I agree. While indirect balance can shake things up Zenyatta i feel is still not in the spot he needs to be.
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Overwatch |OT3| White, White, Blue, White
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I agree. While indirect balance can shake things up Zenyatta i feel is still not in the spot he needs to be.
GraveRobberX
Platinum Trophy: Learned to Shit While Upright Again.
Why is situational awareness so bad with pubs
You would think being Level 110+ now, you at least picked up a few things
Oh hey Torb with Turret, nah let's not kill it, its not a priority, 10 second later, "Molten Core" 3+ players dead
I swear to god I get grouped with some of the most annoying players in solo queue, yet my opposition plays like a well oiled machine
Everyone must know by now if its Lijang Towers and its Command Center, 75% guarantee a Tracer will flank and pick off 1-3 players from behind before point opens up
You see a Mercy or Zeny go down, do other team members notice, fuck no, they just continue on their way
I'm not trying to say I'm some amazing elite player, but I have stopped many teams from whooping our asses, because I always push for the win
Even if I have to be the sacrificial lamb type and keep them noticing me and not either going for point or payload
Bleeding their clock is your gain
To this day I have no fucking idea why when its KOTH, if my team is doing superb, think they got in the bag and push hard into their base, why?
Let them come to you, they can kill you from their home base without dying
I have seen so many points flip because the healer, tank, 2 attackers went into their house to keep them at bay, only to die, then come running back to point that's turned to the other side and a defensive stance taken by the enemy now you have to work really hard to remove
Happens a lot in Ilios and Nepal
Most players still do not know what flanking is and why its a huge gain to the team who can do it right
You have players be stubborn and try to net that POTF, you would think a Hanzo would at least shoot a Phara out of the sky... Nope he's too busy arrow bombing Zarya's shield, earning that Ultimate meter bro
I had to stop having an amazing On fire as Junkrat, to switch to Widowmaker to snipe her out of the sky
I still continue to do good, but most players don't realize they are the goddamn counter to the other teams character
They just continue like its TDM and every kill is the main priority
I can't wait for competitive, at least I'll get grouped in with like minded people, then I won't have to suffer looking at death can where a Widow is sniping far away from the point when its Overtime and not push in when only left to at least try to extend the match
I've had matches where a Widow Yolo'ed, and just jumped and hooked like a maniac, against 2 players, while we rushed back, beat their cavalry and won
I've gotten to the point that if I see double Hanzos or Double Widow on attack, I leave
No way am I putting my time and skill so these Nimrods can Go Fuck Yourself arrows spam and most of the time whiff and not even net a kill, yet die to enemy Hanzo/Widow spectacularly
You would think being Level 110+ now, you at least picked up a few things
Oh hey Torb with Turret, nah let's not kill it, its not a priority, 10 second later, "Molten Core" 3+ players dead
I swear to god I get grouped with some of the most annoying players in solo queue, yet my opposition plays like a well oiled machine
Everyone must know by now if its Lijang Towers and its Command Center, 75% guarantee a Tracer will flank and pick off 1-3 players from behind before point opens up
You see a Mercy or Zeny go down, do other team members notice, fuck no, they just continue on their way
I'm not trying to say I'm some amazing elite player, but I have stopped many teams from whooping our asses, because I always push for the win
Even if I have to be the sacrificial lamb type and keep them noticing me and not either going for point or payload
Bleeding their clock is your gain
To this day I have no fucking idea why when its KOTH, if my team is doing superb, think they got in the bag and push hard into their base, why?
