Why "Random" games FORCES 48-52% Winrate

Games are suppose to be random. BUt there is a “weird” thing about match making.
Issue which was already reoported, but still ignored.

U win 3 games in a row, u gonna lose 4 another. And it is not coz of DRAFT/luck/etc. It is just beceuse game give u 3 ppl who have NO IDEA what to do, or are notorius AFK/feeders/or “solo pushing specialists”. Like bloody diversion, u will get 2-3 games in a row the same moron, who was cause of your loss in 2 previous games. WHY? WHY its like that? This is not random. I had 3 different accounts, and doesnt matter - account on lvl 900/202/125, its the same in every mode. WHY?

Why WINRATE in ranked games, when it is getting near 60%, in next of course “randoM” games ( coz u are in solo draft) u wil get people who gonna troll/afk/feed/rage quit, so your winrate gonna drop around 48-52% WHY?

ANother proof of this situation is when u got leaver icon. 1 team is without people punished for leaving the game, u are leaver u get anotehr leavers. WHY?
WHy the game do not connect leavers vs leavers. WHat kind of game is this, and satisfaction from PVP match when 1 side 1 minute after start 3 people are leaving the game. So 1 side is in PVP Game, and match looks like playing vs phantoms, pure AI game, or vs people who do not exist in the match. WHY.

I know, I cant win all the time, this is not possible, but this 48-52% win rate at all cost is just beyond idiotism.

I will end my topic with old Roman quote “Blackhearts bay must be removed”

Thank u

A good matchmaking will always give you teammates and enemies close to your mmr. When you start winning and climbing, your mmr increases, so you get tougher enemies/matches. Btw, they are the same skill level as your new skill level, they are not “better” than you. I said “tougher” because it takes time to adapt to the new skill level of gameplay, so you might end up losing a bit and going back.

As for AFKs/trolls/feeders/toxic players, they exist in both teams, not only yours. And no, matchmaking can’t know who is toxic, who is going to feed, who is going to afk or anything.

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Glances over at my winrate that has been flutuating between 53 and 57 percent all season

Uhh… yeha 50% fored winrate is totally a thing

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This is not a rare phenomenon. Don’t know about other games, but not in Blizz game anyway. Que-ing around the same time increases your chance to get matched together. As they were in your previous games, it is likely that they’re not far off from your MMR range either. That’s how stream sniping works as well.

If you want to avoid them, take a moment before you que up again. /w (id) even, if you want to check if he found a game or not (as far as I’m aware, this only works if said player is in the same general chat as you).

That’s normally how good match making works, player converging to around 50% winrate in the end.

As for,

this issue. From my experience, lower rank/level players tend to do this (more). If you can, I advise you to get out of that bracket asap. If you can’t, well, another sucks Activision-Blizz don’t care about the game, low(er) playerbase, lack of punishment.

Uhhh…they do? Is there something I missed?

There is some karma in that actually. So try not to get into leaver que.

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This happens in other games as well. A little bit less when the game has a huge playerbase and you are right at that rank where most players are. For example in league, if you are in gold/plat it’s less likely you’ll get matched with the same person even if you queue at the same time, just because there’s hundreds of thousands of players at those ranks. But if you are right at the top, it’s much more likely to happen.

Since hots doesn’t have a big enough playerbase, we have bigger chances of getting matched with the same person.

Could be that people around your rank are often quitting.
Your opponents should suffer the same, those likely are your easy quick wins.

I also noticed that days tend to be streaky, including offering toe-to-toe matches. I always wait after losses so discount that.

This season I’m consistently above 50%, only to get a streak of impossible matches until I reach exact 50%, at which point the pressure is off. I made that note in the salt mines quite a few times over the past weeks.

That aside, 50% is normal, depends on how much you play, though, and how sticky your MMR is. Having a net balance of 25 is pretty normal, which also means that having won a couple matches shouldn’t result in instant unwinnables.

