No, you cannot force yourself onto the same side of a blitz match with a big group of other players.
However, you don’t need to in order to win most of your matches. All it takes is a basic understanding of math and a group of buddies that don’t mind being a cancer on what was potentially going to be an awesome new rated format.
Prerequisite: get to a relatively high MMR. You can do this at lower MMR as well at non prime times.
Get on voice coms as a group of 5 or 7 with your buddies that are similar MMR to you. Queue at the same time - you will usually end up in the same game if you are similar MMR and your MMR is high enough for the time of day that you are queueing - there just aren’t that many players available at high MMR.
Some of you will be matched against each other.
Now with your group of 5 or 7 players, ALWAYS let the side with more of you win. Do this enough times and everyone in the group will have a very high win % and climb the ladder together.
Possible match making of each game for a group of 7:
4 of you on one team, 3 of you on the other:
-your group gets a 57% win rate for that game
5 of you on one team, 2 on the other:
-your group gets a 71% win rate for that game
6 of you on one team, 1 on the other:
-your group gets an 86% win rate for that game
7 of you on one team, 0 on the other:
~100% win rate - congratuations, in this case you get to play as a premade with a good comp (you queued with friends whose specs compliment yours) and you get to stomp a pug while you’re an organized team on voice coms.
You can see that following this structure, done for enough games, each member of your group will have a very high win rate overall, and you get to laugh about it the whole time on voice coms. You can tell yourself that it’s ok because it’s “just a game”, even though you are screwing over real peoples’ real effort.
Why would they do this?
Winning. They get free progress up the ladder.
Boosting - some do this for real $$ profit - plenty of websites sell blitz boosting service.
Blitz has completely destroyed what was left of the toxic cesspool that was Rated (team) BGs. There were some groups of good people playing it, but if you spent enough time in organized rated BGs, you realized there were a lot of very angry, toxic groups in that format. Those people are still around, but the new blitz format has destroyed what was left of their format. What do you think happens when you step on the toes of angry groups who are used to meeting to play rated battlegrounds together every night? Do you think they all just split up and stop wanting to piss on other people while on coms? Blitz is just a new opportunity to do that together, but this time they can get much higher on the ladder because it’s not a fair fight.
Just to add to this I’m pretty sure that the way teams are filled isn’t by randomly putting them on each side but filling one side then the other side then the queue pops for everyone.
This means it is pretty easy to get people mostly on one side especially when healers are involved because two groups of healer+dps queuing at the same time are likely to be put in the same block.
Note that the permutations for the above matchups are further influenced by duo queueing - if they’re smart, they will get a greater statistical advantage if they have exactly one duo queue in their group. It shifts the permutations even more in their favor.
Also note that the way combinatorics works, you’re far more likely to get a 4/3 spit than a 7/0 split, etc. But as long as you execute this algorithm properly with your team, you all will boost each other over time.
FAQ:
How do you force one team to lose as per above?
If you have to ask this, then I think you have not played a lot of Blitz. It’s incredibly hard to win at higher MMR if even 1 person is not doing their job. How do you beat a team that has 6 premade on voice coms with complimentary specs when you have 1 person on your team who is only healing themselves (if they’re a healer) or intentionally doing low DPS ALWAYS against full health targets, always at the wrong objectives? You cannot win that. What if there are only 4 premades on the winning side? Well then you have 3 people on the other side purposely sandbagging their team. There is no reasonable scenario in which an organized group on voice coms doing this will lose control of the outcome of the game.
What can Blizzard do about this?
-Basic logging of games
-I will not detail what Blizz should be looking for here, on the slight chance that at some point Blizzard wants to catch these cheaters in a more proactive and effective way than what they are currently doing - I don’t want to tip off the cheaters as to how they could make it harder to be caught. Anyone with a background in gaming and statistics can find the cheaters if they get to run queries against the game logs. I would be happy to help blizz in any way I could if they reach out to me, but I would hope they have someone in-house with an intersection of gaming and stats.
-Revamp the MMR system
-They should be doing this for other reasons too
-Make games cast a wider net for player skill level so it’s harder to queue sync, match the teams evenly around this, but do not determine individual MMR and CR gain based on their personal MMR/CR vs team MMR/CR like it currently does. That system is designed for 1v1 matches. It works terribly when player MMR varies in the same game. It needs to be evenly matched teams and then your MMR/CR go up for a win and down for a loss.
-Stagger the queue pops for players going into the same game using waves that do not overlap. Yes this will take a bit longer for games to form, but it will be well worth it.
Do you need 5 or 7 cheaters to execute this?
No. Mathematically you can do it with as few as 3. 5 and 7 are just very effective numbers for the way the combinatorics play out, particularly because the 3 vs 0 scenario wouldn’t guarantee you a win in practice. You can play fewer games with groups of those sizes than smaller groups or even numbers. Laughably, even larger groups can work too, but that would be harder to organize and execute.
How do I know about this?
Aside from basic logic, I have had unfortunate conversations with people I no longer have any respect for. I tried reporting one of them to hacks@blizzard.com. I did not hear back and he is still playing. I will not be sending in any more emails. I’m raising community awareness of how this is actually being done, in hopes that you all will band together and communicate to blizzard that this needs to be a priority - intelligent logging and statistical analysis of games to catch cheaters - so that we can get this potentially awesome format fixed.
