How can people say that winrate is not enforced?

General Discussion
21

So the game doesn’t make balanced comps… bit it still somehow is so godlike that it can predict who is going to play better. If Blizzard had that technology, why would they not just use it to make balanced matches?

Here’s the thing - I will buy into this conspiracy if you can explain one very simple thing to me: What is Blizzard’s motivation for forcing you to lose games? What do they gain by keeping this system? You can’t just say “money” either; you have to explain to me how that makes them money.

Once you can establish a motivation, you have an argument. Otherwise, it’s just blame shifting.

5 Likes
22

Imagine you are a trash player (bottom 1% of all players) and you usually lose every single game because you are that bad. Would you keep playing the game? So instead of matching you with players of your skill (impossible at that point) it gives you a team with better players than the average of the enemy team to balance the trash player’s chances of winning (Aka carried). Now that you get some wins, you are more likely to stick around and perhaps you start enjoying the game and decide to spend real $.

This is how I rationalize Blizzard forcing losses on unlucky people. To make it fair, they target people on win streaks/loss streaks to give them a decisive match or 2 after streaks to balance out the overall win rates of players. 80% WInrate players usually get dealt teams of potatoes and lower winrates get higher skilled players to balance the game.

Proof is: Play the game for a LONG time and you start to notice the trends and you eventually get these 1 sided stomps and you wonder how your team or enemy team is so bad (sometimes you even see people play and wonder how the game thinks they are of equal skill to you (they are not) yet they are the same rank. Those Unwinnable/Unlosable matches are the direct result of enforcing the 50%, the side you are on is all about luck.

The result is the current state of SL where nobody below diamond/masters has skill that is consistent with their rank.

I’ll use school as an analogy

They used to fail kids but now everyone passes no matter what (minus extreme situations). Reason they don’t fail them is because if they did, the kid would get discouraged and would not try to be good at school and would not attend College or University and spend money there. So now the kids all pass and when they get to college, they spend money and fail and then they realize school is not for them. But the colleges would not have gotten that dumb kid’s money if he had failed multiple grades. It’s all about creating this false sense of worth and accomplishment to promote a direction in life, or in this case, keep playing the game and maybe spend $, but if you lost all the time (and got called bad every time) you would not stick around and potentially spend $, so the game forces losses on some people by creating imbalanced matches to keep the bottom 50% of players happy (artificially).

Did I miss anything?

3 Likes
23

Let’s call this guy Bob the Caveman. Bob the Caveman does not exist. It is mathematically improbable for someone who isn’t actively throwing to actually lose more than 40% of the time. They have four teammates. If you’re earnestly trying to win and your teammates are decent, will just win lots of games, especially if you play a lot. Already your premise is based on nonsense.

Your proof is feeeeeeeeelings.

Here’s the thing, humans are not consistent. There is no such thing as Bob the Caveman who just loses and loses. We are not machines that perform one function. We have off days, we get tilted. Some days anyone could seem like Bob the Caveman. But, they’re not actually. They’re just having a bad day. The more you play, the more “Bobs” you will find.

You can’t just plug two humans together and expect a formulaic outcome. You’re implying that you can.

What’s more likely: the game forces you to lose, or there are just potatoes who play this game and you happen to run into a few after a series of good games. If your theoretical Bob the Caveman who loses 100% of games exists, he’s gonna be in someone’s game regardless. The game doesn’t have to force him to be there - if you play lots, you will just naturally run into crappy teammates because not everyone is of the same skill level.

In fact, those crappy teammates may say more about you than they do Blizzard. Every game, someone on your team is the worst player and someone is the best. When you win, the best player carries the worst. This happens in 100% of games. If you are in a situation where you are now the best player on your team and you lose, you were not good enough to carry, which means you were carried to the position you are now in.

It’s simple math. If you stretch data far enough, you will naturally accumulate more wins and losses. The more HotS you play, the more your winrate will level out at around 50%. There is no reason for them to force anything.

So you’re like… extremely conspiracy-based. Not surprising, but your analogy is full of holes. Namely, why the hell do high schools care if colleges make money? Actually, please don’t answer that, I don’t care. This is so wildly off topic that I don’t want to address it, but I hope you realise everything you wrote here is completely nuts.

A lot of periods. You’re s’posed to use those to separate different ideas within paragraphs.

