I feel you like to use the start and beginning of quotes but always leave out the meat filling. I’m just going to use this one to show some issues with the mmr moves heaps assumption.
So it is similar, but also not the same. Like how a car and a bicycle are similar but not the same.
MMR moves differently. It can move not at all. This is important for the next logic step to remember.
These words all come to the focus point - progression.
What is the opposite of progression? Stagnation. Staying the same.
So mmr can both stay still, and lacks progression.
SR chases mmr. But mmr can do 0 movement and stagnates. So to reconcile these points movement of mmr must be much less than sr.
Basically the exact opposite of your interpretation is there.
I can’t really come back for a few weeks. Work is sporadic so I can only post during quiet times. Assuming you are staying out of this for now too I’ll recommend people reread your last post so they can draw their own conclusions.
I said it long time ago it is a communist system to make everyone “have fun”. So it matches noobs with veterans.
It is a business to keep the majority happy so they can buy lootboxes.
Why shouldnt bad players have 35% winrate and stay bronze? Why are they forced to have 50% winrate?
Lol removed premades from solo queue. Also in Lol it seemed a steady grind up as you improved. I never saw plats group with silvers in a gold average sr games.
Why the fornication do you allow players with 800 sr difference to group togheter?
This system caters to emotions and “leave no man behind” mentality bs.
It is a game people it should be a challenge and not a binary system where the flip of coin is decided before the game starts.
This system is terrible.
I totally agree with this AND your sentiment that there should be a solo-only mode. (As an aside I think there could just be a solo-only SR while they keep dynamic queueing, but that’s a topic for another discussion.) This isn’t really what the thread is about, though. If it is, the OP should cut down the size of the post and get right to the point, which most of us would agree with.
As for the first bit of your post, this is actually what this thread is about and FOR ONCE someone has finally understood! Thank you!
You’re going to get a Table of Contents here to make it easier to follow:
Rank Deflation
Useless/frustrating matches
Inaccuracy at the margins
Summary
(1) So my first concern is that it would lead to rank deflation. I mean that everyone below a 50% win rate would leave. Since OVERALL there mathematically MUST be a 50% win rate (every game has one winner and one loser) then the higher ranked people will eventually start getting harder matches (more often) and their win rate will lower. There will be, of course, some low ranked Very Serious Players that are willing to put up with being stomped over and over to learn. I don’t think you would share this concern, but I would and the developers seem to as well so I bring it up. I think, based on your above post only, that you’d be ok with comp mode being comprised of only good and/or Very Serious Players.
(2) The “WinRate Ranking” will actually lead to more of the problems that people dislike about the current MM. Let’s assume for the moment that everyone is forced to play comp to avoid the first concern. The average player will have a 50% win rate, right? If half are better than you and half are worse, you will win half the time.
Consider how they will get to that win rate though. Some games they will have Bronze teammates. Some games they will have GM teammates. They are average because they will have no effect on the game. Let me explain further.
There are 2 types of players that are the bane of competitive ranking existence, Smurfs and Throwers. They mess with the system because it turns our productive matches into unproductive ones. We don’t actually know which team is better if there is a Smurf or Thrower on either team.
But if you allow all the ranks to mix it up in games, from the perspective of the average player, Smurfs and Throwers will be the rule rather than the exception. Sure, they’re no longer technically Smurfs (they could be technically Throwers, I guess, but there will be no presumption of skill in your match), but the end result, that there is a person much better than you on the enemy team while you are stuck with a bunch of overripe potatoes is still the same. You have zero chance to win this game. Some games will be impossible to lose. It will all be up to completely random chance.
We know this will be frustrating because it’s one of the criticisms of the MM right now! However, right now the frustration exists due to a combination of bad actors, inconsistency in play, and accuracy of the MMR. In the alternative version, this will be part of the design.
The “productive” games, the ones in which you have an effect on the outcome and are able to show your skill, will be rare less frequent. What will they look like? They’ll be games without much higher or much lower ranked players. They’ll look like matches that the current MM attempts to make. The further away you are from average, the more rare these games will be.
