overperforming player on the enemy side (or underperforming teammates) as some people are theorizing happens.

In other words, don’t have the matchmaker do anything other than a straight SR comparison to create a game… Preferably matching SR per role.

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35

I don’t think the matchmaker is perfect, but I do think it generally works. Streaks happen on both ends of the spectrum, and 50/50’s happen too. You’ll see that over extended periods of time the match maker becomes more comprehensive, and it’s flaws make sense (but are still flaws).

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36

Often on losing streaks it feels like the games get even harder the more you lose. That shouldn’t happen unless there are mmr shenanigans going on. As long as you’re putting up good stats while losing the system won’t let you off the hook until you hit your absolute SR floor.

If a plat player drops to silver they aren’t going to have the same experience matchmaking-wise as your average silver player. The matchmaker can put 6 players on a team with similar SR yet have wildly different expectations for the value each individual player will bring. Where I come from we used to call that rigging.

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37

I’m at 2800 SR now and I’m getting really worried about playing… I KNOW the game is setting me up to go on a massive losing streak that I have no control over. Why? Because it has been too long since I’ve been on a losing streak… Last time I went on a losing streak was when I was at the edge of ranking up to plat. Now I’m getting to the edge of diamond, I know I’m going to get a series of unwinnable games to bump me down again, soon.

I’ve already started getting complete clown games again, ones that are basically already decided before the spawn doors open. Last night, I had a game where our support were brig/zen and would only heal the tanks (basically hard throwing from the start). When I asked why they wouldn’t heal me, the whole team just stopped playing and went afk until the game ended… Then the next game as soon as the spawn doors opened on defense, the enemy team (I think they were all at least top 500 players, if not OWL players) immediately killed our entire team. Except for one guy who never selected a hero and eventually left the game, causing the game to be cancelled (spared me the SR loss, which was inevitable). After those 2 games, I quit for the night.

Then tonight I played a KOTH game where my tanks would not stop charging into the enemy team solo like they were playing deathmatch. About 30 seconds into the match, one of the enemy players leave, but the match doesn’t get cancelled for some reason (I’ve seen this bug occur intermittently).

Even with a 6v5 game, we barely win round 1 with our tanks hard throwing. Then the enemy team gave up so round 2 was an easy win. But this game felt stupid, it was one where we would have lost for sure no matter what I did if the enemy player hadn’t left. But instead, we won BECAUSE he left.

Then the game after that, enemy team had a guy playing bastion and a guy playing torb with no shield (basically both hard throwing). So we rolled them on attack round and one of my teammates decides he wants to play ball because “we can’t lose”. And then does absolutely nothing the entire defense round. Refused to switch, even when enemy team had Mei & junkrat, he just rolled around the payload the whole time.

We still ended up winning that game because our Reinhardt was REALLY good, but it was very frustrating having to work so hard to make up for a throwing teammate in a game that should have been an easy win at that point. We ended up stopping them JUST short of the final point on defense

Even though I won all my games tonight, it just felt frustrating as hell, the matches are still just complete garbage.

I spoke too soon when I said in my previous post that plat feels a lot better than silver and gold… There are less hard throwers, but it generally tends to be like 1 per game, rather than 2-3 every match.

Still too often the matches feel outside of my control (not to mention that I’m STILL seeing gold players show up in my matches, in high plat!). I know a lot of people quote Jayne who apparently said something like “40% of matches are automatic wins, 40% of matches are automatic losses, the other 20% are ones where you influence the outcome by your individual play”.

I’m starting to understand that sentiment, although I think those percentages charge drastically based on which elo you are in. But at the same time, how can you quote that, implying you agree with it and STILL not think the matchmaker is broken?

A rank system is supposed to determine your individual skill, but this quote is basically stating that the overwatch rank system just isn’t able to… unless you grind hundreds of games. Or are currently ranked multiple tiers below where you belong…

Which… most people could watch 30 minutes of someone playing the game and be able to accurately identify within a 3 tier range of where that player should be ranked…

I’m just tilted tonight after the experience of the last 2 nights of playing, despite continuing to climb

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38

Actually the Devs have in the past readily admitted the matchmaker, if you are on a win streak, will give you matches it estimates you only have 20% (or some hella low ratio, check the archives for the actual number he gave) chance to win. You are expected to pick up the other 80%. It doesn’t “force” a loss like many people think, but it stacks the deck against you and expects you to carry the team if you keep winning, in order to get the 50-50 win/loss rate. Which is why, you can grab a new account, run it 25, and see where you sit after 20 or so matches. Most of us, who have done this repeatedly, place several tiers above our “original” account, playing the exact same characters the exact same way. This has been done ad naseum by so many of us so many times, it’s fact now.

Edit: Oh, and remember rank compression. 6-12 month old golds, are now high bronze due to the massive player base loss. But that’s a whole other beast.

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39

Yeah, exactly what I said.

I deserve to be GM => I’m much better than my plats peers => my games should have 75+% chance of winning.
But I constantly get potato teammates that throw my games. Sadge.

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40

You sound like you have very low iq. How in the world do you interpret what Ryom said to be equivalent to what you just said? When did anyone say they deserve to be GM?

Most low rank players that think the matchmaker is broken don’t even want to move up in rank, they just want the matches in their rank to be fair and not manipulated by “hidden mmr” where the system works against them if they are overperforming by actively putting underperforming players on their team and calling it even…

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