BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
edited September 2018
Without writing a huge essay...
Gold/silver are the same representative of the bell curve of player skill they always were (but...)
Total player population skill always increases as a game ages, as continuing players become veterans and casual players dip in and out (or migrate to alternatives like Arcade, or lose interest in competitive rewards), so the bell curve does 'shift' a bit upwards as the lower tail disappears.
OW, like most Blizzard games, uses quite hard Rock-Paper-Scissors balance style, and introducing characters like Brigitte (or rebalancing Junkrat and Symmetra) has shifted the meta a lot. Old knowledge and favoured characters will not transfer over as well, and learning new team comps and effective flex heroes is necessary because ultimately rating tests your effectiveness at fitting into a team, rather than your 'killing potential'.*
Aside from resetting your rating volatility, placements always aim to place you lower than you ended last season (otherwise they'd literally just keep you at your old rating and reset volatility alone). It's industry standard at this point and has been noted in a couple of GDC talks as a player retention/rating algorithm improvement measure.
*Competitive Deathmatch, although not perfectly indicative because of how important playing highly mobile characters is to cut out downtime between fights and kill-thievery, is a better measure of how good you are at just killing things. Also, the extremely quick respawn times and constant combat are very good for practising aim (I would argue far better than Ana-headshot only AI matches, as it teaches you to track or flick to human rather than AI movements).
Also always, playing to improve is most effectively done without investment in win/loss and k/d, and just focusing on your basic aim, tracking and positioning, and not picking characters who don't fit current meta unless you're prepared to outplay way beyond what you would otherwise have to do. Getting the muscle memory and gamesense right is still the name of the game, and once those are done, that's when the stats improve. Focusing on stats will only trip you up. Sadly, I can't find the day9 video where he talks about learning how to beat bunker rushes in StarCraft (maybe it's this one, which is a decent watch anyway), but it's a fairly simple sum-up.
e: no it's this video (timestamp 6 mins if it doesn't start there).
Huh, didn't know that, thought each season was tabula rasa. Thanks for the info.
And in terms of people who have played for a while, and how ranking currently corresponds to skill, etc - I suppose what I'm asking is, is silver the new gold and am I just behind the times and mad at nothing? Or is it still seen as pretty not-great?
With 5 teammates you know you get a lot less idiotic play, you get actual communication, sometimes even good comps, and the frustration of a loss only stays with you until the next game, rather than a constant stress about your rank and fellow players.
Took a huge break from OW completely because its competitive mode made me... unhealthily angry. But I got lured back and, after some pretty dominant weeks in QP, decided to give competitive another go.
Fucking god damn fuck, was that a bad idea. Qualified kinda low, 2150 I think, then immediately started to slide even through things typically felt completely beyond my control or influence (leavers, smurfs, idiots). But, because my job is to understand things through data, I decided to turn it into a study. So I hand-coded the data from no fewer than 166 games, plus all of the historic 'rolled-up' data you can access in the in-game stats section. I'm still working through the analysis but it's interesting, and at least gathering data made me feel like I wasn't just wading through misery. Once I finish the analysis I'll post in the new thread.
Anyway.
Going into this new season I was optimistic. I had great qualifying games, including several where the enemy team gave me a shout-out(!). We're talking Hanzo games with 30 kills, 41% accuracy. Lucío games that looked like this:
and so on.
... then it seeded me.
At fucking 1794? Actually lower than where I finished last season, which itself was bad (1810) and way behind my season (2134) and all-time (2531) peaks?
What the fuck is going on?
Before I go completely insane, is this normal? This nominally seems to put me in the, like, bottom 10% of all players which I just feel cannot, cannot be right. Are other people finding their placings have trended down over time? I'm not so much interested in the whys at the moment (let's discuss that once I've shared my data), but just like are my feelings correct in that high silver is, in fact, quite low, and that if you're placing there it's not saying great things about your skillset? Or have most people drifted?
Placements aren't really going to shift you very much from where you already were. The only way you're going to see much movement is just playing a bunch of games. If your winrate remains around 66%, that'll happen fairly quickly.
Last night taught me that you can fill all the bars you want in game: you're not actually getting better without outside resources and training.
Last night that Twitch viewer taught me Doomfist's real damage sources, the punch-leap mobility trick, and to set up Ana-bot Headshot only games to improve my play with a wide spread of characters.
I am of the opinion that if I have to reach outside resources to learn a game, that is a deficiency of the game (yes, I'm talking about Dark Souls COME AT ME), but I will do it.
