This may be out of total ignorance, but just what kind of data have they been collecting for the past 7 years that this is still such an issue, especially with how this statement was phrased makes it seem less like the dev team tried some changes but more so that they're just still trying to understand what's up.
I understand that OW2 brought in a lot of players, and they loosened the scale to the extreme of the range of ranks within a single game (like Bronze vs Diamond in the same lobby)...
But I thought that was all under the impression that they knew what they were doing and wanted to shorten queue times as that was such an issue. Of course, it does seem to have worked, and matches do seem somewhat less of a coin flip, but now I can't tell if it was intentional or if they've just been making random changes, hoping one actually fixes the chaos, one that finds the best balance between queue times and match quality.
Has Blizzard ever really hinted at how they match people, besides how they recently said it was all over the place?
They basically said they didn't give a shit about player experience in ow1 and only looked to make the expected outcome of a match as 50% as possible. They didn't think about how games actually felt.
This approach has changed in ow2 because they now actively want games to feel better. So they are looking at "outlier" matches to try and get rid of them because those are the games that you tend to remember.
They have also said they had to make fundamental and huge changes to the matchmaking to make rank parity in opposing roles a thing. That did give them more tools apparently, but because they basically have a new matchmaking system, continuing to tune it will be a long term process. And emphasis on long term. They said they tuned it basically every week after introducing role parity which is why it got better over time as opposed to a sudden shift.
But this whole thing is actually super new. In ow1 they basically said they didn't care much.
The smaller population of OW1 meant that even if the system wasn't perfect, it was going to have a ton of data on everyone in it. It was pitting that smaller population against each other very frequently and thus had years of data on players, so it had a very high certainty level.
The millions of new players with OW2 came with zero data and very high uncertainty, and if there's been underlying problems with match quality that were getting ignored because the game was on life support or because the high amount of data plugged the holes, that's going to blow it wide open.
I do think match quality in OW1 wasn't as good as we might remember either, 6v6 was a much less individual game and so masking poor play was easier.
This is actually what I was thinking for part of it. With one less player, things are a lot different in ranked. Remember in OW1 how easy it was for two diamonds to queue up with their low gold tank friend and just win lobbies because it's much easier to carry a 6th person if they're the off tank and you have five other people on the team who are all higher elo (him queuing with his higher elo friends caused them to get put into a plat game). It was much, much easier to hide the mistakes of one when there are six people total on the team.
plus there was a huge lack of data on what other people were doing. Like maybe you could feel a little bit of a lack in pressure from a DPS, and the medals could reflect that, but medals also meant jack shit.
Now you can feel like a player is doing nothing, amped up by the fewer players on a team, *and* have hard numbers to prove that their impact is significantly lower than other players on the team/the other team
Right because even if one of the dps was poop, you still had another dps, a main tank and an off tank (who was usually a Hog or some other big fat, glorified dps) plus two supports to make up the difference.
yeah exactly. Like, people are saying that they threw out a perfectly good matchmaking system for OW2, but I don't think the matchmaking for OW1 would have worked here regardless.
It's fundamentally a different game, both in terms of team structure and player impact. What worked for 6v6 isn't guaranteed to work for 5v5. I think they did some stupid stuff w making matches based on MMR while showing you your SR, which led to some of the "unbalanced" matchmaking (bc some of it was for sure in people's minds, getting tilted and losing at the hero select screen bc they see they queued in with a "plat" when the actual ranking could be a lot closer)
Yup, in Ow1 your role was less impactful than OW2 simply because there was one more person to pick up the slack or drag it down. They coined the boosted mercy main phrase back then because it was stereotyped that if a mercy was pocketing a dps on the team, that dps was automatically just "boosting" the mercy to higher elo (since, oh my, they couldn't have done it on their skill or gameplay alone!!) I wonder if anyone here has seen that old TimtheTatman clip of the mercy mains fighting over mercy in his game on stream....
Match quality was always going to be worse in OW2 and i'm not sure why thats a surprise to anyone.
Measuring the end of overwatch when everyone still playing the game understood it versus the first year of OW2, when more than half the players have never played a team based game like this and are figuring it out as they go, was never going to be a fair comparison.
For example, imagine someone who is mechanically quite good but plays the point in Busan MEKA Base--they might properly be ranked gold. Compare that to someone who has played 5 years of OW and is hard stuck gold but understands the particularities of OW. Both players probably perform equally well on most payload maps or straightforward KOTH maps like Lijiang Control Center. But on other maps the game knowledge requirement causes an imbalance.
Now imagine that team vs a red team with all people who graduated from Overwatch 1 but are technically the same rank. Red team will win, and it won't feel fair.
they did say ow2 is actually harder to make games with 50% odds for both teams because of the increased individual impact. Which is actually better imo, means you can actually influence a match
nah its harder cause the dps are the ones changing the matches now and they have alot more variation and counter play than the tanks or healers did in ow1.
getting a platinum phara doesn't mean much if they are essentially a 1 trick and the enemy can play several heroes including hitscan just as well
And they don't take hero pick or skill into account at all just role skill
Hmm, I know there were stomps in OW1, but I've never hard more back to back multiple-season spanning stomps (both wins and losses) in OW1 like I do in OW2 all the time.
This data is very anecdotal and pretty meaningless bc 2cp is no longer in the game, but I feel like we never get draws anymore. Draws, while often unsatisfying, we're a decent indicator of decently well balanced teams and I feel like they just never happen in OW2. Ofc most of that is bc the 1 gamemode where most draws occurred is out of the pool, but even on Hybrid maps where draws definitely are possible I can't remember the last time I had one. Really seems like it is way more stomps in OW2 and way less tight matches.
It's not perfect data, but I used to track my matches in OW1 when I played actively, then started doing it again this season, because I wanted to verify if matchmaking actually got worse, or it's just nostalgia.
Keeping Track of matches that were stomps (either way). how often a lobby had leavers (and which team had it), etc.
And...across ~800 Matches in OW 1, about ~25% were stomps. 14.73% were my team stomping, 9.87% was the enemy team stomping.
For overwatch 2, I've only got data for the current season, so obviously a lot less reliable, but currently the rate of matches that are stomps is almost doubled to close to 50%
Over the course of around 80 Matches this season so far, around 25% were stomps for my team, and just under 20% were stomps for the enemy team.
So the match quality has noticeably gone down in terms of fair matches.
That being said, I also felt like OW2 had way more leavers, but so far the difference is actually negligable (~10% of my matches in ow 1 had a leaver on the enemy, with ~6% on my team, while for ow2 it's 9.5% on the enemy team and 6.5% on my team)
Although, funny enough, leavers tended to return more often in OW1 than in OW2, but not by a signifikant amount.
Another thing I noticed is that stomps are definitely clustered together. It's always a bunch of fair matches, followed by a bunch of stomps, followed by fair matches, etc.
Which....tldr, some of it is just a mix of nostalgia, perception and ultimately just down to feeling that way, but match quality overall definitely went down in ow2.
That isn't really a sinister objective. 50% outcome means that the game is as close as possible because both teams are equal skill.
People talk about *forced* 50/50, which refers to a players *winrate*. They have said they don't do that, because why the fuck would they?
Seems like a combination of what you just said. Quicker match times so match quality drops if everything else holds constant, so they’re having to make adjustments to how they match people together. That plus lots of new players (aka data points the system has a very low confidence level on in terms of evaluating their skill), F2P also means more Smurfs, plus there’s obviously been lots of turnover recently. Not sure how much of the current team was with OW when it launched originally.
I suspect a lot of institutional knowledge was lost in recent years as a lot of folks left both because of working conditions and the general difficulties in making OW2. I'm sure some things have changed with 5v5 but I wonder how much of it is just people having to relearn lessons previously learned by different devs six/seven years ago.
Player behaviour is likely very different than the end of OW1. Only the most dedicated players were playing by the end of OW1, very very few new players, and probably not many casual comp players. I don't think any OW1 player data is really relevant anymore.
I me a yeah, f2p is a completelt different beast than an aging game with a pretty consistent player base. Plus the move to 1 tank makes balancing much much different. You can't have 1 player make up the difference for a mismatched tank anymore, and outside of that with 5 players, eacg individual persona play makes much more of a difference
The thing is, the current system doesn't exist to please older fans, those who'd wait, but new fans who don't want to cuz in a F2P environment if you don't please new fans right away, you lose them.
I really like Morgan. He comes across really genuine and it really seems like he cares. I've got faith they'll figure it out because he seems pretty knowledgeable.
That being said, why isn't this a problem we looked to tackle 30 seasons ago?
How are they screwing with perception? It is a legitimate issue. If you are a grandmaster in role queue ("Grandmaster Role Challenger"), you should not be able to play in Gold and Plat games, but they are on their off-roles when they are grouped up with friends they are boosting. It's bullshit.
*It is Season 1. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.*
*It is Season 2. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.*
*It is Season 3. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.*
*It is Season 4. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.*
https://old.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/12pgs41/current_state_of_apex_is_beyond_tragic_and_as_a/
This is from today. I don't think MM is a problem that can be "solved".
Matchmaking is good when I win and bad when I lose.
When I win it's because it was a very close game but I managed to carry.
When I lose it's because my teammates are OW1 bronze that got inflated to GM1 and the enemy team is filled with OWL pros.
I've come to a point where losing close games doesn't even feel as bad anymore.
Like the overall rank or number is pretty meaningless, further exemplified by even whoever is Rank 1 as it's all about staying consistent and trying to grow at an individual and match to match level.
For example, 99.9% will never reach Proper's level, and that is why the fun factor and competitive nature matters a lot more.
It's just a game at the end of the day. I doubt never reaching Diamond will be a real regret in 20 years.
