Discussion: The Math Behind Being 'Hardstuck'

How is the game calculating SR gains / losses below Platinum.

TLDR: There is a mathematical basis for claiming to be ‘hardstuck’; we will examine how that can happen.

TLDR for the TLDR: Make the MMR calculation only use the most recent 100 games (for example)

[EDIT: added better links to the images of the stats]

When someone comes onto the forum and complain of being ‘stuck’ at some rank, the response of ‘git gud’ is derisive, dismissive, and more importantly not helpful. Offers to review VODs are usually genuine and I’ve had folks here do me the favor of giving me constructive advice / criticism that has actually helped my gameplay.

Background

As an older player (50+) I know I’ll never be a hitscan god and have no illusions of ever climbing to the above-average ranks like Diamond or above. After I started playing the ‘Competitive’ (in quotes on purpose but we’ll come back to that at a later time) mode, I would lose pretty consistently and quickly started to sink to Bronze and found myself at <500 where you can find the joys of deranking stacks, one-trick-ponys, troll Roadhogs, super accurate Ana’s, and smurfs galore. It’s easy to fill your ‘bad sportsmanship’ plate from the smorgasbord of toxic play available down there.

Coming to the forums looking for answers and finding both an extravaganza of worthless opinions and a lack of any explanations based on math (with the exception of how using the ELO system to rank players being possibly problematic in a team game, again, we’ll come back to that, I promise) , I began to research how SR is calculated. I know, I know, everyone one here is an expert; “win more”, “don’t die”, “don’t feed”, “don’t play tilted”; “you are in the rank you ‘deserve’”, etc. That last one is my least favorite because it both anthropomorphizes a computer algorithm and makes a value judgement on the game experience of a human player. I won’t get into an argument with those who defend the status quo, there are too many forum trolls who feel their place on the ladder is indicative of their worth and sometimes their hundreds of hours of practice (read: grind); wearing their rank like a badge and using it as a proxy for authority over other players. Those who have ‘faith’ in the games design can keep their faith, my task is to peer into the numbers behind the game and possibly shed some light on why certain anecdotes continue to cause debate here, primarily the ‘hardstuck’ player.

Scenario: a new player falls to bronze and then even though they play much better now find it exceptionally hard to rank up.

Assumptions

Assumption: The MatchMaker™ attempts to find a ‘balanced’ match of two teams defined as one in which either team has a 50% probability of winning. There is much sturm and drang expended over this topic. No judgement is made here and the discussion is left for another thread.

Assumption: The MatchMakingRating / MatchMakerRating (MMR) is a real number roughly between -3 and +3 where each whole integer marks 1 standard deviation away from the mean. See this graph of where each group falls in the total population,
www.statisticshowto.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/standard-normal-distribution.jpg
From what Blizzard has said in the past, it is easy to infer that each whole MMR value can be considered a Standard Deviation and maps to a rank threshold, -3 for Bronze, -2 for Silver, -1 for Gold, 0 for Platinum, +1 for Diamond, +2 for Masters, and +3 for Grand Masters. This isn’t exact, but works for our purposes because we are only interested in the bottom ranks, the exact thresholds can move around without affecting the conclusions.

Assumption: All players performance is a normal population and follows a distribution that maps to a normal bell curve.

Assumption: There should be roughly 68% of all players who fall between -1 and +1 standard deviation of the mean.

Assumption: Bronze makes up the lowest 8% of players (this probably varies between seasons but is useful and the exact value doesn’t affect the analysis.

Assumption: MMR is based on statistical methods like Standard Deviations, Confidence Intervals, Mean, etc., and is a proxy for a players overall ability.

Assumption: The game can only adjust your MMR based on the statistics available to it, like win / loss, damage done, time on the objective, etc.

Assumption: The game is using Machine Learning tools, such as a Bayesian Classifier type approach, to calculate how to adjust the MMR of a player based on their performance.

Assumption: PBSR is calculated the same regardless of map. One of the replies mentioned that two maps had different calculations; that might be true but that is the first mention I’ve encountered for that. If you know more about it, please share links, etc.

Assumption: Career stats are tracked relative to Hero and very likely each map. I’ve had consecutive games where my elims were above the stated ‘career avg’ but the avg went down and other games where the opposite happened. At first I wondered if by ‘career’ they meant like the last 100 games, but that makes less sense than tracking stats for each map.