Could be interesting research to figure out why it works this way. Either because it’s orchestrated or because it really isn’t, but there is a hard negative feedback loop that players consistently jump into. (For example, you lose a little, then you tilt a little, log your main, which has rating adjustments, so it gets harder, and you don’t deliver, so really, you just end up with 10 losses in a row. Eventually it flings, your ego shrinks, you play differently, it also got a bit easier, and voila, 10 wins in a row.)

By the way, I did a few logic sessions over the years and got to the ultimate point that orchestration is brutally hard, and even if possible, it’s backwards. For example, you force a win by putting people with many losses together, as they are the ones who are underrated. As for adjustments based on streaks or deviation, it works as long as there is exactly one person with it, but as soon as multiple are involved, they cancel each other out, it’s ultimately just very sweaty random. Sure, it’s possible to set up the result, but you have to consider a million variables, including heroes, synergy, counters, rank history, performance history, potential… very sweaty.

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Notorious complainers still chant the same rants, purposefully staying ignorant.

The majority of the playerbase are bad at the game. They’ll insist that they themselves are good, but then assert it’s their allies, the system, and any number of anything else that they can fault. Since they are convinced they are ‘good’ and are doing the ‘right play’, they stop looking to improve, don’t see their actions as mistakes and don’t learn from any of their games to do better the next time around.

In the same way, you are convinced that you have ‘proof’ and it’s someone else’s fault that things are ‘weird’ and yet, after years of forced 50% topics, you haven’t read any of those, repeat much of the same thing, and have convinced yourself to remain ignorant.

  1. Games are not “random”.

“Random” is a fluff-word, a cushion that people use to indicate they don’t know how something works, and will complain if they don’t get what they want. Computers aren’t ‘random’ and have math to generate probable outcomes to appear ‘random’. MMR – matchmaking rating – is more math that the game uses based on projections of probability. If matches have already been found (averaged mmr across teams) then it’s more likely to keep making that match provided those same samples persist on queueing because the math already works out.

  1. Free will exists.

While people tend to fall into ruts, patterns of repeated behavior, they have the capacity to do better, or worse, then the generalized expectations of their performance. Most matching complaints for games that argue something is ‘forced’ have effectively forgotten that there are other people behind those monikers despite how ‘robotic’ and complacent they may act. Many don’t care, or are convinced they’re doing the ‘right’ thing in how they play (it gets results) much the same way you’re convinced of your ‘proof’ despite not having actually posted any semblance of the variety of ways something is ‘proven’ with evidence, math, or reasoning.

  1. To an outside viewer, your conduct is the same as what you’re complaining about

In the mastery loop of improving at something, your actions aren’t that far removed from the other things you’re trying to complain about, so it doesn’t seem uncharacteristic or ‘forced’ that you keep encountering the same things, and not improved from it. Afterall, it the ‘other’ people who don’t know, don’t play right, and it’s the fault of something ‘weird’ that it loops the same way.

QM is pronounced of particular patterns because the matching is just a sorting system that ends up with a lot of more things than the fantasized equal distribution people expect from something they think is supposed to be ‘random’. (ranked is too, but with a few adjustments) The game isn’t selecting the heroes, or playing the game for all the things it matches, so the impact of complaint largely boils down to people assuming human-like qualities (anthropomorphism) for something that doesn’t have any. However, so long as they have something to blame, then they can forego introspection, learning, and improvement because their efforts are already spent.

Matching in the game is mostly math. While the system may evaluate people to a particular “skill” (a number that indicates the probability to ‘win’ contrasted against other numbers) people generally do not play to the expectations of that number. If a player is on a healer, they’re not as likely to be as impactful as a the mmr of equal weight placed on an assassin, or even tank since healers tend to offer a cushion for players making mistakes (healing damage) they tend to not deal the damage needed to clear waves, take camps, demolish structures, win objectives, and ultimately destroy the core.

