Lets talk about alt accounts and matchmaking

General Discussion
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Since Dafrans last to GM stream brought up the subject of smurfing i think it is the time to talk about the matchmaking and the sudden growth of alt accounts again.

Yes, my profile is public and you can check my rank. I gave up on ranking up but that will be one of the subjects in this thread. Denying opinions for having lower rank than the subject is just a childish and coward thing to do. If you have different opinion then that is fine. What would you do to make the matchmaking and the MMR system better?

1. The matchmaking with groups

It starts to become more frequent over time that solo and duo q’s are being placed against 6 stacks. And the result is very obvious. The 6 stack hardstomps the other team. Its easy to say, to use LFG:

Looking at LFG

“Looking for derankers”
“Road to bronze”

6-stacks are needed to placed only against other 6-stacks. The same with 5-stacks as well since theres a lonely solo q in their team.

2. There were MMR tweaks but no reset

Looking through ranked since S2 there were many tweaks to the system like greatly reducing the streaks rewards or losses or shortening the length of a season but since that 2,5 year there was not any reset. The placements are became just 10 regular matches making climbing beyond hard to those who has the game since S2. To solve this problem i suggest an MMR reset in every year or after tweaks in the MMR system.

3. The rampant growth of alt accounts

The most annoying things that can happen to you ingame. Not someone in you team disconnecting, not someone being toxic at you, the fact that you can buy any amount of copies of the game, second chances to set your rank in competitive.

Lets take this example:

You are bought the game for the first time and feeling ready after weeks of training and practicing to start doing your placements. In the enemy team there is someone with an alt account because his MMR is fresh like yours. In his main account he has 1000+ hours in the game and possibly more amount of alts if hes a pro gamer/ popular streamer. You end up being spawnkilled every time by the alt and the match ends up in a humiliating defeat. What would you do in this situation? You could’nt learn anything about skill from something like this happening to you.

And like i said in the beginning, this is the part where i decided that i dont care about my rank anymore. In the current system you can be a silver with plat skills or you can be diamond with silver skills. All the ranks have merged together and the skill of the players you get in a match is completely random. It makes learning from your rank impossible in most of the cases. If someone is tired about his low rank just buys a new account and with hardstomping newbies gets a high elo making the defeated newbies already give up on the game.

Blizzard, if you detect more accounts on competitive from the same IP, please ban the last one from competitive. If they have different owners, let them prove in Blizzard Customer Service like you have when you want to switch between countries.

You have to watch out for your pro players and popular streamers when they are in stream do bronze-GM’s with alt accounts for the 5th time and get away with it. When they motivate players to throw on purpose.

If you like these players or streamers, then its fine. I dont want to change your point of view but you have to accept that not everyone has the same opinion as you.

4. The lack of unranked mode

QP currently is divided between tryhards, those who warm up before going to ranked and those who only want to chill and have fun.

To solve this, there has to be an unranked mode to be made. The same rules as competitive has (maybe even letting CP to get) but without SR. It will make tryhards and those who warm up to move into unranked. And if you want to learn new characters in a competitive environment, then it is the perfect place for you as well.

To summarize it, you at Blizz are thinking about 222 and role based SR now. You have to watch out for many things that made the current system into the worst possible. The alts, the matchmaker on groups, the smurfing, the lack of MMR reset, the decaying at higher ranks and the lack of unranked mode.

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Not to mention all the ban evasions alt accounts can get away with…

Seeing someone down 1k+ Sr from the Sr they had at the start of the season can tell a picture.

It’s one of two things.

They either got unlucky and placed way higher then they should be and the matchmaker adjusted them accordingly.

Or.

They want to curb stomp low tier players.

But yeah I’d be down for an unranked mode.

2 Likes
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We could do with another mode that has some teamwork to it, unlike Quick Play which generally has none and should have some teamwork, but without the strange skill rating metric that Competitive Play has. Problem is off-season isn’t generally taken seriously either so the question is would unranked just be a mess, hmm.

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MMR reset is totally useless without changing the calculation methods.
In games where it’s have been done without changing the calculation methods it was horrible show and the end point was the same.
The only critique i have on the current method is that it’s not fast enough to recognize where the player exact skill, but it’s like that on most of the games, and if some game doing that fast enough - they have other big flaws because of that.