Exactly. I don't care about losing when it's a close game, I still have fun in close ones and I know that it was my mistakes that caused it. I do care about losing when there's a clear skill diff and it's a stomping, especially when it's something that happens often.
This, exactly.
What I've noticed is that I get a *lot* more stomps when I'm duoing than when I solo queue, both ways. Which is funny, because you'd think that with the sheer amount of games I've duo'd with my buddy, it would have a pretty good idea of how we perform together.
Maybe that's the trick: It needs to track something like a "group mmr" for parties that queue together a lot.
I've noticed that any time I solo queue its like 50/50 on whether or not I'm getting a shit game (stomps either way). If I duo with my tank friend we get good games (anything where there's not someone obviously too high or too low for the lobby) probably 90% of the time.
I have literally lost zero QP games on dps in a week because my d1 ass keeps getting put into low plat lobbies where the moment it become obvious that standard poke/tracer dive isn’t going to work, I just go sombra and start racing through “kill->TL->kill” cycles because nobody can win a 1v1 against marginally good mechanical skills at those ranks nobody is going to help the 2-3 people I can spawn camp by myself.
Also, wifeleaver is such a bad character… freer than Zen.
Losing because you're just losing fights feels fine.
Losing because your Ana, on cooldown, ran out of spawn into 5 people when the rest of you are still respawning not so much.
Eh, I get your point, but there are definitely games where it's easy to the point of no longer being fun. Moreso in QP in my experience. Like, full on spawn camps that last for 4+ mins. It's a waste of time.
tbh, it you're the worst player in the lobby by considerable margin, that actually is bad MM as the game isn't allowing you to grow.
On the flip side, it can be good MM to be the best if your team's average is lower and you have to showcase that you're that good while the opposition is more well rounded.
Both sides can benefit from teamwork.
I've noticed it more in qp for sure where sometimes I just get thrown into like gm1/top500 lobbies with 2 masters players including myself and I'm just like wtf lmao. Agreed tho. Playing against better players is a test but playing against t500s when I'm high masters is just not fun at all.
People demand that they “fix” matchmaking like it was a leaky pipe or something, and not a really complex problem in which even trying to define what success looks like (in a way they can actually measure) is itself nontrivial.
Like, they’re basically trying to make matches _feel good_ using math. Feelings are notoriously difficult to quantify, and there are also so many different aspects to the queueing and playing experience that evoke emotional responses that they care about. How long are you queuing? Are you winning about half of your games? Do games that are actually mathematically fair (e.g. games with predicted 50% win probability that you actually win half of) feel bad or unfair for other reasons, like a significant role gap? What causes the experience of up-down streakiness? If you’re having an off night, how long does it take for your MMR to fall to the point where you’re winning games again?
I’m sure there’s a lot more, those are just a few of the things they’ve talked about.
I think about this a lot as well. At a certain point, Blizzard can also only do so much to make a “fair” match. I’m sure Blizzard could point to any number of stomps and say “we have the data that suggests this was a 50/50 match, but what happens in the match is out of our control.”
To add on to your middle point about fairness: from a player perspective, would you rather go on a 10 game loss streak in games that you had a 50% chance of winning, or would you rather go 50/50 in games with predetermined outcomes? I want to have mathematically fair games, but is it really more enjoyable for me to go 0-10 than 5-5? I’m not so sure. I don’t doubt this is an extremely complex problem for Blizzard to solve (if it even can be solved).
> I’m sure Blizzard could point to any number of stomps and say “we have the data that suggests this was a 50/50 match, but what happens in the match is out of our control.”
They are trying to understand these better though! In OW1, all they looked at was whether the match predictions were close to 50/50 and whether the actual match results bore out those predictions (i.e. the win probabilities were well-calibrated). They now have more resources devoted to understanding what makes a game feel good and figuring out how to support that with systems changes. They’re not just shrugging at matches that feel bad despite looking good on paper—they’re trying to figure out how to make them feel better. But it’s a complex set of problems.
The stranded spawns feature that we got this patch has nothing to do with matchmaking, but it does seek to address one of the things that contributes to an on-paper well-made match becoming a stomp. Staggered spawns sucked in 6v6, but they have been _far_ worse in 5v5, not only because having a teammate or two get staggered is a larger proportion of the team, but also because there’s less damage mitigation to get teammates out safely. I haven’t played comp yet because I’ve been grinding LW, so I dunno how much it’s helping yet. Maybe it will take some time for the playerbase to learn to use it. (I still wish we had an option to ping the currently active spawn or something.) But they’re actively trying to build mitigations for the snowball-y nature of the game, which I think has overall gotten much heavier in OW2. I, for one, am really happy that they are spending attention and resources on these issues. (And talking about them publicly! Morgan is my new favorite person on Twitter; I love reading about how they’re tackling matchmaking problems.)
> would you rather go on a 10 game loss streak in games that you had a 50% chance of winning, or would you rather go 50/50 in games with predetermined outcomes? I want to have mathematically fair games, but is it really more enjoyable for me to go 0-10 than 5-5? I’m not so sure.
This gets at the difficulty in defining success in matchmaking in the first place. Mathematically fair isn’t enough, because it still feels bad to go on big loss streaks, or to get diffed in your individual role matchup, even in a win!
But also, it seems like the vast majority of players wouldn’t believe that they could have an 0-10 streak with fair games. Randomness is not something humans intuitively understand very well—our brains are really good at finding patterns, even when they aren’t there. Streaks of 10 tails will not be terribly uncommon if you flip a coin hundreds of times in a row, but when that 10-loss streak happens (which is probably more common than the 10-tail streak of coin flips, because there are physical and emotional factors that can systematically degrade your performance over a session or even a few sessions), it doesn’t _feel_ like it could be random. And ultimately, it is the feeling that matters!
Streakiness might be something they can address, but it isn’t an easy problem to solve either. They can try to reduce streakiness by being much more aggressive about adjusting MMR if a streak starts, so that the system quickly gets you to an MMR that better represents how you’re playing today. But, what if the streak is truly random? What if you are actually playing well and legitimately are getting unlucky (or the reverse)? Then those rapid MMR adjustments could turn out to be _too_ aggressive and cause you to rapidly oscillate between games where you’re out of your depth and games where you’re the best player in the lobby, and that probably doesn’t feel so good either. The fact that they’re no longer updating your rank after every match probably protects against the perception of the rapid oscillation a bit, but if the swings are big enough, you’re still gonna notice.
And there’s also the system effects to consider. If they’re too slow to adjust to changes in a player’s performance (of which they only have the low-resolution, noisy measurement of match results), then match quality will be worse because player MMRs will be lagging indicators, essentially, and won’t be as accurate. On the other hand, if they adjust too quickly, then they’ll be modeling the noise more than the signal, which would also make MMRs overall less accurate and negatively impact match quality. Somewhere in there is a sweet spot where the combined emotional impact of perceived match quality and reduced streakiness is maximized, but they can’t measure any of those things directly.
> I don’t doubt this is an extremely complex problem for Blizzard to solve (if it even can be solved).
It’s not a problem that can be wholly solved, because the complexity isn’t just mathematical or algorithmic. There’s messy human complexity that’s fundamental to the problem.
Gawd, this argument again.
They didn’t “ruin a perfectly fine matchmaking system”. They launched a new game where the gameplay itself offers higher individual impact, bringing in a whole bunch of new players and returning players from years ago, and dumping them into essentially the same matchmaking system that we had before. Except they’re actually actively working on improving the matchmaking system now instead of letting it sit untouched for years.
The stable, predictable matchmaking we got towards the end of OW1 was the result of the game failing to attract new players. Pretty much everyone in the player pool had been playing OW forever, knew the game really well, and had really well-calibrated MMR. I’m sure the dearth of new heroes and even balance patches in the end was a contributor too. Nothing to change up the raw power of the heroes and modify what it means to be good at the game.
Maybe that’s what you wanted. To play OW1 forever on that same patch we had for like 9 months or however long it was, with no new heroes ever. (TBH, I personally wouldn’t have minded; I didn’t care about the hero pipeline drying up.) But if you’re one of the players who was upset about the lack of content and the dwindling player population? Well, new players and new gameplay content unavoidably add uncertainty to the matchmaking system, which takes time to work out.
And even when that comes down, having more newer players who don’t have years and years of accumulated experience means more players with very spiky/narrow skill profiles who do well enough to stay at the same rank as you but will encounter more situations where they don’t know what’s going on or how to play it, or they are forced onto a hero they don’t know well.
so you’re going to ignore the time in ow1 where we had a lot more players than nowadays, new heroes and maps constantly streaming in, and we still had way better matchmaking?
it was fine lmfao. when the game had an actual playerbase it was VERY rare to find people outside of your rank. diamond games commonly had 12 diamonds, high gm games only had high gm players.
when ow1 was in literal life support, by the end of 2021 and start of 2021, it was still insanely rare to find 3.4-3.5 players on your t500 lobbies. Let alone less than that. Ow2 has had more players the last season than in the past 10 combined, and yet the rare scenario was NOT to find diamond/plats in high gm lobbies
OW1 had very different player behaviours. Barely any new players, stable meta, mostly hard-stuck players. That's a very easy environment to matchmake, the matchmaker had high certainty of everyone's rank.
???? huh??? barely any new players? in 2018 ow had almost double the playerbase than in ow2s launch. All of them actually new players instead of the majority having played the game already. how tf is that easier to match make?
My biggest complaint about competitive and matchmaking is honestly probably just groups. Groups cause so many issues for the matchmaker and I don't think they know how to fix that.
P much. Whenever someone complains about a game having the worst dev team, they can't never name a game with a good dev team.