EDIT: Actually, slow the hell down. How does anything you wrote answer the question I asked? What does someone who sucks at the game have anything to do with forcing “top players” who are apparently supposed to win 80% of games to lose half their games? Why the hell would Blizzard need to keep random, normal people at 50%? What does that accomplish?

2 Likes
24

I tried to illustrate the conspiracy and the analogy was there to show how this is also done elsewhere (or could), I don’t think you grasped what I was saying though. To put it simply: Their motivation is player retention. Someone who loses all the time would never stay, so you need to artificially bloat his winrate so he don’t get discouraged and stop playing. But to make Bob the Caveman win, you gotta make 5 others lose right? So the game stacks the deck in BoB’s favor because if the match was actually even, Bob would naturally lose more than he wins.

Just like if you keep failing college, you will eventually stop trying, so to keep you in college and spending $, imagine they passed you no matter what until your last year to get the most $ out of you.

Sidenote: Here’s a few periods, place em anywhere you want: …

25

So what you’re saying is…

There is no 50% forced winrate. There are just bad players who get carried sometimes. Which is more or less what I said. There is no need for an insidious algorithm to put Bob on your team - you will just find him on accident every now and then.

1 Like
26

No, what i’m saying is, the game keeps BoB in your games even though he does not belong there by stacking games in his favor to keep him at the same place at the expense of every other player.

Because of the bad MMR system, to place Bob at the correct rank would take many games of him losing and if he loses ~30 games in a row to get to where he belongs, he probably won’t stick around, but give him wins here and there and maybe he stays.

1 Like
27

And that makes no sense. Why would Blizzard care about one person at the expense of nine?

Also, you’re assuming this Bob person actually exists, which isn’t the case. I’ve been arguing theoretical, but your whole case is based on something you have no proof for. Simple fact is that no one is that bad.

28

Of course Bob exists (in theory) Bob is what we call players who do not play at their current MMR’s average skill level. Bob is the bottom 1% of his current rank (Let’s say Gold 5) Of all the Gold 5 players, he is among the worse. Because the current system cannot find a way to make Performance Based MMR and can only rank you based on wins and losses.

29

People can say that matching isn’t “forced” because

  1. The people that try to declare otherwise lack proof to back their assertion.
  2. What they use for “proof” isn’t anything of the sort.
  3. The examples demonstrated are more likely to convince people that it isn’t forced because of the logic loops and shenanigans exerted to try to make the claim.

It’s like listening to a kid lying for the ‘first’ time; kids learn from imitation, so they imitate aspects of saying things that aren’t true, but generally lack experience (and observation) to add in aspects of truthful elements into what they say. The more they’re pressed for details, the less consistent and coherent their narrative becomes.

The typical slew of “forced” conspiracy rants tend to

  1. Lack experience with matching in other games (that will see the exact same sort of complaints due to design flaws of using mmr)
  2. Fixate only on a specific matches for their example, and not look at match histories that would ‘explain’ how the matching got to that point.
  3. Have to rely on extreme examples to try to assert their case, rather than Occam’s Razor simpler takes.
  4. Not research other topics tor reinforce their claims; if they want to ignore evidence, then they’re not going to concern themselves with precedent, refutation, alternate explanations, or anything else.

Part of the biggest issue is that people associate matchmaking with “skill”; MMR does not convey skill. There is a correlation that players with more “skill” will have a higher mmr than those that don’t, but without any actual tests, demonstrative hurdles, or direct demands to have specific levels of skill to attain specific levels of mmr, a system based on wins and loses does not indicate “skill”.

The system doesn’t match who it magically predicts is tilted, it doesn’t know who knows how to play a tank that anchors for their team. it doesn’t know if someone is 600x better on one hero compared to another; it’s simply a prediction based on averages.

“Averages” is another bloated term that people don’t really understand. Did you know the ‘average’ person is average at what they do? Yet the ‘average’ person is also more likely to think themselves better than average. And even then, what sort of ‘average’ is any of that?

Mean, median and mode are all “averages” that can take the same data set and come out with different responses. People may mention how the game ‘averages’ mmr to project a “fair” match (“fair” meaning it predicts that either side has the same “chance” to win) However, as soon as people think a match is ‘rigged’ they tend to not try and thus not hold themselves up to the weight of their mmr.