This is one of the hypotheses I explore in my dataset! Exciting times.
I should add that Overwatch is a gloriously complex game to the point its infeasible for in game tutorials to teach everything (example, character specific match opening). But Doomfist's jump/punch? C'mon, Blizz...
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Now, I'm with you on all of this up to about 90% of the way. And in any other pure ELO system I'd 100% agree with you that you belong where you are, give or take maybe 100 SR. I just think that in OW specifically, the PBSR system adds a lot more noise to signal than in any standard SR system.
Like in DotA, there's no doubt in my mind that I belong exactly where I am. How can I argue? If my contribution causes my team to win more than 50% of the time I will rise. In other words, if my skill is materially affecting the game more often than my teammates, then I am better than them and I deserve to play with slightly better teammates, who are my new peers. If my skills that I display in game aren't turning the dial towards win more often than lose then they aren't skills. They're just the norm within my current rank.
But when you add "Performance" to it things get skew-if, and it always comes back to some unknown mathsy definition of how good Blizzard thinks you are. This problem doesn't magically turn Diamonds into Golds or vice versa. I've seen Diamonds play and they're undoubtedly better than me. But I think it adds a certain amount of uncertainty to the whole system that means I can't say where within - gut feeling here - 250 SR up and 250 down you 'belong'. Because where you belong suddenly means something different to how often you win or lose - ie, materially affect the outcome of your games. And if I'm right here - if your range of where you deserve to be is somewhere within a 500 SR range - then every game you're matched in you are skewing the results. And so are all of your teammates who are likewise being tossed and tumbled around the washing machine of Blizzard's PBSR system.
There was a post on r/overwatch a couple of weeks ago - here - of a solidly mid-Plat player who had logged every single game he'd played this season in Comp. He played around 255 games, and he'd risen about 150 SR. Fair play to him, but his winrate was actually lower than his lossrate. And if his ultimate winrate was lower than 50%, then why is Blizzard matching him with teams based on his SR? Because right now, his SR doesn't predict a 50/50 winrate, meaning players who are matched on his team are less likely to win than not simply because he is on their team! Which is great for players like him who are rising with it, but what about the players who are the exact opposite of this guy? The players who are winning more often than they lose but aren't hitting the numbers that Blizzard wants to see from them? Should they lose 150SR because it's not Official Blizzard-Recognised Performance Based Skill that they have?
So how did he rise?
Did he win more often than expected against higher SR average enemy teams, and therefore received disproportionate returns? Was it because he's a Sombra main and therefore reaped the rewards of playing a still slightly off-meta hero in PBSR? Does Blizzard's PBSR system - or just SR system - suffer from inflation each season and we're all rising a little if we just go ~50/50? I don't know. No one knows, because Blizzard won't say what "Performance" really means.
There's also experiments like this where a guy goes from Gold to Master just maining Brigitte. There's some factors that skew the results - for instance, he actually started caring about the game more while doing this - but it definitely raises questions about whether certain heroes create wins wayyyyy disproportionately to the skill of the player. And whether those players are, by being where they don't belong, possibly skewing the games they're getting matched in.
Fun fact: The first guy's post has spurred me to doing a similar experiment, just with a couple of extra variables recorded. Later in the season I'll let you guys know how it goes and if my experiment changes my views. The only problem is that something Blizz has done with their game has started to give me about 1 dc per night where before I had none, and that's going to seriously fubar the numbers if things don't change.
ANother experiment I'm doing though is making a totally new account. I've heard enough players swear they got calibrate d- and then stayed- much higher than their main account simply by making a new one. It's an interesting little side question about whether calibration plus PBSR plus the short seasons actually combine to hold some players down by their historical SR.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
"Pure elo" only really makes any sense in a 1v1 symmetrical game over a large number of games (with both players in good physical and mental health if you want to cover extra factors). As you introduce more variables, elo becomes less and less accurate. A class-based team game, like DotA, LoL, OW, etc., which alters who you're playing with, what classes they're good or bad at, what the game's current meta is, what map you're playing on, and how all those factors play in with your favoured playstyle (and whether you even get to play your favoured playstyle) will have very variable elo. As such, there's a very wide tolerance (low confidence) in elo in games like these, and your average elo across a high number of games is probably the closest you will get to accurate, whereas your max, min, and final elo don't mean nearly as much).