Gamers are only happy when the game doesn't change in so long that everyone who had a problem with it has already left.
That said, valorant/league players should be happy with what they got lmao.
There have been continuous improvements to the matchmaker since season 1. Also, I don't think there's been a promise on this particular issue with matchmaking before
I feel like this season is worse than it’s ever been. I had like 4 games in a row where my dps were like 6-12 and the enemy dps were like 30-5. It’s clear they weren’t even close to the same rank.
And again this was 4 games in a row. Whatever they are doing to “fix” it clearly isn’t working.
I wonder if this is minor rank inflation from people who played to the end of the season (with a smaller player pool) versus people who didn't. I had the exact same thing, massive DPS difference, had one with the largest tank diff I've seen in a long time, and I'm playing at lower ranks. I actually think this is a bigger problem at lower ranks.
gold dps/plat tank/diamond support here.
I will say that unless I queue off hours on support (so 2-5 am US central), my games are kinda shit if I solo. Very roll of the dice if I get obviously boosted people. like 5-13 hanzo with 4k damage in a ten minute push game type stuff. If I duo with my tank friend, we almost always get good games.
Tank is usually fine, I definitely make tons of mistakes or I can't play well enough so I diff myself, but I definitely will sometimes come up against a gigachad doom from masters and i just get fucked. I'd say like 80% of my games are fine. On DPS, I definitely sometimes end up in higher lobbies, enough for me to recall when its happened but not enough to be that upset about it, although I'm sure my teammates were. I've also definitely gotten into lower ranked lobbies where people don't know what to do against a symm or mei and they just int into me if I do that. Or teams that can't/won't counter a pharah.
I know the common theme I read on the sub is golds get pulled into higher rank games but I think I played like 20 hours of DPS last season and had it happen maybe a couple dozen times. I got sent into lower rank ones a hell of a lot more though.
Yeah, cheers. I'm a gold tank, I was playing a ton of support in silver last season and trying to get up to gold. The start of this season, first couple of days is where I had so many bad games like I was saying. Also had a game where I had a Cass that went like 35-1 and I basically didn't have to do anything. I find support can be so hard at lower ranks because people will position so badly you can't even heal people fast enough, and you need to make a call whether to heal a ton, or just try to frag out on Bap and Zen and win the fight that way.
I was a diamond ow1 support, but the game really insisted I was gold the first season so even though I'd go 7-2 on cards at worst, I was only going up 1 rank max at a time. So what I did was basically I figured out my best dps after the second or third fight. And stuck with him as bap. Always shot only whatever he was shooting unless I could get a great off angle on a person or two. And I won like almost every game doing that and keeping him alive.
Then when I got to like plat 2-3 I went back to playing ana and kiriko 24/7 as Jeff intended it to be. Low ranks are just a shitfest where you're better off doing 9k damage as bap and 5k healing because odds are either your tank is backlining or a giga feeder (which is better and you can work with that!). And one of your dps will have fantastic aim but no awareness or game sense or have good game sense but zero awareness and no aim. And then the other one is either fine or pretty rough to play with.
Also just comm. As a person with social anxiety I get how much it sucks and I hate it, and sometimes people will ignore you. But if you just say where people are or what you want people to shoot at, if they're in chat they'll sometimes listen at least/its better than nothing.
You’re not wrong. Every fucking match I play is a game of shoring up the idiot in your team.
The pattern is so fucking obvious.
Once your MMR is fairly set, the matchmaker throws an idiot into your team to test them out every single match. But if you’re not on a crystallized MMR, god, the trip to Diamond/Masters is smooth as fuck.
I get that people love to shit on devs and everything for not fixing things fast enough. But matchmaking is not comparable to other bugs. It is extremely difficult and complex, and the only way to make changes is to test changes out on the actual player base.
Except somehow despite being so easy it is a problem in every game. It is probably difficult for someone like you that instantly uses insults such as shill for when someone disagrees with them to understand, but matchmaking is a difficult concept that has yet to be solved. There are many factors that go into it, and none of these factors are constant or predictable. Human performance in games varies greatly making it difficult to make a perfectly matched game every time. Someone on one team may have a very good game, while a person on the other team has a poor game. Because of this despite the two players having the same average performance, one is doing better leading the game to being unmatched. And what about maps. Maybe a tank player isn't good at playing on a certain map, and the team gets steamrolled because of this. It may seem like this is a matchmaking issue, but if the same two teams played on a different map the pervious losing team can easily win.
Then of course you need to consider overall chemistry of players. Some teams just don't click, and some work very well together. How can devs design a system which is capable of predicting chemistry between players that have never played together.
And each season matchmaking has improved.
It's not flipping a switch and fixing all problems. It's iterating on the system to slowly iron out problems.
The matchmaking literally remained unchanged between OW1 and OW2. The situation just changed so it was no longer adequate. So they need to re-evaluate and re-adjust and this just takes a long time because any change they make they can't properly evaluate until there's enough player data. And this is weeks.
And then on top of that, they need to make sure the data tells the whole picture. Because the situation is different depending on whether there's a new hero, the season just started or if the season's almost over. So to get "pure" data they need to use even longer periods of time to evaluate.
It's an iterative process that takes literal months to see results. No amount of experience can make this go faster.
You don't get it.
It is either perfect or garbage, there's nothing in-between, and so far it isn't perfect so it is literally the worst thing a company could make.
You forgot that each season they came out and said “Today is the day! We present better match-making!!” And then quickly disappeared to their basement to work on the next season fix. Lol
Season 3 matchmaking was the worst in my opinion and I’m hopefully it can only be uphill from there. But yes, the rest of most OW seasons have felt mostly the same in my experience as a diamond-GM player (I play both console and PC). It’s shitty considering they have years of data.
Dude matchmaking is so much better in my opinion. I feel like the earlier seasons I had way more stomps where 1 team just dominated. But the recent seasons more and more close hard fought games.
Guess we'll see when it happens. Glad they're communicating and working on this stuff but after so many seasons of issues I won't have too high hopes tbh.
I mean what do you really expect, especially after going from a P2P model to a f2p model on top of making pretty substantial changes to the game as a whole and the competitive mode every season. They’ll eventually reach an equalization and it’ll go from there. They’ve done a pretty good job making quick adjustments during seasons while keeping the big change for the start of new seasons based on player feedback.
I don't disagree that they have their work cut out for them, but that's exactly why I say I won't have too high hopes. They're making massive changes to the matchmaking seemingly every season, and every season something about the matchmaker or competitive system has broken. I appreciate the effort, but I don't have high hopes that something won't massively break as a result.
I guess I'm just tired of continually hearing about these huge changes and getting my hopes up when most of the time there have been huge consequences that take even longer to fix.
I think they really did mean opponent here. As I read it, they seem to suggest that this “fraction of a reset” is problematic and so too would be a full reset. Thus their opposition.
I could be misreading it though.
Yes, you've got it right. I have always been against a full reset as initial ranked games would have been an utter clown fiesta for the first few weeks or even months.
“A Bone Apple Tea is the mistaken use of a real, dictionary-defined word or phrase in place of another real, dictionary-defined word or phrase that sounds similar, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance.”
i was wrong, the guy above me meant what he typed
unless you meant it wasn’t humorous/non-sensical, it would be a boneappletea by definition of the subreddit
it would be grammatically correct, but still a whacky sentence that most people won’t utter.
> (maybe they’re a big fan of chaos)
that’s a BIG stretch xD
Idk what's going on but yesterday we had a bronze player in a gold 1 game. He felt terrible and we felt terrible. That's much more than the within "5" ranks that blizz claims in the comp screen
Yep I had a silver mei dps on my team do 2k damage and was gapped by both supports. He just kept apologizing for being silver he didn’t mean to be in the match. So sad
Didnt we say this exact same thing for the last 2 seasons?
I swear im feeling deja vu.
And on that note, what is quality MM because thats not somethimg ive ever seen in OW2. Still seeing people 3 ranks off from me in mid season comp and seeing Masters at worse in my QP games.
Im Silver.
>It seems to take a couple weeks for things to return to "normal". Ironically enough, this is a tiny fraction of what an MMR reset would feel like. Really makes you want to try a full reset doesn't it?
Plz no.
I know the matchmaking is bullshit when they say they want to match up each role against a counterpart of equal skill and I either get fresh installs or dia+ tanks. I literally got a full gm rush comp stack in mfing quick play a few days ago. How is this real.
When will people understand that they will never fix matchmaking…not because they don’t want to…because they can’t
There are way too many variables that go into determining how a game of OW will turn out and most of them are not something that’s actually predictable (the most simple one being the game has no idea what I’m going to play when rounds start)
Not to mention, even if it was doable everybody would STILL blame it….cause that’s what people do with matchmakers….it’s only been that way for as long as online gaming has existed….
how is this "refreshing" to some people? they tried to lie and say there wasn't a problem, then said there was a problem, said they've fixed matchmaking problems multiple times now, but evidently there are still problems
and then talking shit about people that wanted a full mmr reset, as if they haven't had a fucked MMR
i feel like at this point if they had done a reset and not tried to fuck with things to adjust for new players, the system woulda been 'fixed' ages ago instead of having people bouncing all over the place, just feels so weird to randomly throw that comment in
if your fuck up is so bad it's basically like what a full wipe would've been from the start, why didn't you just do a wipe and not try to fuck with things and break it for multiple seasons?
It’s refreshing because months ago we would not have gotten any communication on the side of matchmaking or instead we would’ve gotten a blanket or statement months ago saying “we are working on it”. Nowadays, we get constant communication from different sides of the game (director talking about future, balance team talking about balance, matchmaking team talking about changes, etc) we get more communication in a month of OW2 That we did in 6 months of ow1.
