Explain to me Ranked system

General Discussion
1

I’m 500 level and I have at least 3 heroes of each class that I play very well. I always try to play decent. And I would say that I give enemies quite a fight or nice support to allies and I stay attentive to map and all other moments.

Last season I played 3 Placement matches and got Silver rank. I squeezed out all from my heroes that they can provide. And that’s what I usually do. But somehow soon enough I went down to Bronze 5.
This season I had a much better understanding of the game, better skill but after 3 Placement matches I got Bronze 5 immediately. I had 15+ wins. Every victory gives 25 points. Defeat takes 25 points away. 25 is a constant number. And to reach at least Gold rank becomes an impossible task.

Sometimes I have a random team that is quite good and fight as entire one, as if we had a Discord communication. And sometimes other players are sooo bad (not even talking about afk) that victory becomes a fantasy. And I get -25 points. Did I deserve that? Obviously no! But I stay in damn Bronze 5 without opportunity to get higher. It feels like an endless circle.

WHY is there no rank system when you get points for victory and you don’t get SAME number of points taken away if you lose? I shouldn’t be responsible for other people on my team. In some other games, if I performed well I can be the only one who gets +points even if we lose and my teammates get -points. It is fair.
For example, one of the easiest mages is Guldan. I almost never die, deal massive damage (always top 1-2). That hero is at his limits. But despite that, if we lose I get -25 points. So it makes no difference if I stay afk or play hard, if my team loses, I get the same outcome.

And another thing.
I visited streamers. They had 5 wins and got Master rank already. I was shocked. I see they play better than me but not that drastically better that they get insane amount of points to get to Master after 5 wins while I have to stay in Bronze 5 forever.

I wonder, does every one get these damn 25 points?
And even if I had a team of players with voice chat, we grind constantly and we have win after win, it would still take an eternity to reach Bronze 1.

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There is a thing called MMR (matchmaking rating). Not all wins are the same (wins from Bronze is not the same as wins from Master).

That streamer raised his MMR level to 10,000 (arbitrary number. not a exact number). Even in a new season (baically rank starting over), they keep that hidden MMR. It means, when they play their 3 placement games, these top players from previous seasons after seasons, they will start from Master 1000 (GM#1, GM#100, Master 8000, all the same. they will start at Master 1000).

You didn’t raise your MMR level that high. If your previous MMR is like 1000, even when new season starts, your hidden MMR is 1000. After 3 placement matches, you will be placed in that 1000 area (not to confuse with Master 1000).

There are hidden ranks/baked in ranks in Bronze 5. There are Bronze 6-10, but you don’t see it that way in-game. It will still show as Bronze 5. When it’s 67 points per win/lose, then it means you’re on Bronze 5. 25 points mean you’re on Bronze 6.

Now, the question that is in your mind. NO. THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS. If you get only 25 points per win, you get -25 points per lost as well. You don’t lose -200 points per game. Until you drop to Bronze 7, or rise up to Bronze 5 that is. Also, NO, it doesn’t mean you have to win 200/25=8 games to get 200 points. Those are just numbers for show. It doesn’t depict how much games you have to win to rise a rank.

Normally, you require 5 wins to rise a rank. 1000 points per rank bracket, 200 points per win. Bronze 5 numbers work differently. In Bronze 5, you still only need 5 wins to rise rank. But, to use numbers you’re familiar with, 330 points total, 67 points per win. In Bronze 6-10, you need around 12 wins to rise a rank. For easier visualization of Bronze 6, 300 points total, 25 points per win. That’s assuming if you’re bottom of bottom Bronze 6 of course, which you’re likely not.

Not necessarily (note what I wrote above). But yes, you still need to grind back up the lost(es) you receive before.

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The times when you could noticeably rank up with placement matches are long gone.

The 3 matches are just for show, even at normal ranks (above B5) they can barely move you up 1 division, like from your previous rank of Silver 4 to Silver 3.

(Back in the day, there were 20 placement games, allowing you to jump as much as two tiers up, such as from gold to diamond -

but this was nerfed to 10 matches, then 3 matches, because if you run into an extremely unlucky streak of afks, trolls and so on, you could go down 2 full tiers and ranking up from there is pretty disheartening for anyone who doesn’t stream rank-up challenges for a living.)

The B5 system itself is greatly explained by Mizpah. Just think of it as an additional league that goes all the way down to the depths of Bronze 10. It’s just invisible. The higher up you get in the Bronze ladder (6-10) the more points per win you start gaining. When you rise out of B5, you start gaining 200 pts per win and loss again (approx).

