Blizzard have made a couple of tweaks to Overwatch’s matchmaking system within the 1.10 patch, and principal designer Scott Mercer has simply been on the boards to elucidate them.
See what else is new in our summary of Overwatch patch 1.10.
The modifications concern a ‘streak multiplier’, which accelerates the speed at which your ability score is adjusted when you’ve had a number of wins or losses in a row. The multiplier is meant to cope with boosting and smurfing, as explained by game director Jeff Kaplan in another post.
Smurfing – which is when a talented participant makes use of a recent account to match with rookie gamers in order to unfairly stomp them – is imply and might smash video games. Kaplan is assured that Overwatch has the issue largely nailed because of this multiplier, although. Citing the instance of an Overwatch professional who streamed from a smurf account, Kaplan says Blizzard internally in contrast his smurf account to his fundamental, and that the ability rankings have been even inside 15 video games. “I know there is a very bad perception of smurfing,” he says. “But the reality is, skilled players are moved rapidly out of lower skill situations.” Indeed, Kaplan goes as far as to say smurfing “isn’t really that big of an issue.”
The streak multiplier is a part of the explanation why. The extra video games you win (or lose) in a row, the extra every win (or loss) will have an effect on your ability score. As Mercer notes in his post, nevertheless, “win or loss streaks can also just naturally occur when the matchmaking system has already properly identified skill. After all, the matchmaker is trying to place in you fair matches where you have a 50% chance to win. It’s rare, but sometimes you flip a coin 5 times and it lands on heads every time.”
And that brings us to the most recent modifications – the streak multiplier is being tuned to be much less aggressive. Mercer says: “you now need to win or lose more games in a row before any multiplier is used, and it scales up at a slower pace. Furthermore, we will now try to only use the multiplier in cases where the matchmaking system has some confidence that the player’s MMR and skill are wildly mismatched. In cases of natural, random streaks, you ideally shouldn’t see any acceleration either up or down at all.”
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