I totally agree with this AND your sentiment that there should be a solo-only mode. (As an aside I think there could just be a solo-only SR while they keep dynamic queueing, but that’s a topic for another discussion.) This isn’t really what the thread is about, though. If it is, the OP should cut down the size of the post and get right to the point, which most of us would agree with.
As for the first bit of your post, this is actually what this thread is about and FOR ONCE someone has finally understood! Thank you!
You’re going to get a Table of Contents here to make it easier to follow:
- Rank Deflation
- Useless/frustrating matches
- Inaccuracy at the margins
- Summary
(1) So my first concern is that it would lead to rank deflation. I mean that everyone below a 50% win rate would leave. Since OVERALL there mathematically MUST be a 50% win rate (every game has one winner and one loser) then the higher ranked people will eventually start getting harder matches (more often) and their win rate will lower. There will be, of course, some low ranked Very Serious Players that are willing to put up with being stomped over and over to learn. I don’t think you would share this concern, but I would and the developers seem to as well so I bring it up. I think, based on your above post only, that you’d be ok with comp mode being comprised of only good and/or Very Serious Players.
(2) The “WinRate Ranking” will actually lead to more of the problems that people dislike about the current MM. Let’s assume for the moment that everyone is forced to play comp to avoid the first concern. The average player will have a 50% win rate, right? If half are better than you and half are worse, you will win half the time.
Consider how they will get to that win rate though. Some games they will have Bronze teammates. Some games they will have GM teammates. They are average because they will have no effect on the game. Let me explain further.
There are 2 types of players that are the bane of competitive ranking existence, Smurfs and Throwers. They mess with the system because it turns our productive matches into unproductive ones. We don’t actually know which team is better if there is a Smurf or Thrower on either team.
But if you allow all the ranks to mix it up in games, from the perspective of the average player, Smurfs and Throwers will be the rule rather than the exception. Sure, they’re no longer technically Smurfs (they could be technically Throwers, I guess, but there will be no presumption of skill in your match), but the end result, that there is a person much better than you on the enemy team while you are stuck with a bunch of overripe potatoes is still the same. You have zero chance to win this game. Some games will be impossible to lose. It will all be up to completely random chance.
We know this will be frustrating because it’s one of the criticisms of the MM right now! However, right now the frustration exists due to a combination of bad actors, inconsistency in play, and accuracy of the MMR. In the alternative version, this will be part of the design.
The “productive” games, the ones in which you have an effect on the outcome and are able to show your skill, will be rare less frequent. What will they look like? They’ll be games without much higher or much lower ranked players. They’ll look like matches that the current MM attempts to make. The further away you are from average, the more rare these games will be.
(3) Even more to the point, if you are a rare good player, Diamond or above, you will ALMOST NEVER meet your equal in competition. You will have no way of directly comparing yourself to your competition. And you can’t start matching people based on win rates, because matching people of equal skill will result in a 50% win rate, so we’re back to square one. I’m not sure what the OP means as “unproductive” but I think playing games over and over without actually having competition is unproductive. I think you would agree. The person with the slightly higher win-rate may have just gotten lucky with more Bronze opponents, you’ll never know.
(4) Don’t get me wrong, “WinRate Ranking” is actually a perfectly legitimate way of ranking. It could be done like this. You’d have to force people to play it to get any kind of accuracy out of the system and you would never get any accuracy at the extremes of skill. For most of the population the games would feel completely random. This would be true by design rather than a byproduct of the limits of what any MM can do and the interference of bad actors.
The ONLY benefit of such a system is that it’s more intuitively easier to understand, but the current system can be explained. For an explanation of how “Skill Ranking” is actually productive, i.e. how it is supposed to work, go to this post here: