Scott Mercer, the designer of Overwatch, dispelled myths about matchmaking and skill rating changes.

Mercer wrote on the game’s forums shortly before Overwatch gets the „looking for group” feature. He says that the community is somewhat reluctant to group up, mostly due to a few „misconceptions.” The winners wouldn’t get less skill rating (SR from now on) as a group than solo, and the losers wouldn’t lose more SR either. Playing in a group has zero impact on the SR changes.

Others aren’t joining groups because they are afraid of running into more cohesive groups – Mercer pointed out several flaws with this thought: the groups mostly don’t stick together for long, and there are „diminishing returns” if you stick with them, and you get more right after grouping up. Already formed and sticking together teams tend to have high SRs.

He added that only 16% of the matches have only solo players, and Overwatch is going to concentrate on putting us together with similarly sized groups. If our team consists of solo players, 75% of the time the other team will be in the same shoes. With a six-member team, this is 92%, including 5-1, 4-2, 3-3, and 2-2-2 formations.

He added that Overwatch calculates the chance of winning for each team before the match starts. If one side gets less than 40%, the matchmaking restarts. The higher our percentage is, the less SR points will be awarded, and vice versa. He also revealed that six-player teams only win 53% of the time, while the solo players’ winning rate is 49.94% (and that is still more than 2-2-1-1 teams).

There are tons of statistics…

Source: PCGamer