Comment by will4274
5 years ago
I think you might be missing my point. Maybe an analogy - the classic problem in distributed database is CAP - consistency, availability, partition tolerance - pick two. Historically, a lot of people picked AP to build their highly available databases. In the context of Spanner, Google basically said this was the wrong tradeoff - availability is more highly impacted by external events like client to server networking incidents than by the design architecture - so you should pick CP instead.
I'm making the same point with regard to matchmaking. Overwatch has tried to optimize for good matches, ignoring all the issues you rightly describe above, and thinking about the tradeoff between time and good matches without regard to external events that impact matches like smurfs, uneven play, DCs, etc. They'd have been better off optimizing for fast matchmaking. It's bad engineering in plain sight, and gamers go out of their way to justify it.
That makes sense. The question is would more players quit the game because of long queue times, or because they got stomped when they were new. (That would be the result of just picking the first 12 people in the queue and throwing them in a match.)
I think there is some value in caring about that case. I started playing Overwatch with no FPS background (at 31!) and I never felt like I was in unwinnable games. All the players were as bad as me. (I still remember my first games when a D.va bomb would reliably get 6 kills.)