In regards to the whole situation with the placements and pro players placing in Gold or below, here’s what Blizzard initially said:
“Matchmaking values from prior seasons weren’t being respected”
We’ve known for a while, that performance also supposedly matters and this was mentioned yet again in a recent post:
Many players speculated about supposed MMR reset, but from where I’m standing, this is not the obvious question.
Mind you, I’m taking the devs at their word, that the MMR values weren’t being respected. But the results indicate, that there are issues with the whole idea of placement matches and with Blizzard’s ability to track performance. Here’s why:
If the system relies solely on history from previous seasons, that means they Blizzard can’t adequately track performance and they can’t place you accordingly within placements.
Many people throughout the seasons speculated, that all placements do is, that they place you closely to where you were last season. In light of the recent events, it turns out, that’s exactly what placements do and performance seems to be irrelevant.
And when the system is deprived previous MMR history, skilled and pro players placing Gold or lower leads me to believe, that performance is not being tracked at all.
What it says to me is that it’s easier to perform like a Master… in Master’s games. It’s not so easy to perform like a Master when your team can’t even group up down in Gold.
I think the game is too team dependent, and there’s not much chance for good players to rank up… or for bad players to rank down. You just play all these “even matches” they stick you in, and pretty much stay wherever the MMR. ROBOT thinks you belong, based on it’s reading of your stats.
Well, Master game stats WILL be much higher. But what happened when MMR. Robot was turned off? Whoops! High ranked players in Gold.
This is why i think an MMR reset EVERY SEASON should happen. I mean, it’s not really a season when you just place where you were the previous season and play two months of “even matches.”
With the MMR reset and seeing many people going from unranked to GM, you can see plenty of Top 500/Grandmaster players landing in high Platinum or low Diamond.
The matchmaker can only see your skill level during those games and puts you where you belong.
Diamond to Grandmaster track pure wins. Which means, yes, you might be mechanically on par with a Top 500 player as shown in the MMR reset, but they have coordination, drive, teamwork, and other skills that a robotic system cannot determine.
Hence why you’ll see a hardstuck plat or gold carry your team, get 3-5 headshots in a row with Widowmaker, but have poor communication and positioning.
These players got beyond Diamond by having gamesense, judgement calls, positioning, and communication that other people lack. Those things win them games. That’s it.
An MMR reset would maybe drag some people into gold or plat for awhile, but the really determined and really good will climb through teamwork, positioning, and gamesense. It would also just ruin a lot of games for lower tier people that lack these skills.
Thanks for the interesting perspective. Allow me to share some things.
Actually, I don’t think that’s always the case. Maybe sometimes in Master vs Master, stats might end up lower than those in Gold.
If the stats were always higher, the robot as you call it, would not have problem to differentiate between performances. Maybe that’s what the issue comes down to.
But if the system can’t recognize a Master player’s performance if it doesn’t take place against other Master players, then the obvious question is:
How can then the system recognize the performance of a player, that could pull his weight in a Diamond game, but is always playing in Gold or Plat.
The only solution I can see to such a problem is for the stuck player to find a friend or two that are like 500 SR higher (which is a good indication, that their MMR is also higher) and queue with them. By doing so, he’ll play in matches that have higher average MMR and if he pulls his weight during those, his MMR will raise and SR will follow.
It’s been obvious all along that the ranking was at best a guess, even after 1000+ hours. That’s why so many comp games feel terrible. It’s not because of role queue missing, it’s not because someone played drunk or whatever they claimed early on, it’s because the MMR system is actually terrible at ranking players beyond a 1000 point variance guess.