Of course we know blizzard is lying, only they know the code and what factors forced solo players into a 50% zone
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You’re giving them way too much credit. They have no idea there is a 50% zone.
yep. it should just be if you win you go up in points, if you lose you go down. and there is a rank associated with your point level. and the matchmaking tries to match your team overall…with the other team.
NO formulas or adjusting. I agree. I think Bizzard lies about this.
Is the mmr a little borked and a few anomalies occur from time to time? Yes.
Are these anomalies deliberate sabotage, whether to one person or a whole team? No.
Is the game smart enough to track win/lose streaks and is capable of deliberately and accurately assigning matches designed to make people win or lose? No.
The system is not smart, its dumb and therefore dumb matchups happen, that is life. This has nothing to do with ‘forcing 50% win rates’ but more to do with what happens when you assign a highly complex and extremely subjective concept such as ‘skill’ to a single number.
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Never seen someone have so much sparetime they can sit infront of his computer and argue about 50% force winrate for 12 hours straight.
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Alright since my thread got linked over here and the words were indeed taken out of context from the thread I created about me leaving the game, let me elaborate on this.
If you read my thread carefully, I left the game because I didn’t think the 8-10 win loss streaks felt rewarding to me anymore. It felt more like a grind and a chore at the end of the day for me. OP , the post you’re trying to find is probably this one by AZJackson.
And since the content of the topic relates to my post from my thread as well, in a way , let me clarify this. I’m not wholly against the 50% winrate. The thing I’d be more intersted in , which affects and runs this whole system at the end of the day - is the MMR calculation.
As seen in the thread ,stated by AZJackson himself,
“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”.
So I guess what it all comes down to isn’t the 50% forced winrate at the end of the day, but “Should MMR be calculated in the way it is?” Should you as an individual, even though you’ve maybe carried the whole game, only for your team to do a stupid mistake at the end that cost you the game, be punished by the same loss of MMR as the player who literally kept dying over and over again?
Blizzard already tried to tackle this once with the PBMMR - Personal MMR , which was supposed to be a way where it would track your specific performance in the match and adjust your MMR according as opossed to the “classic MMR calculation” we have now, but we know that that was a distaster and for some reason it didn’t quite work the way as it was intended. Also , just a tiny reminder , there was no mmr reset after the disaster that PBMMR brough to the mmr balance.
So I guess rather than arguing over this non-important 50% winrate thread, wouldn’t it be much better to revisit the topic of "how do we calculate and evaluate player’s individual performance in a match rather then team performance = win / loss as the only metric to set players up against each other in ranked. "
The 50% winrate in this thread is not the problem, as stated by AZJackson. The winrate depends on the fact that “players with equal skill are put together in a match” as said in the thread. But if the system allocates “individual skill level” and distributes the players into mmr ranges based on “win / loss” as the only metric (especially relevant for solo queue players) , I think this is where it starts to get a lot more messier.
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Apparently, since the idea of being simply outclassed at a certain tier of players is just anathema.
Also, despite the OP saying there truly is no metric for skill, he insists Blizzard no less has one.
I just… I just wish I weren’t old enough to recognize the errors of the rashness of youth, because that’s all this is. Heart on his sleeve, word in his heart, passion in his word. I just wish he’d slow down and consider the big talking points.
What is one’s deserved rank?
What is the metric by which Blizzard assigns players to teams?
And most importantly, at which point is the loss a product of a lack of skill, and not an attribute to circumstance? (see: it was an AFKer, they fed, our comp was trash etc. etc.)
People just need to realize: rarely will your skill be such that you “rest” at one rank and rarely will your rising and falling happen in a linear fashion.
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Now, surely after 150+ posts someone must have post screens/replays of Blizzard blatantly rigging their matches. Hear hear sneaky devs, you’re about to be exposed!
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If I recall correctly, the reason PBMMR failed was because it function a lot like the mvp screen, taking high stats to mean good. The problem though is that lower rank players spam abilities on Cooldown, while pros and masters time their abilities. This resulted in pros losing points and lower rank spammers gaining. At least, that is what I recall being the problem.
And yet such is easily accounted for by PBMMR when using the time between attacks as an attack combo measure. Pro’s have very little time between attacks on a single target (i.e. their coordination is much higher).
I hear you. Good point. I honestly stop giving it it thought and just accept it either way. But it’s just really strange how matchmaking plays out in general. I never troll or disrespect people, and perform highly every match. Yet, I keep getting teamed up with trolls and throwers. And I have been playing daily since the initial preseason.
