How The Ranked System Actually Works

15:48 someone’s heart just jumped really believing their teammates are just that bad

ELO for dating apps 😂

really really really good video

This is so true, I always try to tell people who complain about their rank all these things and they never understand. This is just intuitive, there are tons of bias and statistics in place. You are statistically not the unluckiest person on the planet

so the reason why i gain 6% per win and lost 30% by lost is because blizzard just dont want me to rank up

I just took 6 L's to the chin in my DPS placement matches (playing with a friend who is in diamond) and was projected for silver 5.

My 7th game was a win that took my placement from silver 5 to gold 4.

I won 7/10 tank placements with a K/D averaging 5.5kd And got placed gold 4. -_-

The ranks are dogs hit!

so i just need to find hero's i like don't get mad that a lose and fail and just play a lot and i mean a lot 10'000 hours and i may get to silver

All of this is bs. Every player across every rank complains about unbalanced matchmaking because the game doesn't prioritize rewarding individual metrics the thing each player controls, so individual skill across elos like gm5-1 varience or silver gold to diamond is entirely bs. Also, the bell curve forces everyone regardless of individual skill to plat/gold because the general assumptiom the matchmaker makes is most players are avg and not anomlaies. The balance is ass because they force que times and geographical area and connection directly influence who you play with. If you live in an impoverished shitty area you play with those people. Do they perform as well as the bay area with fully maxed out rigs? Maybe you have everything you need. Still, the matchmaker will pool you with teammates of that threshold consistently impacting the winability of your games due to geographical location restriction.

Thats the dumbest shit ever. If you are 40 and 0 eith 30 final blows and lose you should go up in rank it doesnt matter what your team does. They are right that dmg doesnt matter. Ginak blows does however. Thats how you win the game.

Individual skill determined from wons and losses is braindead. How do wins and losses determine a players individual skill in team games. Sure you have a positive win rate so you are a skilled player impacting the game in a pos light. What about statistically comparison across players of the same build/hero. If I hit all my shit and am mechanically cold it doesnt matter what my team does or if I win or lose. I controlled what I can control and should be rewarded for it with a higher rank. Thr dependency of wins and loses is dependency on the matchmaker which we all knoe is bs with nee accounts being boosted mmr and even gn top 500 players struggling to climb accounts in the middle ranks with established mmr. Individual skill should be rewarded

"you can't tell how good someone is by looking at their stats"
this is entirely untrue. If you couldn't reference raw stats, then elo or mmr couldn't work in the first place! To those of you who disagree, eat your vegetables.
If you have minimal assists you are a bad teammate and probably not very smart either.
If you have tons of assists but never have a positive kdr, then you probably have bad critical thinking skills.
It's not that complicated.
If you have a high kdr and tons of assists, consider your self goated.
This logic doesn't apply to objectives. For the sloths that don't think good, consider everything I already said+objective goal variables.

From here you can gauge to what intensity the line of behavior that has.
Wow so complicated and ambiguous.

Update: I don't want this guy on my team.

I was playing a game that was winning. Then one of my teammates left the first 5 minutes. Then two other left. It was a 2 v 5 and when we lost. I lost fucking 25% with it saying volatile. Who tf can I be able to carry 2v5. They were dogshit. At least I got play of the game. Such rigged bs

Bro just get to the point God daym

having a hidden Mach Making Rating number for players is stupid.

I actually never knew elo came from Árpád Élő. It was a great surprise since my country isnt often mentioned anywhere.

Great Video just a couple of things worth noting specifically for Overwatch 2.

Win/Loss Streaks have been mentioned that they will or already modify MMR change it was mentioned for the S9 Comp 3.0 explanation at Blizzcon.

Also, every old account going into Overwatch 2 kept the OG Overwatch 1 MMR with decay based on the number of seasons since a consistent competitive experience (mentioned in one of the Comp dev blogs). (This was because in a closed beta they saw a marked uptick in stompy games from Diamond+ players (OW1) in games against players they shouldnt) This also duplicates and extraploates the Old Account vs New Account issues, because new accounts have bonuses to stop Smurfing as well as New Player MMR flexibility.

