Algorithmic Handicapping (MMR) is Wrong for Overwatch

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@Zenren-1447

MMR is lower or higher than the SR you’re playing at.

Strictly it would be “if your MMR is lower or higher than the MMR you’re playing at”, but yes.

@Zenren-1447

So if you’re playing a MMR 900 match and you’re MMR (and SR is 1400) then you will receive substantially less for a win, than say you were SR 550 and playing a
SR 900 match and winning.

Fixed it, but good job. There’s not enough difference between SR and MMR for average, non-decayed, non-punished players to worry about a difference in MMR and SR.

@Zenren-1447

Essentially the MMR is there to keep you at whatever rank it believe’s you should be at.

You aren’t meant to climb without getting better, no. “Believes” isn’t really the right word. MMR IS your rank, really. Any system that can figure out how good you are is the same system that can be used to rank you. It makes no sense to say it can “believe” you should be at a rank but then put you in some other rank. If it knows how good you are then it can rank you because ranking you and knowing how good you are are the same thing.

@Zenren-1447

So even if you are, say, a Diamond level player, if you do poorly on placement and have a bad first few matches, climbing out of a lower SR is going to be very difficult,

Nah. If you are a TrueMMR diamond player playing in MMR bronze for whatever reason (throwing, buy someones acct, REALLY unfortunate set of intitial placements) you aren’t really in a balanced match. You’re waaaaaay under-ranked and will climb out easily. The games aren’t ACTUALLY even matchups, only on paper. This is essentially what smurfing is.

If it worked as you described it no one would ever climb. You can’t have MMR give you a 50% win ratio and then whatever random number you get at level 25 is your SR for life. There’s obviously more to it than that, right? That wouldn’t make any sense.

You should read my primer on how it works, that is how your MMR is eventually figured out:

Competitive matchmaking's MMR system is VERY good

First, if your win-rate hovers around 50% you shouldn’t expect to change ranks, right? Even if you just put 2 random people together, in any game, if they both won about half the time you would say that they were evenly matched. One is not better than the other. If you are not better than your competition, you should not expect to increase in rank. That’s not what you’re asking though. What you’re really asking is “If the MM can produce a 50/50 match, then how can it expect anyone to advance e…

@Zenren-1447

The reason it doesn’t work against smurfs, is because they periodically throw matches and intentionally under perform, so that they’re MMR doesn’t out level their SR and they can continue to troll the lower levels.

It does work against smurfs. Smurfs actually prove that the system works as I describe. They are abusing the nature of the MMR system to give themselves a lower MMR than they deserve and their SR goes right along with it.