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Here is how I know it - for many years now:

  • If you have SL rating, it takes skipping at least two seasons to lose it. Or equivalent time.
  • If you don’t have, it seeds:
    • From QM / Unranked, if you have. Not sure about precedence, nor ARAM.
    • If you don’t, it seems to default to Silver 5.
  • If you have, it has confidence, 0-6. Let’s agree that 0 is confident.
    • It can be set to OffDays-25 or so, basically resets in a month.
    • It can be set to Streak-12 if you go on a streak. Yes, I managed to test it.
    • Not entirely sure, how, but it will reduce. Basically if you have alternating results.
    • You stake (Confidence + 4) * 50 points per match (200-500).
      Except Bronze 5 where that 50 is lower as explained by mizpah.
  • Placement matches just hide your rank. Otherwise works as the above.

So if you score a typical 2:1, you’ll move 200/500 points, basically nothing. Not sure how it was in the beginning, but we had 10 matches, and supposedly everyone was reset to ambiguous (not confident, 500 points), so you could move a bit. I never really did.

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5

Yep, the default seeding seems to be S5, and if you have QM or Unranked MMR you can place as high as Silver 1 922 points (smurfs with 90%+ QM win rates with their buddies always seem to start with this rank and number of points if you inspect such teammates in SL).

if you have any leftover low MMR from recent seasons it’s possible to place instantly into Bronze 5.

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6

Ranked’s matchmakig works the same as Qm’s.

This means that if you are in B5 and your winrate/mmr is high, matchmaking will put potatoes in your team.

Tips:

Play ranked only when you have a winning streak, when you lose a game go play qm/aram

Play with 5 stacks if you can and exploit the compositions.

Some GM players can “force” their way out of B5, but that is extremely difficult, because it means that in some games you will have to take your entire team.

Some heroes like Genji, fast, can do it, but you have to be really good with them, in addition to knowing the mechanics of the maps very well.

As an aside to this last point, knowing the mechanics of the maps is the most important thing, it is not enough to win team fights.

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7

About the 5 wins gets master.

When you end your season on said rank, that MMR is frozen and is interchangeable until you play your next 3 games for that new season you haven’t gotten your rank, if you were diamond/masters, you will end back to that range, maybe a little lower, but this varies on how many games you got in those 3 games to get the rank.

When you play your 3 games and get your rank, you have a massive point influx, this is very common in a lot of games (Rainbow Six Siege does this, it becomes downright impossible to get points after 30 games). In which you win roughly 500, and this starts decaying the moment you start losing at least once, in which the points given are stabilized.

Points granted after first lose would start be in this order (not accurate but its similar): 500 → 450 → 400 → 350 → 300 → 250 → 200.

Normally you get 200 points that’s what anyone should be getting by average.

All of these points given have an offset of a negative or a positive value ranging from god knows how much, sometimes 50 (150 - 250), normally its a 20 range value (180 - 220). This offset remains a huge mystery for me so I cannot really say anything about this, it is said it could be related in some form to the PBMMR announcement, this is theoretical, take this with a grain of salt.

However, I do recall there’s reports that this is affected by party size, you get more points subtracted in a 5man and additive-d if you are a smaller party (especially solo Q)

One thing I can mention is that if you have a massive win streak, the points that are given increases a lot, roughly after 8-10 wins you will start gaining 250-350 and this keeps increasing more and more, the highest I reached was 400 per win.

Otherwise, there’s dodge draft/leaver forgiveness where you gain 50 points back for the next 10 matches after losing 500, this has no strategical advantage its just there for those who leave through any way you could imagine of.

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As far as I know, most of this is due to “favored party” point offsets. Since it is impossible to perfectly match the MMR and party size(s) between two teams, the game puts in a bonus (or penalty) for the team that is favored to win the match. If your team is a trio + 2 randoms vs a full team of randoms and the MMR is same between the two, you will lose more points if you lose, and win fewer if you win, to offset the advantage of the party. If you are both teams of 5 randoms, the team with the higher MMR will have the point disadvantage. The greater the discrepancy between the teams, the higher the bonus/penalty in points.

Edit: The basics of this is described on the main webpage that discussed ranked play in the section labeled “Rank Points”.

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I agree with Hoku, it’s a Favored adjustment.
It used to include (separately) a rating adjustment, until the internal rating was removed.
It isn’t particularly useful in my experience. I usually lose when favored.

By the way, the rank system is wrong. A silver 5 player is closer to diamond than bronze 4.

