Overwatch 2's lack of merit is giving me heart problems

Let's have a round of applause for Overwatch 2's ranking system. They really hit the nail on the head. It truly feels like they got a team of experts together to fine-tune a competitive algorithm.  Blizzard offices wanted to be true to the player, so they had a meeting and asked themselves how best can we serve these players? They want an authentic, balanced ranked system that shows they are actually a video game and not a two-bit cosmetic marketplace. In order to do that, they made a pile of FUCKING SHIT. Never in my life have I played such a nonsensical, ass-backwards competitive game. Overwatch 1 came out and their mission was to make it worse with every change they have made, and here we are now, being served a bowl of shit soup. The person in charge of balancing the ranking system took his underwear off, saw a skidmark, and had an epiphany on what to base it on.  There aren't enough different types of fecal matter to accurately represent the myriad of ways they created a sloppy diaper.

In order to analyze the choices they have made regarding the competitive mode, we need to look at what they tell us about it.  So here it is: nothing.  Here is the landing page for Overwatch.com.

As you can see, if you want to find out detailed information on how the ranked system works, you simply go to their website, hover Game Info, and then go fuck yourself. To actually learn more, I had to click on the News tab, scroll down, and press Load More 4 times. Eventually I figuratively stumbled upon an article titled "Weekly Recall: Meet Your Matchmaker," which is very obviously a developer blog about the matchmaking system. It's really conspicuous and accessible! 

Between that article, and another I found here: Overwatch 2 developer blog: Matchmaker and competitive deep dive, part 1 | December 20, 2022, you can find factual proof that they have no fucking idea what they are doing.  It's really incredible.  They say a bunch of incredibly dumbass stuff in this article, like: 

        "Everyone has an internal matchmaking rating (MMR) that’s a numerical value to describe your skill relative to everyone else,"

and then follow that up with:

        "We never use your outward facing skill tier or division to form matches. Likewise, the rank you see in a player’s profile isn’t the same as their MMR."

This is the cornerstone of a good ranking system. Make the ranking the players see fake, and have the REAL skill indicator be not only completely hidden, but unidentifiable.  Wow! 

There is absolutely no reason to have a secret, hidden ranking system on their end. What are they hiding? Why is there no transparency?  Overwatch hiding their ranked system behind a "hidden MMR" is like when that kid in high school swore he had a girlfriend, but you don't know her because she goes to another school.

Thankfully, I was able to get an interview with an Overwatch developer who wished to remain anonymous (just like their ranking system's inner workings.)

TreeBone: "I constantly outplay not only the enemy, but my team. Why am I ranked the same as a person who performs way worse than me?"
Overwatch Sicko Perv: "Heheh you thought that was your rank? You fool. The rank is hidden. It's a secret ranking that only we know about."
TreeBone: "That doesn't make any sense. It's still uneven with those same players. Your hidden MMR is matching us together. The system is dogshit."
Overwatch Sicko Perv: "No, it makes perfect sense if you have received debilitating brain damage from a head injury. See, we show you a rank, but that one doesn't matter. Your secret rank is the accurate rank we use behind the scenes. We don't tell you what it is, or show it to you, or anyone, but it definitely really exists and is helping somehow."

TreeBone: "So when I have double the damage of my teammate's Damage role, 5 less kills than the enemy Damage roles combined, and my Support has 7 thousand less healing than the other, and we lose the game, that's balanced and the system is working as intended?

Overwatch Sicko Perv: "Yes! You see, we have actually created the ideal, balanced ranked match by lying! You are ranked properly because we said so. You cannot fight this argument because for some reason the player base thinks it's okay to simply parrot the words 'hidden MMR' and don't really look into it beyond that. We don't need to make a real ranked system because this isn't a video game, it's a scheme designed to sell digital clothing for your characters in a first person game where you can't see your own self. Like everyone at Blizzard, I do not care about making a good game video game. I am completely motivated by two things: making money and getting to steal my co-workers breast milk."

A visual representation of a well-balanced ranked match.

Now I could use this as an opportunity to drop a bunch of examples of this, so I will.  You might be thinking that these statistics are not indicative of the complex workings of a match. That's an argument for pussies who can't nut up like me. My statlines make yours look like first grade math homework.  My statistics are always so lopsided, Overwatch should be trying to get me wins any way they can because it's a damning indictment of their entire ranked philosophy.  

Sometimes I lose a game and I try and put the onus on myself and I take a deep breath and say "Okay what could I have done better...let's analyze this." Then I pull up the stats and I was doing every fucking thing I could to help my team and they were role-playing as a hippie conscientious objector who got drafted to war.  Take a look:

When you look at these stats, you can see that I did the same amount of healing as the enemy Supports by myself, and I had the most assists in the game, beating my teammate by 4 and the enemy support by 5. Everything else is pretty even, except for one glaring difference: our Tank got their head slam dunked through their own anus.  Less kills by 15, which could be an entire other player's total. Less damage and less mitigation. I am being held hostage by a single role, made even worse by the fact that they are getting healed by me, a player who is matching the entire other teams healing by themselves.  I deserved this loss, because this is a balanced and fair system. In fact, let's see what Overwatch has to say about this exact topic:  

    "One system that helps achieve this is called Role Delta. It aims to match the skill levels of individual roles on both sides of the lobby in those cases where we can’t create a match where all of the players are exactly the same MMR. For example, if one team’s tank has a 1.5 MMR rating, Role Delta will do its best to find another tank rated 1.5 to compete against them in a specific match. This makes for a less frustrating experience because players go head-to-head with similarly skilled opponents." - Weekly Recall: Meet Your Matchmaker | July 18, 2025

Okay perfect. That makes a LOT more sense on why our tank performed like a blind invalid and theirs like a trained soldier. They matched our Tank's hidden MMR to the enemy Tank. That way it was a less frustrating experience. I get it now. 