The game doesn’t know if someone got carried, if someone else played for them (boosted account) if they normally stack (and aren’t now) it doesn’t know if a side incidentally won via winions (because both sides were bad and wouldn’t end the game) it doesn’t know if someone ate their wheaties (breakfast of champions) or had spinach (popeye powers) who is high, drunk, detoxed, depressed, in withdrawal, not wearing their glasses/contacts, who hasn’t changed their diapers, constipated, has noisy neighbors, a distracting pet, who decide to troll a given match, having back pains, dental pains, gastrointestinal complications, an ingrown toenail, scruffy whiskers, post waxing pains, controlled by earwigs, pod people, etc etc etc

Player performance widely varies from one game, hero, team, to the next and it’s soooo much easier to just blame a projected pattern prediction than to notice any of the above influences that demonstrate people can be less than stellar at any given thing they do, but still expected to be praised for what effort they mustard in a grey poupon commercial.

Until game systems exact specific mechanical skills to align with particular ranks, “matchmakers” are flawed from the onset, but they can’t be rigged by the means people generally try to incite as the realization of those details would simple allow the matching to be better than it is.

4 Likes
30

Ok but how do you track a players skill level with out keeping track of their statistics? :s

31

Well, some of Fans wins are from B2GM games meaning literally smurf - on US account I use I have winrate of 64% but in European only 58% (because EU being lifetime)

32

Still makes no sense.
If they did this then players would rise and fall drastically in rank, so everyone would get a chance to shine in a decent rank and feel good.
But all the time you hear about people stuck in bronze, you think that makes them feel good, even if they win some matches?

At the absolute bottom of bronze, sure those people are always carried by higher bronze allies.
At the absolute top of GM, sure those people are often dragged down by their lesser allies.
But other than the extreme outliers, this isn’t something that happens all the time.

33

Lol this is ridiculous. So firstly, if Bob is seriously this bad to lose every game, he literally had to be bad to a point of trolling, which doesn’t happen. Someone this bad would come to the conclusion that MOBA’s (or gaming) isnt for him and do something else, but again, no one is intentiomally this bad.

There are very bad players though, but there isn’t just one. So these bad players get put together, which is known as Bronze 5. So naturally they win around 50% of games because everyone else is just as bad, until they learn enough to improve.

If this all unmighty Bob did exist though, why would Blizzard force wins on him to get him to stay, at the expense of much better players? To force him to win, they have to force better players to lose, and then they would be the ones leaving due to a forced win rate. Wouldnt they rather let the better players move up when they deserve to (which they do) and let the bad players drop down when they’re consistently playing badly? (Which they do)

Obviously you’re experiencing a 50% winrate right now and think you belong higher. You belong where you are, but its not because you can’t play better, its because you can’t play consistently better. Sometimes you’re absolutely on point, shredding etc and get mvp etc etc, you get one of these win streaks you’re on about.

Then the next day, you have a game, you end up with a feeder, you get tilted, and the next number of games you play not quite so good as you’re tilted, but you don’t see why or how because you’re angry.

I unfortunately have these runs, and need to stop playing ranked during a losing streak (currently being on furlough whilst my partner works means I have a lot of time to just sit and play)

About 30% of games you’ll lose due to a leaver or feeder, and about 30% you’ll win due to the same on the other side. You need to win the middle 40% consistently in order to move up quickly to where you think you belong

2 Likes
34

By having a greater than 50% win rate. Their MMR increases as a result to bring the win rate down towards 50%.

This is quite likely the result of your inexperience. With so few games played your MMR is likely quite low. At low skill levels players do all kinds of strange stuff which may make it seem like games are total stomps. Reality is this is just inexperience and people not knowing how to make the most of their situation.

Ironically it would be much harder for Blizzard to “rig” matches than to do what they do now and use MMR. To rig the matches all kinds of complicated logic and possibly AI would be required. Far easier to let skill roughly decide which is what they do with MMR.

1 Like
35

To back this up, lower ranked players often don’t know what to do when losing, and therefore make the situation worse for themselves and turn it into a stomp. When obj comes up most will just go fight, even when they have a player down and are 2 levels behind, including the enemy having ults.

