Forced Losing Streaks are Real

It is, 6-stacks get punished.
But my response was to somebody who doesn’t like to play with random players.
You have 3 options then:

  1. Create a 6-stack, no more random people.
  2. Quit the game.
  3. Keep doing what you are doing now and keep whining on the forums

Careful, because this one implies you’ll have Amaro on your heels. :rofl:

1 Like

Keep trolling and being childish, says enough about you and the lack of abilities to have a normal conversation.

1 Like

I mean, even of the system were perfectly transparent, unless there happens to be 12 people of the exact same skill, wouldn’t this be the case whether the matches were balanced or a purely random selection? If it was random and not balanced, don’t you think those matches would be worse in terms of disparity between teammates?

All you have to do is google “Microsoft TrueSkill” to get a basic understanding of how the system works.

They’ve said quite a bit that they form matches based on just a number, that number is MMR, MMR goes up when you win and down when you lose.

That’s pretty much it, for most people, most of the time. All this “complicated” business is for QP, decay, smurfs, punishment, not enough players for even matches, and other edge case scenarios.

I"m not sure what you mean about

though…of course there are streaks in any game.

If you mean proof that Blizzard isn’t going into your game and forcing a loss because you’ve been winning too much…

I’m sorry, but no “facts” will ever show someone that they are suffering from paranoid delusion. I’m not being coy, there are things that you can just not prove.

Can you prove that you’re not living in a “Matrix” style simulation? No, you can’t. You just accept that you are not because the most simple explanation that explains all the evidence is usually correct.

How things work: How Competitive Skill Rating Works (Season 9)

Of course streaks exist. They just aren’t forced. Mathematical proof that streaks in Overwatch are not forced: Overwatch Forums

(Rigging/forcing would be required to prevent streaks.)

If you start off with placements based on stats and roles, players shouldn’t fluctuate a lot from it.

Given time and rewarding you based on purely wins, losses, and “SR” differential of the teams, you could end up with players of different skills at a given team, sure. But if the system was totally transparent, you could then chalk those up to RNG and you know that evens out. You just have to make sure that, as much as possible, if X plays with Y, next game X plays against Y.

In the worse case scenario, you’d end with “conspiracy theories” and odd behaviour to try and game the system (throwing, one tricking and leaving, that are very much used in an attempt to game the MMR and PBSR).

I’m not following you at all…not being rude, but I totally can’t make sense of what you are saying here.

Best I can do, you are saying:

  1. A proper placement system would put people in basically the right place where they wouldn’t fluctuate much.
  2. If people were told how the sytem works they’d be more forgiving of the random nature of matching 12 random players together.
  3. No matter what, you’d end up in the situation we have now anyways…???

I’m honestly trying to make sense of what you are saying before I respond, did I even come close?

Just read the thread I made about how I feel the competitive model should be.

And yes, if the system is totally transparent and minimalistic, I believe people will react better to it.

As to will it make for more imbalanced games. I don’t think so, provided you can maintain a rough balance between the heroes you play, having people placed with others who do the same average dps for 10m, have the same KD ratios, healing and so on, should be balanced enough.

Clearer?

Well, then your three options are really this:

  1. Get cheated by the matchmaker.
  2. Quit.
  3. Get cheated by the matchmaker.

Sooo… No facts? I asked politely for a well-detailed set of facts, but you haven’t done that yet, although you claimed to have been doing it this whole time. Why not now?


First off, I just want to say, I love how you go post to post tagging your own posts. :joy:

Secondly, your posts detail mathematics based upon normal competitive systems. We don’t know everything under the hood, which is why your posts will never be 100% accurate. Even factoring in everything that Blizzard has told us so far, you still wouldn’t be accurate because you can’t be sure they have told you everything/told you the truth. Your posts can’t be trusted because, although they are mathematics, we don’t know the full specs of the matchmaking system.

The reason I asked for facts was because, there truly are none. We have no truthful insight into the innards of the matchmaking system. The forums are a place for speculation.

1 Like

Jeff himself said he doesn’t know everything as to how the matchmaker works.