Comparing win rates (and other statistics like accuracy, killing blows, etc.) at different skill levels doesn't mean that much. A player stuck at theoretical 500 elo will have a 50/50 just like a player stuck at 3.5k. You can rise with a 45/55 as long as you're only playing against higher ranked players. In the reddit example, their win % is only 1% lower than their loss %, which is well within the margin of error, and note that there is some significant variance in win rate with roles and maps, even with 255 games played. Their SR graph suggests their average elo only very slightly moved upwards, and has a wide tolerance (and the lower elo you go, the wider you expect tolerances to be, due to the bell curve effect throwing a wider variety of players at you).
Brigitte is exceptionally effective right now and I would not be surprised to see her tuned further down in the future (probably in the stun and E-heal departments). It's far more likely the YT player is just not as good at filling the role of DPS as they are at filling the role of support with Brigitte than the PBSR system is throwing spanners in the works. The fact it is often easier to rise in SR playing a different role isn't new or unique to OW and its elo or PBSR system; wanting to win with DPS is generally a matter of pride and declaring the game broken because other roles or specific classes/heroes have different skill ceilings or floors, and thus SRs, is a symptom of both ego bruising and a rather illusory belief in the absolute capabilities of rating systems in team games like these.
It doesn't really mean anything to say "a player is skewing the game's rating system" by not being "where they belong" if they're playing a different role to their usual role. It's irrelevant if they're only a 2.5k player when playing DPS, if they're a 3.5k player playing support and they're playing nothing but support. Rating systems in team games do not test your overall skill with every character in every position on every map, and then rate you against other players by the same metric. In these sorts of games, it's always a test of "how effectively do your picks and play increase your win rate across a wide number of games on a wide variety of maps with a wide number of players." Playing support or tank that don't test you in the same ways playing DPS do isn't "cheating the system". If someone's idea of what the rating should do is tell them their skill at playing DPS only, then they should play DPS only, and it's irrelevant if they could get higher playing tank or support, because that's not what they want tested.
Overwatch, by design, is a class-based team game with a tank/support/dps design, and expecting its rating system to only tell players how good they are at killing things is just going into it with mismatched expectations. It's just not how the game was designed to be. That may not be fun for some players, and if so, well, my advice is don't chuck good time after good money; find one of the other games on the market which doesn't have tanks and supports in it, and is a classic FPS where everyone's goal is to kill things and not heal or protect them, and play that competitively instead.
Pure ELO works perfectly fine for other class based games. It's not a precise variable, but no system like it can be. Adding more imprecise variables is just a great way to make things even more confused, while telling people that you're fixing the problem by rewarding "performance".
BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
I mean, reddit posts and videos like those you link exist for all those other class based games too. As does the "ranking up on support doesn't count" mentality. It's a commonality.
Without dragging the thread any further into elo discussion hell, I would again say that Deathmatch (and Competitive DM if it rolls back around) are really good for players who just want to kill others (and maybe get rated on killing others).
Maybe Blizzard will even one day design a nice stalemate map like Facing Worlds/2fort/Blood Gulch, so we can just have pure kill servers too.
I learned a couple of interesting things reading through it. Based on one vague Blizzard post, it seems Comp MMR and other mode MMR's don't intermix. Also, I had no idea they no longer use performance statistics above diamond. If you're ranked above diamond, the only thing that matters now is wins. Whether you play poorly or well, are on fire, or how you compare to others on your character doesn't matter anymore for diamond and above as of a few seasons ago.
3 of my last 5 placement matches were losses - I feel like I'm just getting picked way too often - and then my brother and I proceed to play another 5 games, certain that our luck will change. We go 1 and 4, leaving me at 7 wins 8 losses for the season so far. *sob*
I'm just not in the zone, can't get work done.
That was last night. Tonight I log in, play a little Zen, pick Zen again on Volskaya defense but someone's spamming Tracer. ...which I take to mean they want me to play Tracer, so I do.
End up going like 26 and 2, one of my most dominating Tracer performances since The Eichenwald Incident. After feeling like I was dabbing at the reds with a kitten's paw for most of the weekend, it was amazing to finally feel like my old self again.
McCree saves his flash just for me
Mercy pulls her pistol every time she sees me
#1 discord target
"Thank you, yes. That's right. You should all be terrified of me."
Chance on
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
The draw was an insane Numbani where the draw felt like a stunning victory and upset. The match began with this McCree on the enemy team who I'm pretty sure and my brother is absolutely sure is using a mouse. They decimate us on their attack, tons of time in the bank, but I make it my business to hunt him and steal as much of his attention as possible.
By the end of our attack, they'd switched to their Widow main and the fun continues.
