Hey BrightTitan I see you like to participate in debate and you’re a pretty smart guy. Do you have Discord?
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Thanks for the kind words (or the comically funny hot take depending on who you talk to around here). Likewise. 
I usually try to steer clear of social media, but I could get an account (haven’t really used Discord before).
What kind of stuff goes on in Discord?
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I decided to do something completely unique within the Overwatch Discord space which is to have a server that revolves around intelligent debate.
You can access Discord even from a browser without having to even install it. It will create a temporary account for you.
This is the link to the group:
The good thing about Discord is that we can even host live debates sometimes.
@ taleswapper I also invite you to join if you want to participate and represent your points of view.
I would love to see a live debate between you two!
I think text exchanges are good but having it in real time you can address each other’s points immediately.
Usually not much of interest. We Host pugs from time to time. But some mature and well-reasoned debates could really spice things up and substantially improve the quality of discussions.
Just putting it out there. Don’t feel obliged to join but only if you feel like it. .
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I’ve looked around a bit. It seems that the “rigged” viewpoint has become dominant, at least here. 4 years ago, I was trying to combat it because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less consistent people are, the worse the matchmaker becomes. Thinking your games are out of your control makes you less consistent.
There was no better way to destroy a 12 player competitive game than making sure that a few people always believed that they were destined to lose. Wars have been lost with less.
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I don’t know if that is true. Is it?
Don’t even the pros or the coaches tell you that only something like 20% of your games are within your control?
Not to mention I’m sure that most players don’t even read the forums.
I would make an even stronger statement. Thinking the matchmaker is rigged or that the games are out of your control makes you a worse player (not simply an inconsistent player).
And I say that because that is the major component of why I have to have these conversations with my clients/students. When they think that the GMAT algorithm is somehow putting a thumb on the scales, it prevents them from improving. They spend time and energy convincing themselves that their skill is not the chief component that determines their score.
And that means they do not improve because they think improving is fruitless. Their investment is in attempting to “prove” that the algorithm is rigged. Which means the single most valuable thing I can do for them is to convince them that it is not. Then, we can actually begin work on meaningfully improving.
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You can accept that the game is rigged and that games are outside your control and still try to improve your gameplay. It might even save people their sanity because when they fail to climb despite having improved they won’t become so frustrated. A person who genuinely improves and still loses games can start to doubt that what they are doing is correct. So knowing the truth can set you free and actually help you improve because you won’t second guess yourself all the time. I like to work towards improvement because I think it can make me a better player in future custom game scrims regardless of how messed up the matchmaker is.
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To the extent that it is something you worry about in game (the matchmaker is rigged), it actively hinders your ability to play to your potential. And we see this all the time. The moment someone experiences some degree of adversity, they start typing in chat or yelling on coms about “what is this matchmaking” or whatever.
It’s not the only thing that people preoccupy themselves with that hinders people in game, but it is a thing that hinders people in game.
Similarly, to the degree that your OW time is devoted to pondering or railing against the matchmaker, some amount of time and energy that you devote to OW is being wasted.
Having said that, if you put the bulk of your time into improving. And you don’t worry about it during matches. And the out of game time you devote to railing against the matchmaker is a sort of side hobby that does not take time and energy away from improving your OW skill set… if all of that is true… then it’s probably not a big detriment to think the matchmaker is rigged.
However, for most people worried about the matchmaker, all of that will not be true. They will fall into one of those pitfalls. So, to the extent that we are able to spread the idea that the matchmaker is rigged, we will limit the community’s ability to improve and we will increase the likelihood that players in our matches are tilted/throwing/uninvested in the game/tilting other people in the game.
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Tale I’ve actually come around. I did a lot of research on GMAT teseting this morning, specifically to understand why you keep bringing up the GMAT, and honestly to fact check you. That led to finally doing about 2-3 hours of research on SBMM/MMR and ultimately changing my views completely. I wrote a post about it below. I do mention a lot of people who are not so good at explaining this stuff, and arguing for argument’s sake, but I don’t count you among them. Though I will say that everyone needs to study this stuff for themselves, and that these forums, for a lot of reasons are not the ideal learning environment, because of time constraints, the frustration factor, etc.
In general, this renews my faith that debate and argumentation is great, particularly (and really only) if you go into it willing to learn and change your views. It also underscores the real danger of cognitive bias, so this is an important moment of reflection for me.
Things got a little dicey there for a moment, but I’m glad they stayed civil for the most part.
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Ha! It feels weird to be coming at this from the other side of things, but I’ve changed my views on this. They may seem intuitively correct, but I don’t see how it’s possible to maintain those beliefs having done adequate research. Which I did this morning. Spent 2-3 hours reading everything I could about trueskill (e-al), MMR, SBMM, etc. It’s completely transformed my thinking on this, and the whole “rigged” thing just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. These views are really easy to hold, and even understandable until you understand how and why it works, and not only why it’s better, but actually necessary.
I’m eating some humble pie this morning for sure, but still, it feels better to be dealing in facts and reality, rather than in misconception (NOT delusion, as some here will derisively call it).
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Because we have something of a control group in GMs, we know that they will never lose the same number of matches that we lose at our rank, and from that we know that winning and percentages are all almost entirely skill based, and so that 20% number doesn’t really apply, or certainly shouldn’t be considered the gospel in all situations. For players who aren’t skilled enough to “take over a match” then yes, you’re looking at some average number of unavoidable losses – for you – but not all players.
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I agree with everything Tale said, but to clarify here: There’s a difference between going into game thinking it’s out of your control and looking back on a game and coming to a valid conclusion that your team was vastly outplayed.
I mean the first, but yeah, given that you’re 1/6 of your team, only 16.7% is what you can control. I always interpreted it that way, not that you have 100% control over 20% of your games, but that you have 20% (rounded up) control over 100% of your games.
I mean, the first interpretation is obviously incorrect, right? You’ll never have 100% control.
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60-20-20 rule sounds like what I hear
It’s true though, you don’t win them all. You could be playing the hottest game of your life in that 20% and then lose anyway because your dog pees on your router or lightning blows up a transformer. Chaos is a fact of life. The important part is to realize what you can control and work with it.
When people lose faith that they have something in their control, or that the control they exert is not enough, they can become less motivated. If someone thinks the game is a rigged loss from the start, do they care as much to try? I can tell you I’ve seen a lot of people who literally give up after the first minute on 2cp because they feel they don’t have enough control.
The usual excuse is “to not waste my time” - by wasting it.
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Only here in the competitive forums. Unfortunately there are more monkeys in the circus than masters 
The general forums aren’t as misguided and Overwatch University (Reddit) is a MUCH healthier player base.
There’s something about this forum that breeds that toxicity.
When I first started coming here, I was hard stuck platinum (looking for answers) I’d always go up 3 or 4 (sometimes 5 games) and always drop just as many.
Not that I would expect you to waste your time doing so, but some of my original posts/convos were pretty much like that.
- I can’t beat the Smurfs and tanks don’t help.
- Toxic supports
- No matter how hard I play, I’m just stuck
Never turned to rigging for an answer though. But I think that’s because I had friends who were GM players and watching them play I knew there was a difference between them and me.
That’s why I’ve always tried to offer VOD reviews. To share what has been bestowed upon me.
Eventually I met “the right” Smurf who put a lot of time into 1 on 1 coaching me to understand how the game works (from multiple perspectives).
Thank lord for this.
My (insert whatever the trash player with a trash mentality wants to blame) sucks.
- gg
Bro…. We’re 30 seconds into the game!! CALM DOWN!! 
Titan…
Remember I told you I was starting Grad School this semester?
Haha… I got rolled by the GMAT when I was applying. Fortunately my score was good enough to get me into the school I wanted. But still. Hard test. 
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https://mystgraphics.com/overwatchforumarchive/competitive-howMMRworks.html#post-3
Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V of Kaawumba’s post, with the parts you quoted in bold:
What’s the deal with MMR
Scott Mercer Oct 19, 2016
Thanks for the well written post on your matchmaking experiences, I’ll try to explain some of what’s going on.
