Matchmaking in Overwatch, the boulder to my Sisyphus. This is something that haunts me and every other poor sod still clambering to get out of Elo-hell. It may at times seem like a horrid place to be but ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan still assures players that it was the best it could be.
“The matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design engineering tasks you’re ever going to tackle, and they’re thankless,” Kaplan says in an interview with Lex Fridman. “There’s gotta be winners and there’s gotta be losers.”
The biggest complaint of Overwatch’s matchmaking is that it directs players towards a 50/50 win-loss. I’m serious, look at any Overwatch account: Unless they’re top 500 smurfs or unspeakably bad, the win-loss is going to be closer to 50/50 than you’d even think was possible.
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This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. Usually when you’ve hit that point of six wins followed by six losses it means you’re about where you should be on the Elo ladder. But it’s a frustrating reality to grapple with nevertheless.
I started this season with a generational run, after placement matches I won 12 games in a row. All my teams worked together well, our comps had the right synergy, communication was on point, and it made for some of the best games of Overwatch I’ve played in a while. And then the fall.
I should’ve known it was coming, it can’t last forever, but it doesn’t mean it hurts any less. I’m currently on a six game loss streak and counting. I actually stopped myself from doing any more comp for my well-being last night, knowing full well that I have even further to fall.
“We would study it all the time when people would complain,” Kaplan continues. “You see a Reddit post and somebody would say ‘I had a six game losing streak, this is so fucked, it’s the worst matchmaker ever’… I love Reddit. But we would look up that person’s account, we’d do that all the time, I love looking at people’s accounts and seeing what happened. And it’s like, yeah you had a six game losing streak, but he had an eight game win streak before that. There was no post about “how awesome is this”, and the human psychology doesn’t allow for that.
“It’s very hard because most people, and they’re not being disingenuous, like if you ask a gamer what do you want they’ll go ‘I just want a fair match, just make it even’,” Kaplan adds. “But the reality of what they want is they want a match where they’re slightly better than the other guy. They want it to feel like it was close but then win. And you can’t architect that, it’s a zero-sum situation.”
I don’t envy anyone who has to deal with hero balancing and matchmaking. And to be fair, by and large Overwatch does it as well as it can. And hey, the loss streaks can’t be that bad because I’m still playing after 10 years, which is certainly not proof of any other underlying problems.
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