You don’t even need to go that deep. Its only takes 2 Duo’s sync queuing. Situation 1. You get the same team and win due to having half the team on comms and experience playing together so around a 100% WR. Situation 2. You get opposite teams and take turns throwing the game forcing a 50% WR. Combine the 2 possibilites over a length of time and they should be 50% of the time on either side giving a 75% WR. Duo queue’s were a huge mistake for this very reason and need to be removed
Not sure they have the department to do it anymore. Before Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard most of the support department was fired along with the cinematic department.
With how close the MMR of both teams usually is, I don’t believe this is true. I would love to hear more though if you have more information on this. Feel free to DM me or respond here.
How do you deal with the situation where a few members of your group are on the losing side multiple matches in a row, causing the MMR of the players to drift apart? I was getting average team MMR changes of about 200 per win or loss when I played. This would mean a difference of 400 MMR per game, potentially, between those who won and those who lost.
Now granted, I was seeing this at ~2200-1300 MMR, so maybe it’s different above 2200 MMR.
I’m going to need to see evidence of this actually happening? Like… I’ve seen people post a photo or two of people who have insanely low numbers in a match. But I am not convinced that this is as rampant as you people say it is.
And to be honest I haven’t noticed this issue in any of my matches. But then again if I lose a match I tend to look at my own personal performance and move on. So what if I’m only 1600 rn? I’ll keep pushing higher and not let a loss streak get to me. Investigating these crazy conspiracies that you have without any significant evidence because you think that you are better then what your rating suggests is just absolutely wild to me.
And that’s not even circumstantial evidence on the best of days.
I usually have some of the lowest damage on the matches that I win, because I’m usually doing things like running the flag, or trying to CC enemies away from a base a teammate is capping, or capping things myself. I’ve been accused of being a banned RMT booster who hasn’t played WoW in 10 years by multiple people now and it’s just silly at this point.
I see 3 hidden replies, I have most of the RMT people on ignore. Shady 3rd party website employees comb the forums for years now to derail and debunk any talk of Real Money Boosting that has flooded rated pvp.
First is you dont have proof, show pics, then it progresses to everything from ratings shaming to personal attacks. When they exhaust their efforts in silencing players they mass flag to have your post taken down.
Its ALOT of money passing hands, and a Vested financial interest from the high rated folks, and streamers who use wow to pay their bills. And the players that depend on their boost every season defend it with a passion.
In short OP, they fear what you have to say as a threat to their income, you sure caught their attention.
Read the end of my second post. I wanted to put all of that in the OP, but it was too much.
Aside from having the unfortunate conversations that I mentioned, I have witnessed the following in my own games:
~2700 MMR game: flag carrier refused to cap. We killed 6 different EFC’s while our FC was standing in our flag room able to cap and he just wouldn’t. I can believe that someone really doesn’t know what’s happening at 1500. I cannot believe that at 2700 MMR.
~2500 MMR game: a disc healing only himself - not healing his teammates. His healing total on the scoreboard was quite low, but not insanely low to avoid getting caught - he was only healing himself.
I have seen a number of other similar instances. No, we are not supposed to post screenshots here or call out individual players - it is against the forum guidelines.
It seems you didn’t even read the first post if you think you would see this commonly at 1600.
The fact is, the way the system is setup it’s extremely easy to abuse until Blizzard becomes more proactive about going after cheaters using logs (not just trying to find a smoking gun with queue syncing addons) and making changes to MMR and queue pops.
There’s always someone like you who comes along and calls anything a crazy conspiracy theory.
Hey! This is some good basic math here. I like it. It matches what another player said they did. That player said they used an addon to see who popped when and attempt to overcome the ‘random’ that way, but the basic Q sync was the same. Another player said the addon did not do that. But this way, at a certain MMR level, needs nothing other than voice comms and some friends.
I think Blizz was correct in their hesitation with making rated Q’s randoms. It’s popular, but removes accountability under the guise of rating rise/lower. And tons of posts about this and that, all with regard to the all important number.
Anyway, send this into hacks@blizzard.com again if you want. You’ll never hear from them, but results do happen.
I hope the rated Blizz people are able to get to a point where they enjoy it. I certainly like my random/epic BGs…but then there is not number attached, so it’s all good all the time, mostly.
You do not swing 200 MMR per game. Maybe you do in your first 20 matches or so, but after that, no. It sometimes looks like that because you’re getting matched into different lobbies. I’ve won a game and then played ~300 lower MMR on my next game.
You’re right that it is swingy, but not by those margins.
Anyway, when one player randomly gets too low, what is stopping them from doing the following?:
-Duo queue the lowest MMR member and specifically boost them until they’re back up with the group. By duo queueing, you’re guaranteeing that at least 1 other person is winning with them, and by random chance, probably more. So you could pause the previous algorithm until they are back in the pack.
All blizzard did is removed the faction requirement so it is still filling by order of who queued first then going through the list to fill the teams.
Blizzard would never put in the effort to randomize when it is easier to just fill one team then the next team then pop the queue vs getting the total needed then randomizing it.
If they were actually randomizing then there wouldn’t be so many teams where one team has say 5 warriors and the other 5 hunters, the odds of that happening are way lower than 5 warriors and 5 hunters happening to queue around the same time because those are the most played dps right now.
This is the most important post right now. I wonder every day how long it will take Blizzard to step in. I have known this was a issue since week one. I also see all the same accounts rushing to silence anyone who speaks out and calling for them to be reported. Time for everone to stand up against these bad actors.
Agreed! Blizzard is not dead yet, surely the company still likes to make money, and wow is one of their last money makers left. And this problem is one that runs off the players and discourages them from playing.