The first 5 minutes seem to determine the game for a lot of lower ranked players but as you move up, people seem to know more how to counter and trade and keep in the game close enough to eventually potentially turn it around

1 Like
36

They don’t know what to do when they’re winning either.
They’ll win a team fight in the middle of the map, 3 kills and no deaths.
Then they fall back to take merc camps on their side of the map instead of stealing the enemy’s mercs.
They’ll have a good merc/minion push going and be up in talent level, and instead of escorting it to maximize its damage they’ll fall back and just let it die for free.

2 Likes
37

Winrate is enforced. You can clearly see that in QM. Blizzard aims for 50% winrate.

While this would be normal in a ranked environment because you would hit that region where others are just better than you. Example. Let’s pretend a solo game where there are 20 players only. One is top and level 1 and one is terrible and level 20. Let’s say you are a level 3 player and start. You would of course win again the level 20 and thus move to level 19. You would beat level 19 as well and move to level 18. And so forth. Then you will meet a level 3 player, someone as good as you. Let’s say you are completely equal. This would mean that sometimes you win and sometimes he wins.

So you play against the level 3 player and win and move to level 2. You then would play against the level 2 player but since he would be better you would lose. Then you would play against the level 3 player again. This time he is lucky and wins. You would then move back to level 4. The level 4 player you would beat easily, so back to level 3. And then the rotation continues. As you see you reached a point where you will be stuck at a 50% winrate unless you improve yourself.

In QM though were the skill ranges are so huge, you should not end around 50’% winrate. Here Blizzard clearly puts worse comps together as the enemy has and puts leavers, afks, known trolls and noobs into your team to FORCE a 50% winrate on you!

Also the MMR system ensures to keep you at a rank where Blizzard THINKS you should be. It doesn’t just let you play and rank up. But it decides after some matches where you belong. If the system thinks you should be gold 3 then it will do everything to keep you there as long as possible and make it hard for you to level up. It does this by giving you just a few points for winning then but taking away lots when you lose. Also it will pair you with much better players in the enemy team while silmutaneously giving you the weaker players. All to slow your levelling down.

The more you move away from you rank, that Blizzard has assigned to you, the harder they will make it for you to win. And not just by giving your stronger enemy teams, nope - it is much easier to sabotage your own team. So they will instead put all the known terrible players into your team. From my experience they might also put those players in your team, that have accumulated reports. Reports for feeding, afking and trolling. Putting them on your team gives you a higher chance of failing and makes it easier for Blizzard’s boken MMR system to keep you grounded.

1 Like
38

I don’t think they are though.
I don’t think I see bronze-gold in my QM games very often.
QM still uses MMR.
Which is how some people ‘cheat’ the system by grinding in QM before playing ranked, then the game uses their QM MMR for ranked placements.

This is old, but evidence that QM has MMR.

Unranked Draft Mode and Hero League will use a player’s Quick Match MMR as a guideline for players first entering these queues.

Bad players tend to think comp is what made them lose.
It’s not as clear as better or worse comps, even at the most extreme the ‘worse’ comps of like 4 supports end up having only like a 10% lower win chance. And that may be partly because people play those comps as if they were the other kinds of comps they practiced with.
That’s why it is moronic to say QM should enforce any kind of comps.

It’s a real shame they didn’t keep trying to work with performance based MMR adjustment though.

1 Like
39

People win: “Skillzord Imma pr0 player”.
People lose: “Forced 50% winrate rigged mm dead geam”.

Kappa.

2 Likes
40

I mean, there could be a forced 50% win rate in some circumstances. One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever I queue up as a hero I never played before, the first bunch of games are full of counters to the hero. But then when I gave it some thought, I figured that’s exactly what you should expect. If MM expects a new player to be bad at his hero, it should put as much of the burden of winning the game on the other 4 players. So it fills the enemy team with heroes that minimize the difference between a new player on your hero and an experienced one: ie. the hero’s counters. Then it picks the other 4 players to be a comp it calculates has a fair chance vs the enemy comp. To me it felt like QM was trying to screw me over and make it hard to learn my hero, but that’s the solution it found for giving me a decent win rate while I’m learning a hero in hopes that I keep doing it.

When you have an automated system, there can always be perverse cases and poorly thought out criteria. I can readily believe that in some circumstances, the matchmaker finds the simplest way to balance teams to be to give you terrible teammates vs 5 not so terrible enemies.

1 Like