Overwatch Dev Talks Matchmaking and SR Details

Overwatch is a game some people play seriously for some reason, and one of the biggest problems for these hardcore players if finding people who can tolerate their anger issues long enough to coordinate team comps and strategies with. To remedy this, Blizzard has announced a new “Looking for group” system that would allow these anti-social peeps to find each other and fight over who has to be support. But Overwatch fans, as always, have reservations about how this system will mess with their matchmaking and ranking, so principal designer Scott Mercer went on the forums to straighten out some facts.

"It doesn’t matter if you’re solo, grouped with one other person, or in a full group of six. If you are a 2800 SR player grouped with five other 2800 SR (skill rank) players, the SR change after a win or loss is the exact same as if you played the game solo with five other solo 2800 SR players,"

He also said there was no reason to fear super-skilled teams who have been playing together for a long time, because these players would probably already have a pretty high SR so you’re not likely to run into them unless you were capable of handling them yourself.

One more little fun fact he dropped out: it’s rare for players not to be going up against ‘premades’. He said that only 16% of matches ever played are against groups of 12 individual single-cuers: the vast majority have some kind of group attached, be it a group of two, three, four, five, or indeed, a full party of six.

And a final cool reveal: apparently the game uses SR to calculate the “odds” of each side winning. If the game figures you have less than a 40% chance of winning, you won’t play that match. Cool, right?

He talks a lot about the man behind the curtain, so if you have any interest in why blaming your teammates for every loss is bullcrap, be sure to give it a read!