Ok, but what metrics cause the matchmaker to “push” you up or down no matter how you play?
Because according to your definition you can get “forced losing streaks” as an extremely good player. However, most of the time you don’t manage to produce really good stats in those matches, so what makes you still considered a punishable extremely good player after losing 10 matches? Then you would have already been given 50 “side characters” (or “instrumental losers”) to lose. Why are these 50 people worth less than you? Would be easier and more effective to just give you bots, that play even worse, the more you carry.
Sounds a bit narcissistic, if not megalomaniacal.
And why can smurfs move around the SR areas reproducibly and without any restrictions? Regardless of whether on old or new accounts? How does the matchmaker recognize and select these blissful individuals?
Read the patent, there are a lot of points about. In game buys, abandoning the title, time you in a session are some (written by actiblizz, not me).
This is something I don’t said (about losing streak, but can happen), I can’t exclude, neither affirm, cause we don’t have access to all date. If you are interested to know about you have, like me, to claim blizz to make the data, as well the algorhytm public and transparent.
This is interesting. Unfortunately it is a question that can partly be answered by blizzard, unfortunately partly you have the confirmation that there are differences since in the patent there is an explicit profiling activity of the players regarding characteristics third to the sporting activity only.
The most common activity that as a psychologist comes to think of, already used for gambling is the Skinner Box. It fits perfectly with the setting of this patent, but these are answers that the blizzard must give us.
For smurfs there is a complex matter, which is however to be addressed to blizzard. I see in you a fair interest in the issue, why not ask to open the Pandora’s box and know whether or not we are using a transparent product for sporting purposes or not?
Nobody knows whether the patent is actually used in any Activision or Blizzard game, while everything can be explained with the simplest logic and much less “technology”.
We also know how Blizzards “cool” ideas typically work out, at least in the last 10 years.
Have you played World of WarCraft? They tried to be pretty inventive with a lot of things, but the designers really came up with unconvincing mechanics, like several iterations of the discarded “Path of the Titans” which was probably the most hyped “invention” internally for a long time. We had items that resembled the core idea, we had Covenants, Artifacts, and Legendaries with some of that flavor, but in the end their ideas were pretty mediocre. At least it kept you sort of grinding - and paying (subscription model).
Do you really believe that this company, currently barely able to deliver original or exciting game content, also torn apart by sexual harassment allegations, is capable of developing the most intelligent and advanced matchmaking AI the (gaming) world has ever seen?
Please listen carefully to me for a moment:
There are no incentives for Blizzard to keep you playing. Overwatch is not a casino where you have to spend money permanently.
It is a game that is paid for once and which can now be had for a ridiculous price.
In fact, players only put a strain on the servers, so from Boby Kotick’s point of view, it would even be best to buy the game and not play it at all to keep maintenance costs down.
The lootboxes are the “fairest” lootboxes I know of in a game like this. You don’t have to buy keys like in CS:GO or make other ingame purchases to enjoy the game. Skins are also literally thrown at you.
In summary, Blizzard has nothing to gain from psychologically incentivizing you to play. You’ve already paid. They already own the money.
In fact, it would be even better for Blizzard if you freely love the game so much that they could at least get money from you with OWL merchandising. So why should they torture you with matchmaking that turns out sadistic and cruel specifically for you?
It just doesn’t make sense.
Anything that doesn’t work with matchmaking is because players are messing with their stats and accounts. So, at least, blame the people not playing by the rules.
I see a lot of good-faith discussion happening in the thread, and I want to clear up some misconceptions that are derailing the conversation and hindering progress.
As far as we know, the Matchmaker is not tracking the number of wins and losses for individual players or groups, or explicitly trying to disrupt winning/losing streaks. And although it could be doing this, it is not necessary for the Matchmaker to track wins/losses for individual groups and players. It can disrupt patterns of defeat and victory simply by handicapping matches at every instance, based on the performance data that players and groups generate when we play.
I think it’s fine for you to be concerned about this. There is cause for concern in Activision/Blizzard’s Matchmaker patent description. But it is not proven by any developer statements to be implemented this way in Overwatch.
No, matches are rigged for every player. Relatively skilled players are handicapped unfavorably, and relatively skilled players are handicapped favorably. Handicapping is done by the arrangement of teams and the allowance/disallowance of matches between players in a wide range of SR according to their MMR.
This is not the case in every match, it is only an example to illustrate the general workings of MMR. In other matches, there can be more than one standout player and even sets of players who the matchmaker seeks to counteract.
The story is not about just one or two standout players in every match, or even most matches necessarily. The variability and invisibility of handicapping makes it hard to understand, but it generally works to segregate skilled/unskilled players respectively, and to distribute skill evenly across teams. This is done with reference to both SR and MMR.
Actually, artificial 50/50 odds do exactly the opposite.
That’s right, the matchmaker is calibrated to enforce odds in the range of 40%-60% for either team. If it can’t create those odds between a set of players at the same SR level, it simply won’t make the match. And when it does make a match, it enforces those odds via the arrangement of teams with algorithmic handicapping based on MMR.
That is not true, and I have never said this.
Again that is not true, and I have never said this. It is a common and understandable misconception about the functions of SR, MMR, the Matchmaker, and causal relationships between the systems.
Yes all competitive matches are rigged to varying degrees, depending on the MMR and SR of participating players, except for matches at the higher ranks.
Not true, I have never said this.
This is a complex discussion based on highly technical subject matter. There are lots of things to misunderstand about it, especially when Activision/Blizzard has told so many lies and omitted so much important information. I won’t hold it against anyone for being skeptical of my thesis. But at some point you have to consider facts and information from primary sources, like the developer statements and patent details I have given.
