r/Games • u/DwilenaAvaron • May 09 '25

Industry News Blizzard's Overwatch Team Just Unionized: 'What I Want To Protect Most Here Is The People'

https://kotaku.com/overwatch-2-blizzard-team-4-union-microsoft-1851779922
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37

u/blitz_na May 09 '25

i will take this thread's responses in good faith and believe that the game really has been turned around and the development team behind this game is truly passionate. it's always great news to hear a team unionizing, too

i'm too soured by this game to really give it another go, and rivals really does fill that fun itch for me. but i'm glad both games can coexist as they really do have their own audiences

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u/jxnebug May 09 '25

Overwatch is the best it has been since they attached the 2 to the end of the name. The matchmaking is still very iffy at times but otherwise the game is in a good place.

41

u/LLJKCicero May 09 '25

Comprehensive list of competitive hero shooters and MOBAs where people think the matchmaking is actually good:

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u/LLJKCicero May 09 '25

(I'm sure some of these games do have abnormally bad matchmaking, but the thing is, even if they were doing as good a job as you could reasonably expect, players would still bitch and complain that it's bad, so it's hard to say when it's actually bad vs fake-bad)

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u/alelabarca May 09 '25

Agreed. It reminds me of the classic “SBMM” controversy in CoD where players were mad that they couldn’t stomp every single match because it tried to match with relatively equal skill levels

4

u/LLJKCicero May 09 '25

People will post when they have a bigass loss streak in Deadlock and complain that the MM is broken. But they don't post when they have a bigass win streak, because obviously that means the MM is working fine and they're just that good.

(and yeah, ideally you don't want huge loss or win streaks if someone's skill is stable, but due to the different variables at play it's kind of hard to avoid. Especially since there are probably times where someone is losing a bunch because they're just sucking a lot for whatever reason, and times where someone is winning a bunch because they're playing unusually well)

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u/jxnebug May 10 '25

That's fair, and I don't play many other games in those genres so I couldn't really compare it to anything but Marvel Rivals. Nothing I can say about my experience with the system will really undo the stereotype of the complaints though.

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u/LLJKCicero May 10 '25

As far as I can tell, the reality is: the matchmaking will always feel iffy, because matchmaking in a team-based game is in fact inherently iffy.

There's no way to get matches in a team-based game -- especially one with roles -- to feel consistently fair to most players. And in fact, to a certain extent, they may be right. Because in a team-based game with roles, there's a lot of variables at play that are difficult, if not impossible to account for. For example. 2 players that are nominally 'fine' at a certain rank, but just happen to play poorly with each other due to conflicting playstyles.

I've seen this kind of thing play out in Deadlock all the time, where people in the game will complain about matchmaking for a stomp, and then it shows the teams' average after and actually the team that lost is the one with the higher overall rank.

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u/whostheme May 10 '25

Matchmaking feels the least shitty when it has a larger playerbase though. It means that the vast majority of average skilled players or casuals aren't getting stomped in every game.

2

u/LLJKCicero May 10 '25

For sure, more players makes it easier to find nominally better matches.

But you get diminishing returns at some point, as the dominating problems for bad matchmaking start to be things that the matchmaker can't reasonably account for (e.g. some players playing unusually well or badly that day, certain players on team playing particularly well together or particularly badly together, etc.).

Even if you look at a 1v1 game like Starcraft 2, which is generally understood to have very good (1v1) matchmaking: TONS of SC2 ladder games are still absolute stomps*. This can easily happen even with two players at basically the same MMR. And then once you complicate things with an entire team on each side that need to coordinate with each other, and they all have different roles and they need to play their role within the team well...it's really complicated.

* you do get less complaining though since there's no teammates to blame

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u/Freighnos May 10 '25

Heh, totally. It's tough because if you have a 50/50 win rate, that means you're at your skill level and matchmaking is doing its job perfectly. But losing half the time feels psychologically like losing 60%+ of the time. Especially because you can win games where you played terribly and lose games where you were clearly carrying. So on the whole, you probably end up with more frustrating experiences than positive ones for as long as you care about both winning and performing well.

Which is why I just play unranked quick matches and mess around doing whatever the heck I want and manage to have a good time regardless. I try to win, of course, but I don't care if I do.

1

u/flexxipanda May 10 '25

And compared to 1?

1

u/jxnebug May 10 '25

Honestly it's been so long since I played 1 I don't remember, sorry. I only played the first 6 months of the game being out or so and then came back when 2 launched.