Morgan Maddren
@SrslyPaladin
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Server Engineer @Blizzard_Ent on the @PlayOverwatch team. Matchmaking fanatic. My views are entirely my own.
Joined September 2015
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You might have noticed your queue times in OW got shorter since mid-last-week, especially at high MMR and in groups. We made some big adjustments the matchmaker, but queue times were only a secondary goal.
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You might have noticed a new section in the Overwatch Season 4 patch notes about matchmaking!
Going forward we'll be including notable matchmaking changes in patch notes. But those descriptions are very brief so I wanted to explain in a little more detail what to expect...
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Eskay's video is excellent. I pretty much completely agree with all of the pain points she brings up. Most of it wasn't surprising to me, but she articulated a few issues specific to Top500 players in ways I hadn't considered before. Definitely took some notes!
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At this moment, the top-ranked player in the world is GM3
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Hello again. I wanted to give a little more detail on the recent loss streak prevention system in the 2.10.1 patch of Overwatch!
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Read this blog post for more details about the upcoming changes to ranked! A couple clarifications below...
Season 9: Champions is breathing new life into the
#Overwatch2
Competitive experience 🏆
🔄 Comp Rank Reset
💪 New Progression System
🥇 New CHAMPION Ranking
💚 New Comp Rewards
Dive into these changes and more in our latest blog post below 💥
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It's me! It was really cool to get the opportunity to talk about all the awesome matchmaking stuff that the team has been working on.
Game Director
@aaronkellerOW
and Senior Engineer
@SrslyPaladin
are here to discuss some of the new things coming in Season 11 ✨
From the return of Pink Mercy to new matchmaking updates, check out all this and more when Season 11 arrives June 20 💥
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Biggest question on everyone's mind is the "Rank Reset"
This is a "softer" reset. Your MMRs in Season 9 will start out lower. The higher your MMR, the further down you will start. If you're in GM1 today, expect a climb.
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We're looking for an Overwatch Matchmaking Intern for Summer 2024! If you're interested, I'd recommend you apply in the next couple days!
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The highlight of the S4 midcycle patch for matchmaking is a pretty substantial rework of our MMR decay system.
Since I can't describe the changes in detail (too in-the-weeds), it seemed like a good time to go over the basics of MMR systems.
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Just your periodic reminder that in Overwatch, Quick play and Competitive use separate MMRs. Your QP matches have no effect on your Comp MMR, and visa versa.
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IMO Starwatch is one of the coolest things we've shipped in OW2. I hope you have fun with it!
Rule with the Infinite Empire or rebel with The Watchers 💥
Who will you fight for?
Starwatch is LIVE NOW 💫
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@EskayOW
Season 7 leaderboard should be back to a 2 week top500 unlock. That might have not made it into the patch notes (oops!)
It's still far from ideal. We have ideas to make it better.
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Here's a list of 16 ideas I've picked from these responses. I'm going to put out a series of polls putting these ideas head to head, and then we'll use the results to track and update an MMR for each idea.
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Last night we started rolling out repairs for Season 3 ranks. We're trying to prioritize players who were most affected first. It will take several days to get to everyone. Thanks for your patience!
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Too early to say, but I think it's possible that Juno's launch has caused Support overtake DPS as the new Most Popular Role going forward.
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I wasn't expecting someone to hit C5 quite this fast, but not super surprised. I'll be very surprised if anyone hits C1 this month. C1 is way harder to reach than C5.
Let's see if you all can prove me wrong :)
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Since Season 11 launched, queue times in the Competitive Wide pool have greatly improved!
If you haven't tried grouping in Comp lately, I'd recommend giving it a shot :)
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Aaron's 6v6 blog just dropped. Check it out!
Cancel your plans, put on your thickest socks and settle in to your cozy spot... you know the one. The 6v6 Director's Take is live now.
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If you could have one change related to Ranked what would it be? Big changes or small QOL all good. Be creative, I want ideas I haven't heard before!
(Will take my favorites for something fun next week)
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PSA: S12 brings another rank reset to Competitive. Be ready!
