I understand your logic there, jacqui, but I don’t believe it’s correct.
This is what you think will happen (this is an analogy):
Each team has 4 players.
You can objectively measure the skill of each player by a rank of 1-4.
If you are a rank 4 player and the rest of the players on your team are 3, but all of the players on the other team are 3, then you should win more often than lose.
You can do a simple sum and see that 4 players times 3 equates to 12. The opposing team has a total skill score of 12, while if your 4 players all have a score of 3 but you, with a 4, then your team score sum is 13. Your score is greater than their score, so your team should beat these teams more often.
If that’s your equation, there’s nothing wrong with the equation, but that’s not how this works. You’re over simplifying what’s happening.
This is more along the lines of what’s happening:
There are 4 players, but there are 8 heroes to choose from.
Hero 1 counters 2, 2 counters 3, 3 counters 4, 4 counters 5, 5 counters 6, 6 counters 7, and 7 counters 1.
Hero 1 thus is countered by 7, 2 is countered by 1, 3 is countered by 2, etc.
So this happens:
Let’s create a simple metric for time played. Time played will intrinsically equate on some degree, to overall skill. This is self-evident, and we’ll use this metric for simplicity purposes.
So let’s say then that you have 3 groups of players. Players who have played 10 hours, 100 hours, and 1,000 hours. I’m going to say this is Bronze, Silver, and Gold.
There are 8 heroes, so you have to distribute your time across them. If you’re Bronze, you have 10 hours to distribute. Say you did it like this:
Hero 1 = 4 hours
Hero 3 = 3 hours
Hero 5 = 2 hours
Hero 7 = 1 hour
Now remember that hero 1 is countered by hero 7. So imagine on the opposite team, they have a player by sheer chance, that looks like this:
Hero 7 = 6 hours
Hero 3 = 3 hours
Hero 1 = 1 hour
Now your best hero, hero 1, is going to be ruthlessly countered by this player. And dumb luck might rule that if this player counters you with hero 7, who’s counter is hero 6, but the only player with more than 2 hours of skill on hero 6 can’t play hero 6 because they are the only healer and nobody else can will switch, refuses to switch to hero 6, or does switch but it happens that the opposing team has the counter to hero 6, then you’ve the chances of your success change tremendously. It’s sheer coincidence. You do not have more resources than this. You have 10 hours of play time to invest, and this is how you invested it. You can’t change it. The variable is now set.
As the match making system continues to randomize all of this, over a long period of time you gravitate towards about a 50% ratio eventually, which would make sense if things were balanced, but it does not make sense, because the more you play, the better you get, so if you were an elo of say, 100 out of 1,000 and improved from a skill level 3 player to a 4 player and thus your win rate increased to 60%, then you should increase from 100 to maybe 150 until you level back out, but I don’t believe this happens often.
I would like to see the evidence that it does. I want to see players who are queuing solo per capita compared to number of games played and see if they are incrementally jumping up as they play more. There should be a direct correlation between play time and elo increase over time on the average. There has to be, virtually every human being who invests time into something gets better at it. Different people hit diminishing returns at different levels, but it would all average back out to seeing that on average, players are increasing in elo as their play time increases along a single continuum, and I currently don’t believe this is happening.
And say you’re in diamond but have an alternate account that’s in gold. Say on both accounts you have a 50% success rate. This should not be able to exist. Again, if your overall team score is 13 opposed to the enemy team’s 12, then your win rate should be above 50%. It might not be 60% or higher, but it should be above 50%. If it isn’t above 50%, then that can’t be because you’re in diamond. The highest signifier of success then must in fact be random team allocation. It HAS to be. There is no alternative because if you made it to diamond and stay there, then you should be objectively a better player than the players in gold or below. You MUST be a 4 skill player when everyone else must be at least a 3. There’s no other way to look at that. So if your win rate isn’t >50%, then the metric for win percentage must look something like this:
For every skill point past the median (3 in the above example), your win rate % increases by 0.5% (neglegable). Success dependencies increase win rate by ~10% based on team allocation.
If this were even somewhat true, what that means is that the randomness of your team is a larger factor of your success until you hit a specific threshold. Maybe a master player has a skill of 5, and if you are 2 skill points above then that increases your success rate from 0.5% to 5.5%, so you would see an increase that would slowly decrease until that skill level 5 player were on teams of players with a 4 rank, then it would drop back down to ~0.5%, and you would get stuck in a given rank. This would actually explain how someone in diamond or above could get stuck in a lower rank on another account.
And my entire argument is and has always been that the match making is the number one problem. Players need to be able to incrementally succeed. Even if your team loses, you should be able to succeed. I’ll go back to the basketball theme: If LeBron switched teams to a poor team and they started getting creamed, nobody would think LeBron suddenly sucked. They would watch him play like an Olympian, and chastise the fact that even the star player on the team can’t necessarily carry the team.
Remember, there are ALWAYS diminishing returns on these things.
