“I’ve had a eight game win streak in my recent QM games” (your saying) is anecdotal indeed. My quoting all my game experience is not anecdotal for it is not so limited in number and in time (a “sample” as you called it). Please cut the bad faith. This does not interest me. I am open-minded but not with such fallacy. This post will therefore be my last exchange with you in this thread. I usually am a patient person but not towards this.
As I said, the OP didn’t provide enough information to say his “bad matches” were over any specific period of time. My reply was proportionate to his statement, which is simply a complaint post without any specific details, research or context provided. I mean this is the entire post:
You and I have both exchanged about a hundred more words than his entire post. The OP (like many compliant posters) has not even returned to engage with his own thread. You are in fact reaching and iinferring meaning to the OP’s post that isn’t there, and attacking me for specifics the OP never expressed.
Now that is bad faith.
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My winrate is above 50% (I do not remember the exact figure) but I still think the MM is bad. Whether you succeed in “beating it” is a topic of discussion, and is a real pain, but in my opinion it is not good in this mode even though overcoming it is not impossible. (Otherwise it wouldn’t be “bad” but truly catastrophic.) The assignment of allies in regards to their skill level is very erratic and the hero comp assignment leaves much to be desired.
The ideal goal would be to beat people of your level with allies on your level or, at most, ennemies slightly above, this progressing along as you progress, allowing to really get better instead of either being stomped by players way better, or being stomped because of allies who have no clues, or more rarely being the one who stomps because the MM has reversed these roles. Hero comp wise, some difficulty would be ideally welcome without being so preposterous as it often is. All the CC (or close to all of it) for the ennemy team while the ally team can starves for it, ennemy team having bruisers and ally team only the squishiest assassins, ennemy team being all long-ranged vs short-ranged and melee allies, or playing a hero with close to no point-and-click potential versus an all mobile team…
I have to say, the 50% argument is one of the dumbest ones. You could lose 7000 games by 5 lvls and win 7000 games by the same margin and it would still be a perfect 50%. Has nothing to do with matchmaking quality.
MM is pretty awful, everybody knows it. But it’s not going to get any better, there is no more development done for HOTS and population is slowly decreasing which will amount to more and more rainbow matches, etc.
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Calling such an argument “dumb” is largely exagerated. I don’t agree with it either but it raises a lot of questions, for me included, as it adresses – intentionally or not – the matter of a “mythical” forced 50% winrate, which has been subject to much debate in this forum between believers and non-believers. As far as I know, no dev as truly answered this question (or, if I missed something in this regard, someone please tell me).
They have, but true to form, a lot of people dismiss it, accuse them of lying, and just keep believing what they want to believe.
Honestly, Blizzard could make every scrap of data available, and people will continue to believe the system is rigged, rather than honest facts such as the player population being too low, or that they just aren’t as good as they think they are.
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Now that is a great post, and from a dev at that. Thanks for taking the time to search back for it and sharing it. I am surprised I did not see it at the time (well, I am not so often here between my job and familly life) but I am glad I read it. Devs should talk to us more often. As you said there will always be stubborn ones but it will reassure the majority upon many facts.
I had no position about the “forced 50% winrate” before but now that I saw some official’s answer I know it does not exist (I do not think an official would “politicaly lie” about something as insignificant as a video game).
That being said I am not satisfied with how the MMR works (see my post #11 above), at least in QM.
small player pool = bad match making…
No code change will make match making better till the player pool basically doubles or triples.
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I’ve gotten dozens of suspension reports for reports i’ve sent. Gotten 2 just this month alone.
So the report system is actually working great.
The MM however, is not. Not even by a long shot.