Assumption: The collection of stats on OverBuff are representative of the population of OverWatch players in general for the purposes of examining relative behavior. Looking at just the Reinhart players they have over 4000 accounts being tracked. Yes, they will not the be same as the real game but it provides us with a good enough spread of values to make some overall judgements about the possible weightings of difference performance levels.

I’ll add more assumptions later but this will be enough to help with the hypotheses below.

Hypothesis 1

They are simply a bad player. I’m including this for completeness but recognize it is not really an explanation for the sheer numbers of reports of the scenario. If you are really that bad then, ok, please have fun as best you can, no judgement here. I don’t ever say “you ‘deserve’ the rank you are at”.

Hypothesis 2

Players are underperforming while they learn the game and its heros. While having the most truth, it doesn’t explain players who have improved but still can’t climb.

Hypothesis 3

Players are manipulating the ladder by throwing games with the intent of being ranked at a level well below their actual skill. It is tempting to assign a motivation to these players, I will refrain as the inclusion of this hypothesis is more to describe a commonly reported subject and also to be able to exclude it specifically. This is to say, for the purpose of this post, I’m not taking a position over how often this happens, whether it is bad / good, indifferent, how it may be addressed, etc. Simply put, it is beyond the scope of the math I’m wanting to put forth.

Hypothesis 4: This one is the focus of this post, the others are included so trolls can’t say they weren’t considered. The game is basing the MMR on AVERAGE performance over a large number of games. While this makes sense it also has some rather interesting implications. If every game were to have an equal probability of being a win vs a loss, then the factor that more heavily affects the rise / fall of MMR is individual performance. This topic will be the subject of an in-depth thread of its own later, for now, let us ask the question, what do you mean by ‘average performance’.

Now, to answer this question, I want to include a personal observation, not to claim any expertise but as a way of expressing how I came to this particular conclusion about ‘average performance’.

I’ve been using the website ‘OverBuff’ https://www.overbuff.com/ so I could get a better understanding of the numbers breakdown of my performance. Below you’ll find the actual numbers from 2 consecutive games played on the same account on the same day that each moved my SR by the same value (21 SR, down for the loss, up for the win).

Observation: The fact that this 3rd-party site only gets updated when you exit the client makes me wonder if the same thing applies to MMR updates. This might explain the advice to keep playing until you lose. I would also like to ask those ‘unranked to GM’ people about their play sessions, how many games per session, etc.

**Pro-Tip**

if you exit the client after every match, you can actually see a history of how you did both statistically and for your SR using Overbuff. This was important to me because otherwise it was hard to really understand how your performance in any single match was converted into a SR gain / loss afterwards.

----

What did I learn? Well, after a win (win of 21 SR ) followed immediately by a loss (loss of 21 SR) I could examine both the values for each match separately and how they compared to my career averages when both games had the same magnitude effect on my MMR.

SR for a loss

Seeing the numbers for the loss
image found here: https://imgur.com/Ywpd06V

Loss Stats (in Percentiles)

Elims: 24%
Obj Kills: 41%
Obj Time: 96%
Solo Kills: 95%
Final Blows: 92%
DMG Blocked: 7%
Damage: 14%
Deaths: 63%
Charge Kills: 29%
Shatter Kills: 15%
Fire Kills: 7%
E:D Ratio: 34%
Voting Cards: 34%
Medals: 44%
Gold Medals:50%
Silver Medals:63%
Bronze Medals:35%

You can see that my percentiles were all over the 8% threshold we set for a ‘bronze player’ except for Deaths and E:D Ratio, but that is not surprising in a loss. What is more interesting is if you look at the career averages (see below) and ask “is this a bronze player”? The simple way to approach this is to look at the percentile averages and see if any of them are below that 8%percentile threshold, which two are (Dmg Blocked @ 7% and Fire Kills @ 7%) When you look at the other stats, they are much closer to average and some way above average (Solo Kills, Obj Time, Final Blows). Now, if we ask how much each stat is weighted when calculating performance-based SR, it would be hard to refute a couple of observations. Those stats on the high end of the scale (Solo Kills, Obj Time, Final Blows) must be weighted much lower than the below average stats, otherwise the SR for the win would be higher than the same amount of SR generated by the loss.

