For all the topics that crop up over and over again it doesn’t take some magical super theory to “figure out” the match making. Here’s the click-bait secret:
Garbage in = Garbage out.
Matching is ‘bad’ because the players are bad.
- Players don’t have map awareness (to make informed plays based on what the enemy team can be seen doing)
- The wrong roles facecheck bushes
- Players spend a lot of time chasing or doing the back-and-forth waiting for something to happen (reactive rather than proactive)
- They have divergent tactical preference and
- Don’t communicate their intent, they just expect everyone else to be psychic
There’s a bit more to the list, but that’s already longer than people are willing to read, which is part of the awareness issue.
So long as people have something to blame (such as “matching”) then they overlook reflecting on their own flaws, realizing the communication gap to others, and generally just keep on repeating the same ol and expecting something to magically be different because they demand it to be so… and then do nothing to facilitate the change.
Here’s a spiffy replay analysis that demonstrates key qualities on why players are bad.
For context: this is a replay of FAN playing with Jun (two of the top players) Since 40 minutes is obviously too long for anyone to reflect on their own actions, let alone those of someone else here’s a few key bits.
a) left side’s battle plan uses two healers; one for each lane on braxis. The idea is that they have a stronger 2v2, so the enemy side has to rotate more people top, so then the bot lane gets value.
b) Fan acknowledges some of his own mistakes.
During team fights, the players end up getting split, and left side eventually loses (spoiler, but then again, learning from mistakes, like losing, is how people can get better)
From the blaze’s perspective, he sees his dps heroes dying for being out of position. From the dps perspective, their tank is chasing kills he’s not going to get, not anchoring plays, not leading rotations, so they have to be in a different position to compensate.
So one side sees ‘mistakes’ from their allies, and tries to compensate. The other side sees ‘mistakes’ from their allies, and acts based on what they see.
For the ‘side’ that is [you], the other is in the ‘wrong’, and that’s the reason they lost. Doesn’t take a gm level game to see the same reaction regardless of mode: people lack experience, awareness, and a willingness to reflect on their actions compared to the perspective of the rest of their team, but so long as they find fault with some else, [they] must be right. (and also not picking a hero that suits how they actually play ofc)
However, a core ‘truth’ in all this is that if anyone is willing to know a little morea and look a little harder, then their actions will be different because they have a bit more information.
Tme and again, people fault an automated system that doesn’t know if people have map awareness, anchor plays, communicate with their allies, and a myriad of other not-performance reflected metrics that do influence how a game is won, or lost.
Players don’t know what they don’t know (how to watch the mini and read plays) and so long as they lack the willingness to critically review their own actions (learn from mistakes) they aren’t going to change; they have a higher dependence on ‘being lucky’ than on just making that ‘luck’. So the key part of where people can “improve the matchmaker” is by being a better, more informed player than they were the previous time that they played. Looking over comment sections, ama reactions and the like, a lot of negative reactions stem from myths, superstition, hearsay.
That’s why a myriad of games (in similar genres) all suffer “bad matching” Sure, there are ways they can improve things (anything can be better, that’s the point) but a fundamental defect stems from players who don’t strive to be the thing that will be better. And life-hack spoiler: those same flaws apply to real life too.
Lacking awareness, bad communication habits, unwilling to learn from mistakes via self-reflection? That affects how people drive, their customer practices, ability to improve at other skills/disciplines and even leadership/responsibility in political office: all highly visible consequences in current events so while I could use other examples, those are visibily accessible enough for people to ‘see’ the connection.
The 40 minute video is 40 minutes because there isn’t just one super mistake that causes the game to flop, it’s a series of small mistakes that add up; players see “stomps” in their own games because they aren’t aware of the little mistakes. People demand some dramatic flaw to blame (matching isn’t “fair”) because they don’t have the patience to assess collective details. It’s so much easier to tl;dr and be stagnant than it is to foster a bit more effort, broader perspectives, and increase personal awareness. If people aren’t aware that something is possible, then of course they won’t consider it a possibility in their assessment of… ‘life’.
But so long as they have an attention span shorter than a goldfish, they aren’t going to retain much more than the emotional whiplash of remembering something ‘bad’ happened, and not know why.
MMR is not a ‘fixed’ value; people are supposed to improve and constantly challenge the assessment of their ability. If you are ‘better’ than your weight of the system, then of course it’s going to be ‘mismatched’ because [you] aren’t a dank stagnant pool of rot (the consequence of still water in nature.)
Or at least [we] aren’t supposed to be. THAT is the magical explanation of mmr: people expect a static system to be ‘fair’ when the whole thing is supposed to be dynamic. When people don’t realize their disconnected expectations influence their reaction to “issues”, then they don’t apply themselves to changing that.
Tl;dr, people that look to fault something want an easy scapegoat and will generally argue themselves blue in the face instead of checking a myriad of ways they can improve what they can actually influence. If they knew they could influence stuff, they wouldn’t be looking for things to scapegoat cuz that’s time/effort they can use for other reactions they probably didn’t even consider because they weren’t aware those were even options.
And that’s the whole cycle: if people aren’t aware stuff are options, then of course they don’t take them.
, your team has 5 players with the same skill level. GG.
, your team has 5 players with very uneven skill levels… BG ?
