The system has always been trash and the more they have tweaked it season after season makes it worse… I believe that if Blizzard actually told us everything on how the system works most people would recognize it for the sham it really is and leave. Blizzard painted themselves in a corner on this one. Worst ranking system I’ve ever seen by far. This system does nothing but promote toxicity in the games community. It’s so screwed up in so many ways that there is really no hope for it. I just hope more people keep leaving the game so Blizzard has no choice but to scrap it and start over. It’s probably the most worst and most exploited ranking system in video games today.
I find this one of the strangest theories out there. What advantage would such a broken system have? Why implement something so complicated and difficult, when just matching by rating and bumping the winners rating up and the losers rating down works fine?
This is also pretty unnecessary, as win/loss streaks happen naturally in all ladder type games. If Blizzard actually desires win/loss streaks, they don’t need to do anything to force them.
Your intuition is failing you. See https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20759379305
People generally ask for longer wait times for high quality matches, then complain when the wait times are longer. Blizzard periodically messes with the parameters, and tries to guess where the average person is happiest.
But of course you are correct that wait time can also correlate with population. There are a large number of variables here: time of day, location, platform, and Blizzard doesn’t publish anything, so all we can really do is speculate.
I am pretty much always in favor of more transparency. I think at a basic level it makes the game better, and that Blizzard shouldn’t be afraid of it. If revealing some aspect of the system makes the system gameable, then that aspect should be removed rather than obscured.
Because they can? Well, because over-engineering exist, a lot, especially with big data, and a lot of money. “Simpler is better” is not really the mantra of Bliz… or MMR would not exist (or SR would not exist… wait a minute, at start in season 1, it was like that! SR was added afterwards, and we have “split brain” problems since then) I believe some engineers have to show something complex so they stay relevant.
Bliz has also the rep to be stubborn on their decisions, never admitting their faults. To sum up, they overcommit on bad solutions and when it goes south, they build something totally different. Better “reworking” the whole mess into a new stuff than patching it, that would be admitting it was a bad design. Software industry as a whole.
Season 1 had SR, or basically the equivalent, as well. It was just on a different scale and presented differently, but that doesn’t matter. That’s just the aesthetic presentation of your rank. It would be like them changing what the tiers are called, and acting like they changed match making.
You still had a hidden MMR that was used to make matches. While they did change a lot of stuff in S2 (like getting rid of coin flip!), as far as I know, they didn’t touch match making.
And do you think people didn’t complain about all this stuff in season 1? Lol there has literally never been a ranked system that didn’t have people ranting about how they are unfairly held down. Season 1 OW included.
Anyway, this is a fantastic post. The difference between it and all the “conspiracy theory” threads should be obvious. It’s well written, well sourced (with actual evidence!), and has coherent points.
Compared to ramblings that most “conspiracy theory” threads present. Rants with no evidence, incoherent jumping between different ideas, etc. It should be obvious to anyone whose managed to get through high-school level writing/science which is legitimate, and which is not.
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When 10’s of thousands of people are posting and experiencing the exact same thing on these forums, reddit, YouTube and all other social media outlets it hardly is a Coincidence or a Conspiracy Theory anymore… Sorry not sorry… Great Game… Trash ranking system…
By my count, there are probably probably less than 100 people on the forums (including reddit, etc.) that agree with you. Certainly less than 1000. One of us is bad at counting, and I don’t think it is me. Now, there have been 10s of thousands of posts, but that is because you and people like you post so many duplicates.
And the theories of how matchmaking really works don’t agree with each other, so you can’t describe it as “experiencing the exact same thing”. For example, some people (such as Cuthbert) think that being a high performer gives you matches fixed against you. Some people (such as MHz and Olorin, above) think that being a high performer give you matches fixed in your favor. When you look through my popular myths section, the theories are all over the place.
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The old “the smallest percent are the loudest” rings true.
Excellent post OP !
One thing I realize tho :
If a player gets noticeably better, it can take a long time to get to the correct rank. If a player maintains a 55% win rate, he will only go up approximately 220 SR/MMR every 100 games.