Let them come to you, they can kill you from their home base without dying
I have seen so many points flip because the healer, tank, 2 attackers went into their house to keep them at bay, only to die, then come running back to point that's turned to the other side and a defensive stance taken by the enemy now you have to work really hard to remove
Happens a lot in Ilios and Nepal
Most players still do not know what flanking is and why its a huge gain to the team who can do it right
You have players be stubborn and try to net that POTF, you would think a Hanzo would at least shoot a Phara out of the sky... Nope he's too busy arrow bombing Zarya's shield, earning that Ultimate meter bro
I had to stop having an amazing On fire as Junkrat, to switch to Widowmaker to snipe her out of the sky
I still continue to do good, but most players don't realize they are the goddamn counter to the other teams character
They just continue like its TDM and every kill is the main priority
I can't wait for competitive, at least I'll get grouped in with like minded people, then I won't have to suffer looking at death can where a Widow is sniping far away from the point when its Overtime and not push in when only left to at least try to extend the match
I've had matches where a Widow Yolo'ed, and just jumped and hooked like a maniac, against 2 players, while we rushed back, beat their cavalry and won
I've gotten to the point that if I see double Hanzos or Double Widow on attack, I leave
No way am I putting my time and skill so these Nimrods can Go Fuck Yourself arrows spam and most of the time whiff and not even net a kill, yet die to enemy Hanzo/Widow spectacularly
i sent you an invite over the weekend but you don't wanna play with me.
They're playing really bad teams
There was a game yesterday where we set up to stop the payload in front of the enemy starting point on Gibraltar and the enemy team literally never even got out of their base.
And they didn't have a bad team composition either
If people fought teams like that, they might think it was a good idea to crowd the base at all times
GraveRobberX
Platinum Trophy: Learned to Shit While Upright Again.
Sorry Lik, but I zone out when playing
I rarely join GAF groups because most are bothered with my fan going + TV volume
Too hot in NYC
Also someone messaged me that I talk to much from GAF and not to get aggressive chasing for the win, just relax
Since then I just play on my own and don't want to bother people
Usually I join when I know certain people can enjoy my time
Most of the time my fan + TV volume pumped up to hear the footsteps/gun noise
Also I do get carried away sometimes with my hollering
Darryl M R
Member
If I join a friend's game and watch them play, when the match is over will the game put me in their lobby to play with them?
Straight Edge
Member
Nope.
I feel like the difference is, on PC when you get a team of 5 tracers, or the Mei ice wall trolls you while you're heading to the defense point, you still win and the Mei gets POTG.
Trolling is so much more effective when it's actually effective.
Can someone explain me the Caveman spongbob meme?
I see it on twitter al the time but i dont watch the cartoons so i dont get it
tl;dr: Kids and their memes
Frustrated_Grunt
Member
This is decent improvement to both my character diversity and my stats.
Dead Prince
Banned
its obvious most people can't see the area because their FOV is set to 60
Can someone explain me the Caveman spongbob meme?
I see it on twitter al the time but i dont watch the cartoons so i dont get it
tl;dr: Kids and their memes
It's just basically being caught with your pants down or dumbfounded by a sudden situation
toastyToast
Member
am i wrong to think pinging lucio's ult means lets push this point?
If you run at Bastion WITH deflect up you deserve to die. That's some bad Genji. Wait for them to point at you at the very least.
Spectators will only join in if someone playing drops from the match/lobby
GraveRobberX said:
We've all had some really frustrating games but they're over quick enough and you can just move on. People seem more receptive to changing characters if others aren't screaming like maniacs in chat. It's shocking how much better games can go based on how people choose to talk to one another. Try to be positive and proactive during the initial countdown phase to start the team on the right foot. Yeah, you'll run into people who are just not going to care for whatever reason but that's life. I've also seen enough good players to not immediately judge and quit a match at the start based on which characters are picked. Sure, someone might pick a character that seems at a disadvantage for the mode/map, but sometimes they can completely wreck the other team.
after this last weekend, I'm pretty sure it means "here's some extra health so you can go off and die away from the objective".
Thanks dude!
Brawndo Addict
Banned
Ha ha, yeah, reflect is kind a of a weird ability because it requires the opponent to be stupid to be really useful. Bastion continues to annoy me because so many characters can sneak up on them but not actually have the burst to kill before they just turn around and melt you down, or heal up while you duck behind cover. That and Bastion/Reinhardt is not fun to play or play against; requires much more coordination to counter than it requires to execute.
That said, the only time I get unreasonably angry in this game is when people don't play for objectives. Hopefully competitive mode will alleviate that, but it's so frustrating when people kill half the enemy team and then go chasing the stragglers while the payload or capture point remains empty. Or worse, when it's overtime and people forget to stand on the objective and it times out ><
Well, that and when people ignore turrets/teleporters/bastions that are in plain sight and never move. I had a game where I had to suicide kill their teleporter as Lucio every single time, always in the exact same spot in a wide open area. Had to take a break after that one.
