If you check Overwatch data-mining sites right now, you’ll see something curious: The top-ranked Korean competitive player has hundreds of losses and only a few wins.
Ah, the magic of glitches. What seems to have happened is, Korean player IzA aimed for rock bottom, much like Dale “Bacontotem” Brown — who I recently profiled — last season. IzA managed the feat with startling speed (I reached out to Brown, who said his skill rating is currently 432, for perspective). After losing hundreds of matches, they hit zero. At that point, the game suddenly awarded them with the most coveted number in all of Overwatch: A skill rating of 5000.
Source: Master Overwatch.
Now, last season, when Brown hit SR 0, the game just reset his progress at SR 1. Season two, however, has a whole new version of the skill rating system that goes from 1-5000 instead of 1-100, and it’s divided up into tiers. For whatever reason, it also apparently lacks a safeguard against players who decide the only way up is down, down, down.
I’ve not been able to reach IzA, but Brown told me he’s encountered more Korean players attempting to tank their skill ratings.
“If Blizzard doesn’t patch it soon, we’ll also see a few more people on the KR servers do it first,” said Brown. “I met four of them on Sunday, and they’re pushing hard over there to [hit SR 0] already. I do expect to be US first to do it, so we’ll see fairly soon.”
Brown also admitted to me he’s a bit jealous of those Korean players’ dedication to the storied art of, er, losing:
“It is a feat to pull off, since once you’re the bottom the charts — approximately rank 800 or so — currently you can only lose 1-4 rank points per match,” Brown explained. “[There’s] also the time dedication. I’ve lost 83 matches as of today, and I’m a little mentally sore from it all. Meanwhile, that person did 230+.”
I’ve reached out to Blizzard to find out what they plan to do about all of this, but I’ve yet to hear back from them.
Comments
11 responses to “Overwatch Player Gets Highest Possible Rank Despite Losing Every Match”
Currently I am just jealous they are getting to play. I hadn’t been able to connect to PS4 servers for the last two days and when I do the games have been all kinds of weird. (PS long time player, not just for the free weekend)
I feel your pain. My team and I committed to the 10min+ wait times to get into matches and we had alot of weird stuff happen.
our weapons wouldn’t appear in front of us for most of the match so projectiles just shot out of our chests?
Every time I ejected from Dvas Meka the screen would just go black until I died and finally just the most ridiculous lag I’ve every experienced in Overwatch.
Yeah, it’s been sucky for the last few days. My problem is that I can’t join a game, the game says “Error joining game, trying again”, changing maps over and over until I either quit searching or it goes in an infinite loop. When I do get a map by quitting and retrying over and over, I experience zero lag. There was one instance during competitive where I was forced to quit after the lag was just unbearable, at the beginning of the problems. I’ve just been chilling out and playing the Uncharted series for the first time.
yeah exactly, I lucked two games and they were all kinds of weird. Lag, bugs and just general insanity. I suppose I cant complain before this weekend never had a single bug or connection issue ever since launch. Thats a pretty good run so far.
Yep, push your rank to 0 so you can abuse a glitch and forever be against competition that will steamroll you in every match. Good job.
Pretty sure that’s what they want.
What, to be max rank and have no chance against all their competition because they’re over matched? Yeah, great goal there…
But they may well be extremely good players but the the quickest way to the top may be to go down. Like the wise Chief Wiggum once said “dig up stupid”.
It technically may be possible, yes but odds are they aren’t players who are at the top of the game in terms of skill.
I wonder what happens if/when they win.
If they lose, do they start losing ranking points from 5000 down? If they win, do they go back up from 0? Do they just stay stuck on 5000 regardless? If they stay on 5000, thats a hell of a way to grief some damn good players being very precious about their ranking.
certainly sounds better than beating you head against a brick wall when you place in the mid 2500s and despite actually trying to do well getting stuck with people who have no idea about objectives and team composition and having you rank tank every night. And when you do win it awards you such a small amount of points you almost feel like it was all for nothing. ELO hell is real these guys might just be smart enough to have found a way to skip it as unfortunately until you break into the ~3200 rank do people actually get it.