SR for a win

Now let’s turn our attention to a win.
image found here: https://imgur.com/jLh1C5Q

win stats (in percentiles)"

Elims: 81%
Obj Kills: 54%
Obj Time: 80%
Solo Kills: 93%
Final Blows: 99%
DMG Blocked: 99%
Damage: 60%
Deaths: 78%
Charge Kills: 98%
Shatter Kills: 68%
Fire Kills: 32%
E:D Ratio: 90%
Voting Cards: 4%
Medals: 1%
Gold Medals:1%
Silver Medals:87%
Bronze Medals:1%

Ignoring the stats for medals (generally good advice) we notice that all of the stats are way above that 8% score we set as representative of a ‘Bronze’ player. The one of the two stats that were low in the loss are now much closer to the high end of the range (Dmg Blocked @ 99%) and the other is relatively much closer to average, Fire Kills @ 32%. The SR for this win is exactly the value of the previous loss (21 SR for both) so it would be easy to conclude that both performances had a nearly equal effect on MMR. In the loss we wondered if Dmg Blocked had a higher weighting in the calculation but that is hard to explain in the light of the top 1% percentile value achieved in the win. This could still be true but the weights would have to be different between a win and a loss and that would be harder to explain from a pure statistical standpoint.

So what do we have so far? A win with relatively high performance having the same magnitude effect on SR as a reasonably average performance in a loss, especially relative to our 8% threshold of ‘Bronze’ players. This is the basis for players asking, “why do I seem to need to play as well as someone two ranks higher just to start heading towards the next rank?”

How do your Averages affect your SR gain / loss

Here are my average stats for the last 99 games as the same Hero.
image found here: https://imgur.com/yxxC9Hu

Single Player Averages (in Percentiles)

Elims: 24%
Obj Kills: 41%
Obj Time: 96%
Solo Kills: 95%
Final Blows: 92%
DMG Blocked: 7%
Damage: 14%
Deaths: 63%
Charge Kills: 29%
Shatter Kills: 15%
Fire Kills: 7%
E:D Ratio: 34%
Voting Cards: 34%
Medals: 44%
Gold Medals:50%
Silver Medals:63%
Bronze Medals:35%

Note: This average snapshot was saved 9 games (4 wins 5 losses) after the two games shown above but on the same day. Mark the difference up to my realization of the significance of the +/- 21 games later in the play session. I don’t expect those 9 games to have affected the averages (of 99 games) enough to change any conclusion.

Discussion

How do we earn more SR for a win then we lose for a loss? Using the stats for these two games, we can say that we’d have to play better than Gold (the lowest stat in the loss) in order for our PBSR to slowly inch our way out of Bronze. If you look at my averages, the lowest percentile is Fire Kills (7%) and Dmg Blocked (7%) so it is obvious those areas are worth improving.

Interesting question #1, if my lowest stats are already near the threshold for the next rank, why is my SR so low?

Interesting question #2, if my averages are already so close to the thresholds that mark the next rank, why do really good performances not affect my SR more than average losses?

Interesting question #3, how much better would my stats have to have been during that win to eke out a single additional SR? For the stat geeks, this would be the marginal SR cost (in performance).

Interesting question #4, if I could maintain that rate, is it accurate that I would have to play 2000 games to go from 500 to 1500? Remember the 50% win / loss balance, so we have to play twice as many total games so half are wins that net 1 SR.

Interesting question #5, if these are my averages after 99 games, playing 2000 more games at that same performance level will only make it that much harder to alter my overall average?

Interesting question #6, is it reasonable to expect a player in this situation (MMR of -3 but with mostly average stats to need that many games to ‘improve’ from the lowest rank when they already have near average stats?

Conclusions

How do we earn more SR for a win then we lose for a loss? Using the stats for these two games, we can say that we’d have to play better than Gold (the lowest stat in the loss) in order for our Performance Based SR (PBSR) to slowly inch our way out of Bronze.

I would like to address those interesting questions, but that might take a while and this post is already long enough, for now take them as exercises for the curious minds out there.

I think we can conclude a few points from the details I’ve shared here today.

#1 The more game an account has played, the harder it is to move it between ranks, because the system has a high ‘confidence’ in your performance and thus won’t adjust your SR as much for each win / loss. The more confidence the system has, the less PBSR you’ll get and thus your climb goes into the hundreds (if not thousands, see above) of games to advance ranks.

#2 The performance of an individual game has less influence on your MMR than how much you move your averages. Want to climb out of Bronze? You’ll have to fight against those 100 poor games that are effectively an anchor on your SR, keeping it from moving much.

#3 Stop insisting on an ‘SR reset’, this already exists and is called creating a new account; the performance averages will mostly result in the same rankings for the vast majority of players and ignores the financial incentive Blizzard has in players creating new accounts.