In this season, I’ve drastically improved my game (played all seasons, at some point it’s inevitable) : My 8 played heroes all now have between 60% and 80% winrate, main being at 70%, 63 games played, jumped from 2400 to 2650.
I’m now very reluctant to continue this season because I know the system’s balance algorythm (50% chance for both teams) will be more handicaping than fair (it already started to happen tbh).
Is my prediction wrong, basically ? Does this mean that once you go past a certain winrate and SR gain, you should simply stop trying to climb ? (until next season ofc)
Handicapping and forced 50% win rates are listed under the popular myths section. That is, “the system” is not trying to keep you down. If you fall back down to where you were, it would mean that you have only been lucky, not good. More likely is that as you play more games, your win rate will drift down to 50%, but at a higher SR than before, as your overall skill has improved and you are finding your new level.
You shouldn’t sit on your SR like you are waiting for it to hatch. Generally, the times to stop playing competitive are when you are tilted, or tired, or there seems to be an unusual number of trolls on-line in your SR bracket / region / platform (I’ll usually quit after one super toxic game, but your mileage may vary). The last week of the season tends to be bad for some reason.
Other than that, the more you can play, the more opportunities you will have to improve.
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Great answer, thank you ![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5" ":slight_smile:")
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The matchmaking section was getting pretty unwieldy, so I separated it into two sections: matchmaking and skill rating. I think I’m mostly done with edits for a while, but no promises.
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I play with top 500 Dva during offseason and I am only a diamond scrub. Figures why?
My winrate previous season was also around 60-80% and I stayed exactly the same as last last season (in diamond). The system honestly judged you based on hidden MMR so heavily, so even if you are winning and ‘improving’ if you have an old account, you will just going to stay there forever.
Your story doesn’t add up. What was your complete win, loss, draw record for last season? What was your starting and ending SR?
This analysis of the complex matchmaking, MMR, and SR systems was done by a guy who once tried to argue that because you’re decently likely to have one streak of 6-8 heads or tails in a row across a set of 200 coin flips, you’re also likely to consistently get streaks of 6-8 in a set of 20 flips too.
Just because something is wordy and well organized doesn’t mean it’s reliable or accurate.
Do you have a source for this or are you going to encourage people to dismiss his entire work simply on your potential complete misunderstanding of some unrelated discussion?
us.battle . net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20759379241?page=1
I saw nowhere the statement you claimed. Could you please help me find it by being more specific? Was it the link about casino streaks?
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The part Moocow is talking about
People who fake data without any prior mathematical knowledge of odds tend to stop runs at 4 or 5 H’s or T’s. In reality, the longer you keep flipping the coin, the more and more likely it is that you will get longer and longer streaks. A run of 200 coin tosses reduces the probability of NOT getting a run of at least 6 to only 3.47%. The professor simply divides the papers into two piles depending if they have a streak of 6 or more and those without any streaks. To a high degree of accuracy the ones without streaks are fake data, and the ones with streaks are real data
It actually says the opposite of what you claimed. The chance of not getting losing streaks is much, much smaller than what most people intuitively believe. That’s not quite saying
but if people underestimate the chance of streaks in 200, they’re also underestimating the chance of streaks in 20.
The thing about science, and those that are scientifically literate, its that, contrary to popular belief, WE WOULD LOVE TO SEE DATA THAT SHOWS OUR THEORIES TO BE INCORRECT because more than anything we want to know what is real.
If you, or anyone, has actual data that shows anything but what the devs have so far claimed that would be welcome news.
So far the only people that have the data reinforce this thread, not the others that disagree with it. They claim all day their experience is different, but oddly no one writes it down for independent verification. I dunno, maybe Blizzard knows who is scientifically illiterate and punishes them with SR losses.
It’s not that it’s well organized or wordy. It’s that it’s backed up with data that is referenced for anyone to verify. That’s the key to believing what is true vs. what is false. Verifiability. Not feewings. Especially not your own subjective experience.
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