I make her blow he ult on me a few times, and with all her attention on me, we pushed the cart all the way home - but with like a minute to spare.
They full-hold us on the next attack - I can get her off her perch and running, but I can't seal the deal - and going into round 4 we're all disheartened.
There's a moment where no one picks a hero. This McCree/Widow/Tracer (which didn't last long heheh) is monstrous.
We won't be able to hold them off through multiple team fights. We're gonna' lose against this asshole.
Then a dude locks Hanzo. I stick with Tracer, and we full hold them for 3 minutes.
"Draw" never sounded so sweet.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
Chase I’m starting to think you like this game or something
I do. Every now and then I remind myself how weird it is that I do. It is very weird.
I've been playing video games my entire life, pretty much - mainly consoles, with a little bit of PC MMOs back in the heyday of FFXI Online and WoW - and when I got back into gaming hard in like '06-'07, I stuck exclusively to single-player console games. Every now and then I'd check out a multiplayer shooter - The Orange Box, Call of Duty, Battlefield, MAG (remember MAG?), Killzone - and almost-instantly go back to an Uncharted, Dead Space, Darksiders, et cetera. Hated, hated, hated multiplayer shooters. I didn't have the experience or skill or interest to learn. It was just, always, a brief exercise in getting my ass kicked.
My brother always bugged me to play Battlefield with him and I had to repeatedly explain my violent dislike of the genre, to him - even as I felt kinda' left out of all the fun.
Then, three or four years ago, there was the announcement trailer for Overwatch - announced around the same time as Blezzinski's Lawbreakers and another one I've forgotten, and it was like "okay, well, Blizzard's is going to be the one that succeeds," and that's literally as much thought as I gave it. I don't care about it, but I have enough knowledge of the gaming world to know that Blizzard's thing is gonna' work.
Months later - a few months before release - I remember seeing some Zenyatta gameplay and thinking it was so, so, so fucking cool. A chill robotic Buddhist monk who flings prayer beads and floats along in the lotus position. That's fucking awesome! Too bad I don't play multiplayer games.
Then I remember seeing a video of Tracer from the Beta. This was an official-Blizz video, showing a Point A defense on Hanamura, back when Tracer still had 225 hit points. It looked so, so, so fun, but I knew as someone who never played shooters, never liked shooters, that it didn't matter how fun Tracer looked because I'd never get the game and I'm so bad at shooters I could never play a DPS hero like that.
Then my Dad died - within a week or so of the game's release. And all the blogs and websites seemed to be All Overwatch All The Time, making it look so fun. And y'know when you're really super-sad and fuck the world fuck life fuck everything I'm going to sit in the dark and eat this chocolate cake?
Well, when I was in that place I was walking out of Best Buy one day, and there was Overwatch for PS4 and I'm not going to like it and this is probably a waste of ninety bucks but fuck everything I wanna' be a floating robot monk.
Two and a half years later, I've probably completed less than a dozen single-player triple-A games, and maybe a dozen indies. I've completely changed the way I consume games (and probably saved thousands of dollars). All this, I lay at Overwatch's feet.
I've always been jealous of the gamers who could play multiplayer shooters and enjoy them - I was always sure they were having some incredible experience I never could, because of lack of skill and experience and I suppose interest - and having become comfortable with Overwatch, I know that was indeed the case. It's awesome, I love it, and among other things one big reason I make all those Tracer videos is because it still blows my mind that I can even play her at all. It still puffs me up that I can play Tracer and not be a complete drag to my team. It fills me with fiery pride to get endorsements after a good Tracer game.
I saw you comin', Overwatch, but I never thought you'd hit me, and I had no idea you'd hit me so hard.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
Every time I try bowling a team over with Hammond, I end up stuck in enemy territory and they gun me down while I try and escape.
On the other hand, once I bowled into a mercy and slammed her into a wall killing them.
Well it's kinda' the D.Va/Winston conundrum - use your mobility skill to get in to get to work, but how do you get out?
Take a page from Winston: use the grapple and swing to disengage or chase down weakened targets, because you sneakily started the fight from high ground with a piledriver. I say this as pure theorycraft because I've played little Hamham. That said, you might be able to swing in, piledrive, survive with your shield - but that's still like 6 seconds of total exposure - more than enough time to get melted by focus fire.
I've chased down a lot of fleeing Hams in ball form. Ball form all on its own is actually a pretty-great escape option, on par with Soldier's sprint - but you're still a massive, massive hitbox.
