Verifying what he said is true, or verifying that he specifically said it? Because, if it’s not crucial who said it, most of what you’ve put here was spoken or roughly spoken by Jeff too. Myst has a post on it, if you’d treat that as authentic.
https://mystgraphics.com/overwatchforumarchive/competitive-matchmakingandavoidthisplayerremoved.html
(disregard the slug - that’s not the main topic of the post)
good luck, though if fruitful your search will likely lead you to a master of captcha evasion as well
Technically op can’t be stuck because they don’t even play anymore
i have my suspicions about the others, too
most likely not… it will archive the forums, i’ve done it for kicks to throw shade at someone who was spamming threads and deleting them then gaslighting people about their existence.
it’s just, you gotta manually tell it you want to archive that page first
Sorry if my phrasing is confusing here, but I am just talking about verifying the quotation itself (that Scott Mercer did in fact make a statement about SR/MMR in 2016). Some of my detractors deny that he made the statement.
This post from Kaplan corroborates many of the same things that Mercer has said and that I have said about MMR. I remember seeing this post when I wrote my own thread about algorithmic handicapping in 2016, and I considered using it at the time, but found Mercer’s statement much better for my purposes. Mercer’s statement is succinct and comprehensive. He also outranks Kaplan both as a company executive and as a subject matter expert, being Overwatch’s Principal Designer while Kaplan is more of a middle manager.
Kaplan’s statement is not as clear and direct as Mercer’s statement, about the purpose of MMR and the workings of the SR/MMR system. It is more simplistic and promotional. Kaplan is trying very hard to make the system sound logical, and hide the corporate profit motives that it is designed around.
Kaplan tells some obvious lies in this post such as “We have no clue which of the 21 heroes you are going to play during a match.” We know this to be untrue because it conflicts with details of invention for Activision/Blizzard’s patented Matchmaker and Mercer’s statement that “We do evaluate how well you played the heroes you used in a match. The comparison is based on historical data of people playing a specific hero.” He also tells more subtle lies such as “we focused the design of the game on winning or losing as a team,” which is implicitly false because players are ranked as individuals, not as teams.
Interesting that Jeff explicitly mentions “handicapping” in his post, and his salient point that Match Making Rating, not Skill Rating, is the basis of matchmaking. Thanks for digging this up, I had quite forgotten about it!
Are you referring to the vague corporate patent lingo (e.g, “it may work this way”) similar to how they describe that they may implement tons of behavior that isn’t, but still could be while being protected by the same patent? - the language is confusing, I know.
Those statements can both be true at the same time. Former is post game analysis, latter is about pre game predictions. Whether or not I guess what position you’re gonna play and preemptively change who you play against doesn’t stop me from analyzing how well you do relative to others after the fact.
It’s true that a patent of invention doesn’t prove the invention has been implemented in full detail. Rather, I would say it is the words of Scott Mercer which prove that Activision’s Matchmaker has been implemented in Overwatch as described in the Matchmaker’s patented details of invention. And if we look closer at those details of invention we see other troubling things. In their 2015 Matchmaker patent, Activision also gives itself license to discriminate between players based on protected personal data such as gender, income, age and location.
Quite right! The distinction would be lost on most people; you are an incisive thinker.
Just because the application is gathering data on which heroes you play the most doesn’t mean that it uses the information for matchmaking. Correct. I am just saying Kaplan’s claim that "We have no clue which of the 21 heroes you are going to play during a match” is false, they have an abundance of clues in the form of recorded personal data. And they haven’t denied or ruled out using that data for matchmaking purposes, either. Not central to my argument about MMR, at any rate.
I think he might have been forgetting to specify he whether meant “we” in the context of “the matchmaker” or “us as a company” - I can see that being an easy thing to mistype esp if you’re not expecting scrutiny so literal 5 years later. Forum posts tend to be less rigorous than your internal or legal docs etc
They certainly have the data and patented rights to do it, no doubt, but if they don’t expose it as a variable to the matchmaker, then the statement is valid in that alternative context. Reason I say that is bc I’ve seen similar posts in mysts archive where they talk about not exposing the mm to things like that, despite certainly being able to (I believe player level is one, but at the same time there’s talk of separating new accs from the general pop - confusion/contradiction due to a lack of specificity I am guessing)
(mind you, I’ve not seen the mysteriously nuked posts that weren’t archived, so I’m not necessarily trying to convince you of the opposite of those posts)
I’m no legal scholar, but I don’t believe rights can be patented!
I do not consider Activision/Blizzard to have the right to discriminate between players in ranked competition based on a hidden skill rating (MMR). And yet their patents of invention suggest their intent to discriminate in this way, and Overwatch developer statements prove that they do. They also clearly do not have the right to discriminate based on protected personal data such as gender, income, location, age, race religion, political affiliation, etc. And do they? It seems that we don’t know and are not protected from this.
The only way to accurately agree that “algorithmic handicapping” is happening is if one defines “algorithmic handicapping” as the honest attempt to most accurately rank the ladder according to the skills of the player base using the best tools available.
If that is, indeed, what is meant, then one could agree that “algorithmic handicapping” is happening. But, at that point, one would also have to agree that the term “algorithmic handicapping” is incredibly loaded and misleading.
So what is the point of continuing to use that phrase?
It is the equivalent of insisting that people refer to surgery as “slicing people open.” You could do it, but it hinders meaningful communication. People who prefer not to use the phrase, “cutting people open” to refer to surgery are not somehow wrong even though surgery often involves cutting people open. Surgery is the more accurate and useful term. Insisting on the term, “slicing people open,” feels like pushing a weird agenda and/or an indication of a less than full understanding of surgery.
You might search Blizzcon videos instead of forum posts. I clearly remember Chris Metzen saying that post-TBC, Illidan was dead forever and never coming back – “Illidan’s like Boba Fett, a cool character for a while, but in the end he dies like a chump.”
I had a hell of a time finding that quote because it was only in text format in someone’s article comment or forum post from a long time ago. The source was actually in a Blizzcon video which didn’t have a transcript.
Anyway, they brought Illidan back despite those claims, Boba Fett has his own series, and Metzen fled the scene before the horrid dysfunction of ATVI became public knowledge.
I’m having trouble parsing this based on how it’s worded. I still owe you a reply by the way. I realize now that I got caught up on looking into a technicality and forgot to reply once I’d found the answer.
Also, do you know how to quote and intersperse your replies with the original text? It makes it much easier to reply, and the conversation generally flows better and is easier to follow.
Seeing as I was having trouble with your previous statement related to this one, I can’t be sure I’m commenting 100% accurately. Part of this debate has to do with one’s presuppositions about Blizzard’s intent, since based on that one could come to different conclusions despite discussing the same lines of code (of course this same debate is taking place on other forums for other games made by different devs). It’s akin to jurors voting innocent vs guilty having examined the same evidence. If you believe that the purest and fairest form of matchmaking is random chance, aka, a lottery system, or just something that doesn’t try to predict outcomes, then you’re going to see attempts to circumvent that natural process as problematic, and if those attempts conform to a mode of matchmaking that’s profit-driven then it’s debatable how misleading and loaded the terms are. We can’t know what Blizzard’s motives are; we can only ask questions like: is it reasonable to believe there’s a substantial component of self-interest in matchmaking which hurts competitive integrity.
Much of this is Bayesian reasoning through the unknown. But you can’t have a discussion about this topic without trying to draw reasonable conclusions about intent.
Practicality? Shorthand for several concepts and arguments compressed down into a workable phrase that people following this debate will (hopefully) understand. Cuthbert often refers those unfamiliar with the phrase/concepts to his other thread.
If you could hook Cuthbert up to a lie detector, I honestly don’t think he believes the matchmaker does more good than harm. I think he feels it’s fairly pernicious, and if he’s right, and it is stealing people’s time and energy away from them for profit, then there’s no reason to sugarcoat it. I mean, capitalism for instance, is arguably both “the greatest economic engine mankind has ever known,” as well as “the greatest threat to mankind’s continued existence.” I don’t know that anyone has the right to declare that it’s objectively one and not the other.
Are you defining a “right” as any act(s) that’s not illegal?
To my knowledge, you cannot prove that any of those patents are in fact in Overwatch, you can only really argue that it’s more reasonable to conclude that they (or something like them) are more likely to exist in the code than not. None of us have the seen code.
It’s this + several of the patents are in ‘tier1’ active use. This means they aren’t just placeholders in the IP landscape. The USIPO frowns on trolling out IP landscape for the sake of it, so they regularly enforce checks of issue especially on large sleezy companies (like ATVI and MSFT).
So we know they are making > $1 / yr on real implements of the patents, as applied to an actual business product, process, live-service, or licensing agreement. When you query most of the patents you’ll see they are actively in use and apply to “battle net platform”. Does that mean CoD or BanjoKazooie? I guess it could but they show Overwatch screenshots.
At some point you have an admission of guilt + motive + weapon + imbicile standing over a dead body. You don’t have it recorded live but there is really no other alibi or counter evidence, so beyond all reasonable doubt the evidence suggests the crime.
This is again why the lawsuits will be a huge benefit to the community. They will force an actual discovery of the in-game code. Although this company has been known to destroy evidence and obfuscate any incriminating documentation (the Afrasiabi and Mcree Lawsuits).
That’s why in the meantime you might want to screenshot every account you see in your games and use statistical methods to reverse engineer whether it’s fair or not.
I also suggest screenshots of forum posts/posters that seem like trolling and gaslighting or other forms of damage control. Because if it does go to discovery, any blizzard representatives posting on the public forums in an unofficial capacity (using accounts as shills and plants) will be reprimanded and caught up in the legal mess. We should know you will be exposed for taking money from blizz and posting on these forums without divulging it with orange text.
I understand that Cuthbert believes that the matchmaker is pernicious. Just as I can understand how someone could believe that surgery is pernicious. It’s just difficult to convince people who are decently well-versed in modern medicine that surgery is pernicious. You can see how someone could sincerely make the argument. You would attempt to, first, explain what surgery is in more detail. If someone continued to argue that surgery were pernicious, you might try to explain the motives behind the methods employed- why would a patient be cut open/ why might some tissues be removed/ etc. If one continued to express a sincerely held belief that surgery were pernicious at that point, what could one argue to persuade someone steeped in that belief at that point?
And, yes. Grind exists. Things like the mini-events (such as the recent Reaper mini-event) are moderately grindy. The matchmaker and the competitive ranking ladder are not grindy though. They are using the least grindy methods possible to accurately assess the relative skill levels of the people on the ladder.
Many of the proposed alternatives (things like a more random matchmaker or removing performance based SR acceleration) would make the current system more grindy (particularly for those at the top and bottom of the ladder). I think that part of what is being misunderstood is that the matchmaker’s purpose and the ladder’s purpose is not for players to rank up- it’s to accurately assess the relative skill of the player base. If someone wants to (for whatever reason) rank up, they may consider themselves to be grinding. But that’s not the fault of the competitive mode- that’s just how improving one’s skillset works- that’s always a grind.
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