One thing to be careful of is it is sometimes hard to tell when someone is actively trolling or throwing, or just bad at the game. It never ceases to amaze me how many people are just, well, terrible. Even after thousands of games. You do what you can, but there will always be a small element of luck involved.
Fortunately, luck is something that evens out in the long term. There is a 1 in 4 chance you will get the potato, and a 1 in 5 chance the enemy team will. All you can really do is play your best, keep a calm head when things go poorly, and if things are really going sideways, take a break and come back when you are in a better frame of mind.
I also highly recommend working with the non-potatoes, and adding them to your friends list if they prove reliable. Grouping is the #1 thing that will help avoid potatoes. Good luck!
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Gonna clarify this a bit. If you have a 1 in 4 chance, that’s saying there’s a 25% chance to get a potato, while the enemy team has a 20% chance, which would indicate the playerside is more likely to have the disadvantage.
Not only is there a chance more than one potato is on each side (so not 1 in…) but the way you phrase it puts the disadvantage on the wrong side. There are 4 chances for potato players on one side, and 5 chances on the other. If the player isn’t a tuber themselves, then there are fewer opportunities for their side to have a potato than the other. That is to say, they have the better chance of not having said tuber, not the other way around 
But all that aside, as you said, part of the issue is that it can be hard to tell if someone is actually ‘trolling’ or are even ‘bad’ and are just doing something different or unliked by the other team.
In one of my placement matches (where players can assume the worst about someone) I drafted Maiev and my side thought I was ‘trolling’. At the end stat card, I did not have top damage (maiev isn’t guaranteed to deal top as is) but essentially we had a split-push Zagara that skimped out on the first objective, so the enemy team took a first fort early, and spent the rest of the game claiming merc camps. I spent my time, as maiev, trying to solo what camps I could (despite pings for assistance) but functionally I can’t take camps faster than 3-4 people on the other side (and I have to hearth afterward,) and similarly Zag doesn’t push harder than the enemy team. For the times she spent trying to split, she was simply failing to keep up with the enemy rotation and didn’t even manage to trade a tower for the objectives we would lose.
But to her, and iirc two other allies, the Maiev pick was the ‘troll’ because essentially I couldn’t hard-carry team fights, clear waves, match merc camp rotations, and ya know, essentially be Fan in that game. Sure, there’s stuff I could improve on as a whole (i tend to play utility maiev for control/debuffs, and probably just need to shoot for carry/kill instead) but functionally one side had their game plan together, and the other side was as divisive as could be and were looking for a scapegoat to ignore their own bad decisions and uncooperative play.
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Yeah, I realized after I wrote it I got it backwards. Statistics on a weekend is definitely not my strong suit. It was meant to be that there is a better chance for the enemy team to get one or more Yukon Golds, while your team has one fewer spud spots available.
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This doesn’t make any sense. It’s hard to tell when someone is throwing? What??? IT’S OBVIOUS
it was just someone’s bad game
1 in 50 matches do I have a bad game where I have the most deaths where they are multiple more, and I’d be hard pressed to believe that’s not a match where everybody has already given up, and it’s just a wait for the finish.
Both Blizzard and Riot confirmed the existence of 50% winrate, because its the very basis of MMR/ELO system(s).
The question is how hard the system is trying to make you win 50% of your games, make it because of too big MMR spread, smurfing, joke placements or playerbase size issues. Or all of it cough
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yeah i believe in the forced 50%, sometimes i win several games in a row, because i got a decent team, but then the game puts me with heavy noobs and heavy trolls, that doesnt know where they are, and ofc i lose the same games i won
And such disregard for the system as a whole is just bad statistical methodology.
I am sorry, but this is incorrect (surprisingly, as your posts are well thought out usually).
You are basing your statement on the assumption that opponents and teammates are randomly assigned. They are not randomly assigned. Therefore your chance of having 1 or more potato is not dependent on the number of spots in the team not taken by your team (unless you have a 5-man).
Further, potatoes are not homogeneous, one very bad can be worse than 2 slighly spuddy ones.
Are you suggesting Blizzard actively puts potatoes on your team? If so, this is again going into conspiracy territory. They have no financial or business motive to do tihs.
I also don’t see how he is wrong in saying you represent 20% of your team. If you are not that “potato”, your chances of having one on your team decreased by 20%.
Maybe not in one game, maybe not in the next 3 games, but over a large sample like 100-500 games.