Playing 6v6 random this weekend helped me to round out the few heroes I had little experience with, especially when it assigned me to Zarya for five rounds straight. I never really understood her abilities before but by the end I was pulling some real Last Stand stuff. I could see her being the linchpin in a coordinated team, but since I play QP most of the time I'll just stick with Rein and hope people stay on the correct side of the shield.
One little trick to note about Hammond is that you can get up to ramming speed by just attaching to a wall for a second or two and holding the direction you want to go. This lets you start your hook cooldown earlier and barrel straight into the enemy rather than dealing with goofy rotational physics, but of course doesn't set you up for the ground-pound.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
A lot of times the safest thing to do as hammond is just keep barreling forward, get out of range behind the enemy and then wait for your cooldown before you dive through again. And yeah, don't underestimate the power of basic ball forms speed boost.
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.
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Playing 6v6 random this weekend helped me to round out the few heroes I had little experience with, especially when it assigned me to Zarya for five rounds straight. I never really understood her abilities before but by the end I was pulling some real Last Stand stuff. I could see her being the linchpin in a coordinated team, but since I play QP most of the time I'll just stick with Rein and hope people stay on the correct side of the shield.
You don't need a particularly coordinated team to be a terror with Zarya, just a support who's willing to beam you every five seconds or so. She still does entirely too much damage if you can track with her beam at all. Which I can only do half the time, and it shows in that I'll have matches where I build one grav total and others where I build a grav every 1.2 fights.
I think it's often ignored that Zarya's the only tank with passive healing, in the form of her 200 shields. All you need is a few seconds of cover to top yourself off to a comfortable level - she's very much about positioning, leaping forward at an opportune moment, parrying a big incoming attack with the bubble and hitting back harder than they expect you to be able to. 'Course if you don't hit back hard enough, they just kill you.
So she's kinda' McCree-esque in that regard.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
I think it's often ignored that Zarya's the only tank with passive healing, in the form of her 200 shields. All you need is a few seconds of cover to top yourself off to a comfortable level - she's very much about positioning, leaping forward at an opportune moment, parrying a big incoming attack with the bubble and hitting back harder than they expect you to be able to. 'Course if you don't hit back hard enough, they just kill you.
So she's kinda' McCree-esque in that regard.
While that's true, her large clip size and very high consistent damage means it pays off to actively heal her to keep her on the front lines. If Zarya can maintain ~60 charge she'll relentlessly shred Rein shields and Roadhogs.
Damn you, Mystery Heroes! It gave me Tracer and I went on a tear, nearly singlehandedly opening the first point of King's Row to be taken. However, I know if I were to choose her in quick play, I'd end up tickling a Roadhog and then blinking into a fire strike or something. It's just the game giving me false hope. It happens from time to time with Genji and McCree, as well...
Posts
Gold/silver are the same representative of the bell curve of player skill they always were (but...)
Total player population skill always increases as a game ages, as continuing players become veterans and casual players dip in and out (or migrate to alternatives like Arcade, or lose interest in competitive rewards), so the bell curve does 'shift' a bit upwards as the lower tail disappears.
OW, like most Blizzard games, uses quite hard Rock-Paper-Scissors balance style, and introducing characters like Brigitte (or rebalancing Junkrat and Symmetra) has shifted the meta a lot. Old knowledge and favoured characters will not transfer over as well, and learning new team comps and effective flex heroes is necessary because ultimately rating tests your effectiveness at fitting into a team, rather than your 'killing potential'.*
Aside from resetting your rating volatility, placements always aim to place you lower than you ended last season (otherwise they'd literally just keep you at your old rating and reset volatility alone). It's industry standard at this point and has been noted in a couple of GDC talks as a player retention/rating algorithm improvement measure.
*Competitive Deathmatch, although not perfectly indicative because of how important playing highly mobile characters is to cut out downtime between fights and kill-thievery, is a better measure of how good you are at just killing things. Also, the extremely quick respawn times and constant combat are very good for practising aim (I would argue far better than Ana-headshot only AI matches, as it teaches you to track or flick to human rather than AI movements).
Also always, playing to improve is most effectively done without investment in win/loss and k/d, and just focusing on your basic aim, tracking and positioning, and not picking characters who don't fit current meta unless you're prepared to outplay way beyond what you would otherwise have to do. Getting the muscle memory and gamesense right is still the name of the game, and once those are done, that's when the stats improve. Focusing on stats will only trip you up. Sadly, I can't find the day9 video where he talks about learning how to beat bunker rushes in StarCraft (maybe it's this one, which is a decent watch anyway), but it's a fairly simple sum-up.
e: no it's this video (timestamp 6 mins if it doesn't start there).
