Overwatch 2 matchmaking not working – what went wrong?

Overwatch 2 matchmaking is bad right now (Season 3) and it’s a widely discussed topic on Reddit. As you may have figured out by now, you either trample your enemy team or you get trampled. Those days of equal team fights seem to be over, leading many to even stop playing the game altogether. Here’s what you need to know about unbalanced matchmaking in OW2.

Why is Overwatch 2 matchmaking broken and unbalanced?

The main problem with matchmaking in OW2 is that players with completely different ranks (and therefore skills) will team up together or become enemies. For example, GM tank players get silver DPS team members, while entire bronze teams get wiped out by diamond enemies.

This results in chat toxicity, highly unbalanced games, and massive losing streaks. The main reason is that higher skill matches are played at a completely different pace due to different game sense, positioning, decision making and overall skill. Because of this, higher-ranked players get a boost in their ranks, while players with a metal rank go down in rank.

Game Director @aaronkellerOW acknowledged this issue and tweeted about it on February 15, 2023.

Is there a fix for this matchmaking?

The OW team is constantly monitoring community feedback and is aware of the issues players are experiencing. They will continue to monitor and make changes to ensure games are fair and have players of similar skill.

According to player reports, OW1 matchmaking is relatively balanced compared to OW2. Let’s hope this gets fixed ASAP (Mid-Season Patch), even if that means a slightly longer wait time.

Be aware that if you take a long break from playing OW2, your hidden MMR will show up in the picture. This matchmaking rating will drop if you lose your practice a bit. But if you win 5 matches or suffer 15 losses, your rating will be “refreshed”- so it can go up, down or stay the same.

Another thing to note is that there is a difference between your “public”rank and your invisible MMR. The latter will be used to match you with other players.

See what Redditors have to say about this whole scenario here.

What does Blizzard say about this?

In an article published by Blizzard on February 24, 2023, Aaron Keller mentioned hero balance and matchmaking. The balance of heroes looks good this season, but they “made a big change to the matchmaker”in season 3, and they share some thoughts on the effects here:

The main goal was to optimize player pairings to minimize the difference in MMR within a particular role. For example, when creating matches, we place more emphasis on ensuring that DPS players on each team are closer in skill than DPS players on one team who are equal to tank players on the other team. It worked, and in matches the skill delta between players of the same role became much smaller.

However, these changes had some drawbacks, some of which were unforeseen. Queue time has increased a bit in Unranked, and for groups with large skill differences it has increased quite a bit. We’ve made changes and the queue time for unranked games is already decreasing. We’ve also heard from players that they’re going through a big win/loss streak in the game. To be clear, we are not trying to force or prevent streaks based on the ideal win rate for players. We are reviewing these reports and will share more information as we receive it.

The problem we hear about the most from our players is that they face people with very different skill levels in their ranked games. Prior to Season 3, the worst 5% of GM matches between players had 7 divisions, equivalent to Gold 3 to Silver 5. When we originally released 2.3, this increased to 12 divisions or more. Since then, we’ve made a lot of changes, and we’re making changes almost daily, and now they’re down to 9 divisions. We have additional changes planned for the mid-season update that should improve the situation.

To learn more about the game, visit our dedicated Overwatch 2 category.