So in the ‘random’ environment of the game, some roles are more prone to contributing to others independent of the allies around them. Conversely, some players are better able to get cooperation from those they’re playing with and collectively cause everyone on that side to perform better than they would otherwise.

Those are ‘random’ elements of the game that are consequences of free-will that frustrate most projections on who is going to ‘win’ because, surprise-surprise, the game doesn’t actually know if a player is a do-nothing ‘feeder’, the afk-split push that won the game, that player that face-checked a bush and tipped the balance of the match, or the one who stole a lategame boss and turned a loss into a win.

When people win a series of games, they tend to increase the position of their mmr score, but not really affect the average being matched. After a lose streak, you might be the lowest matched player in a game averaging 1800 mmr, win some games, and then be the top mmr in that same average. That means you’ll have ‘worse allies’ compared to where you were a few games ago, and now you have the math-based expectations to do more than what you did a few games ago, but may still be on the same hero and be more reliant on the performances of others, than of your own contribution.

That’s part of why the game even has a ‘meta’ of particular heroes seeing more play, or more success, than others: they do certain things better than others to manipulate some of the math that goes on with the matchmaking; it’s a system of predictions that does predictable things predictably. But despite all that stuff being known, a large-enough number of players keep on refusing to look into this stuff, and then complain that certain things loop when they keep on doing much of the same as everyone else they’re matched against.

So long as people are convinced they have their ‘proof’, they aren’t going to act against that, and then it becomes predictable that the same variables produce the same outcomes over and over again.

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the game is trying to match you against players of your skill level. If you have a 50% WR, it has succeeded, assuming you aren’t improving any faster than the rest of the players.

And yes, leavers/throwers are common, but they are just as common on the enemy team too.

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Maybe they wanna reform a game, so it may become better. It is much better than being happy about everything - “They piss on us and we say its raining”

It’s rare when someone is listed in Silver even in QM. Perfectly normal, just rare, and since it’s HeroesProfile, probably inaccurate (because individual lvl), but begs the question how clear the sight of someone like that about Balance can be.
Especially if the only “counter argument” they make is the ignorant accusation of the other side thinking everything is sunshine.

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not rly. Game is just putting u down , so u can have no more than 48-52%. U can do your best, be the best, but when u got 1 moron, and 2 afk u cant do *****

There are many accounts with less and more than 48-52% wr. Do you think ppl climb out of Silver to Masters with 52% wr?

  • Win games

  • Match maker determines you’re “good” and uses that to even out teams

  • Lose games

  • Match maker determines you’re “bad” and uses that as it distributes players

You can call it forced if you want, but it’s streamlined match making to ensure faster queue times.
If you’re not in ranked then it continually matches players from all skill levels and tries to get balance teams through an arbitrary skill equilibrium.
It could put 1 godlike players with 4 not so good players against 3 good players with 2 really, really not so good players. At least according to their MMR.

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u shouldn’t be playing this kinda game and expecting anything other than a 50% winrate. adjust ur expectations and u won’t be disappointed.

Do you understand probability distributions in statistics?

If you were to measure win rate, the average would be around 50%, that’s how it works for things that only have two possible outcomes. So if you were to compare 1000 players in Gold (assuming there are that many in Gold) and were to record those players’ win rates and put them in a chart, most players would fall within the 48%-52% area. Why? Because there are only two possible results of a match. Win, or lose. If someone wins, the other loses. Its the same thing as flipping a coin. There are only two outcomes. Heads or tails, so if you flip them enough times, eventually it will average out to around 50%.

But not everyone can have a positive win rate. Sometimes people lose more than they win, and others win more than they lose. So you might have someone with a 60% win rate and someone with a 40% win rate. They are outliers, usually at the edge of the distribution. They aren’t common and aren’t supposed to be. Those types of win rates mean that player doesn’t belong in that league because they either aren’t good enough, or are better than others in that league. So they’ll climb or fall. That’s good, it means you are going to end up playing with players of your own skill level, ideally at least.