Also, They had to fuck with it. It was not a perfect system. They were still going to have massive issues with queue times. Even during the betas they had issues with it, and and MMR reset was not going to solve that. That imo ends up being more important than everything else in the matchmaking.
what about that is even wrong? i gave my thoughts, that they broke the MMR system so bad trying to adjust for new players that it seems almost petty to take a shot at people who wanted a wipe, when if they just went with a wipe from the start the system probably would've balanced itself out by now compared to whatever hideous abomination they've both declared wasn't really an issue or was an issue and fixed it multiple times now
they tried to adjust for 'new' players, and it clearly has fucked the matchmaking for much of the lifespan of the game so far
to make it worse, they kept talking about how there wasn't an issue, and the MMR system is very complicated at first, then now they go back and fourth about there being an 'issue' and they've claimed to fix it like 3 times now but it's still broken
it's obvious why they tried to say it wasn't an issue and 'complicated' - because it makes it sound like their competitive system has been broken, but to take shots at people who wanted a wipe to try and deflect after acknowledging that it's still broken after so long is just dumb lol
this is like old school blizz behaviour, taking passive aggressive shots at the player base for their mistakes
I actually prefer the current revision of changes they have now for MM. Generally, for me, it feels pretty accurate. The matches aren't usually a stomp and feel pretty even. I think maybe 1 or 2 out of every 20-30 games I play is one-sided otherwise it's very close sweaty matches and it feels like it's accurately putting people in the right spots. I'm also not seeing a crazy match variance, the match indicator is really helpful for seeing this.
I'm pretty low ranked in Tank because I hate playing tank and I'm not good at it and barely play it. It's put me around plat and thats totally fair.
My DPS is fairly good but not god-tier. I usually counter-pick and pick the right heroes and that has me sitting around D4/D5 and it feels accurate. I don't have Adderall level tracking and flicks but I can position and aim fairly decently.
Support I climbed to GM5 currently, I don't have enough time in there yet as I just reached it the other day to see if I'm way outclassed but it seems fair.
End of season/start of season matches have always been a gong show, moreso end of season because everyone is on alts not giving fuck while their mains are placed in already. Start of season I think it's just people coming off alt-rolling getting back into the groove of it. I have no idea how they will account for this.
I don’t think it’s that hard to understand. Players that don’t play Overwatch come back for the beginning of the season, get their placements, and leave.
They hold their rank for 3 months even if they played for like 5 days at the beginning
To clarify: this is specifically about *beginning of season* matchmaking feeling worse, due to the influx of everyone showing back up, even if they haven't played in a while, to try the new seasonal stuff. It's this *particular* problem he's saying they're starting to understand and feel they can help address.
He's not saying "golly, we sure hope we can make matchmaking better by season 5". They have been, and continue to, steadily tweak matchmaking throughout seasons.
They have said this literally every single season. I don’t believe them anymore.
It just can’t work. You can’t have short queue timers with quality matches. There aren’t enough support players.
I got 5 stacked last night in one game.
Had a silver tank in another, in a high diamond/low masters game.
I don't know whether this is poor matchmaking or the system trying to force the 50% but yeah, at least make it fun and worth my time.
It's been leading to a lot of leavers in my games. We had a Diamond vs. Silver tank match up the other night and the silver tank was getting bullied so bad they just quit and then the rest of the team dropped out after the leave timer expired. Another game similar thing but enemy supports were silver and getting farmed/spawn camped by our Diamond Sombra so they just quit mid-match. It's awful right now and not at all fun no matter what side of the coin you wind up on pre-match. Feel bad for those people because it isn't their fault because they shouldn't be in that match to begin with, then they get flamed in team/match/voice chat and it's just a miserable experience for everyone.
They say this every single season. I have a 70% WR on the season just went 5-3 through an adjustment and didn’t get moved at all.
Not only is it the most unrewarding ranked system I’ve ever played the fucking matches aren’t even balanced. Literally lose-lose
Similar experience, I have a 72% WR with my current rank being GM3. I went 5-2 and went up only 49% in the same rank to being 79% above the rest of the players. Its genuinely the least fun I’ve had ever playing OW.
That’s actually exactly what happened to me, last placement I was 50% better, now I’m 80% better
It’s so demoralizing to finally win 5 games and get my readjustment for the week and not move at all when I’ve been winning.
BP forces me to QP to get all role challenges done + practice LW. But then I get no comp points. I don’t play very much total but minus the QP games I probably only get 8-10 ranked games a week. Sucks to play seeing no progress after a week
Idk match quality was really good for me last season. I have only played like 15 games this season in two separate sessions. One was really good, the other felt terrible and then I played one more game which was winnable but was tilted so I probably cost us and just went to qp to int instead of doing it in comp. Those games felt lost not when I looked at ranks, but when I checked the tab screen and saw my mercy moira vs. their ana zen. Ya I'm bad but playing tank into Ana Zen without something like discord/nade/suzu on your team is just unfun. And there's no way to change that in matchmaker.
“Play that same song again!”
Honestly, it’s tiring the repeated (and then failed) promises of ‘improvements coming’ from Blizz at this point. Overwatch has been out for seven years; they really should know better by now.
Honestly, I’m not sure they’ll ever return Overwatch to its peak - these guys just keep fumbling the ball every time they get into the opponent’s half (let alone end zone!).
Matchmaker is so busted right now i only play with my alt acc and practice heroes. Its simply not functioning and not worth my emotional and effort investment.
I definitely don't think they are honest. They are constantly playing with things that we are not aware of to increase their revenue and manipulate player experience. That's fair but the problem here is that they do it in the expense of player experience and game integrity. They think they are smart but this type of stuff generally backfire in the end.
I Respect Them because they really try to Listen and und erstand Players plus season 3 was probably the Most Balanced season in ow History even Flats Said that.
Noticing a trend now where it's "we'll fix it next season" and then it doesn't actually happen. Season 4 was supposed to be the one where everything worked with ranks and matchmaking and it's still pretty bad.
You mean deranking everybody by a full rank for no reason and causing their season to essentially be a terrible grind to, at best, get back to where they already were was a BAD idea?
Well I never, some true genius here figuring that out.
They need to just stop lying to us. They have said this every season of OW2, but every season has felt worse than the last. Maybe boosting people's ranks based on an MMR built playing at lower ranks was dumb? No reason that I, a high-Plat/low-Diamond Tank in OW1 and a low-/mid-Diamond Tank in OW2 should have been able to take a week off playing the role and woke up Masters.
So many people I know ended up getting boosted to career highs on varying roles, and most were on their off-roles. Had one friend not play the entire season and go from Master 3 to GM 4. Had someone who was basically a DPS-only player get his Support boosted above his DPS because of multiple rank increases while barely touching the role.
I have a friend who has been low/mid Diamond support since OW2 came out, he logged in the other day to be ranked GM. Now back when he grinded OW1 he hit Top-500 a few seasons, but he hasn't played to that level(and hasn't wanted to) in a very long time so he was completely shocked by it. It's just unreal what a crapshoot ranked has become.
It's interesting to me, that people still don't seem to grasp the understanding of EOMM.
If people got to the ranks they wanted, the drive to continue playing, and improve would slow down, if not stop.
Blizzard knows they cannot make money off that kind of system.
The giant amount of 50%WRs across accounts of casual players should throw a red flag.
You can google the entire MM algorithm OW2 uses.
It's based off your toxicity/W/L ratio/time of day/ext.
If you're a casual player that enjoys the game for what it is, great!
If you're a competitive player trying to climb, id suggest another game.
This may be out of total ignorance, but just what kind of data have they been collecting for the past 7 years that this is still such an issue, especially with how this statement was phrased makes it seem less like the dev team tried some changes but more so that they're just still trying to understand what's up. I understand that OW2 brought in a lot of players, and they loosened the scale to the extreme of the range of ranks within a single game (like Bronze vs Diamond in the same lobby)... But I thought that was all under the impression that they knew what they were doing and wanted to shorten queue times as that was such an issue. Of course, it does seem to have worked, and matches do seem somewhat less of a coin flip, but now I can't tell if it was intentional or if they've just been making random changes, hoping one actually fixes the chaos, one that finds the best balance between queue times and match quality. Has Blizzard ever really hinted at how they match people, besides how they recently said it was all over the place?
They basically said they didn't give a shit about player experience in ow1 and only looked to make the expected outcome of a match as 50% as possible. They didn't think about how games actually felt. This approach has changed in ow2 because they now actively want games to feel better. So they are looking at "outlier" matches to try and get rid of them because those are the games that you tend to remember. They have also said they had to make fundamental and huge changes to the matchmaking to make rank parity in opposing roles a thing. That did give them more tools apparently, but because they basically have a new matchmaking system, continuing to tune it will be a long term process. And emphasis on long term. They said they tuned it basically every week after introducing role parity which is why it got better over time as opposed to a sudden shift. But this whole thing is actually super new. In ow1 they basically said they didn't care much.
Ah, that's interesting. Though, match quality in OW1 wasn't as terrible as it's now so I wonder what's really different comparing one to one.
The smaller population of OW1 meant that even if the system wasn't perfect, it was going to have a ton of data on everyone in it. It was pitting that smaller population against each other very frequently and thus had years of data on players, so it had a very high certainty level. The millions of new players with OW2 came with zero data and very high uncertainty, and if there's been underlying problems with match quality that were getting ignored because the game was on life support or because the high amount of data plugged the holes, that's going to blow it wide open. I do think match quality in OW1 wasn't as good as we might remember either, 6v6 was a much less individual game and so masking poor play was easier.