I dare you to try and explain this one

This one is so bad it should be illegal. We lost this game.  There should have been a movie-style red siren and alarm blaring in Overwatch headquarters when this match report was outputted. The servers detect it and then the people responsible for the current balancing are killed by a firing squad on live television and then the company apologizes to me and get to work on fixing it.  The enemy outhealed us by 14,150. Yet I knuckled up, like ballers do when shit gets tough, and I dropped a warhead. I had 15,000 more damage mitigated than the opposing Tank. An impressive Tank feat on it's own, but then you look at the other stats and realize it truly is impossible to carry the dead weight of the lifeless corpses masquerading as actual teammates. The enemy Tank and both enemy Damage players had 18,405 damage together. I had 18,061 on my own. Only one person in the lobby had more kills than me, and it was the enemy Damage role.  One of my Damage players went even at 8K/8D and the other went a pitiful 9K/13D on Widowmaker.  Meanwhile the enemy Widowmaker is at 18K/5D.

Now, I'm one to shame. We're playing a competitive shooter, not a Disney sing-a-long. Tanks don't even necessarily need high kills or damage, if they are good at staying alive and blocking damage and playing their role. Supports also provide value beyond straight numbers. You can forgive low healing if they are also getting important final blows or getting assists, or perhaps a clutch ultimate ability. But Damage must do damage and get kills. It's right there in the name. My team did neither.  If you can't shoot, go play Roblox.  Overwatch obviously can't balance this out, and they don't care to, and some schmuck who paid $40 for a Widowmaker skin where she's wearing a bikini he can jerk off to is throwing up shots like the New Orleans Pelicans while I'm fighting for my life like Liam Neeson in that movie with the wolves (because it's popular) or like the hallway scene in Oldboy (hell yea, way cooler.)  

This doesn't even begin to venture into a million other factors that contribute to the baggie of farts that is this game.  You can't queue for Competitive with someone who is too far away from your skill level. Cool, makes sense. That far away rank can still be placed in your game. Overwatch has 5 rank levels per tier, 5 being the lowest and 1 being the highest. I have played with people on my team that are an entire 5 (or more) rank levels below me, in another entire ranked tier.  What is the purpose of a ranking system if you can play with someone that far apart? It's inherently unbalanced. The fact that you can either means that Overwatch thinks that if they average the rank tiers out, it lines up, which is insanely foolish, or the gap in those ranks isn't that broad, which undermines the entire point of a ranking system this widespread. 

Now we have to get into the points awarded or taken away for winning or losing a ranked game, and Overwatch, again, provides information on this sporadically as they update the game, and it is only catalogued on the Overwatch wiki. It seems like they have the game choose a number at random between 25-30 and give it to you. I have these statlines where I outperform everyone and we win and I get 26% rank up. Same thing and I lose the game and I lose 27%. Why the disparity? I'm at a 50% win rate but I've gone negative somehow. They actually say that individual performance doesn't matter: 

    "In Overwatch 2, your MMR adjustment after every match is not impacted by your performance in each match (regardless of your skill tier)." -Overwatch 2 Developer Blog: Explaining matchmaker goals and plans, part 2  | January 30, 2023

Then it's just a win/lose, so why does the amount of the rank win/loss change at all? The only explanation I have ever seen for this is from a different news article:

        -Revitalizing the Overwatch 2 Experience | 8 February 2024

The only real information we have is here, and unfortunately, all of these ideas fucking suck.  They are far too influential in making the ranked system false in another way: it leads where Blizzard thinks it should lead.  There should not be qualifiers that change the amount of rank points you get per game.  This entire modern idea of "expected rank," and putting me where I'm supposed to be.  All this pre-deterministic bullshit is fake analytics, and I hate analysis even more than I hate fakes. It's like if a nerd had a baby with a scam artist. Overwatch developers couldn't predict my rank if they had a biblical prophet tell them, but I can predict what their employees are doing right now with 100 percent accuracy: sexually harassing their female coworkers.

Even worse than trying to predict ranking, they include Uphill Battle, Consolation, Reversal, and Expected into this mix.  When Overwatch matches you, for some strange reason they make a decision on which team they think is expected to win that game. What for? Your ranking system eats shit straight out of the bootyhole, and they think they can accurately predict the outcome so much that they award more or less points for it. That is completely counter-intuitive and meaningless.  If a team is expected to win, why are they even playing each other? The ultimate goal of a ranked system is balance. If I am supposed to lose against the other team, why are we matching against them? If I am expected to lose, and I win, isn't that just a glaring flaw in the entire construction of the ranking system? You ranked me, then put me in a match where I was not expected to win, then I won. Might as well flip a fucking tarot card after the game when you lose and it's just a picture of a hand giving you the middle finger. 

Here's the kicker: video games have had decent ranking systems for 20 years by the time Overwatch 1 even came out, longer if you consider these things new to Overwatch 2.  They simply had to copy it.  In an effort to put their own little dumbass spin on it, they added a bunch of flippant bullshit to confuse, befuddle, and keep the player base focused on a bunch of meaningless factors instead of questioning why they get players on their team that seem like they were made in a lab to be comically bad at the game.  

I'm sick of talking about this pathetic excuse for a game.  I'm gonna go watch Tiger Woods highlights.