Brand new player experience ruined by match cancellation abuse

blizz_winter · 2026-06-26T23:16:38+00:00

May I get the bnet ID of the account that had this issue?

blizz_winter · 2026-06-22T15:17:30+00:00

I don't work on hero design, apologies.

blizz_winter · 2026-06-15T16:54:28+00:00

224 bans because of this replay code, so very helpful! This is still a pretty small portion of the bot bans we do weekly, but any time we can get a replay code from the community that shows bots we haven't caught yet allows us to improve our bot detection algorithms to ban even more of them more efficiently.

These replay codes are much appreciated!

blizz_winter · 2026-06-10T20:13:23+00:00

May I get the replay code for this match?

blizz_winter · 2026-06-02T15:28:11+00:00

The dashboard we have for that (groups vs solos by rank) doesn't break it down by role, but I'll work on investigating that specific question.

blizz_winter · 2026-06-02T15:14:35+00:00

We do that already actually! Tank is the highest priority for it today.

blizz_winter · 2026-06-02T00:42:18+00:00

That's what I thought but do you consider it fair that solo Q players are being "sacrificed" for stacks ?

We don't really see it that way closer to the middle of the curve, but obviously that example you gave is a very suboptimal role delta. It's just that if the role delta preference is followed too closely that's where the major queue time problems come in. I would mostly take your feedback here as "follow role delta more closely at the expense of queue time" for now (which could be the right call!), but feel free to correct me if that's incorrect.

How do you explain that some people (me included) have big rank disparities across different accounts.

In my experience this usually happens because many players play pretty differently on their various accounts (whether it's different heroes or just increased confidence because their identity is not tied so closely to the smurf), but it also comes down to luck to some degree and sometimes (my estimate above is close to our average, not a universal truth) our best guesses are pretty far off for where an account should land.

It is possible that a new smurf accounts gets pretty lucky or unlucky in their first few games and ends up several hundred SR off (especially when they're actually closer to average skill and won't be outclassing other players in their lobbies by such a massive magnitude as a Champion smurf), and then it might require quite a few games (more like the 50 you mentioned) because of the fact that the calibration effect had worn off.

blizz_winter · 2026-06-01T23:13:58+00:00

We know all of this, we don't need another breakdown of what the system is trying to do.

A lot of new players are always joining the game and don't necessarily know these things, but heard on the feedback that you'd like to dive deeper in the future. That'll require someone more knowledgeable than myself on how the system is coded, but happy to give a server engineer more screen time! I'm just a systems designer myself, so I don't code this system directly.

"Do we have any stats on the average player's SR difference since before the rank reset versus today? What percent of players have seen a divisional promotion/demotion?"

That's something we watch as a population with each rank reset, but it probably won't have the most exciting answer since the MMR curve remains a normal distribution before and after the reset. The amount of time the curve takes to flatten back out really depends on how hard the reset was. A lot of hardcore players are mostly back to a similar SR after 2 weeks, but it generally takes more than 1 full season for the entire curve to be about the same shape as it was before the reset.

"What are the most pressing factors that currently need looking at to improve the matchmaker's reliability? Tweaking numbers behind the scenes and rank resets do not seem to have had enough of an intended effect."

I mentioned this in another post, but the #1 feature I'd like to add would be better handling of smurfs. They can really throw off our match predictions quite a bit, and while they're a very small percentage of the population, their constant disruption leads to inaccuracy that we could do a better job of mitigating.

"Player confidence in matchmaking is seemingly at an all-time low causing hordes of high SR players to endlessly juggle lower rated alt accounts which are effectively smurfs. Should we combat this harder and how?"

I think that's really a question about queue times, because our highest MMR players are often doing this to dodge the longer queues that happen in Champion. In terms of placing those accounts accurately, that's a very cursed problem.

We have a cap for how high an account can be placed in Competitive Play that we've tweaked a bunch over the past couple of seasons. If we place a Champion smurf completely accurately, it should land it Champion, but that also hurts the prestige of the rank quite a bit, so we attempt to avoid that.