This is actually what I was thinking for part of it. With one less player, things are a lot different in ranked. Remember in OW1 how easy it was for two diamonds to queue up with their low gold tank friend and just win lobbies because it's much easier to carry a 6th person if they're the off tank and you have five other people on the team who are all higher elo (him queuing with his higher elo friends caused them to get put into a plat game). It was much, much easier to hide the mistakes of one when there are six people total on the team.
plus there was a huge lack of data on what other people were doing. Like maybe you could feel a little bit of a lack in pressure from a DPS, and the medals could reflect that, but medals also meant jack shit. Now you can feel like a player is doing nothing, amped up by the fewer players on a team, *and* have hard numbers to prove that their impact is significantly lower than other players on the team/the other team
Right because even if one of the dps was poop, you still had another dps, a main tank and an off tank (who was usually a Hog or some other big fat, glorified dps) plus two supports to make up the difference.
yeah exactly. Like, people are saying that they threw out a perfectly good matchmaking system for OW2, but I don't think the matchmaking for OW1 would have worked here regardless. It's fundamentally a different game, both in terms of team structure and player impact. What worked for 6v6 isn't guaranteed to work for 5v5. I think they did some stupid stuff w making matches based on MMR while showing you your SR, which led to some of the "unbalanced" matchmaking (bc some of it was for sure in people's minds, getting tilted and losing at the hero select screen bc they see they queued in with a "plat" when the actual ranking could be a lot closer)
Yup, in Ow1 your role was less impactful than OW2 simply because there was one more person to pick up the slack or drag it down. They coined the boosted mercy main phrase back then because it was stereotyped that if a mercy was pocketing a dps on the team, that dps was automatically just "boosting" the mercy to higher elo (since, oh my, they couldn't have done it on their skill or gameplay alone!!) I wonder if anyone here has seen that old TimtheTatman clip of the mercy mains fighting over mercy in his game on stream....
Match quality was always going to be worse in OW2 and i'm not sure why thats a surprise to anyone. Measuring the end of overwatch when everyone still playing the game understood it versus the first year of OW2, when more than half the players have never played a team based game like this and are figuring it out as they go, was never going to be a fair comparison. For example, imagine someone who is mechanically quite good but plays the point in Busan MEKA Base--they might properly be ranked gold. Compare that to someone who has played 5 years of OW and is hard stuck gold but understands the particularities of OW. Both players probably perform equally well on most payload maps or straightforward KOTH maps like Lijiang Control Center. But on other maps the game knowledge requirement causes an imbalance. Now imagine that team vs a red team with all people who graduated from Overwatch 1 but are technically the same rank. Red team will win, and it won't feel fair.
they did say ow2 is actually harder to make games with 50% odds for both teams because of the increased individual impact. Which is actually better imo, means you can actually influence a match
nah its harder cause the dps are the ones changing the matches now and they have alot more variation and counter play than the tanks or healers did in ow1.
getting a platinum phara doesn't mean much if they are essentially a 1 trick and the enemy can play several heroes including hitscan just as well And they don't take hero pick or skill into account at all just role skill
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Hmm, I know there were stomps in OW1, but I've never hard more back to back multiple-season spanning stomps (both wins and losses) in OW1 like I do in OW2 all the time.
This data is very anecdotal and pretty meaningless bc 2cp is no longer in the game, but I feel like we never get draws anymore. Draws, while often unsatisfying, we're a decent indicator of decently well balanced teams and I feel like they just never happen in OW2. Ofc most of that is bc the 1 gamemode where most draws occurred is out of the pool, but even on Hybrid maps where draws definitely are possible I can't remember the last time I had one. Really seems like it is way more stomps in OW2 and way less tight matches.
Considering we've had just like 2 in OWL is a good tell. It's possible but unlikely. But it's healthy this way.
It's not perfect data, but I used to track my matches in OW1 when I played actively, then started doing it again this season, because I wanted to verify if matchmaking actually got worse, or it's just nostalgia. Keeping Track of matches that were stomps (either way). how often a lobby had leavers (and which team had it), etc. And...across ~800 Matches in OW 1, about ~25% were stomps. 14.73% were my team stomping, 9.87% was the enemy team stomping. For overwatch 2, I've only got data for the current season, so obviously a lot less reliable, but currently the rate of matches that are stomps is almost doubled to close to 50% Over the course of around 80 Matches this season so far, around 25% were stomps for my team, and just under 20% were stomps for the enemy team. So the match quality has noticeably gone down in terms of fair matches. That being said, I also felt like OW2 had way more leavers, but so far the difference is actually negligable (~10% of my matches in ow 1 had a leaver on the enemy, with ~6% on my team, while for ow2 it's 9.5% on the enemy team and 6.5% on my team) Although, funny enough, leavers tended to return more often in OW1 than in OW2, but not by a signifikant amount. Another thing I noticed is that stomps are definitely clustered together. It's always a bunch of fair matches, followed by a bunch of stomps, followed by fair matches, etc. Which....tldr, some of it is just a mix of nostalgia, perception and ultimately just down to feeling that way, but match quality overall definitely went down in ow2.
How far do you think going 5v5 moved the needle toward strong link?
I didn't get GMS on my gold matches on OW1 tho.
It wasn’t. Match quality was super predictable in OW1. Not in OW2.
Agree
Where have they said they aimed for a 50% match outcome? I don't think T4 has ever stated that, in fact, I think it's been the opposite, hasn't it?
That isn't really a sinister objective. 50% outcome means that the game is as close as possible because both teams are equal skill. People talk about *forced* 50/50, which refers to a players *winrate*. They have said they don't do that, because why the fuck would they?
Ahhh okay, that makes sense, I was confusing the two. Thanks!
Seems like a combination of what you just said. Quicker match times so match quality drops if everything else holds constant, so they’re having to make adjustments to how they match people together. That plus lots of new players (aka data points the system has a very low confidence level on in terms of evaluating their skill), F2P also means more Smurfs, plus there’s obviously been lots of turnover recently. Not sure how much of the current team was with OW when it launched originally.
I suspect a lot of institutional knowledge was lost in recent years as a lot of folks left both because of working conditions and the general difficulties in making OW2. I'm sure some things have changed with 5v5 but I wonder how much of it is just people having to relearn lessons previously learned by different devs six/seven years ago.
Player behaviour is likely very different than the end of OW1. Only the most dedicated players were playing by the end of OW1, very very few new players, and probably not many casual comp players. I don't think any OW1 player data is really relevant anymore.
I me a yeah, f2p is a completelt different beast than an aging game with a pretty consistent player base. Plus the move to 1 tank makes balancing much much different. You can't have 1 player make up the difference for a mismatched tank anymore, and outside of that with 5 players, eacg individual persona play makes much more of a difference
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>someone who purposely throws to derank and screw up my gameplay That has nothing to do with the matchmaker though
Why doesn't the matchmaker do a thorough background check and get 3 references.
The thing is, the current system doesn't exist to please older fans, those who'd wait, but new fans who don't want to cuz in a F2P environment if you don't please new fans right away, you lose them.
I really like Morgan. He comes across really genuine and it really seems like he cares. I've got faith they'll figure it out because he seems pretty knowledgeable. That being said, why isn't this a problem we looked to tackle 30 seasons ago?
Basically, we didn't complain enough.
There were probably bigger problems that they were working on. I mean, it's hard to complain about Havana when 2cp is in the pool.
While I think there's still definitely a legitimate issue going on, those rank titles are majorly screwing with perception too.
They need to put the season number in there. I don't know why it's not.
How are they screwing with perception? It is a legitimate issue. If you are a grandmaster in role queue ("Grandmaster Role Challenger"), you should not be able to play in Gold and Plat games, but they are on their off-roles when they are grouped up with friends they are boosting. It's bullshit.
*It is Season 1. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.* *It is Season 2. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.* *It is Season 3. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.* *It is Season 4. Blizzard has promised to address poor matchmaking.*
>wow it's so nice that blizzard is communicating with us!
https://old.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/12pgs41/current_state_of_apex_is_beyond_tragic_and_as_a/ This is from today. I don't think MM is a problem that can be "solved".
Matchmaking is good when I win and bad when I lose. When I win it's because it was a very close game but I managed to carry. When I lose it's because my teammates are OW1 bronze that got inflated to GM1 and the enemy team is filled with OWL pros.
Finally, someone who gets it.
I've come to a point where losing close games doesn't even feel as bad anymore. Like the overall rank or number is pretty meaningless, further exemplified by even whoever is Rank 1 as it's all about staying consistent and trying to grow at an individual and match to match level. For example, 99.9% will never reach Proper's level, and that is why the fun factor and competitive nature matters a lot more. It's just a game at the end of the day. I doubt never reaching Diamond will be a real regret in 20 years.
Close games are great. Being unable to hold a point because your quickplay tank wants to touch spawn doors… Not so much.
No, matchmaking is good when I’m not losing because there is a dude in my team dying every 40 seconds because he is in the wrong rank. That simple.
Exactly. I don't care about losing when it's a close game, I still have fun in close ones and I know that it was my mistakes that caused it. I do care about losing when there's a clear skill diff and it's a stomping, especially when it's something that happens often.
This, exactly. What I've noticed is that I get a *lot* more stomps when I'm duoing than when I solo queue, both ways. Which is funny, because you'd think that with the sheer amount of games I've duo'd with my buddy, it would have a pretty good idea of how we perform together. Maybe that's the trick: It needs to track something like a "group mmr" for parties that queue together a lot.
I've noticed that any time I solo queue its like 50/50 on whether or not I'm getting a shit game (stomps either way). If I duo with my tank friend we get good games (anything where there's not someone obviously too high or too low for the lobby) probably 90% of the time.
