Recently there's been a bit of discussion over whether support players in Overwatch get less SR gains after a win in comparison to other players, and the game's principal designer Scott Mercer has taken to the Battle.net forums to explain the situation, saying that he "wanted to share some of the results of the investigations so far and clear up some community misconceptions along the way."
"As part of the 1.9 Orisa patch, we made a change to how assist scoring was handled to address what we honestly considered to be a bug," he explained. "Players were getting full assist credit even if the player being assisted did very little to the target. This change, along with other more significant balance changes in the patch, meant that we needed to recalibrate the tuning for the systems that calculate a player's contribution to the match. This was performed for all heroes several weeks ago, and we've already recalibrated once more after the recent 1.10 patch."
"The change to the handling of assists also affected how often a player might earn "On Fire" status during a match, but the amount a player is "On Fire" does not directly affect SR adjustments due to player performance. There is some correlation between the two because both systems are trying to measure "How well are you playing?", but there are significant differences. The determination of being "On Fire" examines not just your own performance, but your performance relative to your teammates. The calculation of your SR adjustment after a match doesn't look at your teammates, but instead compares you to the performance of other similarly skilled players with that hero across an enormous pool of competitive matches. So, we compare your Genji play to the play of other Genjis, Ana vs. Anas, etc. Since we're comparing "apples to apples", we shouldn't see any kind of support specific bias in SR adjustments due to player performance."
Mercer also added that, although Blizzard is getting reports of support players getting lower SR gains, they are also getting reports of SR gains looking correct. "Based upon our investigations so far doesn't look like there's a broad systemic issue affecting all supports across all competitive matches. There might be a more localised issue affecting a specific hero, or a certain type of play style or game situation. It also might be something completely unexpected, so we're doing a thorough examination of all the code that affects SR adjustment."
What do you make of Mercer's explanation?