I hate that we have to think like this but it is the best way to reason the situation.
You touch on it very briefly at the end of your post but you have to take into account that a smurf will even be in the mix at all.
I ran a study for multiple seasons and over the course of ~400 games I only had a 5% chance any single game would have a thrower or noticeable smurf. So, in essence, it’s a percentage of a percentage that any given person will have a thrower on their team or a smurf on the enemy team, instead of on YOUR team - with your team having a 16.6% less chance of either (due to you, assuming you’re not the smurf nor thrower)
Yes, of course. I’m just trying to demonstrate that the effect of smurfs on your game is not a coinflip, but a slightly negative winrate (assuming the smurf always wins).
Actual calculations for ‘unfair’ players on your whole winrate would need to account for the chance of any given slot being a smurf or thrower, and they can be combined all sorts of ways including none on either team.
When I was keeping closer track of the smurf population in triple-digit bronze, I found it was nearly a 15% chance of having at least one Known Smurf in the game. (A “Known Smurf” being someone who had a history of both matches of active throwing and matches of exhibiting unreasonable skill for Bronze.) I only had a few dozen Known Smurfs in my list, but the population down there just isn’t that big to begin with.
Which reminds me of an important note for people trying to climb out of triple-digits bronze: Do Not Taunt The Smurfs. You will be matched against the same ones frequently and they do talk to each other, and if you rage at one (especially cussing them out in voice chat) they will make a pet project of picking on you.
Also, if one of your teammates rages on a smurf – add the rager to your avoid list. This will drastically increase your chances of matching with the smurfs and against the rager and getting some free wins. Plus, nobody wants to be teamed with a rager.
Yep the games down in <500 aren’t about in-game ability. SR down there is no longer (or never has been) fit-for-purpose metric. It’s more about intelligent queueing (active avoid/dodge/snipe), flist management, when you play, who you know, etc. It’s nowhere near a meritocracy and the devs know it and do nothing.
In-game ability is not entirely meaningless. E.g., the difference in skill between being crushed by golds in deathmatch and being able to hold your own is tremendous. ‘Hold your own’ not meaning winning matches or any specific score really, just being a threat and having a decent chance of winning any given duel.
A lot of the scoring of Deathmatch is kill stealing anyway, which is irrelevant to competitive… but the Deathmatch modes are about the only way to compare yourself to other ranks since people screw around so badly in QP and most other Arcade modes.
But on the other hand, yes, a little care with your social interactions and taking the effort to update your avoid list every day will help a lot.
Friends list I’m not so sure about… unless you literally have a smurf friend boosting you, I think you’re better off being in solo queue. Remember that being a duo increases the chances of matching against a duo, and you really want to reduce your chance of facing the smurf-helping-a-friend duos, never mind facing the larger groups that pro-boosters prefer.
I mean, the game is certainly a lot more fun playing together with nice people on voice chat, so y’know, I don’t know that you should let ranking up deter you from grouping. But if ranking up is your goal, grouping is going to hurt.
I am a level 5 endorsements player at the precipice of gold (1922 Tank, 1956 Support, 1974 Damage, and 1991 Open), so I know a little bit about getting along with people. I absolutely never group up for Competitive. I’ve tried it with friends, I’ve tried it with LFG, etc, and it does not work.
I think Competitive is harmed by groups, always. Group games are the most imbalanced for me. There are 9 game modes available to play in groups that are not competitive. Maybe there should be one that seeks to determine how good your group of friends are, (Team Queue), but otherwise, let’s find out how good YOU are in Competitive by requiring you to Solo Queue.
Not sure that do they ” belong ” there, but there are probably somehow handicapped persons in this game who probably are more like clad that they have online video game instead thinking what rank they are, they play for fun.
If PBSR works as it’s intended, a single win on a player that has sufficiently deranked to <500 should immediately pull them out of <500 into 750-1000 range.
PBSR doesn’t affect MMR. MMR is used for matchmaking.
Based on what? Nothing in any of what any dev has said, or what has been compiled in The Guide suggests that anything like this will or should happen. Please read the guide.
While the original reference (Scott Mercer) does talk strictly about ‘gaining and losing SR’, the post only speaks about SR. This is almost certainly glossing over the idea that SR is a scaled tracking of MMR, as he’s talking about the SR you gain and lose from wins and losses (which is really a gain/loss of MMR, which is then reflected in SR because SR follows MMR).
AFAIK, the only times SR is adjusted independently of MMR are for leaver penalties (which are just to make you feel bad, not to change matchmaking) and Rank Decay (which is meant to force you to grind for end-of-season rewards and not ‘rank camp’, but without changing matchmaking).
Performance-based modifiers on the other hand are meant to change matchmaking and get you ‘more quickly’ to fair matches, which wouldn’t happen if it was not a change to MMR.
A useful skill to have when playing against a smurf is to have your game be one of the ones they want to use for deranking, not one they want to use for stomping. So if you pretend not to notice they are smurfing and just say stuff like “good round everyone”, they will find it boring to stomp your game. But if you cry about smurfs or try to 1v1 them they will enjoy stomping you immensely.
PBSR is just a functionality of making it so that under 2900 SR gains and losses from match outcomes can be adjusted based on your performance. MMR is always free to move as much as is needed, including zero. Once you’re not a new account, and have been playing a sufficient number of games, the uncertainty metric of MMR lowers and MMR becomes more stable, therefore it moves less extremely, and more similarly to the SR.
There’s a section in the guide about the conflicting information from Scott Mercer’s posts and why Kaawumba interprets things to be what Jeff says, which was explicitly that “Only MMR is used for matchmaking”. PBSR is a change to a visible stat, whereas MMR is a secret stat. We don’t know how much it moves in a win or a loss, but we have been told that it adjusts more freely than the constraints that were placed on SR.
This is a title of a section that has a good amount of info on this.
This is not a thing. The match maker does not pre-arrange wins or losses for either team. Every match is created with the intent of being as close to a 50/50 win chance for each team as is possible within the time it takes to find the right people.
When he says “nearly guaranteed to win”, this is not talking about intentional actions on part of the matchmaker. The matchmaker is using skill information that is POTENTIALLY inaccurate. So, if your skill information is inaccurately low, then it will be accidentally putting you in matches that are easier than they should be. If you continue to lose those matches due to the reality of randomness and team synergy, then your MMR will get lower, and potentially be more incorrect. Eventually, if the MMR is wrong enough, then the games will get very easy, and the chances will increase that you’ll win. There is no such thing as “rigged to guarantee” anything. When MMR is inaccurate, then the chances are just slanted in the direction of correction, because your actual skill is different than their model of your skill. They’re putting you in matches that are INTENDED to be completely fair and even with the understanding that MMR is not a perfect model of skill, just the best that exists in the Overwatch ecosystem.
People talk of statistical probabilities, but others interpret those as intentions, or aims, or bad things. The matchmaker is not a person, it doesn’t seek to even the score. The matchmaker doesn’t care how many games you’ve won or lost, it just takes the MMR and tries to put you in a fair game based on that MMR and the MMR of the people queued at the same time as you.
I’m not talking about matchmaking. I’m talking about a smurf going into a day of games wanting to have fun stomping some of them but also not wanting to level into an SR range they can no longer stomp on. This has nothing to do with the matchmaker.
Single players do not have significant enough influence over individual games to truly make this decision. Most people that throw in order to reliably lower their SR do so as groups. (this is based on LFG information and literally hundreds of people that I have reported).
Just because a player is manipulating their SR, doesn’t mean a player can manipulate their MMR. Since SR is not used for matchmaking, then there is a limit to how much a smurf can manipulate the outcome of individual matches when alone.
The reduction of throwers and boosters is actually one of the primary reasons I advocate for changing Role Queue to a Solo Queue only model. Competitive Suggestion - Solo Queue
It wasn’t intended as an insult. I was 700 SR for a while, the environment sub 1000 SR is toxic and horrible, and I don’t think it gives people a clear picture of how good they are. Mostly it is a demotivating place of torture. I’ve had so much more fun since climbing past around 1100 SR. I don’t think I got significantly better right away, I just got focused, and I stopped trying to take the advice of bronze people. I mean, no one really deserves to be shot calling in bronze except maybe just naming a target…
Lowest I ever dropped to was around 600 SR. I knew I was bad I just didn’t think I was bottom of the barrel bad, but yeah I guess I was. I think most of the reason was just not understanding much about the game. Like people would use ults and I wasn’t sure which team was using them, for example.