My accuracy - per the dataset - is one of the things that has improved, and it wasn't exactly bad to begin with! You may remember in TF2...
I appreciate the word choice.
I should add that Overwatch is a gloriously complex game to the point its infeasible for in game tutorials to teach everything (example, character specific match opening). But Doomfist's jump/punch? C'mon, Blizz...
Even though I'm that Rein I'm appropriating this.
This sums up 4/5 Quickplay games.
Because I spend money st of my game time with that face.
a lurker posted in the job thread and just so happened to have the same avatar as well-known face @3clipse and confused everyone for about a page
and then over the next month most everyone in the job thread changed their avatar to be an edit of that cropped Oglaf panel
(Oglaf is a largely NSFW webcomic that is shockingly consistent in being actually funny, if that bit of context is also missing)
Now, I'm with you on all of this up to about 90% of the way. And in any other pure ELO system I'd 100% agree with you that you belong where you are, give or take maybe 100 SR. I just think that in OW specifically, the PBSR system adds a lot more noise to signal than in any standard SR system.
Like in DotA, there's no doubt in my mind that I belong exactly where I am. How can I argue? If my contribution causes my team to win more than 50% of the time I will rise. In other words, if my skill is materially affecting the game more often than my teammates, then I am better than them and I deserve to play with slightly better teammates, who are my new peers. If my skills that I display in game aren't turning the dial towards win more often than lose then they aren't skills. They're just the norm within my current rank.
But when you add "Performance" to it things get skew-if, and it always comes back to some unknown mathsy definition of how good Blizzard thinks you are. This problem doesn't magically turn Diamonds into Golds or vice versa. I've seen Diamonds play and they're undoubtedly better than me. But I think it adds a certain amount of uncertainty to the whole system that means I can't say where within - gut feeling here - 250 SR up and 250 down you 'belong'. Because where you belong suddenly means something different to how often you win or lose - ie, materially affect the outcome of your games. And if I'm right here - if your range of where you deserve to be is somewhere within a 500 SR range - then every game you're matched in you are skewing the results. And so are all of your teammates who are likewise being tossed and tumbled around the washing machine of Blizzard's PBSR system.
There was a post on r/overwatch a couple of weeks ago - here - of a solidly mid-Plat player who had logged every single game he'd played this season in Comp. He played around 255 games, and he'd risen about 150 SR. Fair play to him, but his winrate was actually lower than his lossrate. And if his ultimate winrate was lower than 50%, then why is Blizzard matching him with teams based on his SR? Because right now, his SR doesn't predict a 50/50 winrate, meaning players who are matched on his team are less likely to win than not simply because he is on their team! Which is great for players like him who are rising with it, but what about the players who are the exact opposite of this guy? The players who are winning more often than they lose but aren't hitting the numbers that Blizzard wants to see from them? Should they lose 150SR because it's not Official Blizzard-Recognised Performance Based Skill that they have?
So how did he rise?
Did he win more often than expected against higher SR average enemy teams, and therefore received disproportionate returns? Was it because he's a Sombra main and therefore reaped the rewards of playing a still slightly off-meta hero in PBSR? Does Blizzard's PBSR system - or just SR system - suffer from inflation each season and we're all rising a little if we just go ~50/50? I don't know. No one knows, because Blizzard won't say what "Performance" really means.
There's also experiments like this where a guy goes from Gold to Master just maining Brigitte. There's some factors that skew the results - for instance, he actually started caring about the game more while doing this - but it definitely raises questions about whether certain heroes create wins wayyyyy disproportionately to the skill of the player. And whether those players are, by being where they don't belong, possibly skewing the games they're getting matched in.
Fun fact: The first guy's post has spurred me to doing a similar experiment, just with a couple of extra variables recorded. Later in the season I'll let you guys know how it goes and if my experiment changes my views. The only problem is that something Blizz has done with their game has started to give me about 1 dc per night where before I had none, and that's going to seriously fubar the numbers if things don't change.