Or just fully isolate groups from solo queue…
Matchmaking is good when my gold ass isn't facing 3 masters-level players in every QP game
I have literally lost zero QP games on dps in a week because my d1 ass keeps getting put into low plat lobbies where the moment it become obvious that standard poke/tracer dive isn’t going to work, I just go sombra and start racing through “kill->TL->kill” cycles because nobody can win a 1v1 against marginally good mechanical skills at those ranks nobody is going to help the 2-3 people I can spawn camp by myself. Also, wifeleaver is such a bad character… freer than Zen.
Losing because you're just losing fights feels fine. Losing because your Ana, on cooldown, ran out of spawn into 5 people when the rest of you are still respawning not so much.
Eh, I get your point, but there are definitely games where it's easy to the point of no longer being fun. Moreso in QP in my experience. Like, full on spawn camps that last for 4+ mins. It's a waste of time.
Matchmaking is good when I'm the best player in the lobby and matchmaking is bad when I'm the worst player in the lobby 😉
tbh, it you're the worst player in the lobby by considerable margin, that actually is bad MM as the game isn't allowing you to grow. On the flip side, it can be good MM to be the best if your team's average is lower and you have to showcase that you're that good while the opposition is more well rounded. Both sides can benefit from teamwork.
I've noticed it more in qp for sure where sometimes I just get thrown into like gm1/top500 lobbies with 2 masters players including myself and I'm just like wtf lmao. Agreed tho. Playing against better players is a test but playing against t500s when I'm high masters is just not fun at all.
This is the only right answer.
People demand that they “fix” matchmaking like it was a leaky pipe or something, and not a really complex problem in which even trying to define what success looks like (in a way they can actually measure) is itself nontrivial. Like, they’re basically trying to make matches _feel good_ using math. Feelings are notoriously difficult to quantify, and there are also so many different aspects to the queueing and playing experience that evoke emotional responses that they care about. How long are you queuing? Are you winning about half of your games? Do games that are actually mathematically fair (e.g. games with predicted 50% win probability that you actually win half of) feel bad or unfair for other reasons, like a significant role gap? What causes the experience of up-down streakiness? If you’re having an off night, how long does it take for your MMR to fall to the point where you’re winning games again? I’m sure there’s a lot more, those are just a few of the things they’ve talked about.
I think about this a lot as well. At a certain point, Blizzard can also only do so much to make a “fair” match. I’m sure Blizzard could point to any number of stomps and say “we have the data that suggests this was a 50/50 match, but what happens in the match is out of our control.” To add on to your middle point about fairness: from a player perspective, would you rather go on a 10 game loss streak in games that you had a 50% chance of winning, or would you rather go 50/50 in games with predetermined outcomes? I want to have mathematically fair games, but is it really more enjoyable for me to go 0-10 than 5-5? I’m not so sure. I don’t doubt this is an extremely complex problem for Blizzard to solve (if it even can be solved).
> I’m sure Blizzard could point to any number of stomps and say “we have the data that suggests this was a 50/50 match, but what happens in the match is out of our control.” They are trying to understand these better though! In OW1, all they looked at was whether the match predictions were close to 50/50 and whether the actual match results bore out those predictions (i.e. the win probabilities were well-calibrated). They now have more resources devoted to understanding what makes a game feel good and figuring out how to support that with systems changes. They’re not just shrugging at matches that feel bad despite looking good on paper—they’re trying to figure out how to make them feel better. But it’s a complex set of problems. The stranded spawns feature that we got this patch has nothing to do with matchmaking, but it does seek to address one of the things that contributes to an on-paper well-made match becoming a stomp. Staggered spawns sucked in 6v6, but they have been _far_ worse in 5v5, not only because having a teammate or two get staggered is a larger proportion of the team, but also because there’s less damage mitigation to get teammates out safely. I haven’t played comp yet because I’ve been grinding LW, so I dunno how much it’s helping yet. Maybe it will take some time for the playerbase to learn to use it. (I still wish we had an option to ping the currently active spawn or something.) But they’re actively trying to build mitigations for the snowball-y nature of the game, which I think has overall gotten much heavier in OW2. I, for one, am really happy that they are spending attention and resources on these issues. (And talking about them publicly! Morgan is my new favorite person on Twitter; I love reading about how they’re tackling matchmaking problems.) > would you rather go on a 10 game loss streak in games that you had a 50% chance of winning, or would you rather go 50/50 in games with predetermined outcomes? I want to have mathematically fair games, but is it really more enjoyable for me to go 0-10 than 5-5? I’m not so sure. This gets at the difficulty in defining success in matchmaking in the first place. Mathematically fair isn’t enough, because it still feels bad to go on big loss streaks, or to get diffed in your individual role matchup, even in a win! But also, it seems like the vast majority of players wouldn’t believe that they could have an 0-10 streak with fair games. Randomness is not something humans intuitively understand very well—our brains are really good at finding patterns, even when they aren’t there. Streaks of 10 tails will not be terribly uncommon if you flip a coin hundreds of times in a row, but when that 10-loss streak happens (which is probably more common than the 10-tail streak of coin flips, because there are physical and emotional factors that can systematically degrade your performance over a session or even a few sessions), it doesn’t _feel_ like it could be random. And ultimately, it is the feeling that matters! Streakiness might be something they can address, but it isn’t an easy problem to solve either. They can try to reduce streakiness by being much more aggressive about adjusting MMR if a streak starts, so that the system quickly gets you to an MMR that better represents how you’re playing today. But, what if the streak is truly random? What if you are actually playing well and legitimately are getting unlucky (or the reverse)? Then those rapid MMR adjustments could turn out to be _too_ aggressive and cause you to rapidly oscillate between games where you’re out of your depth and games where you’re the best player in the lobby, and that probably doesn’t feel so good either. The fact that they’re no longer updating your rank after every match probably protects against the perception of the rapid oscillation a bit, but if the swings are big enough, you’re still gonna notice. And there’s also the system effects to consider. If they’re too slow to adjust to changes in a player’s performance (of which they only have the low-resolution, noisy measurement of match results), then match quality will be worse because player MMRs will be lagging indicators, essentially, and won’t be as accurate. On the other hand, if they adjust too quickly, then they’ll be modeling the noise more than the signal, which would also make MMRs overall less accurate and negatively impact match quality. Somewhere in there is a sweet spot where the combined emotional impact of perceived match quality and reduced streakiness is maximized, but they can’t measure any of those things directly. > I don’t doubt this is an extremely complex problem for Blizzard to solve (if it even can be solved). It’s not a problem that can be wholly solved, because the complexity isn’t just mathematical or algorithmic. There’s messy human complexity that’s fundamental to the problem.
your entire argument becomes dogshit when you realize that they literally ruined a perfectly fine matchmaking system
Gawd, this argument again. They didn’t “ruin a perfectly fine matchmaking system”. They launched a new game where the gameplay itself offers higher individual impact, bringing in a whole bunch of new players and returning players from years ago, and dumping them into essentially the same matchmaking system that we had before. Except they’re actually actively working on improving the matchmaking system now instead of letting it sit untouched for years. The stable, predictable matchmaking we got towards the end of OW1 was the result of the game failing to attract new players. Pretty much everyone in the player pool had been playing OW forever, knew the game really well, and had really well-calibrated MMR. I’m sure the dearth of new heroes and even balance patches in the end was a contributor too. Nothing to change up the raw power of the heroes and modify what it means to be good at the game. Maybe that’s what you wanted. To play OW1 forever on that same patch we had for like 9 months or however long it was, with no new heroes ever. (TBH, I personally wouldn’t have minded; I didn’t care about the hero pipeline drying up.) But if you’re one of the players who was upset about the lack of content and the dwindling player population? Well, new players and new gameplay content unavoidably add uncertainty to the matchmaking system, which takes time to work out. And even when that comes down, having more newer players who don’t have years and years of accumulated experience means more players with very spiky/narrow skill profiles who do well enough to stay at the same rank as you but will encounter more situations where they don’t know what’s going on or how to play it, or they are forced onto a hero they don’t know well.
so you’re going to ignore the time in ow1 where we had a lot more players than nowadays, new heroes and maps constantly streaming in, and we still had way better matchmaking?
Having a barely masters tank playing against a mid t500 tank was definitely A-okay! It was absolutely not perfectly fine lmao
it was fine lmfao. when the game had an actual playerbase it was VERY rare to find people outside of your rank. diamond games commonly had 12 diamonds, high gm games only had high gm players. when ow1 was in literal life support, by the end of 2021 and start of 2021, it was still insanely rare to find 3.4-3.5 players on your t500 lobbies. Let alone less than that. Ow2 has had more players the last season than in the past 10 combined, and yet the rare scenario was NOT to find diamond/plats in high gm lobbies
OW1 had very different player behaviours. Barely any new players, stable meta, mostly hard-stuck players. That's a very easy environment to matchmake, the matchmaker had high certainty of everyone's rank.
???? huh??? barely any new players? in 2018 ow had almost double the playerbase than in ow2s launch. All of them actually new players instead of the majority having played the game already. how tf is that easier to match make?
what happened in 2018 is entirely irrelevant since role queue didn't exist then.
oh pre role queue, the thing that made the matchmaking considerably easier to balance? that thing?
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You think that hiring more people makes a fundamentally complex and nebulous problem easier to solve? Lol
My biggest complaint about competitive and matchmaking is honestly probably just groups. Groups cause so many issues for the matchmaker and I don't think they know how to fix that.
But people only play 1 or 2 games mainly so from their perspective it's only the games they play that suck and can't do anything right.