Win rates also vary, they aren’t concrete. As people get better, they win more often and climb, but as they climb, they also face more skilled opponents and they will start to lose again, until you fall to a place where you are better than your opponents again. This cycle repeats because you’re constantly playing and each match you’re going up and down in rank making you face harder opponents, then easier, until you average out to 50%.

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AZJackson

49 posts

Heroes Developer

May '20

I’m not an engineer, but I can take a crack at this. The forced 50% win rate discussion is weird and complicated because it’s both true and not true at the same time, and people often inject their own biases very heavily on games to support what they think is happening to them, usually to assign blame for a loss to an external source (in this case the matchmaker) because it’s an easy thing to do (the matchmaker can’t defend itself after all!). First, let’s discuss what forced 50% isn’t.

Forced 50% isn’t the matchmaker putting potatoes on your team because you had a win streak. Frankly it’s hard enough just to find good games that there’s no way we would program such a thing, and there is no incentive for us to. We are incentivized to find matches of equally skilled players in our games because they are the most fun overall, which is what the matchmaker always tries to do.

The way it does this is by assigning a skill level to every player as they play our game called MMR. 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. I’d recommend watching some informational videos on how MMR/ELO works if you’re really interested in the nitty gritty). What the matchmaker does is tries to find games where each team has as close to an average MMR as possible while also having the MMR between each player be in as small a range as possible.

Now, imagine that everyone in the entire game has a MMR of 1, meaning that everyone has the same skill level. If we play an infinite amount of games, then everyone will eventually have a win rate of 50%, since their skill is the same. The 50% win rate of those players isn’t the matchmaker punishing those who have win or loss streaks, it’s just a natural consequence of the matchmaker working properly.

In real life it’s not quite so cut and dry since every player doesn’t have exactly the same MMR, but the fundamentals still hold true. As you win games, your MMR gets higher, which means that you will get into games with higher and higher skilled players until you hit your “ceiling”, where you start to lose games because you are the worst person in the game and bring your team down. Conversely, as you lose lots of games your MMR goes down until you eventually get into games where you are the best person on your team. The matchmaker getting you to a 50% win rate is a natural consequence of the matchmaker finding where you, over a long period of time, actually belong. Your MMR being an accurate reflection of your skill results in the natural consequence of you having something very close to a 50% win rate.

Keep in mind also that even 10+ win and loss streak games are perfectly natural in the realm of statistics, even when the true chance of something is 50%. These win and loss streaks are often what people point to as proof that something’s broken, which is simply not true. If you were to flip a coin 10,000 you would not get heads, then tails, then heads, then tails again over and over. Over those 10,000 times you would get each result half the time overall, but you would see streaks of getting heads or tails. This is also true for players who are at their appropriate MMR but still get streaks. It’s not that the matchmaker is broken, it’s just how things are. Also keep in mind that people have good and bad days, and sometimes decide to throw or to try extra hard to win. These behavior changes on an individual game level are impossible to predict and account for, which is why some games, even when they should be evenly matched, can still easily be blowouts.

This is just scratching the surface of how these things work, but again, for a TL:DR:

  1. The idea that the matchmaker forces you to win or lose after having streaks is completely false
  2. Having a 50% win rate over time does happen and is “true” in that it’s the result of the matchmaker finding your proper place in the game over time
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People think the more they win the better teams they will get. But that is not how mmr or winrates works.

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I do wonder how that interraction works. DOes it only care about your opponents or allies as well?

When I first started playing I was horrible and was struggling to reach reach 50%.

Eventually I did it and I kept increasing the margin for a while, but tens of thousands of games later it settled at around 53%, which is surprisingly good considering I play a healthy variety of roles and almost never play in a premade.

The only thing that has changed for the better over time is the average skill level of the people I play with. My 50% isn’t the same as that of a much worse player.

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