SR should be simple

[Wrathion-21937]

I don’t really get how SR is worked out but judging by posts on here neither does anyone else. I can’t tell you the amount of times i’ve been one win away from the next rank, lost 1 game and lost some much SR i then need to win 3 in a row to rank up instead.

Surely it would make sense to just have a win be +x and a loss be -x with a small amount of bonus points thrown in there for things like medals and POTG.

E.g. (in case I’m not clear because I’m not very good at explaining)
Win = +25sr
Loss = -25sr
Gold medals = +3sr (silver 2 bronze 1)
So losing with 1 gold medal would be-22sr (so at least if you tried you’re not punished so hard)

This would just mean losing once wouldn’t throw you way back, I’ve seen posts on here where people are losing like 50+sr in one go which just doesn’t seem fair

Forgive me if this isn’t fair off how it’s worked out and i’ve just misunderstood, please just correct me instead of leaving mean comments

[Kickhamster-2644]

A win isn’t always worth the same. If the team is judged by the system to averagely be stronger than your team you get more SR, if your enemy team is weaker you get less SR

[Bukkit-2956]

if the enemy is lower rank and your team are a bunch of trolls…

there… 9/10 matches are wrongfully rated

[FatBluDragon-2951]

Scott Mercer, an Overwatch developer, has explained how SR is distributed.

@ScottMercer

There are many other reasons for the SR gained or lost after a game to differ in magnitude that have nothing to do with grouping:

• What was the quality of the enemy team and your predicted win chance? You gain more on a win if your predicted win chance was <50%. You gain less on a win if your predicted win chance was >50%.
• Are you playing consistently? New accounts or accounts that have been inactive will see larger magnitude changes both upwards and downwards. This settles back to normal as you play additional games.
• Did your 3000+ SR recently decay due to inactivity? If this happened, you’ll gain more SR on a win until you get back to your “undecayed” SR.
• Are you a Platinum-tier player or below? If you performed particularly well or worse than what is considered a typical performance during a match, then there’s a small SR modification to reflect that.
• Is your current SR really high? Your SR increases less on a win than it decreases on a loss as your SR approaches the systemic limit of 5000.

It is odd that they show those threads over the US forum (I’d prefer to merge the English speaking servers together) but at least we have an explanation.

The most important factor is this one:

• What was the quality of the enemy team and your predicted win chance? You gain more on a win if your predicted win chance was <50%. You gain less on a win if your predicted win chance was >50%.

It indicates that your SR distribution depends on the win chance of the game. It only says that you gain more/less on a win chance of below/over 50% but I think it also has an impact on your SR loss.