The system does in fact try to place equal sized groups on opposite teams whenever possible. Your report for game 2 where both 3 player groups were on the same team definitely seems like something that shouldn’t happen based on the rules we’ve setup, so I’ll look into it further.
We do need to do a better job of not placing players into “unwinnable” matches. When the matchmaker creates a match, it determines the % chance for each team to win based on the match it made. The VAST majority of matches are usually near to 50% (especially if you’re a player closer to median skill rating and you’re not in a group), but I’ve definitely seen logs of matches where that’s really not the case and my eyebrows raise.
The unfortunate truth is that there is not always a “perfect” match for you, especially at very high (and very low!) skill ratings where there’s fewer players of similar skill. Then you throw in the desire to match groups vs. groups, with everybody having low latency, and doing ALL of this as fast as possible even though it’s the 3AM offpeak… it can get tough. We’ve tried different tunings with regards to wait times, and the improvements were unfortunately modest as we increased the time to wait. Still, this is an area we’re always looking to improve and tune better.
Fortunately, when we do put you in a match that we know isn’t a 50/50, we adjust your SR gain or loss based on your calculated change of winning. So if you did get placed into a match with only a 20% chance to win and then you lose, you shouldn’t lose much SR.
For matchmaking groups, there’s actually two separate issues that we try to solve. The first issue is “How do we handle groups formed of players with different MMRs?”. With season 2 we prevented players of REALLY disparate Skill Rating from grouping, but there’s still some variance we need to handle. Over time we’ve tested different models to try and see what’s best and are now using what tested most accurately. (Hint: it’s not simply averaging the MMRs)
The other issue is how do we model the synergistic effects of players being together in a group. As you noted, they have access to voice chat. Now here’s where things get interesting. This “massive” advantage actually differs based upon the skill rating of the group members. Based upon the data we’ve seen groups of low to mid SR players don’t see that much improvement to their win %. Higher SR players do see more notable improvements, but it’s not as huge as you might think. Still, we do take this into account when we predict the win% for each team. Regardless of how the data looks, we do know there’s a perception of a large advantage for groups. That’s one of the reasons why we explicitly try to match similar sized groups together.
So then why do points for losses and wins seem so random? Well, the amount of MMR (and SR) you go up or down isn’t simply a matter of whether you won or lost, and what was your predicted chance of winning. There’s a couple of other things at work. One is the matchmaker’s confidence in what your MMR should be. Play a lot of games, it gets more certain. Don’t play Overwatch for a while, it gets less certain. You go on a large win or loss streak, it gets less certain. The more certain the matchmaker is about your MMR, the less your MMR will change in either direction based on a win or loss.
As a minor factor, we also do evaluate how well you played the heroes you used in a match. The comparison is largely based on historical data of people playing a specific hero (not medals, not pure damage done), and we’ve done a lot of work to this system based on the community’s feedback. In fact, I’ve seen some people indicate that they don’t think we’re doing this anymore. We still are. While it’s a minor factor compared to wins/losses ( The best way to increase your SR is still to play together and win as a team! ), doing so does help us determine your skill more accurately and faster.
So take all that into account, the SR gain/loss after any single match can be a bit more “noisy” that it seems it should, but we’re asking it to look at a lot of different factors to do the best job it can creating fair matches for you.
As an aside to all of this…
“Fair” matches doesn’t always mean that every Ilios match goes 3-2 and 100-99 on the final point, or each team gets the payload to the end in overtime on Dorado, etc. Sometimes when two evenly matches teams play, the result can be one-sided. It just means that at that single moment in time the enemy team played better. It’s not always the matchmaker’s, your’s, or your team’s(!!!) fault that you got stomped.
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Ready to join the discord yet? 
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Not yet, but I’m getting closer! I’ve atleast started to use Discord, even if it’s just to message my girlfriend (cuz apparently normal texting isn’t good enough for her!?)
Have you managed to keep your pants white!? 
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So far so good
HEEYYY!! A step in the right direction!! Lets go!!
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Just remember:
There’s a thin line between a fart and a shart.
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That’s only true when I eat bananas and coffee in the same morning
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