It is a testament to the game though that nine times out of ten I'm having a blast even when I'm losing.
That said, the only time I get unreasonably angry in this game is when people don't play for objectives. Hopefully competitive mode will alleviate that, but it's so frustrating when people kill half the enemy team and then go chasing the stragglers while the payload or capture point remains empty. Or worse, when it's overtime and people forget to stand on the objective and it times out ><
Well, that and when people ignore turrets/teleporters/bastions that are in plain sight and never move. I had a game where I had to suicide kill their teleporter as Lucio every single time, always in the exact same spot in a wide open area. Had to take a break after that one.
It is a testament to the game though that nine times out of ten I'm having a blast even when I'm losing.
Thanks and also how would I use his ultimate? Since I never get any kills and just end up dying in the end.
TheLetdown
Member
Spinosaurus
Member
Thanks for the tips guys. Been having a lot of fun with Winston now and winning a lot more. Leap is soo good, and bullying healers is satisfying lmao.
I had a Winston walk right past a Mei who was freezing me. She headshot me and then chased after him. I closed the game.
One thing I notice about McCree is that I'm more often on trash and clean up duty now. Even if you get headshots which I can pretty well sometimes, it spooks even casual players in pubs immediately and they flee half way across the map. I can only effectively use it to potshot enemy offensive heros that already have a bit of damage.
Sorry to hear that man, he left a friend to die and ignored a free kill.
Sorry to hear that man, he left a friend to die and ignored a free kill.
More people should definitely have this kinda attitude
She's very good against McCree now that he got nerfed. Also great against Mei and Zenyatta.
I know that but I mean hard counter. I feel like she doesnt hard counter anyone, but she isnt hard countered by anyone either.
Kaplan on matchmaking, AKA shut the hell up about "Forced 50":
http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20745504371
"Great post, ExcaliburZ. Allow me to share some of my personal thoughts on matchmaking...
We’ve been following all of the discussion around matchmaking. When topics get discussed in the community (and often among game developers) we tend to talk about things in very black/white or right/wrong terms. But most important decisions you make as a game developer are difficult trade-off decisions with no perfect answer.
The goal of the matchmaking is to make it so that you as a player do not have to find 11 other people to play with. You can click a Play button, and the system finds other players for you. That’s the basics. The reality is, the matchmaker is extremely complex in what it is trying to do. It does way more than I am going to mention in this post so while I am going to offer some information here, I am leaving some things out (not all intentionally – it’s just a really complex system).
At a most basic level, the matchmaker is trying to put you with 11 other people. But it doesn’t just randomly select 11 people. It takes into account a number of factors (more than I am going to list and not necessarily prioritized).
The first factor is time. The matchmaker will try to find you match quickly and not force you to wait too long. A very common thing that happens is that a player will become dissatisfied with a match and say “I don’t care how long you make me wait. I’d rather wait 20 minutes and have a good match than get matchmade into a match like you just put me into.” What we’ve seen is that when the time crosses a certain threshold, players begin to complain about it taking too long to find a match. It sounds good… waiting for that perfect match. But when the reality of waiting too long comes down on most people, they end up vocalizing their discontent on the forums. Also, there is an unrealistic expectation that if a player waits longer for a match, the “better” the match will be. The concept of “better” when it comes to matchmaking is a really hard one to define.
If I were to summarize match results into 5 broad buckets it would be these:
My team won. We beat the other team by a long shot.
My team barely won.
My team barely lost.
My team lost. We lost by a long shot. It wasn’t even close
It was a broken match somehow. Maybe someone disconnected, was screwing around or we played with fewer than 12 people.
(of course there are more cases than this – I am overly simplifying here)
Most players will say that they want a match to be either type 2 or type 3 as I described above. Those sound even. Barely win or barely lose. But I believe when psychology comes into play, most players actually expect type 1 or type 2 to be the result. Even an amazingly close type 3 match can turn into a highly negative experience for a lot of players. And if you keep “barely losing” it’s not a very fun night. Winning is fun and good. Losing is less fun than winning.