Not sure if you said this in defense of the MM or if you were being sarcastic but this statement isn’t true, like AT all if you said it for the first reason.
bad players = bad match making.
people don’t come here to look at how to do better at the game, or how matching actually works or a number of other things; they have their boogie man stories and something has to be ‘fixed’ despite zero feedback on what the ‘problem’ actually would be.
which is pretty much the foibles of lots of other stuff in life and the trouble [somewhat] being that if people actually knew how to provide useful feedback, they’re probably have a better sense of addressing the ‘problem’ in a different manner than they do, which would then influence the issue of the ‘problem’.
time and again many metrics point out the matching is ‘working as well as it can’ – which is why stuff doesn’t dramatically change every 0 post topic that comes out – but the same posters keep on being effectively useless, and not noticing why.
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AZ jackson said its true and not true. The only thing that is not true is that the MMR forces an outcome (win or lose).
From my own experience it is certainly partly true. I have said before about how my first 80 games in QM with Nazeebo had a 72% win rate. Now after 105 games with him… Im at 62.9%. In another 30 games it will be 52-55%.
You can say… You’re simply rising in MMR and getting better opponents! But thats not the primary cause. I have been finding myself more often in hopeless matches where my team gets stomped. My team gets the 12-death Illidan that we never had a chance to overcome.
I feel like if I were in a swim race and Blizz thinks Im swimming too fast. True, they give me slightly faster opponents… but they also put ankle weights around my legs as well. 
Thats why 55% is considered so good. You are trying to beat a coin toss.
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I would like to know how they collect data for those “metrics”.
Like:
- Is a feeder in your team considered Your fault specifically or the fault of the MM missing the fact that this player would do that? Trick question, MM can’t know it → luck factor.
- Is it the case that 1-3 allies in your team who doesn’t have all heroes unlocked, get their best heroes picked/banned? Is this player forced to play something he can’t play? Is the same the case for the opponents? Did that affect the game? Yes? → luck factor. No? → Player managed to compensate OR the opponent’s were actually worse. → again luck factor.
- Is there a player in your team that’s unusually passive aggressive in your team? Does his negative attitude translate into his gameplay in-game? Does it cause a loss? Yes? → Luck factor. Do you guys still win even tho he has been ruining the mood the whole match? You guys compensate or are good enough to still play together no matter what. Did you stomp that match? Yes? → luck factor. No? Even match.
- Did you get a bot? → luck factor.
- Did opponents get a leaver? → luck factor.
- Did an ally intentionally break the setup by picking “what he wants” and it actually became a loss because of that reason ingame? Yes? → Luck factor. Why?
Like take this above for instance, why is it a luck factor? Because the MM gave you that ally randomly. This ally who then decided to not cooperate caused a loss. It certainly wasn’t your own fault. Unless of course it was then again the loss is a luck factor for your allies and not you.
Everything i wrote comes from the definition of the word “Luck” which is:
“Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions.”.
If the things i mentioned above didn’t affect your own personal MMR then luck wouldn’t have mattered. But it does affect it so it’s a problem. And it IS a problem because every now and then, probably 50% of your matches will be matches where atleast one of the above reasons will invade your match as soon as the game says “Match Found”. And if you lose because of it you didn’t lose because the game is competitive, you lossed cuz you got cheated by something that doesn’t know it’s cheating…
if you’re going to claim to want to ‘know’ something, then you’d want to stop deluding yourself with loaded questions. Yes, even if you don’t actually ‘mean’ the question and ask it as a rhetorical device, the ‘rhetoric’ your spouting is a bias set of fallacies that try to praise ignorance over otherwise.
Part of the issue of chronic complainers is that they’re too busy complaining to think through half the crap they’re complaining about. if you concern is that ‘luck’ is a ‘problem’ because “luck” is – as you claim it --: “Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions." then you effectively make the whole of the game about ‘luck’.
Here’s the magic secret: if ‘luck’ is things outside of your control, and you don’t control the enemy team any more than you control your own team… then how much “skill” is there over any iota of luck? you can’t fault luck when things go bad and praise ‘skill’ when things magically go the way you wanted – which is pretty much the bottom line of your hot take – which is why loaded questions indicate slanted thinking.
