SR system is busted w/pic proof - Not a rant, just constructive criticism

Competitive Discussion
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Winrate well above 60% (82% and 76% for counterpicks) for 30 games sample => SR stuck around the ladder average.
h t t p s : / / i b b . c o / y V W M 5 x 0 <-linkhere____

It’s not only the swarm of smurfs and botters the problem. The system is designed to allow for climbing out of the middle rank only if you net a winrate of 85-90%. On top of that it doesn’t take into account smurfs, bots, leavers, throwers and since on average you lose way more than you gain, the vast majority of players are hard stuck.

Blizzard should hire decent data scientists, pair them up with a game designer and devise a functioning ladder system than this garbage here before this game dies, or before they bring this flawed system into OW2.

Also fire whoever though this was a good idea, it’s clearly not working and it’s the worst damage done to the game.
OW is an extremely fun, addictive and engaging game, but by looking at all the ranting post people get frustrated playing and leave it because the actual reward for improvement is beyond such an high threshold.
And the improvement rate of a casual gamer cannot meet such demands, especially since the game itself doesn’t teach you how to play correctly and very small mistakes can cost games and points ( hence hours of climbing).

OW PVP doesn’t need a dramatic re-design ( just more heroes for tanks/healers), to be rewarding. All it needs is a decent ranking system.
Flatten the distribution of the ladder, multiply the ranks x20, remove the upper ceiling, reward the casual just for playing and remove negative SR on loss ( or make them 80% less impactful).

Drop the EXP level, SR will increase just for playing proportionally to the winrate, ( being negative only for leavers ), while hidden MMR will take care of the matchmaking anyway. Players will still plateau but you will not have 75% of your playerbase around 20% of your ladder.

I won’t spend more time to elaborate this for free but what the hell blizzard ( here’s a bit of a rant) get your **** together.

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You lost me and remove the negative SR for a loss.

There is nothing that wrong with the current system. If you improve as a player, and win more than you lose you climb. If you improve greatly, you climb faster.

If you are not gaining much while winning, you are clearly not performing well enough in comparison to your peers.

Also your Rein and Sigma winrates are a sign that you are losing a fair few games too.

I will guess this isn’t your first account? (being only lvl 34…). Were you hoping that on a new account you’d be noticeably higher than your first because you had in your head what you thought your skill level was? Only to end up at about the same SR?

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Thanks for taking your time to piece the link together and to reply.

To answer your questions:
Brand new account was made to have a clean MMR. I am not about to run an A/B test for blizzard but that’s the least I could do.
I have made several OW account over the years and I’m well aware it is consistent. Freshies don’t get a different algorithm or at least neither the MMR or the SR are wrong.

Rein and Sigma winrates are unimportant as they’ve been played for less than 5-10 min as you can see the playtime for Winston and D.va is significantly lower.

Regarding your remarks:
I agree that if you improve as a player you climb and probably with this projection the account could hit 2500 SR at a 65-70% average winrate around 50-80 games. If the system locks the player in place there’d be no OW booster services out there.

My point is that the system is badly designed to engage and positively reward the vast majority of players.
And that is because the improvement needed to climb, and therefore to feel rewarded, are, in my opinion and as of the general tone of the discussions in the chats and on youtube, too demanding for the average player.
The result is that small improvements are not registered by the system. That is especially true, if as you’re rightfully pointing out, “comparative improvements” are considered.
Also the disincentive in playing caused by the SR loss would disappear: how often a player around his plateau would rater not play the game to risk losing SR to a bad game? Many players make secondary account for other heroes to save the SR. ( I don’t want to consider the financial side of selling freshies vs retaining a larger playerbase, but OW has microtransaction, and besides we’re discussing game design here ).
Players with less playtime will not be able to keep up with the meta, casuals especially will flock occasionally in and out, and will always fall down the ladder because the ladder is moving up.

Also you need to factor in the need to improve across several heroes in case of non-one trick players, and the negative comparative effect on climbing that cheaters, boosters, smurfs and a dwindling playerbase cause by shifting the ladder to the right.

Switching from a SR category locked ranking system ( heritage of the last MOBAS generation) for an uncapped system, whereas a player gains skill point proportionally to the number of wins and to the winrate, and loses skill point at a 10% (just an example) of that same rate is a solution to these issues.

An uncapped SR with such a formula would guarantee to the vast majority of players an increase in SR over time, and therefore a feeling of improvement and reward just for playing the game without throwing or cheating. Good players however would gain a bigger multiplier on those point due to an higher winrate and net an absolute number of skill point much higher.

So they’ll see how high they can soar on the right side of the ladder, meanwhile average players around the middle can measure their improvement as the distance from the starting point of the season. The feeling of floating around the same SR is gone. To climb you play, to climb higher you play more, to climb to the top 5% you play more and win more.