ANother experiment I'm doing though is making a totally new account. I've heard enough players swear they got calibrate d- and then stayed- much higher than their main account simply by making a new one. It's an interesting little side question about whether calibration plus PBSR plus the short seasons actually combine to hold some players down by their historical SR.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Comparing win rates (and other statistics like accuracy, killing blows, etc.) at different skill levels doesn't mean that much. A player stuck at theoretical 500 elo will have a 50/50 just like a player stuck at 3.5k. You can rise with a 45/55 as long as you're only playing against higher ranked players. In the reddit example, their win % is only 1% lower than their loss %, which is well within the margin of error, and note that there is some significant variance in win rate with roles and maps, even with 255 games played. Their SR graph suggests their average elo only very slightly moved upwards, and has a wide tolerance (and the lower elo you go, the wider you expect tolerances to be, due to the bell curve effect throwing a wider variety of players at you).
Brigitte is exceptionally effective right now and I would not be surprised to see her tuned further down in the future (probably in the stun and E-heal departments). It's far more likely the YT player is just not as good at filling the role of DPS as they are at filling the role of support with Brigitte than the PBSR system is throwing spanners in the works. The fact it is often easier to rise in SR playing a different role isn't new or unique to OW and its elo or PBSR system; wanting to win with DPS is generally a matter of pride and declaring the game broken because other roles or specific classes/heroes have different skill ceilings or floors, and thus SRs, is a symptom of both ego bruising and a rather illusory belief in the absolute capabilities of rating systems in team games like these.
It doesn't really mean anything to say "a player is skewing the game's rating system" by not being "where they belong" if they're playing a different role to their usual role. It's irrelevant if they're only a 2.5k player when playing DPS, if they're a 3.5k player playing support and they're playing nothing but support. Rating systems in team games do not test your overall skill with every character in every position on every map, and then rate you against other players by the same metric. In these sorts of games, it's always a test of "how effectively do your picks and play increase your win rate across a wide number of games on a wide variety of maps with a wide number of players." Playing support or tank that don't test you in the same ways playing DPS do isn't "cheating the system". If someone's idea of what the rating should do is tell them their skill at playing DPS only, then they should play DPS only, and it's irrelevant if they could get higher playing tank or support, because that's not what they want tested.
Overwatch, by design, is a class-based team game with a tank/support/dps design, and expecting its rating system to only tell players how good they are at killing things is just going into it with mismatched expectations. It's just not how the game was designed to be. That may not be fun for some players, and if so, well, my advice is don't chuck good time after good money; find one of the other games on the market which doesn't have tanks and supports in it, and is a classic FPS where everyone's goal is to kill things and not heal or protect them, and play that competitively instead.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Without dragging the thread any further into elo discussion hell, I would again say that Deathmatch (and Competitive DM if it rolls back around) are really good for players who just want to kill others (and maybe get rated on killing others).
Maybe Blizzard will even one day design a nice stalemate map like Facing Worlds/2fort/Blood Gulch, so we can just have pure kill servers too.
I learned a couple of interesting things reading through it. Based on one vague Blizzard post, it seems Comp MMR and other mode MMR's don't intermix. Also, I had no idea they no longer use performance statistics above diamond. If you're ranked above diamond, the only thing that matters now is wins. Whether you play poorly or well, are on fire, or how you compare to others on your character doesn't matter anymore for diamond and above as of a few seasons ago.
I'm just not in the zone, can't get work done.
That was last night. Tonight I log in, play a little Zen, pick Zen again on Volskaya defense but someone's spamming Tracer. ...which I take to mean they want me to play Tracer, so I do.
End up going like 26 and 2, one of my most dominating Tracer performances since The Eichenwald Incident. After feeling like I was dabbing at the reds with a kitten's paw for most of the weekend, it was amazing to finally feel like my old self again.
- McCree saves his flash just for me
- Mercy pulls her pistol every time she sees me
- #1 discord target
"Thank you, yes. That's right. You should all be terrified of me."Steam: MightyPotatoKing
The draw was an insane Numbani where the draw felt like a stunning victory and upset. The match began with this McCree on the enemy team who I'm pretty sure and my brother is absolutely sure is using a mouse. They decimate us on their attack, tons of time in the bank, but I make it my business to hunt him and steal as much of his attention as possible.
By the end of our attack, they'd switched to their Widow main and the fun continues.
I make her blow he ult on me a few times, and with all her attention on me, we pushed the cart all the way home - but with like a minute to spare.
They full-hold us on the next attack - I can get her off her perch and running, but I can't seal the deal - and going into round 4 we're all disheartened.
There's a moment where no one picks a hero. This McCree/Widow/Tracer (which didn't last long heheh) is monstrous.
We won't be able to hold them off through multiple team fights. We're gonna' lose against this asshole.
Then a dude locks Hanzo. I stick with Tracer, and we full hold them for 3 minutes.
