No problem, brother. Every aspect of Competitive Play is fair game here, because all of it is carefully designed around the paradigm of handicapping. That includes the formulation of placement matches.
Notice that Blizzard doesn’t let us earn our rank each season, with a fresh slate. They lack confidence in the Skill Rating system; as they well should, because it is utterly corrupt with Match Making Rating in the background.
Well, at least we have positive confirmation that you have absolutely zero interest in any actual constructive criticism of the system but instead have degraded your entire thread into a complaint fest where any critique, real or imagined, is held as the result of your terribly mistaken understanding of what balanced matches are, how they are generated, and how they are essential to the ranking system.
You have no coherent system of replacement, either.
There are plenty things to be fixed or tweaked to make them better. Our understanding of the purpose of seasonal placement matches is certainly one of them, but there are no problems with the current system that are due to accurate “handicapping” or creating balanced matches.
I guess it’s your right to conflate your crusade with the more valid concerns of others, but it’s my right to tell everyone primed to go down that rabbit hole with you that you’re full of nonsense and can’t even keep your story straight.
People don’t agree with you. They don’t. Over and over in this thread, once I explain what you actually think people drop off your bandwagon because what you think is silly. They often have valid complaints, yes. You don’t, you just say without evidence or reason that their complaint is the same as yours.
Its not. Almost never is. When it is, they’re just repeating you.
The vast majority of those people that you think agree with you are discussing something else. You may agree with them, but no one wants “unbalanced” matches. NO ONE. Not when they understand the implications of it, because you have NO alternative to balancing that will make things any better.
It’s become pretty obvious that you know this, deep down, you understand that your idea cannot rest on its own merits. So you pick up every complaint as if it were your own.
Like the following, where you’re back to saying that PBSR (a valid point of debate) is equivalent to your “handicapping” paradigm. It’s not. You’re doing what all propagandists do, scapegoating.
Unless you want to say right here that the system works fine without PBSR above Diamond? Because we could knock about 2000 posts of your threads and have a general agreement with a few minor points of contention.
Just like we could with hidden MMR. Just like we could with the weirdness of placements.
For those of us that have followed your thread what you are doing is not only blatantly obvious but often in violation of the forum rules. I don’t understand how they let your insidious misinformation campaign roll on and on like this. The design of this forum keeps these threads going, no question. Go try to defame them on Reddit where your thread (and occasionally your acolytes) will always get downvoted into oblivion where it belongs. Why they let you do it in their own house is beyond me.
The gall you have calling US “vicious trolls”. You should take your time, energy, and talents and work for some authoritarian somewhere making millions instead of filling the game with disaffected players who think they have no control over their skill rating. People doing what you do in a different sphere have been criminally indicted. Fortunately for you this is just a game with no real world consequences.
There are problems. Actual problems and things that people that are legitimately unhappy about and should be. Some of those things need tweaks to the system but some just need people to be properly educated.
Instead you lie and twist and co-opt and misinform and insult while offering nothing productive.
I object to the system on principle. Axiomatic thinking doesn’t preclude me from constructive discussion.
I’ve been reported to the forum administrators and banned several times because of complaints from people like you, for what amounts to ‘thought crimes.’ And I would say that’s a far greater obstruction to collaboration.
If you bunch were interested in constructive anything, you wouldn’t come in here slinging insults and crapping on everything with your patronizing tone. Then flagging posts when someone pushes back…
It does when your axioms are factually incorrect, as I’ve shown them to you to be over, and over, and over, and over…
and will again, gladly, if you ask.
But I don’t think you actually care to learn. Your core position is simple and simply refuted which is why you feel the need to take up all complaints under your one banner whether relevant or not.
I only flag your posts when you call the developers “liars, thieves, idiots, greedy, etc.” as it’s clearly a violation of the forum rules. Not that it matters, those posts remain.
It’s hard to not sound patronizing when I have to explain something so simple so many times, and it’s really hard to not sound patronizing when you dance around your core complaint with unrelated issues in an effort to gish gallop, obfuscate, and win a contest of ideas on standards of popularity.
If you were half as intelligent as you seem to think you are then these threads would have stopped hundreds of posts ago when you realized, like an intelligent person would, where your simple, technical mistake lies.
You would also be having discussions, rather than just repeating your “axiom” and calling it a day. Or worse, doing what I showed you do in post 486, just randomly saying things without even being consistent.
Not only can you can rank people and have balanced matches at the same time but it’s necessary that you do it this way in a game where not everyone plays against everyone else. It’s neither “right” nor “wrong”, it’s technically essential. Competitively ranking people in this game (or any like it) simply wouldn’t be possible without MMR. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but you don’t have any better ideas, do you?
