Why would Blizzard go out of their way to make a arbitrary, needlessly complex and convoluted system that can somehow magically detect if a player is going to throw the next round, then proceed to put you with that specific person to artificially change your SR?
Why would they force a silly overly complex system like that when its far easier to just smack together people of similar SR?
I’m legitimately asking. Do tell us why Blizzard would go to such great lengths to intentionally hold you back.
People hold themselves back. They refuse to believe it and try to justify with anything other than their own fault.
The thrower that is always on his/her team, the smurf that always lands in the enemy team, one tricks, leavers etc.
The game senses you want to climb and will do everything in its power to stop you. Only way to reach GM is to stream the game or participate in public tournaments so Blizzard can use the publicity.
It’s the calculated chance you’ll win. Sure, it’s not ‘forced’ but the system does its best to ensure there is only 50% you’ll win. The rest is up to you and whatever your teammates do.
LOL That post was talking about your SR, not your probability of winning
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%.
That’s the thing though, the system doesn’t bother making a game if it thinks you only have 40% chance or less to win. It really does its best to keep it at 50%.
Trying to keep games fair by giving both sides a 50% chance to win is not the same as forcing a player’s winrate to stay at 50%… In fact, what you quoted earlier actually goes against the “forced winrate” conspiracy.
That’s not meant to keep you at your rank if you deserve higher. It’s meant to attempt to make the match not one sided based on average SR. If your actual deserved SR is more than that, then your team has more advantage and the system can’t tell that.
I don’t think they hold you back from a better rank you deserve, that makes no sense.
What I do think however, is that they they deliberately clump win/loss streaks together by giving you streaks of win chance <50% and streaks of >50%
The reason: The game has no story to progress through, you just play the same maps over and over. The only ‘story’ that can keep players engaged is the story of their own progression.
Consider these 2 scenarios:
1 - The game gives you matches with no streaks. You reach the pinnacle of your skill, so your matches start to be -You win a game, you lose a game, you win a game etc. This is boring for players because they feel like they have plateaued and the game is stale. They go and play something else.
2 - The game forces streaks by putting you in a run of games that don’t have a 50% chance to win.
You go on a loss streak and lose 200SR “I’m better than this, I must play more and get my true rank back”
You go on a win streak and climb from the loss streak and higher than you have yet this season “Wow I love this game, I’m gonna play more because I feel good about how much I’ve improved”
Repeat over and over, and players are compelled to keep playing.
TL;DR: The game is repetitive and has no story, and they need to make it addictive in some way to keep people playing and buying lootboxes. It’s the same with a lot of other games, they borrow the psychological technique from gambling machines.
Have you heard of the gambler’s fallacy?
That post explains that the game designs a coinflip. That is all. It tries to keep the winchance at a fair 50% for EVERY match.
This means that if you had won 9 matches in a row, then the chance of winning that 10th match is still 50%.
That is what the gambler’s fallacy is about. The 10th match won’t be a guaranteed loss because of the past 9 wins.
The improbability of winning 9 matches in a row has already happened. It has no effect on the next coinflip.
People who say that the game is rigged, believe that one match it calculated you have 100% chance of a win, then the next one must be 0%, thus leading to a forced 50% winrate. But such a system would make it literally impossible to win and grow SR for everyone, all the time. While some people still improve in SR. But because the system is rigged, it can not be luck or skill that makes people improve in SR. So what does?
These 2 discussions on the subject is what I have to say:
If you really misunderstand it so horribly, imagine you’re a developer and want to give all players a fair match. This means you want both teams to have a 50% chance of winning. The spectrum of skill in OW can be considered vast, so you don’t want a grandmaster widow getting to their rank as slow as a silver improving to gold, because that’s unfair towards the enemies. So you make bigger jumps in difficulty for enemies the bigger the winstreak, until the person seems to hit a wall, then the system ascertains where the cut off point is for their skill faster.
Having a 50% chance of winning doesn’t mean you’re still in silver but face tougher enemies, it means you’re being moved up the ladder faster even if not instantly, and meanwhile you play fairer matches.
actually depending on how the system calculates the 50% it kinda does
let’s say you barely get the win in one and the next game it thinks you deserve to fight against much tougher players so you get matched and stomped by them, the game now thinks your not that great a player and matches you against people well below your skill level and you stomp them, repeating the 2nd and 3rd step in an endless loop.
I will say that this case has been getting rarer and rarer now, when the new matchmaker was released the locked 50% win rate chance was easy to see and everywhere because the AI that adjusts who you fight kept swinging from well below your average to well above your average I think the only reason it’s been “fixed” is the drop off of players and smurf accounts ping ponging everything in place as you start getting them on both teams. the stomp->get stomped->stomp can still occur but is more rarely seen.
Also it’s been close to a year since forced win rate was discussed, Jeff explained why it was happening and some adjustments to matchmaking had been made since to fix it, it was there but not by design, just a byproduct of an overcompensating system.
That’s not what that means though. What he’s describing is a basic function of the ELO system where you’re predicted to win against a lower ranked player and predicted to lose against a higher ranked and it modifies the points you get.
You’re confusing “Forced 50/50” in which the system automatically decides you’ve won or lost too many in a row and gives you a severely mismatched game (i.e. Golds v masters) that is basically impossible to change the outcome of, with the natural result of an ELO which is putting you up against equally skilled players which should result in games being 50/50
Why do you assume that what they said is true? Why do you think that the system they made is complex and hard to make and convoluted?
Just because 1 person said so, 2 years ago in Blizzcon?
I mean the blue posts are in the old forums and you can read them even now, after the whole MM fiasco, they basically admitted that the hidden MMR is the deciding factor on how much SR you will get each season.
When asked to tell us how often does the MMR recalculate itself and how it works, they said a vague “it is too complicated”…
Truth is we don’t even know how 50% of the system works and that this 50% is what assigns you both your teamates and your SR results.
Until i hear from Jeff himself how MMR works exactly your guess is as good as mine.
So far though my experience has been showing that when you solo queue the 50% forced winrate is a thing. I know also from streamers and friends that you can “break” the 50% forced win ration when you queue with 5 people all of which play all the key roles in the team.
There isn’t a forced 50% winrate, but the system trys to set the win chances 50% and this most likely ends in 50% winrates. Doesn’t matter anyway if ~70% of your games is like flipping a coin