There really is no way of knowing, unless we can see the source code of the matchmaker and cross reference that with all the stats. And even then, I’d wager it would not be an easy task to draw conclusions.

So, either rework it or remodel the competitive system and it’s rules. Some people seem to be fine with the system as it is, but there’s enough ranting to make a reworking of the mode a valuable endeavour.

I’ll still stand firm on the defense of a minimalistic and transparent systyem.

It doesn’t make much sense to hand craft custom responses to every post, when the same posts come up over and over again. It is much more efficient to copy-paste or link.

I don’t need to have a complete understanding of physics (gravity, wind-resistance, inertia, etc.) to test whether a coin is fair (Checking whether a coin is fair - Wikipedia). I only need to take heads/tails data and match it to an appropriate mathematical model, within the quantifiable errors of the measurement.

Similarly, I don’t need a complete understanding of a rating system to show that streak probability is or is not being manipulated by the matchmaker. I only need to do what I’ve done: take data, and match it to an appropriate model, within the errors of the measurement.

What? I thought you just said that the truth is unknowable without full implementation details of the matchmaker. Have you changed your mind since your first post in this thread?

Even I didn’t know this, but that’s actually pretty funny.

Right.

There needs to be some noticeable change.


No I totally get it, I just thought it was funny.

But if you don’t have complete understanding, then your conclusions will not be 100% accurate.

For example, if the government came out today and said “there are two males for every female.” you could draw mathematical estimates for the number of males based on the number of females you see. Would this be accurate? Well, if you didn’t account for every single female, not perfectly accurate.

Now imagine if you estimated that there were four million males on the Earth from all the females you counted. What if the government came out and said, “Well… we didn’t exactly tell the truth. There’s actually a 90% chance that there are two males for every female that you see.” Now your data will be completely off, if not already off before!

Your mathematics can never be perfectly accurate because you don’t know the ins and outs of the full system.

Another good example would be a engineering problem. If I were to calculate the moment on an object through given perpendiculars and forces, I could calculate the moment on that object if the system was perfect. We didn’t account for gravity, any possible high speed winds, breaks in the material of the object, etc… You will only ever have an estimate, and in the case that your information is given in small bits by a company that wants your money, I’d wager that the information isn’t entirely accurate.

I haven’t changed my mind. It’s a stance I’ve taken based on my own experiences. That’s why I said, “through my own experiences.” If I were to have just said, “I feel like they might exist” this thread wouldn’t have received the attention it received. Similarly, if I named the thread “Streaks may be real?” it wouldn’t have grabbed the attention that it did. A little click-baity, I know, but it had to be done in order to bring light to the topic.

Thanks, it was really brutal. >.<

You are literally asking to prove the non-existence of something.

Do you have proof that unicorns don’t exist?

You can never prove that something does not exist.

I’m not surprised you don’t understand this though. Your standards of what constitutes evidence and reasoning are quite well established at this point.

Is this troll seriously trying to argue now that streaks of wins and losses exist?

Talk about a back track.

Ummmm…ok. Yep. Streaks exist. Discussion closed.

Your thought experiments aren’t great. Going back to the coin example, it is true that you can never know to 100% certainty that the coin is fair. However the more times you flip it, the greater the certainty. Or, more accurately, the smaller the error on the measurement of the probability that any given flip will be heads.

I actually have a model, that shows that the system is not rigged within certain error bars. You have … your feelings? A tiny puddle of selected data with no model or significance analysis?

You’re basically saying that your original post is trolling: saying something you know to be indefensible to get clicks and comments.

1 Like

I don’t know anyone who thinks this is the case.

It’s hard to have productive discussions when people don’t understand the basics of how the MM works. There are some parts that we can still disagree on and have productive discussions, don’t get me wrong, but if someone thinks Blizzard is lying in their posts then its going to become really difficult to come to a consensus regarding problem identification.

Root Problem identification, of course, comes before problem solution.

Gamblers fallacy, friendo.

You’re misunderstanding what he’s saying.

The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future.

He’s arguing the opposite. Regarding whether a coin is fair, the more you flip it the closer you will get to confirming it’s bias. After 1 million flips, you should be vanishingly close to 50% if the coin is fair.