Algorithmic Handicapping (MMR) is Wrong for Overwatch

Competitive Discussion
592

Strictly it would be “if your MMR is lower or higher than the MMR you’re playing at”, but yes.

Fixed it, but good job. There’s not enough difference between SR and MMR for average, non-decayed, non-punished players to worry about a difference in MMR and SR.

You aren’t meant to climb without getting better, no. “Believes” isn’t really the right word. MMR IS your rank, really. Any system that can figure out how good you are is the same system that can be used to rank you. It makes no sense to say it can “believe” you should be at a rank but then put you in some other rank. If it knows how good you are then it can rank you because ranking you and knowing how good you are are the same thing.

Nah. If you are a TrueMMR diamond player playing in MMR bronze for whatever reason (throwing, buy someones acct, REALLY unfortunate set of intitial placements) you aren’t really in a balanced match. You’re waaaaaay under-ranked and will climb out easily. The games aren’t ACTUALLY even matchups, only on paper. This is essentially what smurfing is.

If it worked as you described it no one would ever climb. You can’t have MMR give you a 50% win ratio and then whatever random number you get at level 25 is your SR for life. There’s obviously more to it than that, right? That wouldn’t make any sense.

You should read my primer on how it works, that is how your MMR is eventually figured out:

It does work against smurfs. Smurfs actually prove that the system works as I describe. They are abusing the nature of the MMR system to give themselves a lower MMR than they deserve and their SR goes right along with it.

593

What I don’t like is the fact that your MMR gets adjusted down if you can’t hard carry at a lower ranking if grouped up with a friend.

Season 5(my start)-season 10… I always finished in low-mid plat. 2600 was about my avg. I even one-tricked my main up to 3400 on an alt account.

With the deletion of my main, Symm, I stopped playing solo. I only played with my low-gold friend and even with silvers.

My MMR made the games too difficult for them and we lost… a lot. I’ve dropped all the way down to mid-gold which is about the peak in which my friend starts running into challenges (he’s peaked on all of his accounts around 2500)

Every time I solo queue, I stomp people in gold. I have an occasional game that is unwinable… but it is usually from a leaver or a thrower.

Season 10 I finished 2649. I placed Season 11 (bad placements think it was 3-7… considering I was still adjusting to Symm rework) at 2450ish. My lowest placements since my first season. Since I stopped caring and only played grouped with friends in LFG often having high silvers on my team… my SR kept dropping and dropping. Anytime I felt like seeing if it was me being bad, I would solo queue for a day and win back all my SR. But, I didn’t care about my SR so I continued to let it decay to finish at 2269… my lowest finish ever. Even though my post placement win percentage was over .500.

I started out season 12 the same. we actually went 6-4 (but i had my xbox overheat and on one of the wins I got nabbed for a loss so it read 6-5 even though I only played 10 games) and placed 2234. Understandable, considering I probably got hit with a 50sr penalty for disconnect. This is while playing with a plat ranked account that had a high masters player playing on… it was his smurf that he uses to play with us.

But this shows something strong… my skills havn’t dropped to the point that I am a low gold player. I’m still a plat flex player… but because my friends cannot play at a higher level, I get brought down because I can’t carry them when they are playing at a higher elo… Considering I play support when playing with them… it is a lot harder for me to have a high impact on the game.

This season I have a 16-16 record (so 10-11 post placements, yet I am 50sr down on the season.

Last night I had dropped down to 2090 before dropping the group and solo queuing just to see if I was that bad. I went 5-0-1. The only game that was close was the tie because we ended up with a Symm-bastion on attack Numbani which made the whole team give up on attack, but we full held defense.

The games are so easy that I personally, as the worst widow on the planet, was able to actually do well when my team’s soldier was so bad he had a full tac visor and couldn’t kill a single person, including the pharah that was his job.

If this matchmaker is so good… how did it one, drop me so low on my SR… and two… not prop me back up to at least where I started the season at -25sr? With my record I should be over 2210… but I’m 2181 with a career proven record of always being above 2500.

Now mind you… I’ve always had a problem with climbing when I was on the high end. I had a low MMR that was throttling my wins. I always maintained a winning record (except s11 that I finished 1 win short of .500-- which actually was a winning record after placements, but I lost 200sr during the season) Previously, I would always only win 17-19, but lose 27. I had to maintain a 60% win rate in plat in order to have stable SR. I always though that my MMR was always lagging behind cause I was always winning.

But now? Now I wonder if there is just something fundamentally wrong with it. My friend generally runs around 2000-2200. But groups up with silvers and bronzes.

However, when he did his placements with a bronze, he went 7-2-1 and actually increased his SR up to 2300… and has been free falling in his games as he does anytime he plays in games in the 2300+ range. I usually need to bring in my high master son to play with us on one of his low smurfs in order to carry him.

This system just makes no sense. I’m glad I don’t really care about it anymore… except now my SR is so low that I can’t play with my son anymore on his main account. We have to rely on making low rated account for him to smurf on in order to play… which just makes things not that fair.

Either, I should have never been able to climb to 3400 on my alt (which I’ve retired because Symm has been deleted) doing 100% solo queue or I should not be able to fall this low into gold without actively throwing.

Its like the system is trying to bring me down to silver… or something… (where i originally placed first playing the game) The only time i’ve ever had an even win-loss SR gain is when I played games in mid-high plat with my son where our group rating was in Diamond. This system is garbage and has no idea where to place me because of my wide range of friend groupings.

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594

Yep, this is why the idea of handicapping is so obviously false. The MM isn’t some magical black box that knows your absolute skill at all times. It’s a relative ranking of who you are playing right now.

You’re not being able to do as well while in groups and not playing your main shouldn’t come as a surprise if you think about how it actually works.