Season 12 has officially landed and there’s so much to get excited about 💫
Check out our latest blog as we learn more about our newest Support Hero Juno, the ancient treasures of the Premium Battle Pass, the new Clash game mode, and SO much more! 💪
📝
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With the changes in OW Season 4 to tie ranks to MMR, we've gotten a nice reduction in wide ranked matches.
The widest 25% of ranked matches have been narrowed by at least 1 division.
And our widest ranked matches are now about 15% narrower!
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Has anyone ever tried to figure out how much better the average Overwatch player is now compared to like 2017? In terms of like positioning/aim/mechanics, it seems like players are way better now.
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This is the biggest project I've worked on since OW2 launch. Major launches like this are always a bit scary. Nothing quite like doin it live!
The competitive team put so much into this patch, so much of our love for this game. I truly hope you all enjoy it!
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New OW matchmaking blog is out! We show some of the results of all the role delta tech, as well as talk about some of the areas we're focusing on for the next few patches!
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If you are a ranked enjoyer, you do not want to miss Gavin's part of the panel!😉
I'm honored to be one of the speakers at BlizzCon on the What's Next panel, and I'll be signing autographs around 1:15 on Friday!
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The other question on many people's minds was on the grouping restriction changes.
To reiterate, these changes are NOT coming in Season 9. We simply couldn't fit that much in a single patch. Don't worry, these changes are coming soon(tm)!
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That's it! If you reached the end, good job nerd! (sincerely, from a nerd)
(also season 5 gonna be juicy for matchmaking)
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So in S9 the grouping restrictions are largely unchanged. The existing GM restrictions will now apply to Champion as well, until we tear it all out in the future.
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@OhReallyJared
@FallenPlayz
@aaronkellerOW
@PlayOverwatch
This is a result of us increasing the wins requirement to qualify for the leaderboard to 50. Most players haven't completed it yet. This side-effect is not ideal, we're discussing some potential changes for the future!
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We're also increasing our uncertainty somewhat, so that everyone's matches will count a little bit more during (and sometimes for a while after) placements.
I expect a bit of a shakeup. Buckle up! But you'll still be playing against people very close to your MMR.
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MMR is just a measure of skill within a regularly competing population. So if you're Bronze, you're probably like Diamond compared the entire population of the world.
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@GPstU_
Average DPS queue times back in 6v6 were typically about 6 minutes (worse in KR). So I'd guess ~6min.
That said, the shift from 6v6 to 5v5 was not driven by a desire to reduce queue times. That was merely a happy side-effect. 5v5 was purely for gameplay reasons.
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Season 8 is live! Note we also made unranked leaver penalties more severe. Unfortunately didn't get it into the localized patch notes but it's described in the forum version here
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Used an arctan for the first time in a while
New competitive system is gonna be sick
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Check out Aaron's new blog. Grouping restriction removal coming in Season 10!!!
Want a sneak peek at a few things coming to Competitive in the near future? Check them out, along with an early look at Season 9, in today’s Director’s Take!
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The major improvement we've been tuning for is to make matches with a narrower spread of MMRs. And we've made progress, reducing the spread of a typical match by around 10% in Comp!
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We made a few funky matches last night! Should be better now.
Season 5 included a significant round of matchmaking improvements. It's always hard to make it work perfectly out the gate, but there's already some really exciting results.
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*Hits queue button*
"O great and terrible Matchmaker, decider of all, bringer of W's and L's, what is to be my fate this day?"
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Detailed rank updates after every match, rank range on the vs screen, a new rank above GM, and new yearly cadence and rewards (and more!)
Hyped for the changes coming to Overwatch competitive system next year?
Let's goooo!
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Cautiously optimistic
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Meh
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I play Quick Play/Results
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@Anxsaa3
This is false, custom games are unable to update MMRs. Whatever MMR movement happened on your alt is entirely based on the ranked matches that you queued for.
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Season 9 just about to go live!
