Overwatch 2 makes “major” matchmaker improvements amid unbalanced games

The Overwatch 2 devs have announced some “major” adjustments to the matchmaker, but players are still reporting having unbalanced ranked games.

The ranked system in Overwatch 2 continues to drive players up the wall despite the devs constantly making changes to try to improve queue times while also creating fair matches.

In OW2’s short life thus far, we’ve seen countless instances of low ELO players being placed in Grandmaster lobbies, resulting in frustration.

On March 23, Server Engineer Morgan Maddren revealed that even more upgrades had been made with some big adjustments to how the matchmaker handles groups and high MMR players.

The major improvement we've been tuning for is to make matches with a narrower spread of MMRs. And we've made progress, reducing the spread of a typical match by around 10% in Comp!

— Morgan Maddren (@SrslyPaladin) March 23, 2023

Big Overwatch 2 matchmaking changes revealed

In a thread on social media, the Overwatch 2 dev announced that the team made some changes to the matchmaker, commenting that players may have noticed their queue times being shorter.

“The major improvement we’ve been tuning for is to make matches with a narrower spread of MMRs. And we’ve made progress, reducing the spread of a typical match by around 10% in Comp!” the dev exclaimed.

We've continued to make incremental adjustments since last week, but it's probably about as good as it can get for this patch. But you can expect us to keep trying to improve match spread in future patches!

— Morgan Maddren (@SrslyPaladin) March 23, 2023

The dev went on to note that reducing the MMR spread was “tricky,” especially when it pertains to players grouping up and trying to matchmake accordingly.

Sadly, Maddren said that the matchmaker is “probably about as good as it can get for this patch,” but added that they plan to improve match speed going forward.

In the comments, players reported mixed results with the improvements. While some said their matches felt very fair recently, others had ongoing issues.

“Had a long session playing about 15 games yesterday, 10 wins and the matches felt great and fair, very back and forth. Most fun I’ve had since OW2 launched,” one said.

Popular streamer Samito also documented waiting 17 minutes for a game only to get a Platinum support player in his lobby, leading to an uneven game.

I'm rank 60 and wait 17 minutes for this game ;-; If this is what we are gonna do just insta queue me 12 deaths in an 8 minute game

Literally said "I'm sorry guys I don't know why I'm here"

No one flamed them, tried to help but it just doesn't matter this should never happen pic.twitter.com/z8K505EPdP

— Samito (@SamitoFPS) March 23, 2023

“Last night while I’m diamond I did run into silver teammates though and on some other matches while I didn’t look it did seem like the enemy team had silvers as well,” another remarked.

Maddren did note that these wide SR differences are rare and likely the result of stacking multiple very wide groups in a match, however.

That sucks. We do very rarely make matches that wide (mostly this is caused by us stacking multiple very wide groups in a match) so you may have won the lottery if you got multiple of those in one night 🙁

— Morgan Maddren (@SrslyPaladin) March 23, 2023

We’ll have to see if there are larger improvements coming in Season 4, but for now, it seems like ranked is a bit of a mixed bag.