Hearing Gavin talk about board games, and how he’s passionate about making a game for people “like him who like the same things.” I love it! Great to put a name and face to some of the brilliant minds behind the scenes. Wish more devs would do this!

W human

Fucking idiot devs. Just balance your matchmaking. Clearly no normal person likes the way you’re doing it.

my dawg chillin in the basement

I teach on a creative media/event management course that focuses on esports. We have a huge overwatch community. We have 2 teams entered into a national tournament in Overwatch called British Esports student champs. We do an entire unit on esports skills and strategy analysis. We have top 500 players on our team, we have top 50 players who coach. We all play a LOT of overwatch, know a lot about the game and we will put together in class balanced scrims and it’ll still sometimes be a stomp in one direction. Sometimes the strongest team will be stomped too. Sometimes it’ll be a stomp in one direction then next map it’ll be a stomp in the other direction. There’s so much that goes into a “win” in overwatch it’s next to impossible to balance for any match making system. Just kind of is what it is. I get frustrated by it too

What about 5 stacking? Even in narrow groups sometimes it feels like they put us against a group of 3 and 2 that are higher elo to balance out the “lack of teamwork”. It feels way easier to duo or 3 stack than it does to 5 stack for some reason idk maybe it’s just me.

Morgan turned me into a Newt!

1:05:18 "This commenter doesn't trust us" Uh, ya, its a pretty widely consistent stance to not trust Blizzard. Didn't use to be that way.

Something that was really messing with me was understanding her positioning.. that advice about not pushing any engagements on corners or 1v1s is a godsend.

I feel like I've heard Gavin's voice in one of my games before

I’ve never once thought the match maker was forcing 50/50s, if it was then how are people climbing? The only issue I have with the matchmaker is I wish they get rid of the modifiers. Go back to a flat amount gained or lost. There’s nothing more discouraging than going from a game you’ve lost and you lose let’s say 22% you win the next game but it’s expected and you only gain 18%. The discussion of player psychology and player ranked anxiety is something they’ve tried to tackle before. That’s how we got the whole debacle at the start of OW2 with the 7wins rank update. The Ow team tried and I commend them for it but it didn’t work. This is the same deal.

I wish I've been there cause its an interesting interview. Very insightful. Thanks to them for explaining their work. I do believe them when they tell the Matchmaker is summing up the MMR of players and try to guess the outcome. Yet, on the game screen, you sometimes see like a whole division like Gold 5 - Plat 5 game. Does it mean one Team is G5 and the other P5 ? Or is it a min-max players MMR showing up and the teams sum is actually closer. (I assume from that interview, its min max players but I'm always afraid to not getting it right). I also wonder why winning a "40/60" game would only grants 20% bonus in MMR. I feel it could go up to 50% (winning 30% max instead of 24%). I feel like 4% max is too little. For 2 reasons : the number of games to actually rank would be lower and smurfs would climb faster. The other reason is, that if you win a 48/52 game, you don't even win 1% bonus even if the opposite team has actually 10% higher MMR than yours (52 ~= 1.1x48)... In terms of OW1 MMR, coming above 2000 MMR, it would mean beating 200 higher MMR isn't worth more than beating a 200 lower MMR... Maybe the problem might come from players roles rather than Matchmaking and maybe Matchmaking could take in consideration the "carry power" of Supports or DPS cause sometimes, Support players feel helpless if they have worse Damage players. It asks to be more aggressive than supportive, which is kinda weird imo. I'm curious if they have data about that : putting Better DPS with lower Supports and the opposite, and same with tank ; in order to find a way where matchmaking would ask for more specific role goals. Cause if the point is just about winning, that would mean, Zenyatta would be better pick than Mercy cause it has more carry-bility, right ? I'm also wondering if they run some sort "simulation" with just numbers and some simple "behaviour" like "tilting players" / "focusing as losing", etc... ; and just try their ideas on that simulation or if they try directly on the live game.

I guess I'm just a gold player afterall. No more copium Edit:although, if I didn't have such bad social anxiety and I could find a group of people on Discord to grind with every night, I bet you I could hit Platinum again.

43:23 tbh though while kda doesnt affect the match much, your number of deaths do. What if there was a contribution modifier based on number of deaths to the average of the team. As the better player will probably die less. Not to mention if youre dead you arent contributing to the win

The fact that they are willing to come hang out and talk about match making is proof enough for me they care. Especially compared to games like cod and their ptsd conspiracy theory inducing match making.

If matches so tight.. Why so many games that feel unwinnable and completely mismatched? games you end up with in one team a Rein using good use of corners and firestrikes etc... and in the other team a rein that charges all over the map and dies constantly alone in the enemy backline... Shouldnt they be both tanks with about the same MR? Especialy since tanks have so much impact in the outcome of the game.. I understand that sometimes someone else playing someone else account even in ranked.. but it just to many games like one tank does not even know the basics of the hero he is playing and it is another easy win or fast loose game.

Why didn't you ask morgan why he looks dead inside?

"80% of the matches we make tanks are 1 division apart" 30-40% of my games in mid diamond is against master tanks, a lot of wich gm\top500 players who get into masters rank somehow. I literaly played agains top80-100 gm1 tanks in previous seasons, who where in my diamond lobby. How come they fall so low? Maybe i dont play good enough to win more games, but jesus, wining washed gm players and still being diamond is kinda ass to be honest.

Bring in a "Diff" modifier that IS based on stats. If you get a certain percentage of stat difference from the role on the enemy team, you get additional MMR increase. If you are performing WAY better, from a stat standpoint, you should get something. I understand that you can't solely rely on stats, but in a large diff situation, you definitely can.

My beef with ranked isn’t with matchmaking. It’s with how ranked is expressed in the UI. It’s not a fun experience. Worse, it’s designed for engagement… like slot machines. I’m don’t in a competition against other players so much as watching a progress bar go up down. Didn’t win? Just pull the lever one more time to win your quarters back. I hate this paradigm in modern ladder play.

I love this! Super helpful. I think a lot of this philosophy applies to some other ranked FPS games as well.

I ended season 12 on a 69% (nice) win rate as a venture one trick. I spent time actually calculating my play style and understanding positioning which allowed me to climb from gold 5 to plat 3. I think I can keep going to diamond honestly

For a game as complicated as OW, performance based MMR adjustments wouldn't be a simple damage/healing thing. It would be a deeplearning AI approach using all the data stored in a replay (which is a lot) across their entire playerbase and having a deeplearning model that can predict your likelihood of going 50/50 in a particular rank, with particular confidence. You would get a big SR boost for every win you're far below the rank the system thinks you can still win it. This is how Valorant's anti-smurf system works btw, and why an Immortal smurf would never spend more than 2-3 games in Bronze, no matter how deranked the account is.

I’m already gave up on 5v5 I just waiting when 6v6 be permanent

You devs have made the competitive so bad it’s unreal. Especially playing tank. Overwatch 1 had so much better ranked experience even when balancing was off high q time goats. This feels like they have 0 clue what they are doing or how to make the ranked experience fun.

Easy non-matchmaking ways to stop stomps... bland identical heroes, lots of healing and immortalities, softer counters. Not saying any of those are good options.

Let’s be real, this interview was BS. Matchmaking is bad to keep people playing the game with the hopes of spending money.

Incoming TED talk: Individual MMR in a team game is already inherently imperfect, but when it is also almost entirely based on win/loss, it is even more low resolution for the individual. That is until you put massive amounts of time into it (they even said 100 matches is where ranks start to look accurate), which I am not a fan of. I think this is a contributing factor to people burning out/not playing ranked. People don't want to have losses pretty much completely cancel out wins, 1.1 steps forward, 1 step back... (numbers don't matter, only the tiny differential between numbers) This win/loss system, coupled with bad RNG, doesn't rob you of your rank, but your time, your time needed to get to a desired rank/maintain your rank. And I would say that it is also is more mentally draining.

Seems like a simple solution is to simply let both teams know the probability of a win for each team, and show total MMR average per team beforehand. Additionally the team with lower probability to win if its lower then 46%, they should lose proportionally less mmr in that match they had the disadvantage. Also, if there is a leaver in the match, it should keep that into account, and have the remaining 4 players lose half of what they would usually lose, meanwhile the leaver gets a 50% extra penalty, that derank amount will be removed automatically, if he hasnt been a leaver in the next 20 games (bc sometimes internet does crash, and encourages toxic ppl to be normal human beings.)

I also love getting out into the wrong server and being on 130 ping. small indie game company btw.

I think what you’re talking about is not just the identity of the beginning of OW1 but the entire cycle until OW2 where in 2 everything has more of rounded edges to be able to fit everywhere the entirety of 1 is a bout sharp edges I feel the only disagreement of that rule is sigma and echo but if you think about their introduction into the game it made the game broken which is why I wonder why 6v6 is wanted so much but that’s a different matter

Will there ever be an instance that if someone in your game throws/griefs and is reported (and punished/banned for that), that mmr will be retroactively given back from that single match? Obv the downside would be the winning team loses that mmr afterwards, but I wonder how the community would feel about that

Devastating revelations: Overwatch system developers CONFESS that they’ve RIGGED the system so that in EVERY match, ONE TEAM will LOSE!

i played maybe 3 games of OW classic, how can a 6v6 game feel so slow? You would think that adding in a 6th character would help speed up the game but its the exact opposite. And don't get me started on the bs of "you lost because you didn't secure both points", that has always bothered me and its why i refused to play OW till OW2 came out and fixed that issue.

The matchmaking is utter shite. Only game I know of where one can easily go on a 6-8 game loss streak, but never ever get the same on wins. Total BS. I tracked 500 matches a few years back, in OW1. What was glaring is the loss streaks far outweighed win streaks in frequency and length. Tired of this rolling nonsense in games in OW2. I’ve noticed one clear tendency in OW2 at least in QP is that if you are a solo player near the top of a tier, you will get saddled repeatedly with a stack including console players vs stacks of PC and expected to carry these guys play. I check every match and it’s so obvious it’s unequivocal. They make it all sound so even and it’s anything but 70% of the time.

1:16:53 I love the idea of putting toxic players with high block rates in a queue with a bunch of bots

Bro when he said : 60/49 or even 6*/3* would be fair and competitive SAID IT ALL- IF ITS NOT 51-49 it’s not fair and is heavily uneven

It's funny they say all this with clear evidence against it

1:01:19 Just so you all know…they consider telling someone that they shouldn’t do mauga into dva disruptive behavior and is a bannable offense…I wish I was kidding

Im not sure the comments understand that this book is not an opinion piece lol

We are so lucky as a community to have somebody like you Spilo, and a dev team that is this open and transparent. What other game has the BACK END DEVS talking to a content creator for over an HOUR!? Insane stuff, super awesome. Keep up the great work guys :)

I know this has nothing to do with matchmaking but can you ask the devs if it’s possible to allow Doomfist to actually fight back when he’s in mauga cage. Expecting me to do anything with 4 shotgun shots seems unreasonable. And expecting my supports to help in solo q seems even more unreasonable

They should add a double or nothing matchmaking feature. If your team wins you can all opt to play one more round as a team against new opponents. If you win then double the SR. If you lose then back to square one or something.

15:35 Idk how he thinks a coin flip in real life is less certain than 51/49. That would mean the coin is pretty heavily biased to one side due to an engraving or whatever. I think the stat he's citing is that the chance of getting the same side again is about 51% just because it's likely a person will use similar flipping technique again which slightly favors repeating the outcome.

I still think individual performance should matter in how much rank you lose or gain. Why should someone on the losing team who performed so much better than their teammates lose a similar percentage of rank? Punish people who under perform.

That Suzu idea could be the main principle on a new support 👏

Nothing wrong with them designing a system to make it harder for people to get out of a certain rank. It's just where they think you belong! Just go with it.

I think hero selection and comp makes the match making feel unfair. The match maker can create a perfect 50/50 based on MMR, but if my mains are countered by the opponents mains, the match will be much more difficult than a 50/50. I might be forced to switch to a hero that I can't play at the same level as my main.