What you posted in the first line of a google search for ‘luck’ as a definition. Since that suits the tl;dr complaint, that’s all you took in. there are two things i will note from that:
- “Luck is a skill”
- Wikipedia provides a much more thorough elaboration on “luck” and some of the faults, and fallacies pertaining to it.
You fixate on problems as you see them as ‘luck’, and then concern yourself with loses because of ‘cheating’. These are half-baked complaints posted by someone who doesn’t want to know more, do better, or look to actually use their ‘skill’ because they have something else to blame instead.
enemy dodged a skill-shot - luck factor; you can’t control them moving, or stopping, and acting contrary to your expectation. you can’t control the enemy showing up to contest and objective, challenge a merc camp, or what heroes they pick, what talents they take.
If the fixation is that ‘luck’ ruins your ability to ‘win’ at a game, then you’re pretty much undermined the entire point of playing any non-ai scripted based game because so much more is out of your control that ‘skill’ can’t apparently matter. So, we better drop multi-player games, and stick to speed running set games with fixed seeds so ‘skill’ will drive out more of the unwanted ‘luck’.
instead of fixating on same crap sense of what ‘luck’ is, you’d be better of trying to figure out what little else remains that would be considered ‘skill’ in your faulty definitions, and then looking to try to improve that instead of looking for crap to blame over and over again.
Esp given the sort of hero/balance rants you’ve made – and the replies people post as you time and again – getting a sense of self-realization on your luck-squabble would fix a hefty bit of what you see as ‘problematic’.
Different thinkers like Thomas Kuhn have discussed the role of chance in scientific discoveries. Richard Wiseman did a ten-year scientific study into the nature of luck that has revealed that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. His research revealed that “Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, making lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, creating self-fulfilling prophecies via positive expectations, and adopting a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”[14] Researchers have suggested that good luck and good mood often co-occur (Duong & Ohtsuka, 2000)[15] and that lucky people are happy and optimistic whereas unlucky people feel anxious and depressed
Yea, stuff affects mmr that is outside of their personal control. However, the same sort of players and demonstrated, time and again, how they influence “luck” in their play, and fix success despite that. MMR is appraised from winning and losing; one team is going to win, and one team is going to lose. As much as people fixate on the bads of ‘losing’ apparently it hasn’t ever occurred to them that the actual reality of outcomes of playing this game is going to involve losing.
should that even actual occur to them, then maybe they’d actually notice all the positive control they actually have instead of blaming superstitious contributions for holding them back. Whether anyone sees the actual extent of ‘making their own luck’ actually be completely true doesn’t really matter because particular players in the game have a particular tendency to have particular attitudes about the game relative to their skill level.
People that fall privy to ignorance, fixate on stuff to blame, and pretty much spend loads of time deluding themselves to decry any and whomever that doesn’t agree with them could have spent that effort/time investing it in making their “luck” better than they think it to be.
IF you actually want to know something, then have the sense of mind to actually learn it.
IF you’re not interested in that, than cyclical complaints tend to ‘make their own luck’ and never bother to notice why.
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I was exaggerating to make a point, it was simply a reverse of the OP’s post which is also an exaggeration. I don’t think you will find many people defending the MM, for sure not me if you look at my post history.
My point was (which some have missed) that if you make complaint thread about the MM and just say “MM bad, I lose games, the report system great”, then there is nothing of any substance to reply to. The onus isn’t on those replying to articulate positions or arguments for the OP.
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Well… no and absolutely.
When i wrote the part with different scenarios, those are definately scenarios that happen AND is luck factored. You could say “i don’t believe in luck, i make my own luck” but what does that even mean when something you can’t control ruins your day? Or life even.
Luck the way i see it is something you have absolutely no control over. Like you can only experience it and react to it to try to work against it after it has already happened.
Call the dice numbers 1-6, Worse-Better.
throw the dice and you might get (2-2-1-4-6)
Do the same for the opponent team, maybe they get (4-4-3-6-6) which is a overall higher MMR with that team being favored.