I’ve long said that groups mess with the MMR system, though I meant it a bit differently than you describe where you’re not playing a hero that you can make the difference you know you can make.

Generally I mean that the further you get from everyone having the same MMR the harder it is to find a good match. But the problem is that it’s not WELL balanced, not that it’s balanced at all. The group problem is a design choice to bypass MMR in the name of playing with friends. Kinda the opposite of what the OP describes.

I hope no one thinks that your “TrueMMR”, to use my previously defined phrase, is the same with all the heroes. You can easily go from underranked to overranked simply by hitting “H”. Even the pros have a small(ish) pool.

Cuth’s whole idea of handicapping relies on the notion that MMR is very accurate. It can be accurate, but flexing and grouping really throws it off, as you’ve demonstrated!

This is why I teach all my Bronzers to basically one trick at least to gold. You need to do your best to be “underranked” and you’re not going to do it with DPSmoira.

595

Ive been playing since day 1. There is no reward for individual effort. Lack of scoreboard creates toxicity and blind blame. Not matching levels in comp creates un fun and un fair environments. Solo q should only play with solo qs. And this, removing the hidden mmr and sr from comp will vastly improve the quality of life for the game. It’s time for a change blizzard. Or at least a temporary test.

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596

Hear, hear! You’re not the first to demand a scoreboard, for good reason.

No one is claiming that MMR is a “magical black box.” That’s just your way of belittling an argument you don’t understand.

That’s all it needs to be. You completely underestimate the potency of big data.

Yes. MMR perverts the natural selection process that should be taking place in the SR system, replacing it with artificial selection that favors new/inexperienced players.

This is how the MMR system keeps us treading water, rather than making any progress that matches the development of our skill. Thanks for adding your story.

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597

We both think the other misunderstands. Fine. That’s not unreasonable.

However, I have pages of explanation of how I think the system works, how your conception couldn’t work, a detailed estimation of what I estimate is your BEST position, a detailed counter to what I think is your position, and an account of the ways you’ve apparently changed your position to fit the particular mindset of whoever also simply “doesn’t like the system”.

In response, you have this self-contradictory gem:

That “potency of big data”? That IS the “magical black box” bud.

You don’t have a lot of faith in your own position.

You don’t even bother to explain it. You just say that people “don’t understand”. I don’t think you understand either, but I’ve tried to explain, others have tried to explain, and we’re willing to have this discussion otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

If you had any real conviction that this “handicapping” was actually bad you would be able to do the same, i.e. explain to us your position in a way that was convincing rather than just tell us that we don’t understand or that we’re shills or that we’re working for the company you so despise.

If there were any truth to it, your story would be consistent.

Neither of those is the case, though, are they?

If you had half the respect for the community as I have shown to you so far, you’d do your best to explain and answer questions rather than dismiss those who don’t immediately see how you could possibly be right as not just idiots, but planted propagandists.

Heck, I’ll make easy. Explain: how on earth having balanced matches is unproductive for ranking by design? According to my understanding, it’s the MOST productive. Surely you can convince me at least away from MOST productive if you think it’s UNproductive.

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598

Typo?

20 characters.

599

Eh…ton of double negatives. :wink:

600

Your explanation doesn’t track with what we know about MMR, from Principal Overwatch Designer Scott Mercer.

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601

Yeah they’ve admitted it before. It’s a socialism matchmaker and there’s no incentive to try to win.

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602

How do you mean? What specifically doesn’t track? Surely within the pages you’ll find something more specific to critique.

603

I don’t think there’s anything “social” about Match Making Rating. It is co-opting the best efforts of experienced players, to give inexperienced an artificial advantage. An advantage that those players will lose in turn, if they decide to keep playing the game. That kind of manipulation turns Competitive Overwatch into senseless noise. It causes antisocial/toxic behaviour, because we are all racking our brains to make sense of something that is senseless by design.

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604

Remove MMR for one day and everyone playing will get to the rank they deserve I’m 90% sure of that.
MMR did a good job at getting players into low or high ranks but everything in the middle feels like chaos.
This system feels like mud, you can’t climb fast but you can’t derank either.

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605

“This system feels like mud, you can’t climb fast but you can’t derank either.”

It’s almost as if people’s skill levels don’t change drastically overnight.

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606

without mmr skilled players would be on the same rank far too long ruining majority of equally skilled matches

if a players mmr is 2800 but his sr is 2200, he will stomp everyone until he gets there but without mmr he won’t get there fast enough ruining matches for hundreds of players

607

How so?

SR is a number for ranked play. It goes up if you win, it goes down if you lose. You the amount you win or lose depends on how much SR you have going into the match compared to the SR of the other team + the SR of your team.

If MMR is taken out of the equation, there would be no hidden number that takes stat padding into the equation so that gain and losses are merely effects of winning or losing. A MMR 2800 player may be good mechanically, but what if he doesn’t know how to help out a team? Does that player deserve to rank up even if the selfish stat padding plays are causing team fights to go south thus losing the match?

Ranking up will be slower, yes. But the ranks will also have more meaning. The issue is most players start in silver, gold, and plat. They never had to work for those ranks. If everyone started at bronze, and climbed their way out, the system would be fair.

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608

That won’t happen because SR closely follows MMR.

609

It can happen, it just takes a lot of bad luck.

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610

Give us the formula! We demand it!

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611

because some players are just naturally better so they don’t need to be in those ranks

i never touched silver nor bronze, i was in gold for some weeks and next season i was diamond right away, would make little sense to make me stay at 2000 sr where i was placed to slowly climb out.

mmr also calculates which rank you start at, you cannot have this game make everyone start at bronze, it would be unfair for the real bronze players if it put me there with them.