It does? If so, that’s interesting. But I wonder why they do 40 - 60% instead of something closer to 50%? Perhaps due to dwindling playerbase? I hope they go back to 50/50 when OW2 comes out when we should start getting more playerbase.
If they want to make the game more challenging occasionally for the player as they win more games. Instead of doing 40 - 60% they could just do 45/55 which should still make the matches slightly easier/harder for the player without leading to steam roll. I could imagine steam roll happening even from 40/60.
But anyways without a system like this, there undoubtly would be even more matches where one team steam rolls the other. Even quickplay uses MMR based matchmaking, so if we didn’t have any alorithmic matchmaking, the games would turn out even more of a mess.
Yes. I mentioned that this is possible, not confirmed, or worse no rules force them to provide informations about this. We are here for this.
Exactly, I did not mentioned winning losing streak but their patent did. One of the variables are win/loss records (legit for a skinner box).
For example, player information may include, without limitation, a style of gameplay (e.g., aggressive), a role preference (e.g., an explicit by the player of such preference), a role actually played, a duration of gameplay sessions, a number of gameplay sessions played in a given login session, in-tame items used or purchased by the player, membership in a clan or team, preference to play with clan mates or friends, demographic information of the player (e.g., geographic location, gender, income level, etc.), win/loss records, scores, and/or other information that may be used to determine whether a player will enjoy a given gameplay session, a match and/or a game.”
For the Skinner Box. It is a behavioral psychology mechanism, a branch of operating behaviorism: if you randomly administer a reward to a subject, it will be encouraged to increase the attempts to obtain it (the more you play, bigger player base you have, the more chance you have to earn purchases in the app ).
If you manage to administer the skinner box to everyone, you maximize the chance that everyone will be “satisfied (deceived)” and minimize the amount of users who leave the game. (even more if you can hide match history, in game stats, and much more to make players unaware of unbalanced matches)
If, on the other hand, you leave the natural mechanism: making balanced matches only on the basis of skill, punitive (but natural and casual) mechanisms come into play against some players due to macropopulation dynamics. Some players improve, some luck, some players only play in the evening and therefore are tired: you increase the chance that someone is particularly unhappy.
This system have been used on slot machines and other gambling before regulations denied.
Yes the Matchmaker does aim for 50% odds and that is usually what it produces for both teams. But it is designed to allow matches with up to 20% difference between the chances that each team has to win, as predicted by participating players’ MMR.
And that difference could be even greater if one of the player happens to be having a bad day, decides to OTP a hero they’ve never used before out of the blue etc. So yeah, I can see even 50/50 leading to uneven matches due to unforeseeable variables. This could be circumvented by implementing some kind of advanced deep learning A.I. to the matchmaker algorithm that takes into the player’s habits on top of their raw stats. But I’d imagine that would be too expensive and not worth it for Blizzard.
I could also see this being true. I do often get the desire to play just one more game if I lose the previous one. But there’s a fine line to this though and it can get discouraging if I keep losing games instead of winning. I guess that’s where the addictiveness potential of 40/60 can come from. But even with this system, players can still experience winning and losing streaks so the algorithm seems to have a limit to how much influence it can have on the outcome of the match it predicts.
Very good, Vulpes! You recall the patent details better than I do. I had forgotten where was the reference to win/loss records. It is hard to remember when Activision/Blizzard are including so much intimate personal data, literally including how much we are sweating when biometrics are available…you gotta hand it to them, they thought of everything.
Yes, players can have winning or losing streak in both scenarios. For this reason actually I don’t think about winning or losing streak as an indicator. I’ve often mentioned as good indicator perceivable by the user (in my opinion, but it is my opinion) is being placed in a match either too easy or too difficult. This would become more noticeable as the playerbase became thinner and the combination of these matches would be more difficult for an algorithm forged under thriving playerbase conditions.
The fact that youroverwatch and many other high-level users perceived this “poor ranked quality” would fit in perfectly with such a scenario. It should be noted that we are in the field of hypotheses, as long as blizzard hides all the data such as match history, statistics, profiles and keeps the algorithms secret, it is not possible to obtain a truth.
It is possible to request it, as we are consumers.
Blizzard’s MMR is their own intellectual property, what makes you think that customers “deserve” to know how it works?
I can see a lot of people trying to manipulate their MMR if they knew exactly how it worked (Not saying it already doesn’t happen with alts, but you get my point)
They can preserve intellectual property by patenting it as all other companies do, and they can show it as all other companies have done where required by law.
Octo, I am sorry to point this out to you, but you and your group are engaged in opposition activity, not debating.
Opposition activity is defined as opposing any allegation a party opposing their group puts forward. Since I am one of the users you target, through targeted attacks organized in your discord, I do not pretend that you agree with me.
It is the same speech as the food delivery riders and the law that Europe is drafting to make algorithms transparent.
You can very well save your intellectual property by submitting to the regulatory bodies cited by law (in my country it is called AGCOM for telephone, energy and consumer companies in general).
Current consumer’s associations are as inexperienced in this area as they were in the face of gambling (modern) at first times of diffusion of it.
As I have often repeated, the problem is simply legislative. When we have adequate laws we will be able to open Pandora’s box.
What I do not understand, and this too I have often repeated, what do you have to gain by not wanting to open the Pandora’s box, or the users who intervene simply to denigrate those who want to open the Pandora’s box (too poor, lazy to improve, crazy , etc.). What logic does it have?