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Beyond what everyone has said about the ranking system, I would suggest sharing some replays. I can imagine being stuck in bronze 5 is unpleasant, but it isn’t an accident how one gets there. You’re provably overestimating how “well” you actually play.

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This is a curve to visualize one aspect of the match making.

Bronze 4 through Diamond 1 have increments of 1000 points between ranks. Typical point adjustment is ± 200 points in that span of ranks. At anything below bronze or higher into master/gm, the math and visuals change with how the system ranks players.

What people typically see is the estimation of their ‘mmr’ as bronze/silver/etc but they usually don’t think of their ‘rank’ in relation to the rest of the playerbase unless they’re in grandmaster as that is when the actual rating kicks in (ie GM #1 has the highest points). However, the effect is still there and it’s much more palatable to see “bronze 4” than “player 10 millionth”

MMR doesn’t work out the same way as a negative number, so the numerical indicator compresses the points won/lost per game to still allow space between the lowest of ranks, and those above it. 200 points out of a 1000 rank is 20% progress per game, so that ratio still holds at the “below bronze 5” sub-ranks that game will create. Since anyone can throw and leave games to tank their rating, bronze 5 has a wide range of player ‘skill’ that makes it hard to properly assess ‘fair’ games in a 1000 point-span. If the game didn’t try to slow the deviation from 0, then eventually players would get so low they couldn’t get matched at all – it is a problem over at the other end (gm) where gaps in matching get bigger, and waiting gets longer.

Systems like these (ELO, mmr, etc) usually have to stretch/compress the numbers at some point in their representation. If they don’t squish at the low end, then the upper end would stretch and they’d be getting thousands of point swings instead of the dozens exchanged at the low end.

It’d probably be ‘better’ if HotS used the star-based visual that Hearthstone used for their low ranks to indicate stagnations (lose star, gain star) instead of using scary-scary numbers.

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For the life of me, I cannot understand the logic behind seasons if your previous season/QM performance follows you. THAT IS NOT HOW SEASONS WORK. Start over! Fresh start! What’s the point otherwise?

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That happened once when Blizzard tried to implement personal MMR, and it was a completely miserable experience for everyone. Masters were playing with and against Bronze people, and no one enjoyed it. The Bronze were getting curb-stomped, and the Masters weren’t having any sort of competitive experience. Even worse, you would end up with nonsense like 2 Masters and 3 Plats against 5 Silvers, because “everyone gets treated as if they are the same skill level”.

So that is a hard no for me. Let the MMRs persist from season to season, as the other option was a nightmare.

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15

Conceptually, it might feel a bit odd, but honestly it’s better than resetting everyone’s MMR. You’d just have wild chaos matches at the start of each season that would ultimately take months to settle down to what it was probably going to head towards anyways.

It’s not like you magically lost all your skill and knowledge just because the season started. And even if we had a machine that could wipe all that away, would you want it to?

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The planet doesn’t have a hard reset when it transitions from season to season.

There also some similar carry-over in sports; having a win/lose ratio reset doesn’t mean the conferences need to figure out who is a AAA team all over again.

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I see what you mean. I remember that time, and it was chaotic. I understand why people prefer it, but I don’t. Perhaps I’ll try that thing tubers do, start a fresh account and climb from scratch.

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That comes across a bit like just wanting to stomp on people, rather than playing with and against those who have proven to be around the same skill as you. What exactly appeals to you about having a reset?

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It just feels like a proper way to do things. I’m no developer, so I’m sure there’s good reasons why they don’t do it this way any more, like you mentioned. In my mind, it’s a strange method.

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We’re not receptive of the idea for two reasons.

  • Typically, people who would insist on this are also well aware that the beginning of the season would be lottery. As long as you luck out with more skill on your team, you can climb. Boosting is also a possibility. The main point of the argument is to open the opportunity to become a master without having the skill.
    • The counter to that is, that you only get to earn your rank after 100+ matches. Solo. In a row. If your win rate is in the 45-55 range. (Currently, people boast their season’s high, and many players just play the minimum amount to have a visible rank.)
    • In a 1v1 game, of course, luck is minor, and you can have the climb experience. By the way, absolutely every serious real world tournament has seeding, which is effectively the same thing. The #1 tennis / chess / football team won’t play against the dead last, except for show.
    • Stomping much weaker opponents is poor sportsmanship. Serious games with more support actively ban smurfs.
    • There is also little reason anymore. Boasting aside, there is no special mount or portrait.
  • It is just chaos, and it doesn’t matter in the long run.

If your desire is to experience growth, become a monk ARPG games would probably suit you better.