(3) Even more to the point, if you are a rare good player, Diamond or above, you will ALMOST NEVER meet your equal in competition. You will have no way of directly comparing yourself to your competition. And you can’t start matching people based on win rates, because matching people of equal skill will result in a 50% win rate, so we’re back to square one. I’m not sure what the OP means as “unproductive” but I think playing games over and over without actually having competition is unproductive. I think you would agree. The person with the slightly higher win-rate may have just gotten lucky with more Bronze opponents, you’ll never know.
(4) Don’t get me wrong, “WinRate Ranking” is actually a perfectly legitimate way of ranking. It could be done like this. You’d have to force people to play it to get any kind of accuracy out of the system and you would never get any accuracy at the extremes of skill. For most of the population the games would feel completely random. This would be true by design rather than a byproduct of the limits of what any MM can do and the interference of bad actors.
The ONLY benefit of such a system is that it’s more intuitively easier to understand, but the current system can be explained. For an explanation of how “Skill Ranking” is actually productive, i.e. how it is supposed to work, go to this post here:
I haven’t seen Mercer say that anywhere, and I don’t think it’s true. The purpose of Match Making Rating is not to predetermine the win/lose result of a match for individual players – that’s impossible. Its purpose is to give every player a 50% chance of winning. It does this by distributing the most skilled players evenly across teams.
My argument is that this form of handicapping is wrong, because it corrupts the win/lose results of games as a measure of player skill. Yet that is what the Skill Rating system is based on: winning and losing. It is the double standard that makes Competitive Play a complete waste of time. By hiding Match Making Rating, Blizzard is being patently dishonest with Overwatch players. We assume that our Skill Rating is based on our ability to win matches in an impartial system, but that is not true.
Maybe don’t attribute moral failing to a technical method of measurement that you simply fail to understand.
Whether MMR is hidden or not doesn’t really matter. Whether skills are spread evenly across teams doesn’t really matter.
There are other ways of measuring skill than counting up win ratios against random opponents, which would be the result of removing the Rating they use for Match Making. Much better ways. Ways that have been used for decades in a variety of sports and games.
MMR is one of those ways and it works much better than your alternative, if you even have one.
But that is exactly what the Match Making Rating system is designed to ensure, so you can’t say that. Blizzard has done a lot of careful engineering to make sure player skill is spread evenly, on a per-match basis. My argument is that by doing this, MMR ruins the accuracy of the Skill Rating system which relies on win/lose results to rank players. By hiding MMR from players, Blizzard not only denies players recognition from their peers, it keeps them from recognizing their own personal handicap in competitive play. That kind of deception is a violation of players’ rights.
I mean in your last thread i linked you to the article, here we go again. As stated before read between the lines
Skill ratings go up when we win a game and play well during it. On top of that, Overwatch is constantly making predictions about how well we’ll play compared to an enemy team and to a chosen hero’s average player stats—and we receive more SR when we exceed expectations. (Contrary to popular belief, the amount of time a player spends “on fire” isn’t a direct influencer as much as it’s a reflection of how well they’re doing). Also, SR isn’t the only measure for skill. There’s also an invisible stat called matchmaking rating (MMR), which only Overwatch developers see. Essentially, SR reflects MMR, but with rose-colored glasses. So, if you’re playing on a super-powerful team against a not-very-good team, and you win, you’ll gain at least the minimum amount of SR, but not necessarily much MMR. That way, you’ll feel rewarded for winning, even though the match wasn’t fair.
And even if it was correct, it is very out of date. The main topic of the article, people’s SR being busted down below their MMR at the beginning of each season, hasn’t been true since Season 5.
If Skill Rating actually used win/lose results to rank players then you would be correct, sure.
You can’t balance matches then use the win/loss results, that’s so obviously stupid I’m actually shocked that anyone thinks that’s what they do. Didn’t you stop to think that maybe you’re missing something before you conclude that the system works in the dumbest way possible?
