Maybe there are not enough people who play so mm have to find players that are not in the same league as you to make a game maybe.
No, it’s not rainbow stuff. It happened after each winstreak. The ranks grew and grew and grew against me.
The usual issue of mmr complaints stem from people having a fixed expectation of what the matching is going to do.
They may see:
2000 2000 2000 2000 2000
vs
1850 1900 2000 2100 2150
^(player)
from one game, and expect their progression of games to then match up to
2200 2200 2200 2200 2200
vs
2000 2100 2200 2300 2400
^(player)
so they keep the same relative matching to their ‘good’ allies and can continue to win. However, since matching doesn’t ‘anchor’ around the same 1 player every time (the point were mmr tries to be averaged around) a player may find themselves switch to a ‘lose streak’ once they’re the high end of the same matches.
So when players see
2000 2000 2000 2000 2000
vs
1850 1900 2000 2100 2200
_______________________^(player)
They interpret the system has ‘forcing’ them to have bad allies instead of seeing the mmr matching as being the ‘same’ because deviation isn’t as dramatic as the numbers or symbols may convey. (players want progress to ‘feel good’ more than they want to understand math) It’s a deviation of expectation due to a lack of experience since they tend to not come from ELO systems, like competitive Chess, and ‘feel’ how long change can take to settle.
Because mmr is said to track “skill” people expect players to have ‘better’ skill when they go up the ranks, but functionally, mmr does not track “skill” at all. The correlation is that players with more ‘skill’ will [eventually] get more mmr, but there isn’t a quantifiable factor that can parse the specific ‘skill’ of one player and calculate how it influences victory from one game to the next.
What players think of as “skill” for mmr to match at 50/50 is better conveyed as a ratio of games won. Instead of saying one team has 50% chance to win, it’s better to say out of 10 games, they may win 5. So the ‘streak’ players experience can be playing out that ‘series’ of games (despite there being different allies, mmr doesn’t change enough for it’s average to expect a different ratio) and end up ‘proving’ the prediction of fair matches to be ‘correct’. (ratios like these are better understood in the FGC - fight game community, as those define the meta expectations of gameplay)
If the player wins OR loses more than the expected ratio, then the confidence loosens in their matching.
For a computer system the numbers on this process make “sense” and function within the estimated confidence. However, since players don’t see the raw numbers the system is using for the matching and they don’t see how many players are on at a time and they don’t see how the system is trying to match all those things, they shape their expectations off of their singular “experience”. So their ‘experience’ seems rigged to them, but to the numbers on the game, it’s operating as expected. They see matching as ‘rigged’ rather than the confirmation the system gets out of meeting it’s expectations, esp since the game doesn’t know if someone is trying harder, playing worse, and a number of variables that make tracking “skill” incredibly inconsistent. Rather than own up to player-made variation, players look to blame something instead and chalk it up to superstition.
That aspect of mmr functionality is part of why pretty much every game (overgeneralizing because I haven’t played ‘every game’ but of the games I have played, I see this) that uses mmr ends up with the same complaints for years on end. Players see everyone else as static (not changing) and themselves as dynamic, so when allies are ‘worse’ the game is “forcing” them to lose.
Despite years of this cycling, ‘proving’ the complaint remains the same and tends to only stick to the perspective of the one player. The tend to not pull the histories of the other players, see their matching win/lose and see how that ties into their ‘theory’ of how the system is “rigged”
That is to say, they only ‘prove’ that they are being held back, and don’t extend the theory to how that explains everyone else in the match. Usual experience by players has them assume that other people have the same perspective and experience (what I see, they see) so they then conclude that if someone doesn’t agree with them, it’s because they don’t ‘see’ their perspective, and must therefore be wrong.
Once someone assumes someone disagrees with them, (or that they’re “wrong”) they filter out what other perspectives exist, and then convince themselves to stay in a rut. Part of the issue of that attitude is that it frustrates their ability to climb the mmr; if their perspective is static (does not’ change) then they aren’t keeping up their end of the mmr expectations. Since it’s easier to blame & flame than it is to read and lead, the frustrated player takes the expectations of the system being ‘rigged’ to reaffirm that it’s holding them back, and if it didn’t do that, they would climb.
So functionally, they neglect how to improve (even if that means leading allies) and so long as they have something else to blame, they’ll do that instead.
Since players don’t see the math, tend to be scared of that, and tend to not know statistics, what they see as ‘normal deviation’ for a computer system is a “rigged” metric instead. And that’s part of the issue of player understanding of a game: once they ‘expect’ the system to be broken, and they don’t know how it works, they start assuming human-like qualities that the automation doesn’t have.
So the usual ‘tin-foil’ theories are based on ‘feel’ and conspiracy, rather than anything else. And since people assume they’re good/right, they don’t have any consideration to say otherwise.
So, despite how the years on end go, they stick to the same song and dance instead of considering all these other perspectives to confirm their “experience” to others that don’t share that result in their matching.
Functionally, that means said players don’t know much about matching metrics; they haven’t learned from any of the other topics on the same complaint, and they probably carry that perspective from one game to the next and continue on for years on end. Which is why they come back here, repeat the same thing, and haven’t improved their outlook, understanding, skill, method of argumentation or care about ‘proof’.
If people were more self-aware on how ‘conspiracy theories’ work, they’d stop using the ‘feel’ impulses to try to convey their ‘proof’ and toss in an extra something else instead of essentially expecting anyone else to ‘prove a negative’ that they’re just going to ignore anyway.
But backfire is a thing, and that just boils down to more impulse reactions that look to blame anything else instead of other reactions.