Also another thing Blizzard have tuned the MatchMaker to find people with equivalent-ish MMR in the same role and place them between teams. I.e. your Tank has a Gold Badge but Diamond levelled MMR & Your opponents Tank is Diamond badge and MMR. This means that the teams average is usually less than 3 minor Divisions of MMR (An action of this is to normalise MMR change between rankd cause the teams are eqivalent skill on paper)

MMR said I'm mid masters like 6 months ago. Ranked system said I'm plat/diamond. My account is like 500+ hours aged at that point, and I slingshot backwards even though my performance was fine.

I HATE OVERWATCH'S RANKED SYSTEM I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER MY RANK

That exaplains a lot. Most of my comp games I played 'just like that', 'for fun'. I didn't think about being better. I just played. In one day I made a decision I wan't to be better. I fixed many bad habits, got more skill, better aim... and what? I hard stuck on same level for many many games. Even if I was playing better than before. Eh. It seems it's time to create new account and check what is my real rank currently.

went from s5 to b1 with 42 elim. does that not help rank up tho

Season 9 supposedly changes a lot of things in OW2, and also resets it.

I am silver since OW Season 1 and i got to high plat only once when i played Widow only and then fell back to silver, never to go out again and i always get best stats but lose..

Trying to model skill leaves out a bunch of factors that people don't tend to count, marks and call outs, pushing enemies back/off of positions but not eliminating them, occupying enemy attention away from the objective which may result in being killed without an elimination but significant capture time for the team etc

Halos system is way better and I don't agree with what you were saying in the beginning. You don't need to model skill all you have to do is set a lobby where everyone in the lobby is the same rank and set it to wins and losses. People are overcomplicating something very simple and making it worse

I’m happy with the competitive changes that are coming into season 9, I’ve been playing Overwatch since beta and was never really into competitive like that but more into QP. I always placed gold after my placements but recently hit platinum. Hopefully in season 9 I can hit diamond

I went 5 and 0 3 time's in a row and stayed the same rank i go 5 and 2 and get demoted twice even though i had 50 kills in those 2 losses

This video is incorrect it's actually lose 1 game = rank down, 1 lost + 5 wins in a row = rank down

Might be the holder for wr magua dmg 45k in a comp game 66 and 9. And i lost and i supposed to take blizzard word one it idc if its 1000games or a mill games in row straight loses if a player can put numbers like dat up in comp its no fluke do it all the time actually

I just want to know what the game actually takes into account because I've played roughly 50 matches at this point and am still stuck in Gold 2. I get average 14k healing, 20 or more assists, sometimes (if I'm Zen or Brig) I also get roughly 15 elims and I'm usually good at positioning and dodging attacks.

It's just really frustrating at this point.

They used to have individual performance back in the day, and I miss it. It incentivised paying more attention to your own performance, and gaining +30 on wins and -10 on losses communicated very clearly "keep it up and you will rank up". That W/L is the main metric means people will be so toxic when they think a teammate is bad, and subsequently throw their own games as a result. This feeling those players get is bad for all players in ranked when in colors the perception of super fun losses that were tight games. IMO the solution should be to focus on sub-objectives like "2-3" on a flashpoint map probably meant it overall was even, and if those games don't feel good to lose, what hope do we have of immature players ever taking responsibility for their actions? The frequent draws didn't feel great on 2cp in OW1, but at least there was this feeling of it always being a possibility preventing teammates from tilting. So I'm not sure it helps that draws are so rare now. I'd rather take a 30 min draw over a 15 min loss for competitive integrity. A single 5-6 payload game should be counted as 5 wins 6 losses just imo.

15:30 "somehow the universe itself is working against you, putting all the worst players in existence on your team" I know for a fact its doing this. Every game I'm in there is this one guy named Jing who is throwing my game.

4:30 "and even online dating apps" Time to grind to GM :D

OW2 ranked is trying its hardest to make the ranked experience as unfun as possible.

basically players have almost no control over how they gain or lose rank woop

I have 81 hours of game and im a main bastion. But this shit system dont care how many games i won, im forever stuck in bronze 5
(Ps: sorry for my bad english, im Brazilian)

Me and my fiancé play overwatch together. We play competitive, and I have a higher win rate than him. I also play on my own, he usually only plays with me. I play all different game types, and have a positive win ratio on all of them, along with a higher win ratio to my fiancé. I am currently at Silver 1. That’s currently my top this season. Wanna know where he got to? Fucking platinum. He managed to rank all the way up to platinum while I’m still stuck in silver, despite every single part of my account would tell you that I should be higher. I have more time on different heroes, higher progression level, higher win ratio with more games to make it accurate. All of my statistics are higher than his.