I described a system that uses win/loss records only. MMR is not it. This is why I don’t think you understand how Skill Rating works. I get that it is hard to understand how it works, so I tried to describe that in the linked post as well.
It’s telling that you keep saying that win/loss is how we rank players. I’m trying to tell you, as a simply factual matter, that’s not the only way to rank players. OW ranks based on estimation and validation, not really win or lose. Individual wins or loses are nearly meaningless to the system. Basically, a loss “counts” just as much as a win.
MMR being hidden is something we could debate, I guess, but even I don’t think having it hidden adds anything to an active account’s ranking. That’s why I say it doesn’t matter, not because it never matters to anything but because it’s not really relevant to your desire to get rid of MMR (after all, if it’s gone whether it’s hidden is a moot point).
MMR would work in any set of relative skills on the teams. I mean, any chance of winning between two teams would provide information for a skill based rating system. 50% estimation is a good starting point, but it’s not necessary at all. That’s what I mean when I say it doesn’t matter, it’s a goal for QoL but it’s not really important for actual ranking of players.
The thing is, if a skill based ranking system works, a 50% win rate is what a person will experience, because in ANY endeavor, two people of equal skill in that endeavor will triumph half the time.
Skill Rating doesn’t go up without a win, or down without a loss. Performance-based SR adjustment is Blizzard’s feeble attempt to restore the meritocracy of Competitive Play; to offset the profound SR-skewing effects of handicapping/MMR. It is a tacit admission that the SR system fails its supposed function of ranking players according to their skill.
If matches were made by an impartial system based on SR rather than MMR, wins and losses would naturally drive players into appropriate ranks. Blizzard chose to pervert that ideal, in order to make their game more addictive. They manufacture 50% odds for either team of every match, at the expense of the best players. At the benefit of the worst players.
Blizzard doesn’t want players to know about Match Making Rating, much less understand it. Competitive Overwatch lacks any user-interface mention of Match Making Rating. It lacks an in-game scoreboard. Blizzard doesn’t want players to perceive the fundamental dysfunction of the Skill Rating system.
“They manufacture 50% odds for either team of every match, at the expense of the best players. At the benefit of the worst players.”
So basically what you’re saying is you’ve completely ignored for the millionth time everything we’ve explained to you about this. How does getting a fair match hurt any of the players on either team? How in the world can you be so utterly convinced that the system rewards bad players and hurts good ones, when clearly the better players get ranked higher, and there is a progression in skill across each rank.
You must realize that PBSR is not necessary as part of a skill based rating system since it doesn’t exist above Diamond, so I’m not sure why you’re tugging at this thread at all. Are you claiming the system works fine for Diamond and above?
Also, words like “profound” make zero sense in this context. It’s not simply a synonym for “large”, it implies emotional importance. Using words wrong like this makes you sound like a charlatan. It would be easier to take you seriously if you stayed away from the thesaurus.
sigh The primary driver of the rating isn’t the win or loss, it’s WHO the win or loss is against. A win against me means something entirely different than a win against Jjonak. To think that it simply “goes up on a win and down on a loss” is exactly the mistake that you are making. That’s not, strictly speaking, true. Though in practice it appears that way, which is good.
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Read the post I linked to above (I’ll post again if you need it) and for Pete’s sake at least TRY to understand how people can be ranked without using a win/loss RATIO.
I’m curious what makes you special, that you can perceive these things that are so well hidden by the multitude of blue posts, tweets, and interviews that attempt to explain that secret MMR that they don’t want us to know about. If you could explain it without using language of morality but rather technical, referenced accuracy, I could be convinced. It’s hard to go from “balanced” matches to “unfair” matches. Bridge this gap.
Attacking the person, rather than the idea he brings to the table, isn’t refuting the idea. It just is a less obvious way to say you have nothing better to say, but don’t plan on backing down either.
Just look at the amount of people who dislike it and think that Blizzard’s matchmaking does a very poor job. 83% of posts during the start of the seasons are complaining about placements. How in the world can you be so utterly convinced that it’s a good thing to have a majority of your users dislike the way you assign them to a team?