So waiting a really long time to lose by a long shot is obviously not good. But waiting a really long time to barely lose is also a negative experience. And if we assume that your chances of winning are 50%, that means that even waiting a really long time for a “better” match means that you’re going to wait a really long time to probably lose half the time… If your expectation was that you were going to wait a really long time for an awesome match where you either 1) Won by a long shot or 2) Barely won… but still won nonetheless, your expectations for what the system can or should do are in the wrong place. We do not generate bots to take losses so you can win more than 50% of the time. Those are real people losing on the other end of every loss you take.
A second factor we take into account is ping. We’re matchmaking people all over the world and we want to match people to the closest servers for the best play experience. In our second stress test, we had other things prioritized over ping-based matchmaking such as skill and time. For those of you who participated in that stress test, you’ll remember how terrible the game performance was on the first day as well as how “lit up” the forums were demanding that players be given an option of server choice. So now we prioritize ping for players. Some players live in challenging parts of the world when it comes to high speed data connections (I’m looking at you, Andes mountain range… so it’s not perfect for everyone. But largely, most people get a really decent connection to our game servers. Matching players with wildly disparate pings also results in a higher frequency of undesirable side effects such as “getting shot behind walls”. Of course if you live in Houston, Texas and group with your buddy in Geneva, Switzerland, you’re now introducing uncertainty to our system that’s harder for us to deal with… but we allow it.
Which brings us to the next factor that we match on: grouping. The majority of our matches are comprised of either all solo players or solo players and players grouped with one other person. However, the system does try to match groups of equal sizes together first and foremost. As the time people wait grows, we expand the search to try to find others for them to play with. This means that occasionally we will match groups with players who are not grouped or in a group size that is smaller than their own. Like I mentioned, this is exceedingly rare but can happen. And that match is only made when players have crossed a waiting threshold that we deem too long. For most group matches a group of 6 is placed against another group of 6.
Groups are a big challenge in our matchmaking system. You can group with people of wildly varying skill and ping and we allow you to. It’s pretty unlikely that there is another group in the queue that exactly mirrors the unique circumstances that you have set up (pings, skills etc.). We want you to group. We feel that it’s the best way to play the game.
So we try to avoid things that discourage grouping and we want to continually improve the social systems so that you’ll find it easier and easier to group with people you have chosen to play with. Playing with people you choose to play with is going to be more reliably fun than playing with people we choose for you. I once used the analogy of hanging out with people on a Saturday night. If you were to go out with five of your friends it would probably be a better time than if we tried to find 5 random people for you to go out with, no matter how smart we were in our selection process…
Anyway, this leads me to matchmaking rating. This rating is the most important thing that we try to match on. Basically this rating means “how good are you?” Commonly, you’ll hear this referred to as Matchmaking Rating or MMR. MMR is derived differently in different games. Overwatch borrows a lot of knowledge from other games but also does a lot of things unique to Overwatch. As each player plays games, their matchmaking rating goes up or down depending on if they win or lose. The system is extremely complicated and there is a lot more going on here than I am going to spell out. So please don’t take this as the comprehensive guide to how MMR is calculated in Overwatch. There is definitely a lot more going on under the hood.
In Overwatch, whether your MMR goes up or down is contingent on winning or losing. But there are a number of factors that determine how much that rating goes up or down. For example, what map you’re playing on and whether you were attacking or defending is factored in. We know the win rates on attack/defend on all of the maps and we normalize accordingly. Not all wins and losses are equal. We also look at your individual performance on each of the heroes you played during the match. Everyone has better and worse heroes and we have tons of data showing us what performance levels should be like on those heroes. We also look at your opponents and whether or not their matchmaking rating is higher or lower than yours. These are just a few of the things that are considered when determining how your skill should go up or down. At no point in MMR calculations do we look at your win/loss ratio and win/loss ratio is never used to determine who to match you with or against. We are not trying to drive your win/loss percentage toward a certain number (although the fact that so many people are at 50% win rates makes us extremely happy). All the system does when it comes to matching on skill is attempt to match you with people of a similar number.
