Its not a exactly a penalty, but the matchmaker tries to keep groups of equal sizes together to ensure a fair play experience for all players. I personally don’t agree with the rule but this is what Scott Mercer has said in the past about it.
There are many other reasons for the SR gained or lost after a game to differ in magnitude that have nothing to do with grouping:
What was the quality of the enemy team and your predicted win chance? You gain more on a win if your predicted win chance was <50%. You gain less on a win if your predicted win chance was >50%.
Are you playing consistently? New accounts or accounts that have been inactive will see larger magnitude changes both upwards and downwards. This settles back to normal as you play additional games.
Did your 3000+ SR recently decay due to inactivity? If this happened, you’ll gain more SR on a win until you get back to your “undecayed” SR.
Are you a Platinum-tier player or below? If you performed particularly well or worse than what is considered a typical performance during a match, then there’s a small SR modification to reflect that.
Is your current SR really high? Your SR increases less on a win than it decreases on a loss as your SR approaches the systemic limit of 5000.
Now let’s talk about groups and matchmaking a bit. Interestingly enough, there’s actually more grouping going on than you might think! For the next set of data, we’re going to look at all competitive games from February 1st up to May 28th of this year.
Only 16% of all games purely consisted of solo players.
The most common match composition is 2,1,1,1,1 vs. 2,1,1,1,1, which represents 28% of the all matches.
If you are in a full team of solo players, 73% of those matches were against another team of solo players and another 24% were against a 2,1,1,1,1 team composition. Only 3% of the enemy teams were groups of three or more players.
If you’re in a duo, 74% of your matches are against other 2,1,1,1,1 teams, 14% against 1,1,1,1,1,1 teams, and 8% against 3,1,1,1 teams. Only 4% of the enemy teams you faced had groups of four players or more.
If you’re in a full six player group, 92% of your matches are against the combination of other six player groups; 5,1 teams; 4,2 teams; 3,3 teams; and 2,2,2 teams.
The matchmaker was designed to try and create games with equivalent-sized groups, especially for solo players, and these statistics show that it’s doing a pretty decent job. We believe that games with equivalent groups create the fairest possible experience, and fair games create the best chance of players having a fun experience. When the matchmaker does compromise, it’s usually during off-hours when there aren’t as many available players, as well as at the lowest and highest extremes of SR.
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