It’s simple. Give it up and let’s move on to real issues.
So SR losses aren’t simply attributed to how well you do in a match compared to other players playing that character, but also who you play against and whether you’re MMR is lower or higher than the SR you’re playing at. So if you’re playing a SR 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 900 match and winning. Essentially the MMR is there to keep you at whatever rank it believe’s you should be at. 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, because what’s going to happen is that your MMR will eventually be figured out, but in order to ensure the matches at whatever SR you’re at are fair, you’ll be matched against someone you’re own skill level to be sure that you don’t roll the other team. 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.
Strictly it would be “if your MMR is lower or higher than the MMR you’re playing at”, but yes.
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.
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.
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:
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.
What I don’t like is the fact that your MMR gets adjusted down if you can’t hard carry at a lower ranking if grouped up with a friend.
Season 5(my start)-season 10… I always finished in low-mid plat. 2600 was about my avg. I even one-tricked my main up to 3400 on an alt account.
With the deletion of my main, Symm, I stopped playing solo. I only played with my low-gold friend and even with silvers.
My MMR made the games too difficult for them and we lost… a lot. I’ve dropped all the way down to mid-gold which is about the peak in which my friend starts running into challenges (he’s peaked on all of his accounts around 2500)
Every time I solo queue, I stomp people in gold. I have an occasional game that is unwinable… but it is usually from a leaver or a thrower.
Season 10 I finished 2649. I placed Season 11 (bad placements think it was 3-7… considering I was still adjusting to Symm rework) at 2450ish. My lowest placements since my first season. Since I stopped caring and only played grouped with friends in LFG often having high silvers on my team… my SR kept dropping and dropping. Anytime I felt like seeing if it was me being bad, I would solo queue for a day and win back all my SR. But, I didn’t care about my SR so I continued to let it decay to finish at 2269… my lowest finish ever. Even though my post placement win percentage was over .500.
I started out season 12 the same. we actually went 6-4 (but i had my xbox overheat and on one of the wins I got nabbed for a loss so it read 6-5 even though I only played 10 games) and placed 2234. Understandable, considering I probably got hit with a 50sr penalty for disconnect. This is while playing with a plat ranked account that had a high masters player playing on… it was his smurf that he uses to play with us.
But this shows something strong… my skills havn’t dropped to the point that I am a low gold player. I’m still a plat flex player… but because my friends cannot play at a higher level, I get brought down because I can’t carry them when they are playing at a higher elo… Considering I play support when playing with them… it is a lot harder for me to have a high impact on the game.
This season I have a 16-16 record (so 10-11 post placements, yet I am 50sr down on the season.
Last night I had dropped down to 2090 before dropping the group and solo queuing just to see if I was that bad. I went 5-0-1. The only game that was close was the tie because we ended up with a Symm-bastion on attack Numbani which made the whole team give up on attack, but we full held defense.
The games are so easy that I personally, as the worst widow on the planet, was able to actually do well when my team’s soldier was so bad he had a full tac visor and couldn’t kill a single person, including the pharah that was his job.
If this matchmaker is so good… how did it one, drop me so low on my SR… and two… not prop me back up to at least where I started the season at -25sr? With my record I should be over 2210… but I’m 2181 with a career proven record of always being above 2500.
Now mind you… I’ve always had a problem with climbing when I was on the high end. I had a low MMR that was throttling my wins. I always maintained a winning record (except s11 that I finished 1 win short of .500-- which actually was a winning record after placements, but I lost 200sr during the season) Previously, I would always only win 17-19, but lose 27. I had to maintain a 60% win rate in plat in order to have stable SR. I always though that my MMR was always lagging behind cause I was always winning.
But now? Now I wonder if there is just something fundamentally wrong with it. My friend generally runs around 2000-2200. But groups up with silvers and bronzes.
However, when he did his placements with a bronze, he went 7-2-1 and actually increased his SR up to 2300… and has been free falling in his games as he does anytime he plays in games in the 2300+ range. I usually need to bring in my high master son to play with us on one of his low smurfs in order to carry him.
This system just makes no sense. I’m glad I don’t really care about it anymore… except now my SR is so low that I can’t play with my son anymore on his main account. We have to rely on making low rated account for him to smurf on in order to play… which just makes things not that fair.
Either, I should have never been able to climb to 3400 on my alt (which I’ve retired because Symm has been deleted) doing 100% solo queue or I should not be able to fall this low into gold without actively throwing.
Its like the system is trying to bring me down to silver… or something… (where i originally placed first playing the game) The only time i’ve ever had an even win-loss SR gain is when I played games in mid-high plat with my son where our group rating was in Diamond. This system is garbage and has no idea where to place me because of my wide range of friend groupings.