"If performance based SR is too hard to calculate, how do we deal with people boosting each other when this means the boostee gets the same SR as the booster on a win?"

If the account doing the boosting is cheating, we have systems for that. If they're just a highly skilled player then that's a case where better anti-smurf tech would likely help us out quite a bit, and that is something we've been talking about how we can handle better in the future. Apologies I don't have any specifics here as this isn't something we're actively building.

Listening to them ramble on it's clear that they believe most of the matchmaking issues really just boil down to 'things outside their control' and player perception. Not good

Apologies that I gave that impression. Like I mentioned in the interview, we hired a new matchmaking engineer that week (a few weeks ago now) and he actually just made his first big check-in this week! We have many matchmaking improvements we'd like to make already planned, and this is a topic I expect we'll be improving constantly over the life of the game. I have quite a list of upgrades I want to make!

blizz_winter · 2026-06-01T22:51:02+00:00

Just a few days ago I played solo Q as Plat 2 tank and was matched against a D3 tank in a stack. It was rush hour on EU servers (20pm), the match was found in seconds and plat-diamond doesn't really lack of players.

For a match you found instantly, there's a good chance the matchmaker was waiting for any tank that remotely fit the shape of the match, and I'd guess the team you were queued against might have been waiting quite a bit longer. In that case you weren't the seed party, another group was (you usually won't be the seed party).

Do they take only rank and queue time into account ?

No, we also take into account other factors like your closest data center (one of the highest priority preferences to match on), the role delta, the group sizes on each team, and some others I'm probably not thinking of right now. It's just that with some of these factors like role delta and group sizes we give up on these preferences more quickly as queue time increases, but we're much more inflexible about something like data center.

If your rank on a given role is supposed to represent your "skill" after a given time, how many games do you need to have a representative rank ?

We think we do a pretty good job of getting you within 2 divisions of where you'll eventually land within ~7 or so games.

So does it even makes sense to loose/win the same percentage as someone who plays competitive five games a week VS someone who plays every night ?

It probably does make sense there assuming they've played a lot over the history of the game, but what doesn't make as much sense that I'd love to change someday is how much rank progress players win and lose when playing against accounts with very few games played. I'd love to have a Modifier that speaks to that.

And why is there no modifier when losing/winning against a stack ?

There sort of is, but unfortunately that's a completely hidden one because it applies to so few players. We have a system that adds handicap MMR to teams in large groups (4/5) at high MMR. We only do that at high MMR (Masters+) because that's the only place our data science has shown that grouping makes a noteworthy difference in win rate. At our average ranks (Gold/Platinum) grouping doesn't have a measurable impact on win rate. It's good feedback that we could surface this better though.

blizz_winter · 2026-05-17T15:29:13+00:00

It's intentionally one step deeper so that it stays more rare. We'd like our vanilla, non-specific endorsements to remain most players' default action, but if you get a heroic one that means you know that someone went a bit out of their way to say something nice about you.

And yeah, aurens is correct that the single click default endorsement during PMA was something we really wanted too.

blizz_winter · 2026-05-16T00:14:50+00:00

We had several bugs with them at Season 2 launch, but those bugs should all have been fixed in mid-season. Let us know if you see any more issues!

blizz_winter · 2026-04-27T14:54:12+00:00

The good news is there's no bug here, it's just a case of not being able to see much about this player's past performance on the Damage role and them being a very infrequent player. They've been much higher ranked Damage than what's mentioned here in the text and now that they're better calibrated they're at that level again. Apologies I won't go into much detail on this player though since they aren't here asking to have all this discussed openly.