Class is in session! Join
@mL7support
and
@EskayOW
as they breakdown some of the changes coming to
#Overwatch2
in Season 9 🧑🏫
Check out these changes when Season 9: Champions drops TODAY 💥
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Speaking of new ranks, we have actually shifted the rank thresholds around a little bit. So you may be surprised to find yourself reaching a new rank!
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First impressions of the S9 ranked changes?
Actually love it
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It's pretty good ig
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Merely acceptable
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Still angy for some reaso
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The headline change this patch is that we're making the backfill system much smarter. We did a bunch of research into what was causing stomps, and found that in some cases the answer was: us!
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This may sound like a modest improvement--reducing MMR spread in matches is a really tricky problem. The main way we improve it is to be smarter and smarter about how we matchmake groups.
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It was a really subtle problem, and we found it in a large part thanks to everyone sending me weird cases on Twitter! So I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's sent me reports, it made a big difference!
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That's it for Season 4! This was a slightly lighter season on core matchmaking because we were also helping out with the changes to Ranked.
We've already locked the S4 midcycle and are actively working on S5, and oh man I am so excited to tell you about those soon :)
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OK First round of the ranked ideas tournament! Here's a thread of 8 polls pitting two ideas against eachother, pick which one you like better!
(For more details on this see this linked thread)
I was not expecting this many responses! A lot of really cool ideas here.
But how do we compare these ideas to figure out which ones people like the best? Let's find out with the power of matchmaking!
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I had a couple more thoughts on this that I'd like to add. First off, I've seen some takes like "what if we just made 6v6 tanks a bit more compelling wouldn't that solve queue times?"
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Me when my group goes 6-2: "This matchmaking is pretty good"
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A fun "easter egg", you might notice this is the first game mode that lets you choose your team since Yeti Hunter. And if you remember, that one was just preference, not a guarantee. Just a little bit of new matchmaking tech I added, hopefully we use it more in the future :)
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In case you missed it, last week we put out a new blog about Competitive, including the much-awaited distribution of ranks!
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Some really cool insight into the design philosophy for comp, and juicy hints about what is to come! I'm really excited about what we're building...
Competitive systems are a hot topic with our players and we're jumping into the conversation with today's Director's Take.
Check it out here!
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However, note that this new tech is just avoiding this one case. It's a very important principle to us that we never try to intentionally create unbalanced matches, or force players to win/lose. The matchmaker should be neutral in these things!
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This point bears stressing. Loss streaks aren't very fun, but they're a fact of life in a competitive game. The matchmaker is not artificially preventing loss streaks. We just don't need to be randomly making loss streaks longer.
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Back from vacation! Time to read Aaron's blogpost again to remember what I'm supposed to be working on
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We've continued to make incremental adjustments since last week, but it's probably about as good as it can get for this patch. But you can expect us to keep trying to improve match spread in future patches!
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It wasn't intentional of course! But our backfill system was prioritizing filling a slot quickly at all costs, and most of the time it filled a reasonable player, but sometimes it ended up finding a player who was at a very different MMR from the rest of the match.
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TLDR is that the goal of this new system is to avoid a very rare and specific case that we observed which led to un-fun matches. To show, first a bit of background.
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Also I think it's important to keep in mind that most of the time, matches that have one-sided outcomes look pretty balanced from the point of view of the matchmaker. So expect this new system probably won't be super noticeable to most players.
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An indirect improvement to match quality in S4: By snapping rank to MMR, I'm hoping we get a minor bump in match tightness that comes from more accurately restricting grouping in ranked. Hopefully this will make particularly the worst cases slightly better.
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This just felt like a bad match for us to be making. It seems less likely to be a fun match.
So all this change is doing is telling the matchmaker to stop making those matches, just avoiding this case we think is clearly bad.
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Season 12 is just about to launch! Good luck in your placements
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Seen a lot of confusion about players hitting higher ranks in S3 than before. This isn't a bug, it's actually because we FIXED a bug!
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I was not expecting this many responses! A lot of really cool ideas here.
But how do we compare these ideas to figure out which ones people like the best? Let's find out with the power of matchmaking!
If you could have one change related to Ranked what would it be? Big changes or small QOL all good. Be creative, I want ideas I haven't heard before!
(Will take my favorites for something fun next week)
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7 minute queue times were horrible. People shouldn't be spending almost half their playtime sitting in queue!
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Oddly enough the system has behaved like this for years and we had never noticed! In OW2, we've been able to prioritize matchmaking in a way that we never could in OW1. Now that we have more bandwidth, we've been looking more closely for these types of edge-case problems.
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Expect the first couple weeks after the reset to be a bit hectic as everyone resettles into their new ranks!
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When we would make these matches, the matchmaker wasn't paying attention to whether any players in the match were on a loss streak. So by random chance, we would sometimes make matches where a player on a loss streak would get put on a team that was at a disadvantage.
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Fascinating! From our internal stats, much less than half of the playerbase plays Comp regularly! As I guess you might expect, Comp players are disproportionately more likely to be on Overwatch dev social media :)
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The vast majority of Overwatch matches look incredibly close to the matchmaker. but in some cases we make matches where one team has a slightly more noticeable advantage over the other (Still very competitive though!)
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Good news for the ~80% who said better match quality, the next few patches have some exciting improvements :)
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*Hits queue button*
"Did you know you can never get a match in under 7 seconds? So if you mis-clicked or changed your mind you'd have time to fix it. Utterly fascinating huh!"
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It turns out that the problem of "how much do I learn about an unknown based on new information" is an extremely deep problem! There's even entire fields of philosophy and math dedicated to it.
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If you are GM in Overwatch, would you consider the following a net positive change?
You can now group up to 5-stacks (adhering to division restrictions), but your match quality gets worse, even when solo: 1/4 matches have a wider spread of MMRs and an extra 1/10 are stomps
Clear net positive
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Very mixed
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Clearly not worth
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Not GM/Results
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The other improvement in S4 is harder to describe concisely, it's more some internal optimizations we made to how we explore the "possibility tree" when forming matches. This will take a little bit of tuning, but should hopefully lead to a bit more "efficiency"
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Isn't it comforting to know that le sserafim will still be performing in 60 years
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Note that this is new rule isn't a guarantee, it just means we'll try not to make these matches. So sometimes this case will still happen, just much much less.
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You'll notice we actually changed how grouping for placements works a little bit. Now you will see your predicted ranks immediately, and if you group up, we'll use your predicted ranks for determining whether you're in the wide/narrow pool.
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Often I get questions like "why do I have to lose MMR for a loss even if I played well", "why did you get rid of SR", "can you just publish the MMR formula" etc. Hopefully this addresses some of those too :)
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How does tying ranks to MMR improve wide matches you might ask? I'll give an answer tomorrow but I want to see if people can figure it out first :)
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A few points of clarification: as before, this is a "soft-reset" to MMR (moving players a bit closer together, I like to call it a "scrunch" but that's just cus its a fun word to say)
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By the way, we're hiring for a Server Engineering role on the Overwatch Core Gameplay team!
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Oh and just to make it clear, the system is continually decaying everyone a tiny amount and the decayed MMR isn't permanently lost. The amount is only noticeable if you've been gone for a long time. So there's no need/benefit to change your behavior in any way!
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Anyways I'm really hoping this leads to a measurable reduction in stomps from games that had backfills!
Note that matches will probably be 4v5 for a few seconds longer than before. But it'll be worth it! (I hope)
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Anyways, we've started to understand this problem well enough that I'm hopeful we'll be able to make beginning-of-season match quality feel better in time for Season 5! Stay tuned for more details :)
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What I mean by efficiency is more or less how much match quality you get per time in queue. So with these changes we can usually make queue times better without making quality worse, or we can make quality better without making queue times worse.
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So what are MMRs and why do we care about them? One motivation is that we want to make fair matches (both sides have roughly the same chance to win).
In order to do this, we need some way to quantify player skill so we can make teams with the same skilled players on each side.
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