The system is of course deeper than this. There are penalties and handicaps added for things like not playing for a while or playing in groups of varying sizes. We also do special things for brand new players to (hopefully) keep them away from the general population. Players will often mistakenly look at player level and accuse the matchmaker of making unfair matches. One thing that I have mentioned before is that we were evaluating your skill during closed beta, open beta and the second stress test weekend. If you played in any of these (over 10 million players did), we had already determined a skill rating for you (most likely). This means that it’s not uncommon to see a level 1 matchmade against much higher level players. In most of these cases, the Level 1 is a skilled player who played during the phases I mentioned but did not immediately play at launch.
There are many factors that are beyond our control that add noise to the matchmaking system.
• Leavers are extremely disruptive
• Players vary wildly in their skill with different heroes. We have no clue which of the 21 heroes you are going to play during a match
• Groups form with wild variance in skill levels and ping. Contrary to popular belief there is not a “perfect match” for your unique snowflake group
• Sometimes your little brother plays on your account
• Sometimes the cat walks in front of the screen
• Sometimes your wireless mouse runs out of batteries. (Why do you use a wireless mouse btw?)
• Sometimes a highly skilled player buys a new copy of OW to “start fresh” on a new account
• Sometimes you have internet problems
• Sometimes you play drunk or tired… or both
• That first game of the night…
• …that last game of the night
• “Life”
So this brings me to some thoughts I’ve been having about Overwatch. While this whole post has been mostly my personal thoughts – this next part is “especially” my thoughts and not reflective of the team or the company’s POV.
For better or for worse, we focused the design of the game on winning or losing as a team. OW is not a game where you ignore the map objectives and then look at your K/D ratio to determine how good you are. We want you to focus on winning or losing and as a result you do focus on winning or losing. We tried to make it so that losing isn’t the end of the world, but to a lot of people they expect to win far much more than they lose. I sometimes wonder if we were able to clone you 11 times and then put you in a match with and against yourself, would you be happy with the outcome? Even if you lost? Out of the 5 types of matches I described above, it is my belief that you would still experience types 1-4. Are those “stomps” still not acceptable? Because they will happen…
And I believe OW is strange game in that regard. I spend a lot of time studying the matches that I am in because I am very focused on matchmaking. I’ve been in so many Control Point maps where my team got destroyed on the first point, the enemy team got destroyed on the second point and then we play the third point to a 99%/99% overtime. If you judged any of those single points on their own merits you could say you have two stomps (one in your favor, one against you) and one close match. Same players...no change in matchmaking. Or take a match that I was just in on Route 66, for example. My team was on attack and could barely push out past the train cars. Two members of our team swapped heroes and we proceeded to march the payload all the way to the end of the map practically uncontested. The match went from a stomp in one direction to a stomp in the other direction.
So while it is possible for a mismatch to result in a stomp, not every stomp is a mismatch. If every time a team dominates another team it is viewed as “the matchmaker is broken”, the problem we have is with perception and expectations. Look across all pro sports. Even matches happen every night. Stomps happen every night. It’s a reality of any competitive game. Does that make being on the receiving end sting any less – probably not.
We are constantly improving the matchmaker. We learn more each day. We have one of our best engineers and best designers full time dedicated to the system. Many of those “silent” patches that go out during the week are adjustments to the system. For example, we recently realized that “Avoid this player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.
We will always be working on our matchmaking system. We’re listening to feedback, we’re playing the game a ton ourselves and we’re looking at hard data to inform our decisions. This post wasn’t my way of saying everything is fine. I just wanted to share some of my thoughts as someone who has been evaluating the system itself very closely as well as monitoring the feedback. I want to put it out there that there is a lot of room for improvement but also suggest that there are forces in play that cause some fair matches to sway lopsided due to forces out of our control. The game is as much (if not more) art than it is science. We’ll keep working to make it better!"
http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20745504371
"Great post, ExcaliburZ. Allow me to share some of my personal thoughts on matchmaking...
We’ve been following all of the discussion around matchmaking. When topics get discussed in the community (and often among game developers) we tend to talk about things in very black/white or right/wrong terms. But most important decisions you make as a game developer are difficult trade-off decisions with no perfect answer.