The problem with smurfs, boosters, etc, etc is mitigated greatly as the player’s engagement is raised by the constant “artificial” feeling of improvement. And the MMR system can be kept the same to guarantee the matchmaking.

Surely there are reasons and motivations that us players cannot know on to why this flawed approach is used. I personally hope it’s not just plain bad design and stupid decision making.

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You see there are 2 very simple answers here.

  1. they have a lot of very smart devs working on many many games across many platforms. If there was a system that was miles better, it would be in place.

  2. Rank, SR, smurfs, boosting are all irrelevant to some degree. Just play, enjoy, move on.

If you’re sweating, buying more accounts and so on just to prove a point, you are wasting a lot of time and money. 5 odd years and millions of players/accounts later… pretty sure all the conspiracy theories have been set out into the wild and been proven to be nonsense by now.

It is a video game. Pick the mode and heroes you enjoy and play. If you’re not enjoying, stop playing.

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The only time I wasted sadly was replying to a forum worker and make a thread on a discussion on alternative SR systems. Ah the queue is done, I hope they pay you at least. Have a great day and farewell!

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Accusing someone of impersonating a member of staff…

Weird

You just mad because you can’t climb and you’d rather blame the system than just get better at the game.

Just because I have worked put how to go from bronze to diamond, I must be an employee.

Suppose I could buy another account and end up in the same SR window… because you know, thats my skill level… (wait, I did, I have a Ball one trick account… its 3.1k)

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Cool, you made your point: I am a madman, your not a forum worker and a far better OW player and Blizzard has the best system.

Now, please stop replying to this thread because maybe somebody with some actual insights and arguments just might add something factual to the topic. Even though I’m not getting any hopes up.

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While I see what you’re saying, I find it impossible to get sufficient heals in many games. I’ve stood with 24 hp, asking for heals in front of a moira who’s spending time DPS’ing
I’ve played with anna’s and baps who only snipe away.
Support’s where both of them go as a secondary support.
I was even bronze in heals as a mei, while our HOG was gold heals…

These aren’t isolated incidents, I’m assuming your perspective is from Plat and above? But to get to get above gold is so hard. Not saying I deserve plat, I did make it there, when I was with a team of similar SR players, because we had our main roles, and preformed the role we played.

TBH, Recently I’ve spent more than enough time in games asking healers to heal. And since August, the number of low xp “smurf” accounts is about 20 times what it was in my previous 3 years of playing. It took a year for me to even see my first “smurf” account.

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I do agree that the smurf/cheaters/boosters are plaguing the game. And also that the quality of the teamplay in pugs has become very erratic. A few games you get amazing teammates, in some other you get people that have never probably played that role before.

I don’t see any solution to these issues in games such as OW. If a Bap wants to mostly dps ( because maybe he’s trying the hero) and causes the team to lose there’s nothing that can mechanically be done by the dev to stop that and force teamplay.

Therefore the incentive for an uncapped SR system that only adds points would make players feel less penalized by “unfair or unlucky” games. If a player loses, just lost the time, not the progress you’ve made up to this point for this season. A better player that loses less would gather more points in the same amount of time and will be placed relatively higher in the ladder.

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I climbed from bronze to diamond by working on what I can control.

I pick who I play with, when I play and work on ironing out small mistakes each time.

You can be mad at “the system”, but don’t get upset when someone points out you’re just another conspiracy theorist that could be putting this effort into either working on improving their gameplay, or playing something else.

Offers nothing but to protect those who get upset a little when they lose. Or those who are so scared of losing a little SR.

I lost 120ish SR yesterday… but gained about 200 today. Losses happen.

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Pretty much sums up why I have them ignored. They spam every thread and usually avoid responding to the main points made in threads, only to imply players are just bad or pretend there’s not an issue despite lots of arguments to the contrary.

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Most people, including myself, are pretty bad at the game.

Thats why spending your time worry about the system and making up theories about why its holding you back is completely pointless.

Maybe if we all just got better at the game we’d find less issues… pretty out there idea.

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This is just a rant post cause its not as many smurfs and bots as you pretendent it is. You are just acting salty cause you are a hard stuck but instead of learning from mistakes you call out others for being smurfs and bots just cause they undertsand the hero they play and by that i can promise you that you have minimal chances of climbing the sr aslong as you make up excuses instead of improving

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Thank you very much for the clarification.
Corporate Forums always have small armies of fanboys that regurgitate the company marketing narrative. Rarely they have none, when they lack these individuals marketing ops are runned to flood and slide threads in attempt to moderate context. However I don’t think this one is paid since he could just flag the thread for the link and close it (*hint *hint).

However users are right in claiming that the ladder system is not well designed and is suffering greatly from a lack of maintenance and various forms of abuse.
You also rightfully pointed out that there’s an overwhelming consensus about the game having several problems. The SR system being poorly balanced and unrewarding, leading to a “poor player experience”. It is the vast majority of player’s feedback.