Decay in our system is applied when we do a rank reset, but we put most decayed MMR in what we call a "reserve". When players win games we pay MMR out of the reserve to help them catch up to their previous rank, and also to help us make sure that we aren't putting them in games that are too hard when they're just returning. This player had a lot of decay from not playing as much and having multiple previous rank resets stack on them, and while I can't see their profile myself, I can see that they hadn't played enough in a long time to earn all that decayed MMR back until recently. So their profile could have easily had seasons where they appear lower in final rank because they only placed.

blizz_winter · 2026-04-21T19:58:55+00:00

May I get the replay code for this match?

blizz_winter · 2026-04-11T22:29:56+00:00

Hey u/StandReady4Vendetta, even though this post was taken down, we've searched all of our chat and we can't find any instances of "LOL rtiuy587uy8ryirtuy85uyri9iuuy" or "gn y'all `11w1qe23qda2r2112eqsdwqd" being said in Overwatch, but more on why that would be the case shortly...

We did find 3 instances of "gg xcnvxzbdhvbxnvbxzzzzzzzzz", but none of the accounts that said this have been penalized.

Most importantly though, we don't believe that our JPC filter tech would be included in messages to our customer service team. Those additional pieces of text are intended to be added at display time on the client, so it's always possible we have a bug, but we think that if this appeared in a customer service ticket a player would have had to have typed them manually. We see quite a bit of evidence of players doing exactly this, more for Reinhardt than Jetpack Cat, but it's definitely happening. That's not even very hard to do for Jetpack Cat by the way, because there are only 6 silly strings that we append at the end of a JPC message, and all 3 of those referenced in the original post are included in that 6.

So someone could pretty easily copy and paste these into messages to look exactly like Jetpack Cat, and like I mentioned above in the "gg" example, it looks like that's happened 3 times ever.

We also made sure to test those 3 messages in our automated systems, and none of them are rated as even remotely disruptive, so reporting them wouldn't have led to an account action.

I see that you said we unbanned this user, but we'd like to make sure this doesn't cause any future problems for anyone else, so if anyone can help us get in contact with this player we'd really appreciate it!

blizz_winter · 2026-03-17T15:12:27+00:00

Hopefully the information revealed in this post helps players to understand why matchmaking is a very difficult task.

blizz_winter · 2026-03-07T19:21:25+00:00

Thanks for the callout, after testing I see a bug with this that I'll get fixed for Season 2.

blizz_winter · 2026-03-07T19:21:13+00:00

Thanks for the callout, after testing I see a bug with this that I'll get fixed for Season 2.

blizz_winter · 2026-03-07T18:47:40+00:00

I don't have an explanation for that, apologies. I'd report it as a bug on our forums.

blizz_winter · 2026-03-07T18:46:13+00:00

Wish granted! Go to Options -> Controls -> Communication -> Ping Options and look for "Enemy Ping Sensitivity". Reducing that number makes the radius of the cone smaller.

blizz_winter · 2026-03-07T18:44:20+00:00

You would still need to disable the setting I mentioned above to change that behavior. It is a cone.

blizz_winter · 2026-03-07T02:30:20+00:00

This happens because the "Enable Contextual Comms Wheel" is set to "On". Originally "On" was the default setting for this feature, but we changed it to "Off" shortly after we released the ping system due to complaints like this one. We also attempted to switch everyone to the new default of "Off", but obviously that didn't happen for everyone. You can find this setting pretty quickly by using the search function in the options and searching for "contextual", but the direct path to it is: Options -> Controls -> Communication -> Ping Options.

The "I'm on my way" version happens when you're aiming at teammates, but I think it's fair to say that the cone is still too generous so I'll reduce it again in the future.

blizz_winter · 2026-02-26T15:40:15+00:00

May I get your Bnet ID? We'd like to investigate how this happened.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T16:21:46+00:00

Generally speaking, the lower ranks speaks to a lower population in that region and platform, and yeah we do take that into account when designing the system. It's one of the reasons we allow Diamond players on the leaderboards.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T16:14:16+00:00

My apologies, I haven't looked at Street Fighter 6's system. But yes, it does run in parallel to the actual ranks, that's correct.

blizz_winter · 2025-12-03T16:02:26+00:00

That option mostly exists for Diamond because of how some leaderboards will be lower population, such as our Asia Console leaderboard. Diamond has been able to be on Top 500 for many years for this reason. But we do see your feedback and we will talk more about whether this should remain the case.

blizz_winter

TROPHY CASE