The goal of the matchmaking is to make it so that you as a player do not have to find 11 other people to play with. You can click a Play button, and the system finds other players for you. That’s the basics. The reality is, the matchmaker is extremely complex in what it is trying to do. It does way more than I am going to mention in this post so while I am going to offer some information here, I am leaving some things out (not all intentionally – it’s just a really complex system).
At a most basic level, the matchmaker is trying to put you with 11 other people. But it doesn’t just randomly select 11 people. It takes into account a number of factors (more than I am going to list and not necessarily prioritized).
The first factor is time. The matchmaker will try to find you match quickly and not force you to wait too long. A very common thing that happens is that a player will become dissatisfied with a match and say “I don’t care how long you make me wait. I’d rather wait 20 minutes and have a good match than get matchmade into a match like you just put me into.” What we’ve seen is that when the time crosses a certain threshold, players begin to complain about it taking too long to find a match. It sounds good… waiting for that perfect match. But when the reality of waiting too long comes down on most people, they end up vocalizing their discontent on the forums. Also, there is an unrealistic expectation that if a player waits longer for a match, the “better” the match will be. The concept of “better” when it comes to matchmaking is a really hard one to define.
If I were to summarize match results into 5 broad buckets it would be these:
My team won. We beat the other team by a long shot.
My team barely won.
My team barely lost.
My team lost. We lost by a long shot. It wasn’t even close
It was a broken match somehow. Maybe someone disconnected, was screwing around or we played with fewer than 12 people.
(of course there are more cases than this – I am overly simplifying here)
Most players will say that they want a match to be either type 2 or type 3 as I described above. Those sound even. Barely win or barely lose. But I believe when psychology comes into play, most players actually expect type 1 or type 2 to be the result. Even an amazingly close type 3 match can turn into a highly negative experience for a lot of players. And if you keep “barely losing” it’s not a very fun night. Winning is fun and good. Losing is less fun than winning.
So waiting a really long time to lose by a long shot is obviously not good. But waiting a really long time to barely lose is also a negative experience. And if we assume that your chances of winning are 50%, that means that even waiting a really long time for a “better” match means that you’re going to wait a really long time to probably lose half the time… If your expectation was that you were going to wait a really long time for an awesome match where you either 1) Won by a long shot or 2) Barely won… but still won nonetheless, your expectations for what the system can or should do are in the wrong place. We do not generate bots to take losses so you can win more than 50% of the time. Those are real people losing on the other end of every loss you take.
A second factor we take into account is ping. We’re matchmaking people all over the world and we want to match people to the closest servers for the best play experience. In our second stress test, we had other things prioritized over ping-based matchmaking such as skill and time. For those of you who participated in that stress test, you’ll remember how terrible the game performance was on the first day as well as how “lit up” the forums were demanding that players be given an option of server choice. So now we prioritize ping for players. Some players live in challenging parts of the world when it comes to high speed data connections (I’m looking at you, Andes mountain range…
so it’s not perfect for everyone. But largely, most people get a really decent connection to our game servers. Matching players with wildly disparate pings also results in a higher frequency of undesirable side effects such as “getting shot behind walls”. Of course if you live in Houston, Texas and group with your buddy in Geneva, Switzerland, you’re now introducing uncertainty to our system that’s harder for us to deal with… but we allow it.Which brings us to the next factor that we match on: grouping. The majority of our matches are comprised of either all solo players or solo players and players grouped with one other person. However, the system does try to match groups of equal sizes together first and foremost. As the time people wait grows, we expand the search to try to find others for them to play with. This means that occasionally we will match groups with players who are not grouped or in a group size that is smaller than their own. Like I mentioned, this is exceedingly rare but can happen. And that match is only made when players have crossed a waiting threshold that we deem too long. For most group matches a group of 6 is placed against another group of 6.
Groups are a big challenge in our matchmaking system. You can group with people of wildly varying skill and ping and we allow you to. It’s pretty unlikely that there is another group in the queue that exactly mirrors the unique circumstances that you have set up (pings, skills etc.). We want you to group. We feel that it’s the best way to play the game.
