Overwatch 2 Developer Blog: Explaining matchmaker goals and plans, part 2

news.blizzard.com:

Welcome back, heroes, for part 2 of our matchmaking series! In part 1, we talked about how matchmaking works: It’s an incredibly complex system that needs to consider many different inputs to make every single game as fair as possible. For part 2, we’re going to address some community concerns regarding the matchmaker from the perspective of the competitive game mode. Let’s get into it! 

We’ve seen your feedback on matches with wide skill variation, and we want to talk about a few reasons that could be happening as well as our plans to address your concerns.

We allow players to group together even when there’s a difference in the MMR between party members, and this is a major source of wide skill disparities in matches. We’re working on some changes that will match parties with similar MMR disparities together more frequently, which we expect to noticeably reduce how often we make wide matches. This will make it much less likely for a solo player or a party with a narrow skill disparity to end up in a match with a wide skill disparity.

Often matches with a wide displayed skill tier difference still look very close when looking at the difference in MMR between the two teams. The partial rank reset at the beginning of the season may be exaggerating this by making it look like someone is lower than their actual rank. However, regardless of the seasonal reset, both skill tier and MMR can decay over time for players who are inactive for a considerable amount of time. Players who return may see dramatic shifts to their skill tiers as they resume playing regularly, and the game becomes more certain of that player’s current skill.

We’ve also seen the community talk about inconsistent games or how some games feel incredibly