We make a joke that it’s because blizzard is sexist, but I honestly think it’s because I main healers. For some reason, I can’t climb as a mercy main. This makes me think that they rank you similar to deathmatch, on your K/D…and don’t really pay much attention to healing or assists. I maybe get a max of 5 kills in a game, because it’s not my job as a mercy to frontline damage. However, it doesn’t matter how many people I save, resurrect, assist…it feels like the matchmaking system doesn’t look at that…or more that it can’t also put that into consideration. It’s why we don’t get healing POTG, because they don’t know how to judge what’s good healer activity against someone who got a triple kill. It doesn’t matter that you kept them alive which allowed them to do it, that’s not what’s measured.

Blizzard has said that it’s not the case, but they already have that type of shit for POTG, and I don’t think that they’re being entirely truthful.
I love playing healers, it’s my favourite because I like being fast and helping people rather than going in myself. But it feels like I’m gonna have to start choosing between roles that I like, or ranking up.

i have no idea what my rank is even supposed to be tbh
i'm a new player to pc in the first place, played ow since like august, 300 hours
completely had to learn how to use keyboard and game mechanic
i've been stuck in silver 5 for like 2 months though, even though i am often in mid gold lobbies because my friends are ranked higher

recently i was curious, and decided that i could use one of their smurf account (plat 3) to see if i could even compete with that, and i ended up winning some games, some were tougher, and i deranked it to plat 5
i wonder if that is more accurate to my skill level or did it just go down the maximum amount it could?

I appreciate the video and all, great work, but I am BEGGING that in future the screen isn't cutoff around the sides. It's been putting me on edge seeing the HUD cutoff slightly on both sides xD. That is all thank you.

i didnt watch the video yet but this rank system fucking sucks i went 5-2 adn then 5-3 guess what im still in silver 2 this shit makes 0 sense

Good video, the main frustration I have with the system is the combination of needing hundreds of games to balance out "everything that could happen" and the fact that the more games you play the more confidence the system has in your ability. I guess id add the fact that there's also zero individual performance metrics. All this culminates in me in a place where I know I am higher skilled that the lobbies I'm in and I AM climbing but its so slow because I had a rough start with leavers/throwers/people who look like they've never played an fps before. (Gold2 initially to Plat2 took me 150 games over 2 seasons) I consistently have a better stats than my team win or lose and I thought the system would recognize that and move me up faster, learning that it does not is kind of annoying. /rant

Still looking for explanation of: literally performing the best in the whole lobby with highest elims, damage, healing (yes im a moira main)

Yet STILL HARDSTUCK. I’m in Gold and almost every game I’m watching my team spawn in, then one by one running straight into the enemy team 1v5 and dying. Rinse and repeat.

Im watching DPS (when they actually hit shots) focusing enemy tank that is being double pocketed by their supports.

I was Plat (occasionally touched Diamond - PS5 fwiw) in OW1 and had to quit because of these frustrations. Recently picked up OW2 and I’m experiencing the exact same thing.

It’s like, the better you perform in a game, the worse players it puts you with the next game. So playing well becomes a vicious cycle of frustration.

Im trying my hardest to focus on my own gameplay and not blame my teammates (that top 500’s keep reminding us to do) but come on….

im not actually stuck silver its just im with my friend hes bronze 4 nd 5 but, we get bad tanks so often idky

I'd like to ask about bots in lower ranks of ow
It's not fair idk if it's only in certain regions but the amount of bots in games is annoying