#4 Last but not least, if you ask ‘what are we supposed to do about it?’ I have a simple answer: Petition Blizzard to limit the MMR calculation to the most recent X games, where X can be a reasonable amount like 100 or 200 games. That way, those games where you were just learning how to use heroes abilities, map layout, etc. eventually stop counting against you.

Thank you for reading this far, cheers and I hope this generates a healthy and civil discussion.

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Hello, this is a good read, but i will advise you to post everything in general discussion, since every other channel is dead completely.

Well written, i will however try to think of a few answers on the questions asked.

I think the mmr takes way too long to adjust to your stat, like i know a guy that climbed from plat to gm on widow, the catch is, he had 39% winrate, When its common sense you need 55%+ winrate to climb consistently.

Because i guess they want the game to take a grind, they want players to play their game more and get more lootboxes out of them so they make him take 50 hours to climb instead of 5 for example.

Idk, can’t answer.

Actually, the mmr affects the sr gain and loss, so with enough stat padding, you can climb with less than 50 winrate as I mentioned, like for exp people who finish 4.6 in a season get a huge sr boost next season so they gain 50 sr per win or more and lose 5 sr per loss.

Possibly, idk though for sure.

Thats the huge flaw, people not seeing immediate improvement even though they have a better skill then the rank they are in are just gonna quit the game, thats a reason this game is frustrating.

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i just want to say that the reason people tell everyone that says “im stuck cuz of noobs” to get good. is because the numbers you get per win are based on performance in low elo

so like if your getting 10 per win but losing 30 it means the game thinks you belong lower due to your past and current performance. if you consistently perform well the game will start too give you the max SR its aloud too.

your point about playing more makes it harder to climb is counter intutitive. i was hard stuck in silver during season1 and 2 (even though s1 didnt technically have silver), barely made it into gold by season 3 but was tilted. finally made it too plat by season 4 then diamond into masters in season 5.

that might not seem like alot, but from when i started to play the game to when i first hit masters. i had played close to 900 hours of overwatch 50/50 split between qp and comp. saying that if you play alot you cant climb is…well dumb.

yes the MMR is a lil different now, but i still routinely climb up every time i come back on that same exact account. climb to 3000, swap accounts. get bored, quit for sometimes a year at a time. come back, place the account sometimes as low as gold, then slowly climb it back to 3000

your assumption implies what i do is impossible. but if a washed up player can come back and slowly climb back into diamond. then why exactly cant a gold player climb into plat? or a bronze climb into silver

its not a matter of math, its a matter of not tilting and trying to find excuses. if i lose i blame myself and solve the problem, if they lose they write forum posts. im suspecting such an action caused this one.

also just going to throw this out there, seeing as it references bronze. im just guessin the OP here is infact bronze. trying to find an excuse

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I think game is using certain stats to determine how much sr you gain or lose which we will never know.

I think one of these stats is “feeding” which could easily be indicator of higher or lower SR after match.

It wont show anywhere in numbers but its also stat worth nothing as it obviously make a lot of difference if you on hog fed enemy team with thousands of dmg instead of only hundreds for example.

Also SR loss gain is not related to only last two games, it take your overall MMR into consideration. I will show you example tonight. I cant post it now from mobile.

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I actually created a tool that simulates random picks at any given MMR (-3 to +3) and plots the skill difference and expected win percentage based on relative MMR and using the knapsack technique.

I codified it and put it into an Excel spreadsheet on Google Docs.

After I finish up making the front page all neat and tidy, I’ll post a link. Right now there’s a lot of scattered data on the form and the full script isn’t done yet. But if you’d like I can post what I have currently.

Note that this tool isn’t designed to be an accurate representation of the matchmaker, it is just a tool that tries to simulate what it does based on what we know.

So far, the win rate estimations are very close to 50/50!

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I would love to see it and am looking forward to the link.

I did consider that the game is using stats that aren’t visible (either in the end-game screen to to 3rd party tools) but don’t believe that would have much impact. I assigned a ‘fairness’ motivation to Blizzard by taking the stance that they would give players the information they needed to know to improve even if said player doesn’t know how to use it or how much weight it has, specifically the end-game stat screen. I might be wrong about this, but it gives me a place to start with this type of question.

I thought about various versions of ‘feeding’ and excluded them for the simple reason that a computer would have a hard time quantifying a metric for behaviors like this. The one exception I’d point out is ‘on-fire’ and that one is more likely than ‘feeding’ or something similar. Remember, the MMR calculation only deals in things that you can put a number on, so think about how hard it would be to decide how to put a number / equation / algorithm behind a behavior like ‘feeding’.

