I'm intent on doing it solo-ish. I play at weird times for most people on my friends list.

Can anyone confirm there is no penalty for leaving in the hero choice phase? If so, that'll help a lot.

Same. I plummeted from 50 to 45 fast after playing a bunch of solos. Most of the opposing teams seemed like they were coordinating. Didn't get the sense my teammates were coordinating between each other. A couple of the games a player on my team left and it basically turned into a guaranteed loss.

In other news, it's amazing what % of the Overwatch population has no clue how to support a Reinhardt. Also amazing how unwilling people are to shift their selection depending on what has already been picked despite compelling strategic reasons. I mean, I would hope people realize we don't need three Widowmakers on Ilios on console, but nah.

The matching system is pretty good at getting you into 6 solo queuers, you can tell in the initial join screen. It'll show 4 & 2 vs 3 & 3 etc.

I must be missing something. How can you tell?

Playing more Hanzo makes my rating stabilize (feel that way) around 42-43. lol.

I really am awful at Hanzo it seems.

I was 40-44 for 50 or so games. I am now 49 and would hope to stabilize around at least 52-55. I haven't improved much, just the first ~40 games went really badly for me.

The koth bug fix is really helping though.

answer my q man!!

At the fancy intro screen there's a bar next to the player names that are partied up

It's easy to make friends and get teams going regularly in this game from my experience.

Really enjoying competitive play, and quickplay is fun too when you feel like experimenting with different heroes.

Sorry, dunno

This is how my morning went roughly.

Lose 2 games on early DCs... lose 2 ranks.

Win 2 games on early DCs, gain 0.5 rank.

I'm definitely feeling the salt

Reading the overwatch reddit it seems pretty bad.

disagree with this, there's just too much variance. some examples from this morning while playing solo:

playing as 1-level underdogs on temple of anubis. we win on defense then win on attack. before we're about to win on attack 2 people on the other team leave. my ranking bar moves up half an inch instead of what should've been a huge jump to the next level just because two people quit which had zero impact on the match outcome (they left right after a team kill). this has happened to me 4 times now since friday.

another game where the both team averages were 48. 2 guys on my team were level 53. they BOTH picked hanzo on nepal. one guy played him the entire time, the other switched to mercy on second map (we already had a lucio) and then back to hanzo on the 3rd map. these are the guys that are supposed to be carrying our team but instead they are the two most useless guys on the team. doesn't matter that i played winston and got 3 golds, i'm losing rank.

also the game doesn't adjust for how you play with the 20 different heroes. when i'm playing with my usual group i'm almost always support or defense. when i'm playing solo i might be forced to play a reinhardt or tracer. my skill level with them is wayyy lower, so i might be in a ranked match where the team averages are 50 but i'm going to play like a 30.

Complaining about teammates dropping or doing other stupid stuff is like complaining about bad beats.

Not really

it just shouldn't affect how mmr is gained or lost

having someone dc and then you not gaining mmr is just really bad design

mmr based on performance is dumb as well, win/loss should be the only one

im not complaining, just responding to the post that says overwatch's MMR will work itself out. it works very differently from the MMR in other games and is unlikely to be very accurate under the current setup

I am complaining.

How many poker players think they're genuinely unlucky?

How many Overwatch players think they're genuinely unlucky?

As Hanzo, I think I need to get to two key thresholds:

Headshot ulting soldier
Shooting Pharah out of the air

Those two things alone will dramatically improve my winrates I think.

tldr: variance.

Your argument would probably be really popular on reddit vs a poker forum

3rd time I've been drop hacked today

its ridiculous

it really isn't variance though. solo players are much more likely to leave than groups of 5 or 6. if im mostly playing solo my wins are gonna result in lower XP gains (because someone always leaves at the end) than if i were in a group of 6 vs another group of 6.

Word on the street is they are permabanning fools that do this, so hopefully it stops soon.

Of course being solo will suck more than being in a full group, and that's without the leavers. But if you solo queue you get matched with other solos, which means on average you'll get as many leavers on your team as everyone else.