Good explanation. If accurate, it highlights a problem we experience a lot in support roles: you talk about the 'stickiness' of MMR, how as you play lots of games it becomes harder to rank up or down because of the averaging effect (the sort of Bayesian 'prior modifier') that is slow to update. The problem with that model is that when you are in a support or even tank role, where it is hard to carry your team, that exacerbates how slow skill improvements are to update, if at all. For example, let's say that your win probability in a support role is only 30% tied to your performance and 70% tied to your team performance. That mutes the effect you play on outcomes, so that any skill improvement you have takes a lot longer to be recognized (because the 'noise' of your team's performance anchors you at whatever your current MMR is). So now you're doubling slowing updates. Funny enough that problem could be solved, by the way, if they did something that probably hurts the rest of the experience: add MORE variance to match up MMRs, but only as an individual. For example if you are at MMR 2000, they should occasionally stick you in MMR 2800 games, where all 9 other players are similar MMR except for you. Having say 5-10 games like that would reveal whether your MMR is appropriate. If it is, you'll lose a lot more than you'll win

Love your content but I wanna coach your Bubble management for Zarya so hard

15:52 Bro gave us time to recover from the asteroid hit

I went five and zero but didn't rank up or down. So I think it's fine... Everyone is just exagerating. Overwatch is trash. 😂

Hi Casual! Interesting video - thank you! Coming from game development myself, could you argue why do you trust Blizzard has implemented the elo-system ”as is” / without modifications (e.g. coming from business guidance, user experience, etc.) ?

This video is spot-on about the ranking system. I wish everyone knew this. I probably wouldn't have known this if I didn't have a gm tank duo who's been coaching me since I started playing the game. A few of my biggest problems trying to rank up was just not doing well on a certain character. I really like Ana but I used to tunnel-vision and focus mainly on healing tank, so I missed healing my other teammates. I switched to Kiriko and I won more. It ended up fixing my tunnel-visioning problem so I did get better on Ana but if I had just played Kiriko instead of all the Ana games my rank would have been higher (for reference I fluctuated from initial placement of gold to plat, back down in gold even lower than my initial placement, and now I'm diamond).

I'm now experiencing this on dps. I love playing Ashe and Widowmaker but my aim is extremely inconsistent. I can carry plat lobbies when it's good and be mid in gold when it's bad. I initially placed plat 3 and went on an epic loss streak to gold. A few days ago I figured out Soldier is my most consistent dps and went on an 8 game win streak. I play a lot in diamond lobbies and unfortunately get placed in masters lobbies sometimes. I know I "belong" in plat at the very least, but my character and lobby choices don't help me out. I enjoy playing high-skill heroes but I'm not at a point where I can always carry on them. I'm also learning the most difficult character in the game (Tracer) rn, so it's a rough experience.

Deranking feels bad, but for people who are dedicated to improving (i.e., not only caring about rank), it's actually a symptom of improving. I'm challenging myself by playing in higher lobbies. It's frustrating when I derank but I'm getting better at the game by playing against higher-skilled opponents. Before my duo reached gm, he got carried by his smurf duo from either diamond or masters to gm and got shit on. He went on a huge loss streak to diamond but he had improved immensely by playing against gm players. He climbed back to gm and actually belongs this time.

The best advice I can give to people who are unhappy with their rank is to stop caring!! If you keep improving at the game, you will eventually rank up, so who cares what your rank currently is? Treat every game like a learning experience. Every time you die, ask yourself "What could I have done to not die here?" or "How could I have played that differently?". Be excited to play against high ELO players in qp. You'll find it very difficult to get better at the game if you hang out in low ELO queuing with your bronze friends.

Also, I don't know if this is a common experience, but I hyperfixate on a specific role. Tank was my first love. I actually started playing this game because of Wrecking Ball (I started playing earlier this year so idk what ow1 looked like). I initially placed gold and just climbed through plat. Finished plat 5 my first season playing the game. Didn't even place on other roles. Climbed to plat 3 the next season and then started disliking the role because of the Orisa meta. I turned my attention to support and then more recently to dps. I came back to tank last season and assumed I was still stuck at that rank, but to my surprise, I was carrying all my plat games. My game knowledge had improved simply by trying to get good at other roles. I easily climbed to diamond. At that point, my support was gold, so I focused on getting better at that role and eventually got stuck. I turned my attention to dps and I just ranked my support to diamond. It's a cycle of improvement. I think I'm stuck and then I rank up on some other role. I think it's a great way to improve. Keeps you from being hardstuck in a singular role.