Efficiency and deaths will show if a player is feeding or not.

1 Like

I’m open to ideas, but can you describe the math well enough for a computer to calculate it? What would the equation look like?

Oh, man! This is an interesting thread you’ve presented us with my friend!

encase your links with ` (the one above the ~ key)

example.com

also see: The Ultimate Forum Guide (Codes, Trust Levels, FAQ) - General Discussion - Overwatch Forums

Since season 3, I’ve played 6015 games with a net result of +1500sr (300sr-1800sr) [W:48.21/L:49.11/D:2.66]. As you can see I’ve went up with a slightly negative winrate. Since split roles were introduced in season 18 I’ve went from roughly 1000sr to 1800sr on all roles, give or take. profile is open


Alright, now I’d like to point out some stuff and give a conclusion. Your math seems okay (I’m not so certain about the ±3 you bring up but that’s irrelevant, honestly) but you’re failing to account for the volatile game state that happens after you win 3 matches; along with that you’re also failing to account for PBSR that is counted on a PER MAP basis - Numbani and King’s Row have different values for what is considered “good” placed on them just because of the map and the heroes that are typically played.

To get a correct comparison you’d need to play on the same map with the same character and each time win then lose, or visa-versa, and hope you get accurate game data while losing the same amount.

I’ve generally come to the conclusion that a match that is average for the map and hero you play will result in a value of 23 and have a standard deviation of ±4 as long as you’re within a non-volatile state.

The volatile state is there to filter out smurfs back into their higher rank and I’ve seen it in action personally. I played on an alt account and was down at 1300 then abandoned it and got up to 1800 on my main then went back to the alt a few months later and CRUSHED everyone at that level and was getting inflated SR gains within 4 games. This system also happens in reverse.

Ultimately, my argument is that stat anchors only hold you into a ±3 loop until you actually learn more and are able to put it into practice. Once you’re able to break that loop the game will rapidly boost you as long as you keep winning. When you start losing again it drops you with a “forgiveness” tolerance of the same 3 game loop.

To add to this, I would like to point out something that happened back in around season 8 - PBSR and statistics were giving people unproportional results for unpopular heroes. Just after the large rework to mercy, blizzard either reset their backlog and started gaining new data or they somehow tweaked the entire system to not give more than a standard amount after a new patch launch to give time for meta shift and hero reworks time to catch up with new statistics.

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This is a big issue, and why there is an MMR/SR reset and likely SR decay and revisions to the SR/Comp system in OW 2 to stop the grind. I think the OP is right, the problem is your numbers get “baked” and its more difficult than it should be to climb out. This is often why people literally report getting an account “stuck” in say Silver or Gold, but start an alt, do new placements and go up from there… the whole thing makes a mockery of Comp really.

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You WILL have crappy teammates in some matches, but you’ll ALSO get awesome teammates in other matches.

I think the game is designed for a relatively long grind compared to other games, so this frustrates some players.

One thing I’ve learned is that your odds go up when you queue with at least one other player.

When I solo queue I don’t expect my win rate to be as high.

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There, I fixed that for you.

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Well, like I described, the devs said you have lower odds when solo queuing compared to teaming up with other players.

Fixed it for you:

“Guess which composition has the highest win rate? If it’s not too obvious, it’s a full six stack of grouped-up players. This is naturally because of communication among teammates trumping randoms who are just guessing what’s going on. However, it is worth noting that this win rate is but a mere 52.88% because individual skill and cohesion will always come into play. Meanwhile, the most common composition of “2,1,1,1,1” — two grouped players, four solo players — has a 50.03% win rate.”

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I don’t believe I’m hard stuck, I just need improvement. However, I do think that it’s relatively time consuming to up your mmr because only about 20% of your games seem to be gatekeeper matches against the next tier of mmr. this is despite me having 20/1 kda in games at the tier below.

I don’t deny that I failed the gatekeeper matches due to my own weakness at hog (one of my two weakest tanks. trying to get to diamond on every tank but still haven’t one it on hog/sigma/rein), but I feel like I get about 1/4 to 1/5 games that are gatekeeper matches. when you lose you are then forced to prove yourself again and again for several matches, with low SR gains at the lower tier. though this may just be due to low player numbers on tank. I have 67% win rate but am not ranking up because I fail the matches at the higher tier. however, if the server (taiwan/oceania) had more players maybe I wouldn’t find this to be the case. I bet masters tier and above on low pop servers have it even worse

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This is interesting discussion but I think it overlooks a couple of big factors.

