Suggestion to make gold/plat ranked matchups better

General Discussion
1

Hello everyone. For players who have played in gold you know that there is a huge difference between one gold player to another. Some players plays like low plat and others can play like bronze. Ofcourse you can get out of gold if you’re good enough but it doesn’t change there is a elo hell gold. The reason for this are that all new players usually starts out in gold so both more experienced players and new players are combined with each other. Not only this but which team that get’s the most new players are also a lottery. One team can have a full team with new players (players with a bronze portrait and 1 or less stars) and the other team could have a full silver portrait team. This makes a huge difference and makes it harder to get out of gold than it should.

I have 2 suggestions. The first one is to balance out teams with respect to levels too. For example making sure that both teams has around the same amount of experienced people compared to everyone on both teams. I don’t only mean per say per team so that you have 1 gold portrait guy and rest new players but I mean that every teammate has an enemy teammate with a similair level (equally experienced). I don’t think the rank matches times will be longer because there are enough players in gold that this system would work and I know this from experience. I think this system should only apply to gold because it’s in gold mainly that this is a problem and higher ranks probably woulnd’t gain anything from it because there are for example smurfs and they will ofcourse have a lower level.

However this is isn’t a perfect system but it would make the ranked experience for gold and new players much better. The reason to why it’s not perfect are because there are players that has experience from other games that can help when playing Overwatch. However the majority of new players plays like silver/bronze players and usually are not in the level of gamesense as more experienced gold players.

My second suggestion is to put all new players in high bronze/silver. The reason for this are that most new players do not play like gold players from the beginning. This would balance out the ranks more because then you wont see players who plays like bronze and low plat in same game and because most new players don’t play like gold players it wont make much worse for lower ranks.

2

Sounds like a back door way to ring fence the game so you don’t get new players.

For me that’s a no.

The MMR system works quite well at determining your skill, so the matches are surprisingly balanced.

It will just never cater for a team positioning weirdly and collapsing in the first push. That can happen to anyone, even the pros.

3

I think it’s the opposite. I think there are many new players that maybe don’t play in level of gold players yet that would prefer to start out in a lower rank. When I myself for example started playing ranked I almost didn’t want to play ranked anymore because I feelt so bad that I didn’t play as good as the other players in my matches and I didn’t want to be feeding. I think it’s better to start out in a lower rank and gain your way uppwards in rank than for example losing 10 matches in a row.

I agree that the system works much better in other ranks than gold. My experience in plat are that teams are much more equal and balanced. However in gold, it’s really often that 1 team destroys the other one and the team can’t even get out of spawn. 1 reason for this could be that 2 teammates respawn and doesn’t wait for other teammates to regroup and walks alone to the enemy team and getting killed. Giving the other team so much ult charge that they in next engage can counter everything and taking so much time that they win the fight.

4

I’ve played about 100ish games this week. The worst players in gold seem to be the high level players that think they know everything.

And those rolls in gold stem from that. They know best and it turns out to be totally wrong.

5

tip for sanitys sake, don’t look at ranks,
just look for flaws in your own play.

i know i know, you’ve heard that a billion times, but really you’re not gonna change anything about the formula for the game to get better unless you are a huge influencer so might aswell take the L and focus on what you can actually control.

1 Like
6

Yeah people with new accounts can get to gold / plat from placements. (Alts)

7

You try it then. Prove your claim.

8

I don’t want to buy another account like you thanks.

9

Only have one. But if you make a claim, back it up.

10

Na anyone with a brain will know.

11

Prove it then. Put your £12 where your mouth is

Unless you’re scared you’ll be wrong.

Give me your PayPal, I’ll send you £15 to do it lol. Just won a load of money today, might as well have a laugh with it. Or just gift you the game.

12

I was that new player that didn’t know how to play the game and spawned in gold. Don’t worry, the game was fast to recognize my lack of talent and I droped to 800SR in my first season.
I now know how to play better and I am in plat (same account) and going to take a shot at diamond in the next 2 seasons.

(hang on it will make sense… I think?)

I do think that gold is a elo hell, but not because roughly all new players spawn there. If they stay there, it means they have the gold level.
The problem with gold/plat, in my opinion, is that the majority of the playerbase is there. We need to be better than so many other players that it is going very slow. So yeah, when we climb, it feels like we’re hardstuck there, but no (I mean… maybe ^^), we’re just competing with millions of players, not just the 12 players in our games.

So basically with your suggestion 1, I would have stayed in gold way longer than I was supposed to because I would have been matched up too many times with players of my (crappy) level when I needed to go to bronze and fast (I deserved it). It would (roughly) create a bronze matchup in a gold game when what the game needs to do is match 6 players that need to lose against 6 players that need to win for players that don’t belong in gold, whether it is high skilled or low skilled players (althought it can be hard for the system to understand who is worthy or not when it has few data for new players).

IMO your suggestion 2 is closer to a solution, but I am afraid it would create another problem in those ranks. There are a ton of new accounts that have nothing to do in gold and even less in high bronze/silver. It is already frustrating to be there (although I kinda like high silver) and not being able to “play well”, you don’t need a bunch of players coming from other fps that come in and are rolling on you because they are just good (not talking about the smurfs and alt accounts that would start there).

I started playing Apex recently and I think the ranking system is pretty nice, but I don’t have much experience of it so I don’t know if it could be a (good) solution for OW?

Regarding new players, Flats (main tank in NA) made a discussion video that, I think, will resonate with your post. You can find it on youtube by typing “Flats discusses smurfs”. It’s 1h long so try and find the moment where he addresses the complaints about new players in ranked.

Happy to discuss further on the subject :wink: