From the way I've had it explained to me I figure they could go a long way into figuring out how not to make wins mean everything in Comp. SR kinda functionally means nothing since it only works on wins from what I understand and has nothing to do with stats. I could be wrong? I'm only going by anecdotal accounts but I think it's interesting it works that way if true.
That's almost completely 100% wrong, both from everything Blizzard's said and demonstrably. Blizzard has been cagey with how they measure things, but we know quite a bit about it, usually because they do something that completely breaks it.
Easy example:
Around the time of the Orisa/Uprising patch, they fixed a bug with support fire gain. Supports were SUPPOSED to get proportional fire for assists, but they were getting full fire for every one. Instantly, every support character's SR gains halved in wins, and the losses doubled in losses. The bug had been around long enough for it to seep into what the game expected were the 'normal' stats for a character at that level, and all of a sudden, players seemed to be performing MUCH worse, so it was penalizing them massively, and Blizzard seemingly didn't do anything to account for it. It took about a month of getting new data into the system before things leveled out again.
Basically there are two main numbers in play. First, your MMR. That's invisible to you and there's no way to check it. It's used for Quick Play and Arcade to ensure that Bronze players aren't matched with Grand Masters, etc. Then there's your Competitive SR. Placements are not against a completely random group of people. It uses your MMR as a starting point and tweaks from there. I imagine that's because Comp is a bit of a different beast from QP, and most people play there a little differently, but they haven't said beyond that. They can diverge for a bunch of reasons; if you don't play comp for a while (and improve or decline dramatically), brand new mouse, if you're high level and your SR decays, if you're boosting/throwing, etc. Blizzard wants your SR to match your MMR, and if the two of them differ dramatically, it'll add an extra weight to your wins/losses. If you play enough Competitive games, the two should converge.
Performance is also a factor, as mentioned with Mercy. This is the most shrouded aspect though, and they've said they're tweaking it all the time. They collect a lot of stats, and especially for non-DPS, what they consider 'good' seems fairly haphazard from the outside, but can change without any reveal to us. Back when Mercy was having massive SR problems, people were able to very highly correlate getting one or two huge 4-5 man rezes (back when that was her ult) as 'performing well' (and so higher SR gained, less SR lost) whereas four or five smaller tempo rezes was 'performing poorly,' so less SR gained, and more SR lost. Personally, tanks and support seem the most adversely affected by this since they're so reliant on coordination and other people's performance, not to mention games where their team dominates, their stats will be worse, exacerbating the problem.
Note also that in the past, they would penalize/reward you for loss/win streaks, but that's gone the way of the dinosaur except for cases where MMR and SR are greatly different. For a few seasons, they also started you a couple hundred points of SR below where you were 'supposed' to be, because they wanted everyone to gain SR from where they started because that felt better, so everyone would have big SR gains after placements, and small SR losses. They've since removed that, and haven't really said much about SR or the like for a long time now.
Personally, tanks and support seem the most adversely affected by this since they're so reliant on coordination and other people's performance, not to mention games where their team dominates, their stats will be worse, exacerbating the problem.
I think it's not so much that tanks/supports are affected by low coordination and others' performances - since firstly, a team's bad performance lowers everyone's stats, and secondly, you can allow for bad games in your calculation of performance - but more that doing well as a tank and support has so many more intangibles than a dps.
For instance, we've all had that moment as a tank where we're out of our defensive ability, but as a last resort we've bodyblocked for a low health teammate. No system can figure out the importance and 'skill' of what you did; in fact, most systems would judge you harshly for taking more damage. But what you did was both important and skillful. Meanwhile, there are far fewer situations where taking damage - or dying, or doing less damage, as other examples - is actually good for a dps. Such situations still exist, but they're fewer, and they can more often be overcome - 'performance' wise - with pure damage output over the course of the match. All things being equal, one dps doing more damage/elims than the other is a really good indicator of him/her being the better dps.
And that is one of the reasons why a straight W/L system would be better.
If you guys play in the evening, we usually get a group going almost every evening (sundays not so often). We usually play 8 or 9 'til 11ish and mostly have nice organized games.
We do get salty occasionally but it's a million times more pleasant than solo queue. Just send me a friend invite, Kana#12104
I'm doing this tonight, please get me hooked into the PA group. I tried inviting people from the spreadsheet but it's hard to know who is active. I went through the same thing with HOTS and it's what eventually drove me away from the game. I was hoping a shooter would let me have a little more individual achievements after playing TF2 for so long, but I didn't realize how team-centric Overwatch is.
Finally got around to finishing my placements... with three straight losses. One of which with a streamer who wouldn't shut the fuck up and then had some kind of fit when we lost because nobody on our team could kill their Mei. Including our Pharah and Zarya. Sigh.
~2300. I'll basically need to hit Plat in order to hit a better high than last season. I have severe doubts that'll happen, but I've set a new high every season but one, so who knows!
It never feels like the right moment, because I always need to be guarding. And every time I do charge, I die in seconds, so I'm building up a lot of negative reinforcement.
0
miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
even if you're playing defensively, you can start by practicing countercharging the other team's rein (or doomfist)
It never feels like the right moment, because I always need to be guarding. And every time I do charge, I die in seconds, so I'm building up a lot of negative reinforcement.
See, I'm only a Rein-in-Training, but I've learned there are a few times to at least try out your charge:
1) To fuck up a key enemy while your team does cool shit that would not work with said enemy in play. Usually this is the other Rein, but it could be a support, a Zarya, who knows.
2) If your fallback plan is to hit a nearby wall and raise your shield again.
3) When you have a clear numbers advantage.
4) If you notice the enemy has ignored you because you're "just a tank". You must punish this. Hammer Down is better in this situation but hey, sometimes needs must.
5) If a) you have hammer down, b) you can't get it off from the front, c) your team doesn't need your shield and d) you want to force them into a Sophie's Choice of "react to a Hammer down from the rear" vs "get shot right in the butt when we turn". This one is hard to explain and possibly a bad instinct. I dunno.
even if you're playing defensively, you can start by practicing countercharging the other team's rein (or doomfist)
Exactly. Pretty much always counter charge an enemy rein. You basically can only gain from it. You're out if the equation if you get charged anyways, but don't eat the damage, and the other rein is also stunned.
Getting charged and pinned as Reinhardt yourself should basically never happen.
Especially as it doesn't matter how far you counter charge. As long as the charge animation started for even a tiny moment, the other rein will fall down.
Question: if you charge and charging rein but time it just right to hit them perpendicular to their direction, do you both fall down or do you pin them? Not that that is an easy thing to time, just curious how it would be handled.
I like air dueling other Pharahs because I'm a Tribes nut.
Aside from lobbing the occasional random rocket at her, I try to avoid it in most situations, because dueling Pharahs become such easy targets for people on the ground, which can lead to pretty random outcomes. I might go for it if the enemy Pharah seems to be causing more trouble for my team than I'm doing to theirs, although in that situation I'd usually switch to a 76 or something.
The only exception is if the enemy Pharah moves so badly that I can reliably hit her without wasting much time, in which case I'm never leaving her alone until she switches.
In DM I've noticed Pharahs also generally just ignore each other, preferring to focus on easier pickings and/or bigger threats.
If I'm playing well I can mid-air Pharahs and Mercys reliably even if they try to dodge, but I have to be in the zone. I enjoy practicing exactly that in DM & TDM though!
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
0
TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Question: if you charge and charging rein but time it just right to hit them perpendicular to their direction, do you both fall down or do you pin them? Not that that is an easy thing to time, just curious how it would be handled.
You both knock each other down and take the damage of a charge.
One of my first experiences in the game was charging the enemy rein at the same time on the Hanamura bridge to point B and we killed each other in glorious battle
0
BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
Question: if you charge and charging rein but time it just right to hit them perpendicular to their direction, do you both fall down or do you pin them? Not that that is an easy thing to time, just curious how it would be handled.
You can literally be charging in the same direction and you'll bonk.
It SHOULD be hard though, her rez is just an ordinary ability, it's not her ult. There's going to be counterplay to it now, which is great for the game as a whole.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
It SHOULD be hard though, her rez is just an ordinary ability, it's not her ult. There's going to be counterplay to it now, which is great for the game as a whole.
Its counterplay is a longer CD than literally every other non-ult ability in the game (by over 2x!), and the fact that she had to be standing on top of someone who likely died to poor positioning, while being the single most-sought-after target on her team. Put Hanzo's scatter on a 30-second CD and make him stand still for 2 seconds before he can shoot it lol. It's just an ordinary ability!
I'm cranky today.
Chance on
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
Ability cooldown time has nothing to do with the concept of counterplay, it's an altogether different kind of balancing factor. Just as an extreme and ridiculous example, if there was a regular ability that just let you choose an enemy to instant kill anywhere on the map, it having a full minute cooldown would not mean it had any sort of "counterplay." The opposing team would have no say whatsoever in when and on who it was used. While Mercy resurrection carries a potential risk in exposing herself to enemy fire, it was by no means risky enough - it usually succeeded while letting Mercy comfortably survive.
Mercy nerf I highly doubt will be enough. Doesn't affect random picks. Just keeps her from being able to fly into a melee and res.
Limiting her frontline rez ability is already huge, plus if you have someone who can target the backline (for example, whoever made the pick in the first place), she's gonna be way more vulnerable even making that random pick rez. We'll have to wait and see, but I think this will definitely move her away from being a must-pick (although I'd still like to see her ult time/power reduced some, because that is fucking annoying to play against).
I think the rez needed a massive nerf, as I hate the Mercy meta with a fiery passion...but I also hate movement penalties in shooters and Overwatch has a lot of them already, so I wish they'd figured out an alternative solution.
Mercy nerf I highly doubt will be enough. Doesn't affect random picks. Just keeps her from being able to fly into a melee and res.
Limiting her frontline rez ability is already huge, plus if you have someone who can target the backline (for example, whoever made the pick in the first place), she's gonna be way more vulnerable even making that random pick rez. We'll have to wait and see, but I think this will definitely move her away from being a must-pick (although I'd still like to see her ult time/power reduced some, because that is fucking annoying to play against).
Eh, maybe I just don't see the frontline rez as something people do a lot. Stupid Mercies in QP/MH, absolutely. They'll fly right in, rez, and immediately die because oops, they're on the frontline where they shouldn't be. But you're still going to be able to revive your picked-off-from-a-random-stray-whatever Zen/Ana/Lucio/Junk/76/etcetcetc from the safety of where you're already supposed to be, or just behind a barrier, to say nothing of if they're near a convenient corner, which is practically everywhere. I kind of wonder if it might actually make the Mercy problem worse by disincentivizing suicidal/stupid behavior.
Posts
That's almost completely 100% wrong, both from everything Blizzard's said and demonstrably. Blizzard has been cagey with how they measure things, but we know quite a bit about it, usually because they do something that completely breaks it.
Easy example:
Around the time of the Orisa/Uprising patch, they fixed a bug with support fire gain. Supports were SUPPOSED to get proportional fire for assists, but they were getting full fire for every one. Instantly, every support character's SR gains halved in wins, and the losses doubled in losses. The bug had been around long enough for it to seep into what the game expected were the 'normal' stats for a character at that level, and all of a sudden, players seemed to be performing MUCH worse, so it was penalizing them massively, and Blizzard seemingly didn't do anything to account for it. It took about a month of getting new data into the system before things leveled out again.
Basically there are two main numbers in play. First, your MMR. That's invisible to you and there's no way to check it. It's used for Quick Play and Arcade to ensure that Bronze players aren't matched with Grand Masters, etc. Then there's your Competitive SR. Placements are not against a completely random group of people. It uses your MMR as a starting point and tweaks from there. I imagine that's because Comp is a bit of a different beast from QP, and most people play there a little differently, but they haven't said beyond that. They can diverge for a bunch of reasons; if you don't play comp for a while (and improve or decline dramatically), brand new mouse, if you're high level and your SR decays, if you're boosting/throwing, etc. Blizzard wants your SR to match your MMR, and if the two of them differ dramatically, it'll add an extra weight to your wins/losses. If you play enough Competitive games, the two should converge.
Performance is also a factor, as mentioned with Mercy. This is the most shrouded aspect though, and they've said they're tweaking it all the time. They collect a lot of stats, and especially for non-DPS, what they consider 'good' seems fairly haphazard from the outside, but can change without any reveal to us. Back when Mercy was having massive SR problems, people were able to very highly correlate getting one or two huge 4-5 man rezes (back when that was her ult) as 'performing well' (and so higher SR gained, less SR lost) whereas four or five smaller tempo rezes was 'performing poorly,' so less SR gained, and more SR lost. Personally, tanks and support seem the most adversely affected by this since they're so reliant on coordination and other people's performance, not to mention games where their team dominates, their stats will be worse, exacerbating the problem.
Note also that in the past, they would penalize/reward you for loss/win streaks, but that's gone the way of the dinosaur except for cases where MMR and SR are greatly different. For a few seasons, they also started you a couple hundred points of SR below where you were 'supposed' to be, because they wanted everyone to gain SR from where they started because that felt better, so everyone would have big SR gains after placements, and small SR losses. They've since removed that, and haven't really said much about SR or the like for a long time now.
I think it's not so much that tanks/supports are affected by low coordination and others' performances - since firstly, a team's bad performance lowers everyone's stats, and secondly, you can allow for bad games in your calculation of performance - but more that doing well as a tank and support has so many more intangibles than a dps.
For instance, we've all had that moment as a tank where we're out of our defensive ability, but as a last resort we've bodyblocked for a low health teammate. No system can figure out the importance and 'skill' of what you did; in fact, most systems would judge you harshly for taking more damage. But what you did was both important and skillful. Meanwhile, there are far fewer situations where taking damage - or dying, or doing less damage, as other examples - is actually good for a dps. Such situations still exist, but they're fewer, and they can more often be overcome - 'performance' wise - with pure damage output over the course of the match. All things being equal, one dps doing more damage/elims than the other is a really good indicator of him/her being the better dps.
