Plz explain the 50% win rate to me

I have 43% winrate lol

But that’s because I play the game a lot when Im not supposed to, like after drinking. And I probably shouldn’t.
I met super high ranked people who had more than 60%, but I will never be that good.

so the 50% is total bs? if someone tried to lose every match would they eventually get put on teams that would just carry them or could they actually have a 0-10% win rate?

That thing gets repeated by brainlets who understand nothing… I mean I wish I was forced to win 50%, Id probably go up an entire rank :rofl: I had an entire season at 35% in 2019 because I played pretty badly.

But if you want higher win %, you should play with a friend or two. Or even 4. I find I win way more in that kind of setup.

1 Like

Even 60% will climb out of Silver quite fast. The only league that is super slow to climb out of is Bronze 5 because each win awards so little points (anywhere from 2 to 50 points).

Its kind of a myth, kind of not. Ideally the mm would tend towards 50% win rate. The issue is how it gets there. If it could make close games that were 50% chance it would be one thing. What happens is they try and average mmr. Lets say your team mmr average is 2k. It will try to make the other teams mmr 2k. If it say takes 3 2k players 1 1500 mmr and one 2500 mmr player to do that iy can be ok the prob is it will give you 3 2k players 1 1k player and one 3k player. Which is bad for both sides. I had a ranked game today only last 9 mins 13-2 every one was diamond 1 or 2… they had the better team comp, but they also had 3 feeders. 2 had 4 deaths at 5 mins. The other had 4 deaths at 7 mins. That was not a fun game nor was it fair for the 2 other players on thier team that playes well

I’m not an engineer, but I can take a crack at this. The forced 50% win rate discussion is weird and complicated because it’s both true and not true at the same time, and people often inject their own biases very heavily on games to support what they think is happening to them, usually to assign blame for a loss to an external source (in this case the matchmaker) because it’s an easy thing to do (the matchmaker can’t defend itself after all!). First, let’s discuss what forced 50% isn’t.

Forced 50% isn’t the matchmaker putting potatoes on your team because you had a win streak. Frankly it’s hard enough just to find good games that there’s no way we would program such a thing, and there is no incentive for us to. We are incentivized to find matches of equally skilled players in our games because they are the most fun overall, which is what the matchmaker always tries to do.

The way it does this is by assigning a skill level to every player as they play our game called MMR. This skill rating is based on whether or not you win or lose games and nothing else (this is up for debate and some day we may find improvements in the future in how MMR is calculated, but there are many good reasons for this and almost every game uses this kind of system to determine player skill. I’d recommend watching some informational videos on how MMR/ELO works if you’re really interested in the nitty gritty). What the matchmaker does is tries to find games where each team has as close to an average MMR as possible while also having the MMR between each player be in as small a range as possible.

Now, imagine that everyone in the entire game has a MMR of 1, meaning that everyone has the same skill level. If we play an infinite amount of games, then everyone will eventually have a win rate of 50%, since their skill is the same. The 50% win rate of those players isn’t the matchmaker punishing those who have win or loss streaks, it’s just a natural consequence of the matchmaker working properly.

In real life it’s not quite so cut and dry since every player doesn’t have exactly the same MMR, but the fundamentals still hold true. As you win games, your MMR gets higher, which means that you will get into games with higher and higher skilled players until you hit your “ceiling”, where you start to lose games because you are the worst person in the game and bring your team down. Conversely, as you lose lots of games your MMR goes down until you eventually get into games where you are the best person on your team. The matchmaker getting you to a 50% win rate is a natural consequence of the matchmaker finding where you, over a long period of time, actually belong. Your MMR being an accurate reflection of your skill results in the natural consequence of you having something very close to a 50% win rate.

Keep in mind also that even 10+ win and loss streak games are perfectly natural in the realm of statistics, even when the true chance of something is 50%. These win and loss streaks are often what people point to as proof that something’s broken, which is simply not true. If you were to flip a coin 10,000 you would not get heads, then tails, then heads, then tails again over and over. Over those 10,000 times you would get each result half the time overall, but you would see streaks of getting heads or tails. This is also true for players who are at their appropriate MMR but still get streaks. It’s not that the matchmaker is broken, it’s just how things are. Also keep in mind that people have good and bad days, and sometimes decide to throw or to try extra hard to win. These behavior changes on an individual game level are impossible to predict and account for, which is why some games, even when they should be evenly matched, can still easily be blowouts.