So we try to avoid things that discourage grouping and we want to continually improve the social systems so that you’ll find it easier and easier to group with people you have chosen to play with. Playing with people you choose to play with is going to be more reliably fun than playing with people we choose for you. I once used the analogy of hanging out with people on a Saturday night. If you were to go out with five of your friends it would probably be a better time than if we tried to find 5 random people for you to go out with, no matter how smart we were in our selection process…
Anyway, this leads me to matchmaking rating. This rating is the most important thing that we try to match on. Basically this rating means “how good are you?” Commonly, you’ll hear this referred to as Matchmaking Rating or MMR. MMR is derived differently in different games. Overwatch borrows a lot of knowledge from other games but also does a lot of things unique to Overwatch. As each player plays games, their matchmaking rating goes up or down depending on if they win or lose. The system is extremely complicated and there is a lot more going on here than I am going to spell out. So please don’t take this as the comprehensive guide to how MMR is calculated in Overwatch. There is definitely a lot more going on under the hood.
In Overwatch, whether your MMR goes up or down is contingent on winning or losing. But there are a number of factors that determine how much that rating goes up or down. For example, what map you’re playing on and whether you were attacking or defending is factored in. We know the win rates on attack/defend on all of the maps and we normalize accordingly. Not all wins and losses are equal. We also look at your individual performance on each of the heroes you played during the match. Everyone has better and worse heroes and we have tons of data showing us what performance levels should be like on those heroes. We also look at your opponents and whether or not their matchmaking rating is higher or lower than yours. These are just a few of the things that are considered when determining how your skill should go up or down. At no point in MMR calculations do we look at your win/loss ratio and win/loss ratio is never used to determine who to match you with or against. We are not trying to drive your win/loss percentage toward a certain number (although the fact that so many people are at 50% win rates makes us extremely happy). All the system does when it comes to matching on skill is attempt to match you with people of a similar number.
The system is of course deeper than this. There are penalties and handicaps added for things like not playing for a while or playing in groups of varying sizes. We also do special things for brand new players to (hopefully) keep them away from the general population. Players will often mistakenly look at player level and accuse the matchmaker of making unfair matches. One thing that I have mentioned before is that we were evaluating your skill during closed beta, open beta and the second stress test weekend. If you played in any of these (over 10 million players did), we had already determined a skill rating for you (most likely). This means that it’s not uncommon to see a level 1 matchmade against much higher level players. In most of these cases, the Level 1 is a skilled player who played during the phases I mentioned but did not immediately play at launch.
There are many factors that are beyond our control that add noise to the matchmaking system.
• Leavers are extremely disruptive
• Players vary wildly in their skill with different heroes. We have no clue which of the 21 heroes you are going to play during a match
• Groups form with wild variance in skill levels and ping. Contrary to popular belief there is not a “perfect match” for your unique snowflake group
• Sometimes your little brother plays on your account
• Sometimes the cat walks in front of the screen
• Sometimes your wireless mouse runs out of batteries. (Why do you use a wireless mouse btw?)
• Sometimes a highly skilled player buys a new copy of OW to “start fresh” on a new account
• Sometimes you have internet problems
• Sometimes you play drunk or tired… or both
• That first game of the night…
• …that last game of the night
• “Life”
So this brings me to some thoughts I’ve been having about Overwatch. While this whole post has been mostly my personal thoughts – this next part is “especially” my thoughts and not reflective of the team or the company’s POV.
For better or for worse, we focused the design of the game on winning or losing as a team. OW is not a game where you ignore the map objectives and then look at your K/D ratio to determine how good you are. We want you to focus on winning or losing and as a result you do focus on winning or losing. We tried to make it so that losing isn’t the end of the world, but to a lot of people they expect to win far much more than they lose. I sometimes wonder if we were able to clone you 11 times and then put you in a match with and against yourself, would you be happy with the outcome? Even if you lost? Out of the 5 types of matches I described above, it is my belief that you would still experience types 1-4. Are those “stomps” still not acceptable? Because they will happen…
And I believe OW is strange game in that regard. I spend a lot of time studying the matches that I am in because I am very focused on matchmaking. I’ve been in so many Control Point maps where my team got destroyed on the first point, the enemy team got destroyed on the second point and then we play the third point to a 99%/99% overtime. If you judged any of those single points on their own merits you could say you have two stomps (one in your favor, one against you) and one close match. Same players...no change in matchmaking. Or take a match that I was just in on Route 66, for example. My team was on attack and could barely push out past the train cars. Two members of our team swapped heroes and we proceeded to march the payload all the way to the end of the map practically uncontested. The match went from a stomp in one direction to a stomp in the other direction.