And that is one of the reasons why a straight W/L system would be better.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
I'm doing this tonight, please get me hooked into the PA group. I tried inviting people from the spreadsheet but it's hard to know who is active. I went through the same thing with HOTS and it's what eventually drove me away from the game. I was hoping a shooter would let me have a little more individual achievements after playing TF2 for so long, but I didn't realize how team-centric Overwatch is.
~2300. I'll basically need to hit Plat in order to hit a better high than last season. I have severe doubts that'll happen, but I've set a new high every season but one, so who knows!
Aaand I feel like death. What the fuck.
10% of the time it works all the time.
I had a game as Rein where the enemy genji must have thought I'm some kind of prescient Reinhardt savant.
My flame strikes killed him about 6 times mid air, 4 or so of those from a flick where I aimed by hearing, two of which ended his ult.
Two more times, I earth striked right when he ulted and once hammered him, the other time with another flame strike.
That felt great
Not everyone learned the important lesson of the reinhardt short movie I guess: Always protect the squad.
They can't hurt the squad if they've been pancaked into a wall!
Only thing I learned is that I need two Hammers.
go mei, throw a wall in front of him if he tries to leave the team behind
INSTAGRAM | ART TUMBLR | OCCASIONAL TWEETS
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
It never feels like the right moment, because I always need to be guarding. And every time I do charge, I die in seconds, so I'm building up a lot of negative reinforcement.
INSTAGRAM | ART TUMBLR | OCCASIONAL TWEETS
See, I'm only a Rein-in-Training, but I've learned there are a few times to at least try out your charge:
1) To fuck up a key enemy while your team does cool shit that would not work with said enemy in play. Usually this is the other Rein, but it could be a support, a Zarya, who knows.
2) If your fallback plan is to hit a nearby wall and raise your shield again.
3) When you have a clear numbers advantage.
4) If you notice the enemy has ignored you because you're "just a tank". You must punish this. Hammer Down is better in this situation but hey, sometimes needs must.
5) If a) you have hammer down, b) you can't get it off from the front, c) your team doesn't need your shield and d) you want to force them into a Sophie's Choice of "react to a Hammer down from the rear" vs "get shot right in the butt when we turn". This one is hard to explain and possibly a bad instinct. I dunno.
YMMV; just see what works and what doesn't.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Exactly. Pretty much always counter charge an enemy rein. You basically can only gain from it. You're out if the equation if you get charged anyways, but don't eat the damage, and the other rein is also stunned.
Getting charged and pinned as Reinhardt yourself should basically never happen.
If I'm playing well I can mid-air Pharahs and Mercys reliably even if they try to dodge, but I have to be in the zone. I enjoy practicing exactly that in DM & TDM though!
You both knock each other down and take the damage of a charge.
One of my first experiences in the game was charging the enemy rein at the same time on the Hanamura bridge to point B and we killed each other in glorious battle
"...only mights and maybes."
Patch notes.
You can literally be charging in the same direction and you'll bonk.
Mercy nerf I highly doubt will be enough. Doesn't affect random picks. Just keeps her from being able to fly into a melee and res.
If you're already out in the open and/or they have a bead on you, you should be dead in 1.75 seconds anyway.
Its counterplay is a longer CD than literally every other non-ult ability in the game (by over 2x!), and the fact that she had to be standing on top of someone who likely died to poor positioning, while being the single most-sought-after target on her team. Put Hanzo's scatter on a 30-second CD and make him stand still for 2 seconds before he can shoot it lol. It's just an ordinary ability!
I'm cranky today.
Limiting her frontline rez ability is already huge, plus if you have someone who can target the backline (for example, whoever made the pick in the first place), she's gonna be way more vulnerable even making that random pick rez. We'll have to wait and see, but I think this will definitely move her away from being a must-pick (although I'd still like to see her ult time/power reduced some, because that is fucking annoying to play against).
Eh, maybe I just don't see the frontline rez as something people do a lot. Stupid Mercies in QP/MH, absolutely. They'll fly right in, rez, and immediately die because oops, they're on the frontline where they shouldn't be. But you're still going to be able to revive your picked-off-from-a-random-stray-whatever Zen/Ana/Lucio/Junk/76/etcetcetc from the safety of where you're already supposed to be, or just behind a barrier, to say nothing of if they're near a convenient corner, which is practically everywhere. I kind of wonder if it might actually make the Mercy problem worse by disincentivizing suicidal/stupid behavior.