From the news we’ve seen, I believe the dev took this feedback regarding “poor player experience” seriously, they tried and failed over the years to balance the game and make it more enjoyable, and are actually working on improving the quality of the games ( role queue SR, Open queue, text comms, more autonomous and versatile heroes like Sigma, Echo).

Also for clarity, the “poor player experience” is solely related to the “reward and satisfaction” gained from games quality and from the SR system outcome. The gameplay itself is extremely engaging, masterfully polished and it’s the only reason why the game is still afloat.
Also for clarity the current SR system is not locked, it’s not forcing people to hover around a certain SR, hitting a consistent winrate ( around 70-85%) allows you to climb onto the next rank

The company fanboys are saying that “you need to improve, not rant”, “you want to climb, you need to improve”, etc., etc., without realizing that the winrate requirements for the SR climb is simply too high.
Since it is too high it doesn’t recognize the average player’s progresses, punishes him for mistakes and gives him the impression of not improving at all.

Sure there are many players with a better gamesense and skill, that will climb easily and feel rewarded, but let’s face it, the vast majority of players will not invest the time to develop skill, to correct mistakes and to make “impactful improvements” to hit such an high ceiling.

The satisfaction for the player is gained when he can measure the progress he’s making with a scoring system, the current SR system simply cannot track this. That is why it should be revised ( and in my opinion an uncapped SR system that doesn’t detract point for losses works better for this purpose)

Also for the statistics,
a single account doesn’t mean much statistically wise, but if a 65% average winrate in 30 games didn’t net a positive SR in gold while on overbuff the average winrate for heroes with a 5%+ pickrate is below 55% it means that the climbing requirement is way too high and lost games causes a disproportionate SR loss.

By bad design the ladder distribution it’s overly clogged around its mean.
I don’t want to speculate on how the SR dynamic loss/gain is calculated but it’s clearly broken, as it is not capable of tracking the average player’s progresses properly and therefore engaging the player.

disclaimer for the forum white knights:
I won’t reply again to the “improvement” point you’ve made by sliding the thread. I’ve explained in details why it does not work and why it yields players complaint.

I won’t replay to claims “there are no bots/smurfs/thegameisperfect” as there are loads of threads and tons of videos reporting and documenting these issues. To claim the contrary is simply wrong.

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No its not the majority cause the majority of players are not trying to blame their lack of skills on smurfs and bots instead of improving at the game they like

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So many people acting like salty kids that refuse to sort themselves out before blaming others… Then act like someones insulted their entire family when they are countered.

Imagine driving around at night, drunk, with your lights off… Then blaming everyone else when you crash into something. This is how mad people like that sound.

NOW if the OP is playing perfectly and never making a single mistake, never being the player that misuses their abilities/ults to the point they are soft throwing. Is always in the right position to maximise their value. Then maybe they have a point that something might be up…

But I would suggest, given that they are in silver… They probably have a lot to work on themselves, rather than worrying about others.

Me, for example, I am “stuck” in gold. Why? Because I am bad, and that is my skill level. If I want to climb I need to work on my mistakes. And I do that a bit, but not at the expense of just having fun playing with friends.

Or, just enjoy playing the game and accept the rank you are in is the rank you are in.

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Again you are not contributing to the discussion, and are ignoring the topic in the thread, please stop posting.

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Because your idea for a new system is pointless.

  1. They don’t care.
  2. There isn’t really anything wrong with the current system.

If you are stuck. Maybe improve and thus gain more SR when you win.

People don’t want to hear the “improve” argument because they think they are better than they actually are.

You are silver, because that be your skill.

Also, “overwhelming consensus” any proof of that?

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Structuring the reply below:

This falls under the:
Again you are not contributing to the discussion with new insight, are ignoring the topic in the thread and trying to slide it to a personal flame, please stop posting.
Count: 3

Finally you’re talking about an alternative SR system below, even if a bit discombobulated.

However I don’t see any specific point explaining the shortcomings of an uncapped SR system with no negative point for loss. I invite you to read the posts above again, if unclear I’ll be happy to re-elaborate for you.

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So disagreeing with your claim is not contributing?

Never has anyone claimed the system to be perfect, but it is surprisingly accurate when people play properly.

Your system would fail if they came out with a major patch that would drastically change one role, for example. Some would thrive and climb. Others would suddenly be much worse than their peers in that role, but would be safe guarded because “the system” and would be actively throwing games because their abilities are no longer up to scratch.

You haven’t really offered any proof that there is an issue. Other than your personal anecdote. Which is not really conclusive of anything other than you being in a rank.

But the biggest issue of all… Who actually cares what rank they are in, or about the ranks of others. Yeah, some milestones are nice to go “woo I did a thing”, but who you impressing? Just enjoy playing the game. If you get better, games will get harder.