So while it is possible for a mismatch to result in a stomp, not every stomp is a mismatch. If every time a team dominates another team it is viewed as “the matchmaker is broken”, the problem we have is with perception and expectations. Look across all pro sports. Even matches happen every night. Stomps happen every night. It’s a reality of any competitive game. Does that make being on the receiving end sting any less – probably not.
We are constantly improving the matchmaker. We learn more each day. We have one of our best engineers and best designers full time dedicated to the system. Many of those “silent” patches that go out during the week are adjustments to the system. For example, we recently realized that “Avoid this player” was wreaking havoc on matchmaking. One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy – they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior). The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had “opened up” to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.
We will always be working on our matchmaking system. We’re listening to feedback, we’re playing the game a ton ourselves and we’re looking at hard data to inform our decisions. This post wasn’t my way of saying everything is fine. I just wanted to share some of my thoughts as someone who has been evaluating the system itself very closely as well as monitoring the feedback. I want to put it out there that there is a lot of room for improvement but also suggest that there are forces in play that cause some fair matches to sway lopsided due to forces out of our control. The game is as much (if not more) art than it is science. We’ll keep working to make it better!"
killdatninja
Banned
Read an article from forbes about our good little buddy torb. I think he absolutely destroys pubs on console. One thing i noticed the article didn't point out, is that the PC community was already more experienced due to the beta (and various players also had experience with classed based shooters like TF2), whereas the console version you have people who have never touched a classed based shooter of this caliber and the inexperience is killing everyone. Would torb be a non-issue on console if we just wait a month or two?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...g-overwatch-on-ps4-and-xbox-one/#2ce4accc1419
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertc...g-overwatch-on-ps4-and-xbox-one/#2ce4accc1419
I feel like I can destroy Zarya with Tracer.
Illusive_Juan
Member
So this happened to me the other day.
People learn with time. This statement is so reactionary when you still have folks playing TDM and running in solo vs a whole team.
LucidMomentum
Member
If you're smart, possibly.
Most solo Tracers I've played against I'll just bait in by not upping my shield for a bit, then popping it and tossing a right click where they backtrack to.
Yes, that's what it means. It bugs me so much.
We're close to losing so I ping the team "hey, my ult is ready" meaning "hey, we should group up and take the point". People DO group up, we get close to the point and I pop it.
People RUN OFF THE POINT to 1v1 some Genji outside the point and die.
I'm the only one running around the point - well, me and a Tracer, the Dva is off somewhere.
Guys, pls.
Zarya should have that one imo. Regening shields + her bubble is a long uphill battle for tracer. Don't wanna stay in firefights long as Tracer either as it attracts more attention. At best a stalemate for both players until someone else show sup.
I forgot about her. If Zarya has her shields on CD its a wrap.
I guess that wouldnt be a hard counter then
He's not covering the main complaint though, a lot of the time people on one team are not playing the objective while another, who might not be very good is at least TRYING. That's the problem and why I don't belive the MMR is as effective as they are claiming it is. It works moderately well in group play though.
Once you get to a certain point you should not be having any matches where one side is not playing the objective. Maybe one or two people, but the whole team?
I had a KotH where my WHOLE group flanked and never once entered the ring, this is at 200 hours of play, MMR is clearly not working.
I will make a comment on great team work in a winning game and some people will say they rarely get good team games. I have gotten tons of friend requests because people wanted others that stood out to play with.
The matchmaking is a joke.
she is really, really good against junkrat. pharah to a lesser extent.
So this happened to me the other day.
Nice!
I've have yet to make one of these :/
How so for Pharah? Id actually say that it's likely Pharah counters her since you can take to the air making zarya unable to really hurt her.
Sir Blaming
Member
So this happened to me the other day.
Hey, I saw this on reddit.
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