"Draw" never sounded so sweet.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Not too shabby. Just a couple of steps back to Silver!
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
I do. Every now and then I remind myself how weird it is that I do. It is very weird.
I've been playing video games my entire life, pretty much - mainly consoles, with a little bit of PC MMOs back in the heyday of FFXI Online and WoW - and when I got back into gaming hard in like '06-'07, I stuck exclusively to single-player console games. Every now and then I'd check out a multiplayer shooter - The Orange Box, Call of Duty, Battlefield, MAG (remember MAG?), Killzone - and almost-instantly go back to an Uncharted, Dead Space, Darksiders, et cetera. Hated, hated, hated multiplayer shooters. I didn't have the experience or skill or interest to learn. It was just, always, a brief exercise in getting my ass kicked.
My brother always bugged me to play Battlefield with him and I had to repeatedly explain my violent dislike of the genre, to him - even as I felt kinda' left out of all the fun.
Then, three or four years ago, there was the announcement trailer for Overwatch - announced around the same time as Blezzinski's Lawbreakers and another one I've forgotten, and it was like "okay, well, Blizzard's is going to be the one that succeeds," and that's literally as much thought as I gave it. I don't care about it, but I have enough knowledge of the gaming world to know that Blizzard's thing is gonna' work.
Months later - a few months before release - I remember seeing some Zenyatta gameplay and thinking it was so, so, so fucking cool. A chill robotic Buddhist monk who flings prayer beads and floats along in the lotus position. That's fucking awesome! Too bad I don't play multiplayer games.
Then I remember seeing a video of Tracer from the Beta. This was an official-Blizz video, showing a Point A defense on Hanamura, back when Tracer still had 225 hit points. It looked so, so, so fun, but I knew as someone who never played shooters, never liked shooters, that it didn't matter how fun Tracer looked because I'd never get the game and I'm so bad at shooters I could never play a DPS hero like that.
Then my Dad died - within a week or so of the game's release. And all the blogs and websites seemed to be All Overwatch All The Time, making it look so fun. And y'know when you're really super-sad and fuck the world fuck life fuck everything I'm going to sit in the dark and eat this chocolate cake?
Well, when I was in that place I was walking out of Best Buy one day, and there was Overwatch for PS4 and I'm not going to like it and this is probably a waste of ninety bucks but fuck everything I wanna' be a floating robot monk.
Two and a half years later, I've probably completed less than a dozen single-player triple-A games, and maybe a dozen indies. I've completely changed the way I consume games (and probably saved thousands of dollars). All this, I lay at Overwatch's feet.
I've always been jealous of the gamers who could play multiplayer shooters and enjoy them - I was always sure they were having some incredible experience I never could, because of lack of skill and experience and I suppose interest - and having become comfortable with Overwatch, I know that was indeed the case. It's awesome, I love it, and among other things one big reason I make all those Tracer videos is because it still blows my mind that I can even play her at all. It still puffs me up that I can play Tracer and not be a complete drag to my team. It fills me with fiery pride to get endorsements after a good Tracer game.
I saw you comin', Overwatch, but I never thought you'd hit me, and I had no idea you'd hit me so hard.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
On the other hand, once I bowled into a mercy and slammed her into a wall killing them.
Speed bump detected
Well it's kinda' the D.Va/Winston conundrum - use your mobility skill to get in to get to work, but how do you get out?
Take a page from Winston: use the grapple and swing to disengage or chase down weakened targets, because you sneakily started the fight from high ground with a piledriver. I say this as pure theorycraft because I've played little Hamham. That said, you might be able to swing in, piledrive, survive with your shield - but that's still like 6 seconds of total exposure - more than enough time to get melted by focus fire.
I've chased down a lot of fleeing Hams in ball form. Ball form all on its own is actually a pretty-great escape option, on par with Soldier's sprint - but you're still a massive, massive hitbox.
Also,
Source.
Also,
Oh my God. Thank you so much, everybody!
You don't need a particularly coordinated team to be a terror with Zarya, just a support who's willing to beam you every five seconds or so. She still does entirely too much damage if you can track with her beam at all. Which I can only do half the time, and it shows in that I'll have matches where I build one grav total and others where I build a grav every 1.2 fights.
So she's kinda' McCree-esque in that regard.
While that's true, her large clip size and very high consistent damage means it pays off to actively heal her to keep her on the front lines. If Zarya can maintain ~60 charge she'll relentlessly shred Rein shields and Roadhogs.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
I don’t got it.