This is just scratching the surface of how these things work, but again, for a TL:DR:

  1. The idea that the matchmaker forces you to win or lose after having streaks is completely false
  2. Having a 50% win rate over time does happen and is “true” in that it’s the result of the matchmaker finding your proper place in the game over time
102 Likes

There is not forced 50% winrate.

There are 2 things that happen:

1 - The matchmaking tries to match people in a way that both teams have 50% chance of win. This is what a good MM should do, give both teams the same chances.
2 - Once you play enough games, you should settle around 50% winrate. This is just how players go. You play until you reach your first limit. Then you get better, you climb and reach another limit. If you have 50% winrate after several games, you probably reached the rank you should be now.

People feel like the game is trying to force them to have 50% and all that because the population is lower now and it is common to find someone trolling, afk or something like that. They say the system put the player on their team so they lose after they won a lot, but the system can’t know if that player will troll/afk etc. The only thing the system knows is the mmr of that player matches their mmr.

People also use that to justify their incompetence in getting better. It is easier to blame the game/system than themselves.

Make a new account and just feed and force losses every game, then tell me your winrate after 100 games. You will probably win a game here and there but you will end up with 10% winrate or even less.

6 Likes

Yes. That is how it would happen in QM and unranked. Once your mmr becomes high enough or low enough, the game will have trouble matching you with people at your level, and so, the match maker will simply throw you on a team and match you against another team within the same mmr range…

Now, the problem here, is that you could be one of the BEST players in the world with a hypothetical mmr of 3600 (handful of people at that level), but because of that, you could end up with a 4-man bronze/silver group at 1900-- and this is because the match maker is looking for a game to put a 5-man high-plat/low-diamond team into-- So, with your team’s collective mmr of 2240, that high-plat/low-diamond team is going to be playing against you, despite the fact that every single member of the other team is considered to be MUCH better than any one of your team mates.

The game is quite simply expecting you to carry under that scenario.

2 Likes

FELL THE HATRED OF 10.000 COIN FLIPS :slight_smile:

24 Likes

Finally an official post proving this is how it works. No more make-belief and guesswork.

12 Likes

Oh you sweet summer child…

26 Likes

There were already official explantions regarding the topic, so…

threads of “forced 50% winrate”, cuz deniers will be like:
nope.!

9 Likes

Why couldn’t someone from Blizzard have posted something like this like 4 years ago and stickied this?

3 Likes

This is an amazing explanation. This needs to be plastered all over these forums. Make it the first thing you see every time you open the forums!

Ok that’s going overboard but you see my point.

2 Likes

Based on this sentence, and how you described MMR to work, if I lose a game even though personally I performed better than anyone else in the match my MMR will still decrease?

2 Likes

Yes. There is no ‘i’ in ‘team’. :stuck_out_tongue:

It is interesting that they are debating the one-dimensional criterion, though. Cross our fingers that they get some resources shunted their way to actually implement stuff. :crossed_fingers:

Or, that they start marketing the game hard. With enough players, the current approach would work just fine – certainly no worse than any other MOBA.

Because people would have told him he is wrong… Think about what AZJackson wrote for a moment, and then consider what a 5-stack vs solo-que looks like. I don’t think I have to elaborate.

I made friends with a guy who only plays supports a little while ago. He plays an amazing Malf, but was stuck in gold in ranked… We played for almost 6 hours together and won 90% of our matches. This is a player that while fulfilling his role as the healer, was also able to out-damage enemy assassins consistently. And yet, because the matchmaker kept giving him potatoes, he was having to work a LOT harder than he should have.

1 Like

There were actually a couple thread with responses from Blizzard similar to this one. We used to link them in every forced 50% thread, but people still didn’t believe it.

6 Likes

Yup. It’s questionable how you can definitively come to a conclusion that you personally performed better though.

2 Likes

As someone who has climbed out of gold as a support player and also enjoys Malf, sorry, no sympathy.