Overwatch's matchmaking has been an issue for some time, but fresh reports of wildly unfair pairings are being shared after the latest Season 3 update. According to fans, players as high as Top 500 are being placed in Gold tier ranked matches, as the game seemingly fails to take previous Season results into account.
This comes after the latest update fixed some issues players were facing in competitive play, although seemingly leaving the matchmaking complaints unaddressed. It's not clear if the team is working on a way to ensure that those who previously performed well are kept away from lower-rank matches, as these reports seem to spring up at the start of each Season.
"Guess matchmaking isn't very fixed after all," says Reddit user TheGoodVibez. "Got a Top 500 player in my high gold-low plat game and got subsequently rolled because of it. It really makes this game feel awful to play."
They are far from alone in experiencing this. Another user recently shared that their team had a Tank with an SR of around 4,400, whereas they were around 3,000. This is likely due to a recent change in which the matchmaking seemingly doesn't necessarily match a team by SR, but rather makes sure opponents are evenly matched. Therefore, a game could include two high-rank Tanks on opposing teams, supported by lower-rank DPSs.
However, this is still an issue in Open Queue, in which this mechanic cannot be applied since players can select whoever they want. I experience this last night when I was put against a team with a recently Top 500 Lucio main. Considering the match was otherwise full of Gold/Plat players, needless to say, it didn't go in our favour.
Blizzard has previously tried to explain why many of us keep experiencing this. For example, it has been confirmed that our visible Rank isn't the one taken into account during matchmaking, and it's instead our hidden SR that the game takes into consideration. This is influenced by a bunch of things, including your win/loss ratio in Quick Play. However, considering many higher rank players are likely to use Quick Play to practice as characters they aren't great at, and then unleash their main in competitive, it seems that this practice isn't working as intended.
Since the initial wave of complaints closer to the launch of Overwatch 2, Blizzard hasn't suggested that it is planning any further changes to the way it pairs us up in games. So for the time being, we might just have to get used to the occasional ten minutes of trashing that comes with going against a Top 500 in lower ranks. Hey, they'll be put on our team one day, right?
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