Oh cool.
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Sorry, I’m not reading all this… it looks like the thing my phone company sends me every week with new terms and conditions 
However, yes, the system of matchmaking, forced loss, and lack of deranking accountability is flawed and just bad for gaming.
You shouldn’t go into a game and be able to tell within the first 10 seconds or so that the game is completely tilted one way or the other… but that’s almost every match in OW. At this point I look at my team and see the 6 stack of “new” bronze accounts or stack of diamond and plat players against our silver and bronze and just leave.
Honestly I hope MS cleans house at Overwatch.
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If there was no MMR, every game would be filled with “smurfs”. It’s the MMR that sorts people. 
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True.
However! Even if with 6-player teams the randomness may even up, and end up having balanced matches from time to time, in a stomp-friendly game such as this, not having a balanced teamup is definitely a bad idea.
In the pre-matchmaking online games, being a better-than-average player meant you could “clean” servers with ease. Not something I want to go back to.
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There is no such thing as an “unwinnable” game. Unless they are cheating like a lot of people do they simply aren’t so good that they are an order magnitude better than the average high skilled player.
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There is also something else to factor in when it is a even a medium sized streamer and that is that are people 100% trying to snipe their games on alts and when they get them they are playing their best hero to “beat the streamer”.
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This kid is still talking here? lol.
Well if you can’t do anything useful in life, just spit nonsense on the forums, I guess. Maybe that will help him feel better in some way.
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There is so much randomness that can occur in a match. You don’t know what heroes people will pick or if they are just having an off day or even an off match. You just can’t win forever no matter how good. This isn’t a 1v1 game so you have to rely on 5 other people and anything can happen.
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It’s fun to have a reasonable chance either to win or to lose. Without handicapping, you will have more games which you have little chance of winning and more games which you have little chance of losing. That’s less fun. I want to have fun when I play games in my free time.
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To answer your concern, wouldn’t Blizzard handicapping matches be conspiratorial in nature?
Also, Gab (as a free speech substitute for Twitter), is phenomenal. There is no banning on Gab, you can say whatever you want.
Gabtv is a work in progress, but in regards to Q, does it matter what other people say about other topics? Just as long as your message is getting out, you should let the chips fall where they may.
My invite for an interview still stands, as I strongly believe that your message, “algorithmic handicapping,” should be heard by anyone willing to listen. Do I agree with 100% of everything you say. No, it would be wrong of me to suggest that. But the core of your findings, should be broadcasted far and wide.
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I think ‘conspiracy’ is a wrong characterization of the problem. Conspiracies involve few people and are hidden. Match Making Rating involves everyone, and is technically in plain sight. And yet it is hidden, simply and poignantly by being omitted from the user interface, along with any other kind of publicly viewable in-game scoring. These omissions were designed by Activision/Blizzard to blinker us from seeing the truth of matchmaking and even what goes on in our matches.
I haven’t been banned from mainstream platforms yet, but I’ll keep it in mind 
We’ll talk! I appreciate the invitation.
What you have, good sir, is a common affliction on these forums.
It’s called Unconscious Incompetence.
It also affects sports fans. People look at something done professionally and because of their lack knowledge (they don’t know what they don’t know) they think they understand, but really they don’t.
So much so, they are willing to argue with people that are literally paid for their expertise on the specific matter as they overestimate their own understanding.
Good luck to you.
I’m afraid our friend Cuthbert has gone off the deep end.
Equating using two calculated values instead of one in video game matchmaking to human rights abuse.
Need I remind you.
A) he has no idea how the matchmaker is made and has several assumptions that have no evidence tied to them.
B) there is a failure to accept that SR itself is a calculated value that is effectively a representation of MMR.
C) good players are generally at higher SR and worse players are generally at lower SR despite their own self-perceptions
D) the average frustrated Overwatch player believes they should be at a higher SR but is unable to see the mistakes that keep them at their SR
There is no grand conspiracy. This isn’t a problem. Cuthbert, let me say this again.
Even if absolutely everything you say is true, the sum total is that people would take slightly longer to get to their true SR than they would otherwise
That is what you’ve made multiple threads for. That is what you’ve written to your government for. That is what you made an extremely long video for.