To a point, mmr almost doesn’t even matter since player expectations aren’t too broad or empathetic of other people’s experiences anyway.
6 Likes
Fing wall of text, dude.
If it was a fair system, it wouldn’t stack the deck against you as you go on winstreaks. It would be random and cut out each option with a variable to reduce the chance of that one reoccurring. But it instead it’s biased toward making the climb more difficult.
I remember the first time I did it in pre-season. After I lost match 8 as a rank 30 against a bunch of rank 10s with unranked on my team, I lost double the normal rank points. It was clear as day that it was trying to keep me at the rank I was at, an artificial complexity to make the climb slower for me. I can even come up with a practical explanation for it, that they want people to climb slower so they don’t just get rank 1 and quit the game. Still, that would be a matchmaking bias not in the spirit of competition per match which is all anybody wants from being locked in for 20-30 minutes without an option to leave or forfeit.
If you say “tinfoil” again, I won’t respond. I bet you wear a mask.
We here on the INterNETS use the phrase, “Pic, or it didn’t happen.”
Also,
So, this super scientific person conducting a study wasn’t banned for feeding every single match 100 times. MY hypothesis is that this man is a charlatan of a scientist and I don’t even need the proof to know this.
People who conduct real studies do record-keeping to prove their theories. If this guy just says, “I fed 100 games and was handed free wins without trying”, I wouldn’t trust the claim at all.
I hear the words “Blizz shill!” ringing in your ears. It would be an insult to me to call me that.
No one here in the forums or the Super Special Sauce GMs can give you the evidence of how MM works or if there is something nefarious going on in the background.
Blizz tells us something that seems to make sense, of course, without real evidence. Some still doubt, some shrug, and some trust it. Me? I don’t care if it works properly or not, since evidence is behind lock and key. At the end of the day, I ask myself, “Is this game still fun to play?”.
3 Likes
But wouldn’t your win streak be a product of this forced 50% winrate? But you only make it a problem when you lose…? Okay.
Very convenient.
The whole world isn’t against you. Stop being so self centered to think that a multi million dollar company would give a large enough darn to pay hundreds of people on the internet to shush. Plus, it maybe healthy to just… idk? Move on? You sound delusional and bitter.
3 Likes
Dude, if you quit blaming your losses on a “failed system” and start thinking about how you play youll start climbing the ranks. Failure is a fantastic teacher if your actually paying attention to the lesson.
1 Like
They do it with Gaming news sites. I want my cut!
hehe
Just because I say “study” doesn’t mean a contracted scientist came in to reddit to execute a government grant funded evaluation.
He simply tried to lose 100 times to see what happened. Logged it.
He wasn’t banned. He tried it in LoL and was banned very quickly.
That’s why people started reporting abusive chat because it was the only report option that was automated.
I don’t think you’re a shill. I’m just glad you’re not one of the 3 trying to btfo me with snark from Blizzard’s Kangaroo pouch.
@waterlong, Oh I would like nothing less, but I encounter this corruption, and I must fight it. If it was a fair environment, I’d have no excuses, and I’d have no distractions and would have to get better at the game. But every time I play it’s like a train sideswipes me from out of nowhere because Blizzard has their schemes for making money off of fickle gamers that come and go based off promotions and hype.
My sarcasm has been missed.
You’re wording is misleading, by saying “actual study”. A scientist is a person who performs experiments. They don’t have to be backed with millions of dollars to be one.
This may have been the case YEARS ago. Yet, you seem to claim it is still happening today, with a shoddy story. Now win/loss streaks are involved. Win/loss streaks that happen in a pattern is something of a concern.
1 Like
Even IF thata how it works theres no such thing as a perfect system. If it really is all balanced on the knifes edge of 50% then anything that tips it in your favor (even a little bit) will eventually give you a rank increse.
…
I’m just saying Blizz uses extremely questionable practices to generate income rather than make a successful, competitive, fun, fair game.
But hots is one of their least profitable games, that’s why their dev team got downsized and the game as a whole is more or less on the back burner.
sigh…
I’ll be moving on from this thread, just like you moved on from the subject.
3 Likes
Im getting a strong “im usualy the best player on my team, this shouldnt be happening” vibe from all of this.
4 Likes
my vibe is about hopeing for something so you know @waterlong
I’m always the best player on the team. This shouldn’t be happening to me, but it does. So now I only have to play OP heroes ad nauseum to average carry my garbage teammates. So the game sucks hard.
Ergo, if I play whatever I want again (e.g. TLV) and end up with garbage teammates (that soak lanes alongside TLV), I will end up “where I belong” (1600 MMR capable of beating GMs on smurf runs) till I go on this stupid streaking again to carry me out (e.g. last season Deckard 72% winrate in 100 games).
Luckily I am smart enough to realize being good has everything to do with me, and nothing with teammates and nothing with rank. Yet, try as I might to educate, it goes nowhere. Thus, we must conclude that humans suck.
PS the game is dead.
Why would I think this? I’m that ignorant? Some games are like walking on a cloud. In fact I know I can slack off sometimes because my team is functioning so well. The lead is strong. I get to do comfy things like split soak or something. Other games I’m at my wits end, doing everything I can possibly do, at the end of my limits, searching for something I can do to turn the game, and in which case I either have a breakthrough or fail. And then there’s sometimes where I can’t literally do anything because my team won’t cover lanes, we’re 3 levels down, they die right before Objective, etc etc. Don’t toy with me about vibes.
You’re kind of toxic, aren’t ya?
Can we put this to rest already? Forced winrate is just the flat earth of HOTS.
Losing streaks happen, get over it.