A couple weeks ago, we reported on the issue with inflated Mercy players and how the ranking system is incorrectly awarding ineffective styles of play. The issue arises when certain styles of play, despite efficiently earning gold medals, don't necessarily help the team win consistently. No one can blame players for identifying the fastest way to climb the ladder, so the responsibility for correcting is squarely on Blizzard.

This week, Canadian Overwatch pro Lane "Surefour" Roberts shared his extended thoughts on how this issue it is detracting from the highest level of ranked play. Surefour is a notable solo-queue player, most known for once reaching the #1 spot through entirely through solo-queue. His individual mechanical skills are so impressive, he was once the target of serious hacking accusations during the early days of competitive Overwatch. He has since been vindicated (thanks to it surfacing how unreliable the spectator camera can be) and now enjoys considerable clout among the NA community.

So when Surefour took the time to affirm the existence of this problem, he does so from a place of considerable experience. He starts off his thoughts with a clear statement of the problem:


"...Right now for S5 Overwatch's rank is actually pretty terrible. There's dare I say it, people that don't deserve to be at the rank they're at, somewhat "boosted". 

This creates a huge problem for people that are actually at the rank they deserve to be at. It creates huge balance deficits because the matchmaker isn't actually determining their ability to play the game at the highest level, it's determining the most balanced "SR" match. Now i'm not saying some people havn't improved, people do, but the amount of people that actually go from 2k - gm/top500 is actually crazy, and when you have a 2k ABILITY player in a GM/top500 SR match, it leaves the team with that player that didn't improve with a big crutch."

Surefour continues to elaborate on the issue, explaining the most likely explanation of the "boosted" problem using the most apparent example: Mercy players who are disproportionately rising in rank:


"Everyone knows the mercy problem at the moment, mercy mains that are gaining ALOT of SR because of the buff to her res because they are "outperforming" the stats of other mercys. So what changed? Did all the of the mercy mains that got to GM this season all of a sudden reach a HUGE improvement of skill in this season? Perhaps, but most likely because alot of those mercys would die after they res, which means they wouldn't necessarily win every fight they res. But as a result of the invuln buff, at the lower ranks, they would probably ALWAYS survive after resing, resulting in more fights won or them having less deaths. So in the past the system had all these 'bad' stats for mercys, but now alot of mercys are staying alive and getting "good" stats. In return, the MMR system rewards them for their 'performance' . "

Later in his post, Surefour concedes that he can't know  "100%" how the adjustments work. However, he suggests a system that adjusts SR based solely on wins and losses and not on performance. This system would reduce way the disconnect that exists between how to "actually" win with a hero and how to gain high SR through gold medals with a hero.

"In the end, my point is, the SR gains/loss based on performance has only worked for so long, and we're starting to see the flaws of it. I think it's time we change to a more static mmr system with an mmr reset most likely. In the end, if you do your job better then the other team, if the matches are balanced, you will win. If you're slacking, you will lose. That's how I think it should be."

You can read the entire post on Twitlonger here. Do you agree with Surefour's call for a system that disregards performance and takes only wins/losses into account? Or is the "Boosted Mercy" a fabricated issue that doesn't really exist? Let us know how you feel in the comments section below.