I talk about the MM so much because it’s my biggest issue with the game. I don’t mind the OP heroes as much as i mind the MM because OP heroes can be dealt with. Easier to deal with OP heroes than it is to convince un-cooperative allies to be cooperative. You could do something single handedly but that’s not an easy task if you’re a healer or a tank in that match. There are limits to what you can do with a uncooperative team. Depending on the severity of the refusal to cooperate you will suffer the consequence even more.
I love the game but i passionately hate to lose not because opponents played better but because your own team refuses to “connect” and act like 5 best friends. I’m not trying to say that i’m always the best player in my team every match. No, i have my bad days aswell. I will always try to improve whenever i can.
These are some pieces of the reason i’m so stubbornly firm in beliving that the game is about luck more than it is skill.
When you get hit by luck too hard then your skill wont cut it. If you get hit by a little bit of luck factors you could possibly “catch-up” and turn the table. It’s the way i see it. Luck will be there affecting everything.
And that won’t happen because Activision doesn’t care about HotS so no resources get dedicated…it’s just a vicious circle. Basically Activision killed their own game via terrible mismanagement.
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They cannot fix it because they have created a tiered hero system. So long as gods and ploebes are able to be together, the games will always suck.
What a person can control is their reaction and their preparation; if they can’t control their reactions, then they don’t have sufficient preparation. But people ‘make their own luck’ through preparation. Some people are prepared to accept consequences come what may, some prepare for ‘worse case scenarios’ and act accordingly, some are prepared to look for opportunities others do not; the list goes on.
If something ‘ruined their day’ then they likely weren’t prepared for it, and weren’t prepared to watch out for it. Yea, people can’t account for everything, but a big factor on the fixations people stress on luck tend to come from those that don’t know how to consider otherwise, so they feel mired in bad luck because they simply don’t consider otherwise.
That is part of the basic gist of the quote i pulled: people do ‘make’ ‘luck’ frequently, but that can seem farfetched to an increasingly insular people just fixing from one distraction to the next. That’s part of why i point out that people looking for something to blame generally don’t improve: their fixation is set, and they don’t have the interest to look and prepare otherwise. Forgone conclusions (fulfilling prophesies) stand out because that is the opportunity people are looking to have happen, so it does.
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Mmh I knew i should’ve added something that closed this gap. Text is getting too long alot of the times.
Saying you were not prepared enough is too theoretical, “theoretically” if you’re prepared you could somehow with the best of your ability equally meet the obstacle placed in your path. “Theoretically” you can over-come it. It’s easier to over come it if this game was 1v1 rather than 5v5 which could potentially add 9 more obstacles you need to be prepared for. It’s too speculative and too “what if” and “you might/could” like.
You can’t be prepared for everything because different factors have different degree of impact. Some can be within your preparation, others can’t be and some could even never be within your preparation because certain factors can’t even be predicted to even place a single thought of preparation for.
Saying “you could be prepared” is too simplified of the various scenarios you’re placed in. I don’t see it representing all matches, it represents “turnable” matches more than it represents stomp loss matches for instance. There’s alot more factors playing around than 1 out of 5 players preparation for all the factors. It will have to include how well the other 4 are prepared for the scenarios they’re put in too.
It’s your problem + 4 other players problems combined AND the 5 opponents. Too many variables to exclude luck factors.
Anyway this is just circular, You don’t see it luck based so your stance will make you reply in defence of it totally excluding luck, mine is the reverse.
I say this game is luck first, skill second
You say this game is skill and there are no luck factors.
i include both, you exclude one.
I say this game is skill based but luck factors will affect your MMR
You say this game is skill based and there are no luck factors, only your own failiure to prepare.
What i say is true (Imo) the fewer matches you play
What you say is true when you pass 500+ played matches.
I play around 5 matches a day and experience luck factors 3 out of 5 matches. And i do so because i see failiure of allies or better matched opponent team as luck factors.
It’s a luck factor if you get stomped by them, but it’s NOT a luck factor if the 2 teams are even and you still lose.
Lol, many metrics? Name a few?