Please put this effort into something that will benefit your life brother.
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Personally, I hope Buzzard goes bankrupt or defunct.
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Uh okay…?
Doesn’t seem very on-topic.
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Why do people keep saying this?!? I have provided two highly relevant primary information sources: a developer statement from Overwatch’s Principal Designer Scott Mercer who explicitly confirmed the purpose of MMR, and the patents of the game holding company Activision Publishing Incorporated, which contain exhaustive details of invention literally about handicapping in a Bayesian skill scoring framework.
Let me answer my own question. You’re saying that I have provided no evidence because you don’t know what evidence is. Disregarding these sources is insanely ignorant. And you say I’ve gone off the deep end.
Simplistic misinterpretation of the facts, totally false. SR and MMR are obviously not the same thing.
You say I’m making assumptions? Now these are assumptions, and I think they are unreasonable assumptions.
You have the Scott Mercer source (there is also a Jeff Kaplan explanation too). The Activision patent is simply an assumption.
The company I work for holds patents it will never use.
There is no evidence that this patent is implemented in Overwatch.
I did not say SR and MMR are the same.
And yes, I am making assumptions. I am also capable of recognizing I am making assumptions and not pretending myself it is evidence.
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if a matchmaker is giving everyone a 50% win rate that means it’s working perfectly
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I admitted my reference to the patents is an assumption. But as I say in the OP it is a necessary and reasonable assumption to further examine details of invention on Activision’s Matchmaker, which was very likely implemented in Overwatch. Mercer and Kaplan’s statements confirm that Overwatch Matchmaker functions essentially the same way as described in Activision’s patent filing.
Well I think that makes two of us, anyway.
I think there are several things that you consistently fail to understand about competitive ranking algorithms; the two most relevant to the recent conversation are that the matchmaker does not favor new players and that the OW matchmaker is not an outlier among competitive ranking systems.
If you think that the matchmaker favors new players you are only looking at part of the equation and ignoring the rest. What any well-designed competitive ranking system (not only the OW matchmaker, but also similar systems designed for things like computer adaptive tests) does is provide for more swinginess in the rating when there is increased uncertainty.
So, for example, when someone sits down to take a graduate entrance exam (like the GMAT), the predicted score will swing more after every question initially than it will near the end of the section. (So on a 31 question Quantitative reasoning section, you will see greater score gains and losses from the first 7-10 questions than you will from the last 10 questions- that’s just the most sensible way to do a competitive ranking system like this.)
Likewise, a new OW account can gain or lose more SR per match initially (if they go on a win or a loss streak) than an account which has played several hundred matches. The reason for this is so that people reach matches in their actual skill rating sooner rather than later. And to ensure that the matchmaker is getting more relevant data sooner rather than later.
What can the game learn from placing someone who has just stomped all over mid-tier competition in another game with mid-tier competition? Not much, honestly. Likewise, the game learns more from putting someone who has just played spawn camp simulator against mid-tier competition in a match with lower tier competition than it does from placing them in another match against mid-tier competition.
And basing gains and losses on performance is merely a sensible choice in any environment in which performance impacts outcomes. But if the idea that people who are performing better than others on their hero in their SR will get more SR from a win and lose less SR from a loss bothers you, rest assured that they will not maintain any rank increase if they cannot compete against the tougher competition at their new SR. And we’re only talking about a swing of a couple hundred SR, realistically, anyway. There’s less than zero evidence that any of this would cause variance of a legit silver player stuck in bronze or similar.
I’m editing in a third point since what were initially two conversations have been merged (not that I disagree with the merger- there are way too many of these duplicate threads): SR and MMR are essentially the same thing. The difference is that SR can be manipulated in a way that MMR is not (and it would be harmful for MMR to be manipulated the way SR is). MMR must be as accurate a reflection of player skill as possible. Whereas, SR allows for things like penalizing players who leave competitive matches. SR is the public value that can be modified based on things other than skill/win rate. MMR is the hidden value that reflects skill/win rate.
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Yay, a new megathread dealing with the antiquated matchmaker which harbors a lawsuit.
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