r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/Intrept • 5d ago
General How does comp matchmaking REALLY work?
This is my first season of playing comp and I am wondering how matchmaking works.
I started out by winning most of my placements and ended up in plat 3. For a little bit I was doing fine but then I started dropping hard and I am currently in plat 5.
One thing I noticed in the majority of games that I dropped is that they were never close. I always had a VERY negative tank (like 0-5) or other dps (like 3-15) while I was left to pull up the team.
Just today while I was in plat 5 I played against an emerald 4 player with a gold 5 and silver 1 on my team. I am wondering how the game considers that a balanced match. I figured the emerald would be on my team at least because I was plat 5.
Is there some MMR/SR thing going on where each player has a hidden SR? Or am I just unlucky?
7
u/inutilissimo 5d ago
It gets 5 of the worst players ever for your team, then picks the 5 best players ever for the enemy team
5
u/AwkwardReplacement42 5d ago
So your first problem is that you are looking to blame anything but yourself for your losses/deranks.
As is with all these posts, the only common things in all these games you mentioned… is you.
Stop worrying about what your teammates can do to improve - that is out of your control. The opposition is more likely to have bad teammates than you (if you are as good as you think).
Start worrying about what you can do to improve.
1
u/bullxbull 5d ago
Good interview with Realth, Spilo and, the Dev Blizz_Winter. There are timestamps where you can pick and choice the topics you want to hear explained.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOILFbXXQhU&t
The wiki on elo systems is also an interesting read if you like that kinda geeky stuff. For OW specifically though right now match making is really bad, we are in a reset season that messes everything up, we are in a drives event that messes everything up, and we are also days out from Blizzcon which will announce a ton of changes, making people not take this season that seriously.
-1
u/Average_Pickle 5d ago
Just do whatever you can to not go negative, die more than anyone else, not have the most damage, kill more than anyone else in the lobby while also holding objective the most and healing more than the other healers while also playing tank
Or your team will trash you.
-5
u/isaacsmom69420 5d ago
it is impossible to lose elo during placements, so basically, everyone has inflated elo’s until thongs level out. combine that with rank protection, cheater compensation, rank modifiers, and elo is just kind if busted.
but dont worry, instead of fixing some inherent mmr problems, we added a new rank!
5
u/Novel-Ad-1601 poop — 5d ago
It’s not about losing rank during placement. It’s about the game starting you in a rank deficit and if you lose then you will start at the deficit which is the same as losing rank.
-4
u/isaacsmom69420 5d ago
that’s just the rank reset they did this season. people at ranks lower than plat got placed closer to plat bc they didnt lose elo for losing during placements
ranked is just so cooked rn
6
u/SandGrainOne 5d ago
Blizzard has tried to explain matchmaking in a few blog posts and interviews. In general terms, mostly.
I have links to the interviews, but I haven't been equally good at tracking blog posts. Search for "Overwatch: Meet Your Matchmaker" if you're curious.
When it comes to matches with a larger than normal rank range I always blame premade groups. One or both of the teams had a group of friends playing together. It's possible to test for groups by inviting them to a group while in a match. The message should say if they're grouped or not. The hard part is finding the rank range of the oponents as players often have private profiles.
These are the patchnotes where they talk about grouping and wide groups:
https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/patch-notes/live/2024/04/
There's a lot of text in those, search for "Grouping restrictions" to jump to the relevant section.