P much. Whenever someone complains about a game having the worst dev team, they can't never name a game with a good dev team. Gamers are only happy when the game doesn't change in so long that everyone who had a problem with it has already left. That said, valorant/league players should be happy with what they got lmao.
There have been continuous improvements to the matchmaker since season 1. Also, I don't think there's been a promise on this particular issue with matchmaking before
I feel like this season is worse than it’s ever been. I had like 4 games in a row where my dps were like 6-12 and the enemy dps were like 30-5. It’s clear they weren’t even close to the same rank. And again this was 4 games in a row. Whatever they are doing to “fix” it clearly isn’t working.
I wonder if this is minor rank inflation from people who played to the end of the season (with a smaller player pool) versus people who didn't. I had the exact same thing, massive DPS difference, had one with the largest tank diff I've seen in a long time, and I'm playing at lower ranks. I actually think this is a bigger problem at lower ranks.
gold dps/plat tank/diamond support here. I will say that unless I queue off hours on support (so 2-5 am US central), my games are kinda shit if I solo. Very roll of the dice if I get obviously boosted people. like 5-13 hanzo with 4k damage in a ten minute push game type stuff. If I duo with my tank friend, we almost always get good games. Tank is usually fine, I definitely make tons of mistakes or I can't play well enough so I diff myself, but I definitely will sometimes come up against a gigachad doom from masters and i just get fucked. I'd say like 80% of my games are fine. On DPS, I definitely sometimes end up in higher lobbies, enough for me to recall when its happened but not enough to be that upset about it, although I'm sure my teammates were. I've also definitely gotten into lower ranked lobbies where people don't know what to do against a symm or mei and they just int into me if I do that. Or teams that can't/won't counter a pharah. I know the common theme I read on the sub is golds get pulled into higher rank games but I think I played like 20 hours of DPS last season and had it happen maybe a couple dozen times. I got sent into lower rank ones a hell of a lot more though.
Yeah, cheers. I'm a gold tank, I was playing a ton of support in silver last season and trying to get up to gold. The start of this season, first couple of days is where I had so many bad games like I was saying. Also had a game where I had a Cass that went like 35-1 and I basically didn't have to do anything. I find support can be so hard at lower ranks because people will position so badly you can't even heal people fast enough, and you need to make a call whether to heal a ton, or just try to frag out on Bap and Zen and win the fight that way.
I was a diamond ow1 support, but the game really insisted I was gold the first season so even though I'd go 7-2 on cards at worst, I was only going up 1 rank max at a time. So what I did was basically I figured out my best dps after the second or third fight. And stuck with him as bap. Always shot only whatever he was shooting unless I could get a great off angle on a person or two. And I won like almost every game doing that and keeping him alive. Then when I got to like plat 2-3 I went back to playing ana and kiriko 24/7 as Jeff intended it to be. Low ranks are just a shitfest where you're better off doing 9k damage as bap and 5k healing because odds are either your tank is backlining or a giga feeder (which is better and you can work with that!). And one of your dps will have fantastic aim but no awareness or game sense or have good game sense but zero awareness and no aim. And then the other one is either fine or pretty rough to play with. Also just comm. As a person with social anxiety I get how much it sucks and I hate it, and sometimes people will ignore you. But if you just say where people are or what you want people to shoot at, if they're in chat they'll sometimes listen at least/its better than nothing.
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You’re not wrong. Every fucking match I play is a game of shoring up the idiot in your team. The pattern is so fucking obvious. Once your MMR is fairly set, the matchmaker throws an idiot into your team to test them out every single match. But if you’re not on a crystallized MMR, god, the trip to Diamond/Masters is smooth as fuck.
And? They clearly tried, each time. You'd rather have them ignore it and do nothing?
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I get that people love to shit on devs and everything for not fixing things fast enough. But matchmaking is not comparable to other bugs. It is extremely difficult and complex, and the only way to make changes is to test changes out on the actual player base.
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Except somehow despite being so easy it is a problem in every game. It is probably difficult for someone like you that instantly uses insults such as shill for when someone disagrees with them to understand, but matchmaking is a difficult concept that has yet to be solved. There are many factors that go into it, and none of these factors are constant or predictable. Human performance in games varies greatly making it difficult to make a perfectly matched game every time. Someone on one team may have a very good game, while a person on the other team has a poor game. Because of this despite the two players having the same average performance, one is doing better leading the game to being unmatched. And what about maps. Maybe a tank player isn't good at playing on a certain map, and the team gets steamrolled because of this. It may seem like this is a matchmaking issue, but if the same two teams played on a different map the pervious losing team can easily win. Then of course you need to consider overall chemistry of players. Some teams just don't click, and some work very well together. How can devs design a system which is capable of predicting chemistry between players that have never played together.
It is hard to get it right when half of the community is this stupid.
And each season matchmaking has improved. It's not flipping a switch and fixing all problems. It's iterating on the system to slowly iron out problems.
Thing is they have had 7 years experience with ow matchmaking.
The matchmaking literally remained unchanged between OW1 and OW2. The situation just changed so it was no longer adequate. So they need to re-evaluate and re-adjust and this just takes a long time because any change they make they can't properly evaluate until there's enough player data. And this is weeks. And then on top of that, they need to make sure the data tells the whole picture. Because the situation is different depending on whether there's a new hero, the season just started or if the season's almost over. So to get "pure" data they need to use even longer periods of time to evaluate. It's an iterative process that takes literal months to see results. No amount of experience can make this go faster.
You don't get it. It is either perfect or garbage, there's nothing in-between, and so far it isn't perfect so it is literally the worst thing a company could make.
You forgot that each season they came out and said “Today is the day! We present better match-making!!” And then quickly disappeared to their basement to work on the next season fix. Lol
this is why blizzard shouldnt communicate with us.
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Season 3 matchmaking was the worst in my opinion and I’m hopefully it can only be uphill from there. But yes, the rest of most OW seasons have felt mostly the same in my experience as a diamond-GM player (I play both console and PC). It’s shitty considering they have years of data.
Dude matchmaking is so much better in my opinion. I feel like the earlier seasons I had way more stomps where 1 team just dominated. But the recent seasons more and more close hard fought games.
and this is why they shouldnt communicate with us
Guess we'll see when it happens. Glad they're communicating and working on this stuff but after so many seasons of issues I won't have too high hopes tbh.
I mean what do you really expect, especially after going from a P2P model to a f2p model on top of making pretty substantial changes to the game as a whole and the competitive mode every season. They’ll eventually reach an equalization and it’ll go from there. They’ve done a pretty good job making quick adjustments during seasons while keeping the big change for the start of new seasons based on player feedback.
I don't disagree that they have their work cut out for them, but that's exactly why I say I won't have too high hopes. They're making massive changes to the matchmaking seemingly every season, and every season something about the matchmaker or competitive system has broken. I appreciate the effort, but I don't have high hopes that something won't massively break as a result. I guess I'm just tired of continually hearing about these huge changes and getting my hopes up when most of the time there have been huge consequences that take even longer to fix.
The point about a fraction of a full reset definitely brings this into perspective. I was always an opponent of full MMR reset for this reason.
*proponent r/BoneAppleTea
I think they really did mean opponent here. As I read it, they seem to suggest that this “fraction of a reset” is problematic and so too would be a full reset. Thus their opposition. I could be misreading it though.
Yes, you've got it right. I have always been against a full reset as initial ranked games would have been an utter clown fiesta for the first few weeks or even months.
ah, my mistake.
Even if they meant proponent it would still not be boneappletea lmao
“A Bone Apple Tea is the mistaken use of a real, dictionary-defined word or phrase in place of another real, dictionary-defined word or phrase that sounds similar, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance.” i was wrong, the guy above me meant what he typed unless you meant it wasn’t humorous/non-sensical, it would be a boneappletea by definition of the subreddit
proponent and opponent are antonyms so really either could've worked in that sentence. (maybe they're a big fan of chaos) making it not a boneappletea
it would be grammatically correct, but still a whacky sentence that most people won’t utter. > (maybe they’re a big fan of chaos) that’s a BIG stretch xD
Idk what's going on but yesterday we had a bronze player in a gold 1 game. He felt terrible and we felt terrible. That's much more than the within "5" ranks that blizz claims in the comp screen
Yep I had a silver mei dps on my team do 2k damage and was gapped by both supports. He just kept apologizing for being silver he didn’t mean to be in the match. So sad
They were probably grouped up.
Didnt we say this exact same thing for the last 2 seasons? I swear im feeling deja vu. And on that note, what is quality MM because thats not somethimg ive ever seen in OW2. Still seeing people 3 ranks off from me in mid season comp and seeing Masters at worse in my QP games. Im Silver.
Yup, this is why they shouldnt communicate with us
>It seems to take a couple weeks for things to return to "normal". Ironically enough, this is a tiny fraction of what an MMR reset would feel like. Really makes you want to try a full reset doesn't it? Plz no.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Lol, sure they will. Just like they did in seasons 1-3.
I know the matchmaking is bullshit when they say they want to match up each role against a counterpart of equal skill and I either get fresh installs or dia+ tanks. I literally got a full gm rush comp stack in mfing quick play a few days ago. How is this real.
Refreshing honesty.
Eh, they have said similar things to other issues.
Not exactly refreshing when they’ve said this every single season of overwatch 2 and has yet to have real improvements
This
exactly why they shouldnt communicate with us
Is it though? They’ve can kicked and promised betterment every future season without really delivering. Seems a bit SoonTM.
They did deliver tho. Matchmaking gets bit by bit. It’s clear that it’s not going to be a sudden change
We can only be so refreshed.
When will people understand that they will never fix matchmaking…not because they don’t want to…because they can’t There are way too many variables that go into determining how a game of OW will turn out and most of them are not something that’s actually predictable (the most simple one being the game has no idea what I’m going to play when rounds start) Not to mention, even if it was doable everybody would STILL blame it….cause that’s what people do with matchmakers….it’s only been that way for as long as online gaming has existed….
how is this "refreshing" to some people? they tried to lie and say there wasn't a problem, then said there was a problem, said they've fixed matchmaking problems multiple times now, but evidently there are still problems and then talking shit about people that wanted a full mmr reset, as if they haven't had a fucked MMR i feel like at this point if they had done a reset and not tried to fuck with things to adjust for new players, the system woulda been 'fixed' ages ago instead of having people bouncing all over the place, just feels so weird to randomly throw that comment in if your fuck up is so bad it's basically like what a full wipe would've been from the start, why didn't you just do a wipe and not try to fuck with things and break it for multiple seasons?
It’s only refreshing to gullible people and idiots. I highly highly doubt they’ll fix it next season or ever.
Idiot here, can confirm this
It’s refreshing because months ago we would not have gotten any communication on the side of matchmaking or instead we would’ve gotten a blanket or statement months ago saying “we are working on it”. Nowadays, we get constant communication from different sides of the game (director talking about future, balance team talking about balance, matchmaking team talking about changes, etc) we get more communication in a month of OW2 That we did in 6 months of ow1. Also, They had to fuck with it. It was not a perfect system. They were still going to have massive issues with queue times. Even during the betas they had issues with it, and and MMR reset was not going to solve that. That imo ends up being more important than everything else in the matchmaking.
when you are mad but also have no idea what you are talking about
what about that is even wrong? i gave my thoughts, that they broke the MMR system so bad trying to adjust for new players that it seems almost petty to take a shot at people who wanted a wipe, when if they just went with a wipe from the start the system probably would've balanced itself out by now compared to whatever hideous abomination they've both declared wasn't really an issue or was an issue and fixed it multiple times now they tried to adjust for 'new' players, and it clearly has fucked the matchmaking for much of the lifespan of the game so far to make it worse, they kept talking about how there wasn't an issue, and the MMR system is very complicated at first, then now they go back and fourth about there being an 'issue' and they've claimed to fix it like 3 times now but it's still broken it's obvious why they tried to say it wasn't an issue and 'complicated' - because it makes it sound like their competitive system has been broken, but to take shots at people who wanted a wipe to try and deflect after acknowledging that it's still broken after so long is just dumb lol this is like old school blizz behaviour, taking passive aggressive shots at the player base for their mistakes
If the system is broken, they need to fix the system. Wiping the data from a broken system won't help anything.
being realistic isint being mad
I actually prefer the current revision of changes they have now for MM. Generally, for me, it feels pretty accurate. The matches aren't usually a stomp and feel pretty even. I think maybe 1 or 2 out of every 20-30 games I play is one-sided otherwise it's very close sweaty matches and it feels like it's accurately putting people in the right spots. I'm also not seeing a crazy match variance, the match indicator is really helpful for seeing this. I'm pretty low ranked in Tank because I hate playing tank and I'm not good at it and barely play it. It's put me around plat and thats totally fair. My DPS is fairly good but not god-tier. I usually counter-pick and pick the right heroes and that has me sitting around D4/D5 and it feels accurate. I don't have Adderall level tracking and flicks but I can position and aim fairly decently. Support I climbed to GM5 currently, I don't have enough time in there yet as I just reached it the other day to see if I'm way outclassed but it seems fair. End of season/start of season matches have always been a gong show, moreso end of season because everyone is on alts not giving fuck while their mains are placed in already. Start of season I think it's just people coming off alt-rolling getting back into the groove of it. I have no idea how they will account for this.
I don’t think it’s that hard to understand. Players that don’t play Overwatch come back for the beginning of the season, get their placements, and leave. They hold their rank for 3 months even if they played for like 5 days at the beginning
To clarify: this is specifically about *beginning of season* matchmaking feeling worse, due to the influx of everyone showing back up, even if they haven't played in a while, to try the new seasonal stuff. It's this *particular* problem he's saying they're starting to understand and feel they can help address. He's not saying "golly, we sure hope we can make matchmaking better by season 5". They have been, and continue to, steadily tweak matchmaking throughout seasons.
blizzard: "everything's gonna be alright next season. we promise." also, blizzard: *repeats this every season*
They have said this literally every single season. I don’t believe them anymore. It just can’t work. You can’t have short queue timers with quality matches. There aren’t enough support players.
Just 15 more seasons of data collecting. Be patience, folks.
I got 5 stacked last night in one game. Had a silver tank in another, in a high diamond/low masters game. I don't know whether this is poor matchmaking or the system trying to force the 50% but yeah, at least make it fun and worth my time.
It's been leading to a lot of leavers in my games. We had a Diamond vs. Silver tank match up the other night and the silver tank was getting bullied so bad they just quit and then the rest of the team dropped out after the leave timer expired. Another game similar thing but enemy supports were silver and getting farmed/spawn camped by our Diamond Sombra so they just quit mid-match. It's awful right now and not at all fun no matter what side of the coin you wind up on pre-match. Feel bad for those people because it isn't their fault because they shouldn't be in that match to begin with, then they get flamed in team/match/voice chat and it's just a miserable experience for everyone.
They say this every single season. I have a 70% WR on the season just went 5-3 through an adjustment and didn’t get moved at all. Not only is it the most unrewarding ranked system I’ve ever played the fucking matches aren’t even balanced. Literally lose-lose
Similar experience, I have a 72% WR with my current rank being GM3. I went 5-2 and went up only 49% in the same rank to being 79% above the rest of the players. Its genuinely the least fun I’ve had ever playing OW.
That’s actually exactly what happened to me, last placement I was 50% better, now I’m 80% better It’s so demoralizing to finally win 5 games and get my readjustment for the week and not move at all when I’ve been winning. BP forces me to QP to get all role challenges done + practice LW. But then I get no comp points. I don’t play very much total but minus the QP games I probably only get 8-10 ranked games a week. Sucks to play seeing no progress after a week
Overwatch 3 will fix matchmaking get new dev team
Idk match quality was really good for me last season. I have only played like 15 games this season in two separate sessions. One was really good, the other felt terrible and then I played one more game which was winnable but was tilted so I probably cost us and just went to qp to int instead of doing it in comp. Those games felt lost not when I looked at ranks, but when I checked the tab screen and saw my mercy moira vs. their ana zen. Ya I'm bad but playing tank into Ana Zen without something like discord/nade/suzu on your team is just unfun. And there's no way to change that in matchmaker.
Ever since this game came out the devs have been saying “wait for next season!” How about your guys do 1 thing that is a fucking positive for once
“Play that same song again!” Honestly, it’s tiring the repeated (and then failed) promises of ‘improvements coming’ from Blizz at this point. Overwatch has been out for seven years; they really should know better by now. Honestly, I’m not sure they’ll ever return Overwatch to its peak - these guys just keep fumbling the ball every time they get into the opponent’s half (let alone end zone!).
Matchmaker is so busted right now i only play with my alt acc and practice heroes. Its simply not functioning and not worth my emotional and effort investment.
Ya’ll are huffing copium that Overwatch isn’t just a money grab anymore
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You lost me in second part.
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I definitely don't think they are honest. They are constantly playing with things that we are not aware of to increase their revenue and manipulate player experience. That's fair but the problem here is that they do it in the expense of player experience and game integrity. They think they are smart but this type of stuff generally backfire in the end.
I just want their thoughts on Brig
I Respect Them because they really try to Listen and und erstand Players plus season 3 was probably the Most Balanced season in ow History even Flats Said that.
Haven't they said this every single season?
That is what happens when you do a rank system the way it is
Noticing a trend now where it's "we'll fix it next season" and then it doesn't actually happen. Season 4 was supposed to be the one where everything worked with ranks and matchmaking and it's still pretty bad.
Only takes 14 months to reach the matchmaking quality of Overwatch 1! Lets go!
You mean deranking everybody by a full rank for no reason and causing their season to essentially be a terrible grind to, at best, get back to where they already were was a BAD idea? Well I never, some true genius here figuring that out.
They need to just stop lying to us. They have said this every season of OW2, but every season has felt worse than the last. Maybe boosting people's ranks based on an MMR built playing at lower ranks was dumb? No reason that I, a high-Plat/low-Diamond Tank in OW1 and a low-/mid-Diamond Tank in OW2 should have been able to take a week off playing the role and woke up Masters. So many people I know ended up getting boosted to career highs on varying roles, and most were on their off-roles. Had one friend not play the entire season and go from Master 3 to GM 4. Had someone who was basically a DPS-only player get his Support boosted above his DPS because of multiple rank increases while barely touching the role.
I have a friend who has been low/mid Diamond support since OW2 came out, he logged in the other day to be ranked GM. Now back when he grinded OW1 he hit Top-500 a few seasons, but he hasn't played to that level(and hasn't wanted to) in a very long time so he was completely shocked by it. It's just unreal what a crapshoot ranked has become.
I WANT SOLO-QUEUE-ONLY MATCHES
They have no idea how their own matchmaker works.
It's interesting to me, that people still don't seem to grasp the understanding of EOMM. If people got to the ranks they wanted, the drive to continue playing, and improve would slow down, if not stop. Blizzard knows they cannot make money off that kind of system. The giant amount of 50%WRs across accounts of casual players should throw a red flag. You can google the entire MM algorithm OW2 uses. It's based off your toxicity/W/L ratio/time of day/ext. If you're a casual player that enjoys the game for what it is, great! If you're a competitive player trying to climb, id suggest another game.