  1. Stats on overbuff are not drawn uniformly.

That data comes from the set of players with their stats public (and considering overbuff still has “Defense” heroes, may also be wonky in other ways). So percentage values on sites like that are not very likely to be similar to whatever blizzard tracks internally.

OTOH, something like your “on fire” time that’s viewable in-game is probably a useful signal. The “on fire” stat is clearly meant to be some kind of approximation of how well you did, and it’s obviously tuned so as to only kick in when a player is doing better than average.

(But it’s still very hard to track meaningfully, since blizzard’s internal math would be comparing your “fire” numbers to averages for a given character on a given map.)


  1. Large-scale ELO effects

At the global scale, the whole thing is some flavor of ELO system, right? And one might naively expect that in an ELO system winning > 50% would be a guaranteed way to climb.

But, here the system isn’t closed - new accounts enter it every day. And since Overwatch isn’t really attracting new players, it’s likely that many of the new accounts will be existing players abandoning a low-ranked account for the SR reset (or more cynically: bot operators making more sub-500 accounts to sell to smurfs).

And if there’s a steady inflow of new accounts replacing ones with low ranks, in a naive ELO system that would push existing low-ranked accounts upwards towards the middle. Everybody who isn’t botting or throwing would naturally drift upwards, feeding on the downward motion of newly created accounts.

So there’s probably some kind of built-in downward pressure to compensate. That is, in low ranks you probably lose more SR than you gain by default, even when your performance is exactly average and and you win 50% of your games.

Or am I missing something?

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What i have read says the exact opposite, that statistically, it doesn’t matter that much 52.8 means literally a 2.85 increase which a good player over time can overcome- who’s right then?

Nice try though. I mean again, you guys can try defend this stinker of a system all you want, it has clear issues both in the ELO system itself, and in the problems of too many alts and the problem of Smurfs. Both of which are unreasonable and affect the ELO system which takes all player actions as “perfect”. If it didn’t have problems Blizz would have no room to change it in OW 2, but they are.

Stacks only really become meaningful by about Mid-Diamond anyhow, in other words around the 87th percentile in the game.

This often seems to be the case. You win, you might get 20 SR; you lose, its easy to lose 30. And this is not on freshly placed accounts either.

This may be true in an absolute sense, but there are enough records to consider them a large enough population with a normal distribution and we can make valid comparisons as long as we use the same population. In this case the same SR gain / loss achieved based on specific performance relative to this sub-set of the population (OverBuff) shows that the areas of lowest performance (for a single game) can’t have that much affect on the calculation because those same areas were much higher in the win and yet the net SR was 0.

I need to think about this one, as it is interesting and a bit counter-intuitive. My understanding of the MatchMaker™ is by creating ‘balanced’ matches it treats measured skill as the currency of rising / falling rank with the assumption that performing near average (when you are ranked below average) would create an upward current drawing players towards the middle. This is why I think there is some weird unintended factor in the system, you can play at an average level and yet continue to fall. Maybe the answer is the influx of new accounts you mention which raise what is considered ‘average’.

Wouldn’t be hard at all. Not so hard with the following variables: Distance from other teammates upon death, proximity to enemy team, damage dealt vs damage taken per time window. I’m reasonably certain that anything a human could divine from any given overwatch situation, an algorithm could as well.

Would explain why my cousin who has played mostly support seems to be in this mode of games he does exceedingly well in numbers wise gains like no points and then loses a ton for a simple leaver on our team. Kinda crazy that the game takes into account our ENTIRE gameplay history in comp…seems counterproductive.

Here you go!

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XtVVYyEx0__EwdrGJ0WGbZr_rUI3Up94Wacu-Fi2kRc

It’s not perfect, but for the most part it shows how some things work behind the scenes. Some assumptions are made, such as the random 12 players are the best possible players found for the match (or that any other players would result in worse odds).

The odds are just a simplified estimation of which team has a the higher skill rating, and thus which team will likely win. It’s pretty fun!

Additionally, I made the matchmaker pull for players with the goal of creating a zero-average skill gap, such that counterbalances are such so that each subsequent player is as close to the average as possible.

This sometimes results in matches that can potentially be several hundred SR away from the target SR goal, but also result in fair picks for the resulting match.

1 Like