Yep, this is why the idea of handicapping is so obviously false. The MM isn’t some magical black box that knows your absolute skill at all times. It’s a relative ranking of who you are playing right now.
You’re not being able to do as well while in groups and not playing your main shouldn’t come as a surprise if you think about how it actually works.
I’ve long said that groups mess with the MMR system, though I meant it a bit differently than you describe where you’re not playing a hero that you can make the difference you know you can make.
Generally I mean that the further you get from everyone having the same MMR the harder it is to find a good match. But the problem is that it’s not WELL balanced, not that it’s balanced at all. The group problem is a design choice to bypass MMR in the name of playing with friends. Kinda the opposite of what the OP describes.
I hope no one thinks that your “TrueMMR”, to use my previously defined phrase, is the same with all the heroes. You can easily go from underranked to overranked simply by hitting “H”. Even the pros have a small(ish) pool.
Cuth’s whole idea of handicapping relies on the notion that MMR is very accurate. It can be accurate, but flexing and grouping really throws it off, as you’ve demonstrated!
This is why I teach all my Bronzers to basically one trick at least to gold. You need to do your best to be “underranked” and you’re not going to do it with DPSmoira.
Ive been playing since day 1. There is no reward for individual effort. Lack of scoreboard creates toxicity and blind blame. Not matching levels in comp creates un fun and un fair environments. Solo q should only play with solo qs. And this, removing the hidden mmr and sr from comp will vastly improve the quality of life for the game. It’s time for a change blizzard. Or at least a temporary test.
Hear, hear! You’re not the first to demand a scoreboard, for good reason.
No one is claiming that MMR is a “magical black box.” That’s just your way of belittling an argument you don’t understand.
That’s all it needs to be. You completely underestimate the potency of big data.
Yes. MMR perverts the natural selection process that should be taking place in the SR system, replacing it with artificial selection that favors new/inexperienced players.
This is how the MMR system keeps us treading water, rather than making any progress that matches the development of our skill. Thanks for adding your story.
We both think the other misunderstands. Fine. That’s not unreasonable.
However, I have pages of explanation of how I think the system works, how your conception couldn’t work, a detailed estimation of what I estimate is your BEST position, a detailed counter to what I think is your position, and an account of the ways you’ve apparently changed your position to fit the particular mindset of whoever also simply “doesn’t like the system”.
In response, you have this self-contradictory gem:
That “potency of big data”? That IS the “magical black box” bud.
You don’t have a lot of faith in your own position.
You don’t even bother to explain it. You just say that people “don’t understand”. I don’t think you understand either, but I’ve tried to explain, others have tried to explain, and we’re willing to have this discussion otherwise we wouldn’t be here.
If you had any real conviction that this “handicapping” was actually bad you would be able to do the same, i.e. explain to us your position in a way that was convincing rather than just tell us that we don’t understand or that we’re shills or that we’re working for the company you so despise.
If there were any truth to it, your story would be consistent.
Neither of those is the case, though, are they?
If you had half the respect for the community as I have shown to you so far, you’d do your best to explain and answer questions rather than dismiss those who don’t immediately see how you could possibly be right as not just idiots, but planted propagandists.
Heck, I’ll make easy. Explain: how on earth having balanced matches is unproductive for ranking by design? According to my understanding, it’s the MOST productive. Surely you can convince me at least away from MOST productive if you think it’s UNproductive.
Typo?
20 characters.
Eh…ton of double negatives. 
Your explanation doesn’t track with what we know about MMR, from Principal Overwatch Designer Scott Mercer.
Yeah they’ve admitted it before. It’s a socialism matchmaker and there’s no incentive to try to win.
How do you mean? What specifically doesn’t track? Surely within the pages you’ll find something more specific to critique.
I don’t think there’s anything “social” about Match Making Rating. It is co-opting the best efforts of experienced players, to give inexperienced an artificial advantage. An advantage that those players will lose in turn, if they decide to keep playing the game. That kind of manipulation turns Competitive Overwatch into senseless noise. It causes antisocial/toxic behaviour, because we are all racking our brains to make sense of something that is senseless by design.
Remove MMR for one day and everyone playing will get to the rank they deserve I’m 90% sure of that.
MMR did a good job at getting players into low or high ranks but everything in the middle feels like chaos.
This system feels like mud, you can’t climb fast but you can’t derank either.
“This system feels like mud, you can’t climb fast but you can’t derank either.”
It’s almost as if people’s skill levels don’t change drastically overnight.
without mmr skilled players would be on the same rank far too long ruining majority of equally skilled matches
if a players mmr is 2800 but his sr is 2200, he will stomp everyone until he gets there but without mmr he won’t get there fast enough ruining matches for hundreds of players