Overwatch 2 Matchmaking is bad right now (season 3) and this is a highly discussed topic on Reddit. As you might have experienced, you either stomp your enemy team or get stomped. Those days of equal team fights seem to have gone, leading many to even stop playing the game altogether. Here’s what you need to know about unbalanced matchmaking in OW2.
Why is Overwatch 2 Matchmaking Broken and Unbalanced?
The main issue with matchmaking in OW2 is that players with vastly different ranks (hence, skills) are getting teamed up together or brought on as enemies. For example, Grandmaster Tank players are getting Silver DPS team members, whereas entire Bronze teams are getting wiped out by Diamond enemies.
This is leading to toxicity in chat, highly unbalanced games, and massive loss streaks. the main reason is that higher skill matches are played at a completely different speed due to different game sense, positioning, decision-making, and overall skill. Due to this, higher ranked players are getting a boost in their ranks while metal rank players are de-ranking.
Game Director @aaronkellerOW has acknowledged this issue and tweeted about it on February 15, 2023.
Is there a Fix for this Matchmaking?
The OW team is constantly keeping an eye on community feedback and is aware of the problems players are facing. They will continue to monitor and make changes to ensure that games are fair and have players with similar skill sets.
As per reports from players, it seems that OW1 had relatively balanced matchmaking compared to OW2. Let’s hope it is fixed as soon as possible (mid season patch), even if that means slightly longer queue times.
Do keep in mind that if you take a long break from playing OW2, your hidden MMR comes into the picture. This Matchmaking Rating will lower, assuming you’ve lost your practice a bit. But if you win 5 matches or get 15 losses, your rank will be “updated” – so it may go higher, reduce or stay the same.
Another thing to note is that there’s a difference between your “public” rank and your invisible MMR. The latter is the one that will be used to matchmake you with other players.
Check out what Redditors are saying about this whole scenario here.
What does Blizzard Say About This?
In an article posted by Blizzard on February 24 2023, Aaron Keller mentioned hero balance and matchmaking. The hero balance looks good this season, but they ‘made some big changes to the matchmaker’ in season 3 and they share some insights about the effects here:
The primary goal was to optimize the pairing of players to minimize the MMR difference within a specific role. For example, when making matches, we put more emphasis on the DPS players on each team being closer in skill than we do for the DPS players on one team being evenly matched with tank players on the other team. This has worked, and matches have a much tighter skill delta between players of the same role.
However, there have been some downsides to these changes, some of them unforeseen. Queue times have risen in Unranked a bit, and for groups with large skill differentials, they’ve risen quite a bit. We’ve made changes here, and queue times for Unranked are already moving lower. We’ve also heard from players that they are experiencing large win/loss streaks in game. To be clear, we don’t try to cause or prevent streaks based on an ideal win rate for players. We’re studying these reports and will share more information when we get it.
The issue that we’re hearing most from our players is encountering people from vastly different skill levels in their Ranked games. Prior to Season 3, the worst 5% of Grand Master level matches would have players 7 divisions apart, the equivalent of Gold 3 to Silver 5. When we initially shipped 2.3 this leaped to 12 divisions apart or greater. We have made numerous changes since then, and are making changes almost daily, and this has now been reduced to 9 divisions. We have additional changes planned for the midseason patch that should improve this further.
For more related to Overwatch 2 – check out our dedicated category on Gamer Tweak.
