One would think that Sr would be a much more fair measurement of success. It seems MMR takes one’s rank mobility into account. A purely SR based matchmaker would just find people of roughly the same SR and randomly select from that pool. Then survival of the fittest would do its thing, your sr would bump a bit, and now you are up against slightly better players the next round.
MMR seems by its very nature to measure how specifically you are doing that round compared to others for matchmaking purposes by being more momentum oriented than the base SR.
I think we have some terms confused here. In Overwatch, skill rating is an integer from 1 to 5000 that represents a hidden stat called your matchmaking rating, which is a non-integer based number on a comparable scale. Skill rating “closely chases” your MMR and for most players should be accurate to each other.
I don’t think you do understand. Skill rating is the hidden number just translated into something we understand.
I don’t know exactly what the scale is for hidden matchmaking rating but let’s just say for the sake of argument it is a scale of zero to one. If my skill rating is say 2059, my matchmaking rating is likely to be 0.4118 or some other strange fraction.
The one thing to know is that skill rating will always increase by some amount if you win a match and will always decrease by some amount if you lose a match. In extremely unusual circumstances is it possible for your hidden matchmaking rating do not increase when you when and vice versa. But this requires an extremely unusual influence of performance-based Statistics that influence the matchmaking rating which is only available in the bronze to platinum ranks. In other words you literally would have to carry your team extremely hard or be hard throwing to have opposite effect on your skill rating from result of that match.
There have been multiple developer statements specifically from Principal Designer Scott Mercer and Game Director Jeff Kaplan who is detailed information about the hidden matchmaking rating system.
I am currently on my mobile so I can’t easily access the posts and copy them here however you can look in my dev post directory to look up everything you could ever want to know about skill rating and hidden matchmaking rating.
Technically skill rating is the viewable MMR. Now what you and a good chunk of the rest of the community are probably trying to figure out is why your skill rating goes up or down by so much after each match. And for the most part it really does depend on whether you win or lose the match but how much is dependent on how strong your opponents were, how frequently you play, how close you are to the very top or the very bottom of the ladder, and if you are in Platinum or lower rating tiers what your performance was with your heroes in comparison to other players using those exact same heroes in other matches.