Not true, there is nothing to support that except some personal anecdote.

On the other side, we have stats that show radical differences between ranks, in all the stats category we have.
How much it’s accurate we can’t tell since we don’t have the exact stats, we do have the words of the developers tho.

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Yes, but the groups are adapted to that. The team of duos & trios should have higher MMR than the 6-stack team. I usually win against 6-stacks.

This game does not have so many players to match 6 stacks against 6 stacks. Queues are already long enough for big stacks.

Reset is not appropriate, it was a huge mess last time. Only people who think they belong higher want this reset - it won’t change anything. Maybe you will be placed higher, but you will eventually end up where you were previously.

Placements should be taken as a fresh start. I believe your MMR changes more rapidly in placement & is more tied to your performance as it’s not tied to SR in placement state.

So you suggest a huge mess after each year? Nice. What’s the point of climbing when it’s gonna be reset after a year?

I don’t see any issue with this.

Well, when you enter your first placement match, you are placed in a ~2300 MMR match. If you are a higher skilled player, you are probably going to defeat the enemy team. That is reflected in your MMR. It will rise up to ~200 points. Yes, it will be slower and slower as you play more matches, but you will end up in really high rank (masters). And after placements, you will be granted ~60 SR per game. If you continue playing and winning, you will end up where you belong.

The players who did this sort of “challenge” (unranked to gm, …) should not be punished as they didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t get firstly placed in a 2300 MMR match - the game did it, because it doesn’t want you to be in a too high or low MMR match. The game doesn’t know what is your skill when you enter first placements. That’s why the MMR bounces in really high numbers. This is not smurfing, they didn’t throw on purpose & then climbed.

Imagine having a new player scenario instead of a GM player:
The player will be eventually placed in bronze. Did the player hurt your match somehow? By you, he did, because he wasn’t placed in a bronze MMR match.

Even the devs themselves stated that MMR gets more certain if you play more.

This is not gonna work. That’s like “Hey, we detected a new IP login on your account, let’s ban it for account sharing”.

Off-season was already bad (no one tried at all). It was just more MMR balanced Quick Play based on competitive rules with leaver penalty.

To summarize it, the system is not bad at all, the system has the ability to detect around what rank should new accounts be placed in, match you at your current skill against relatively same skilled players.

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Gonna have to disagree there.

I promise you that there is indeed a difference between ranks. Sure, the exact line between 2499 and 2501 is completely arbitrary, but when comparing the likes of Silver to Plat+, there is a noteable difference. I can get away with so much stupid stuff in lower ranked games because they just don’t punish those sorts of plays like they would in higher games. Likewise, I know I am not Diamond material because I’ve been there, and I’ve had my Plat tier mistakes punished hard.

Yes, within a specific rank, there is some genuine skill variance, especially in the average rank of Gold. But there is certainly not enough to keep someone down in a tier far below their skill level. The closer you get to where you belong, the harder it is to climb. Stonewalling at a certain rank means you just found your spot on the ladder. You’re not being held down by worse players since the enemy will have the same problems you do.

No thank you

Resetting the MMR completely would actually make competitive into the genuinely random game mode you talk about later. It wouldn’t be players relatively close to one another duking it out, it’d be a stream of constant one sided stomps as all the high tier players are now on the same level as low tier ones, and you’re just flipping a coin to see what side you’re on. When the game fist started it wasn’t that bad because no one knew what they were doing, so the skill gap between the top and bottom wasn’t that huge. But now, people have learned the games and the skill gap has spread itself out a fair bit. GM is drastically better than the likes of Diamond, and forget Bronze. Squishing all the ranks back together into one little clump will actually make the game miserable to play until things settle out again, which would likely take months.

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In every game what has an annual MMR reset the randomness only takes a month. But at least 2 years ago silver-plat is a huge randomness. If someone is skilled enough then they can climb their way back to masters+ if not, then they stuck.

For example my first ever placement was 1526 back in S3 then without any defeat i climbed to 2006. I saw how the players skill becoming higher with each 100SR i climbed. For now i was in silver, gold and even with my friend in plat and all of them felt the same.

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My first placement was in Silver.

My peak is in Diamond.

There is certainly a difference between the two, and I definitely noticed a shift as I climbed, especially more recently as I had to climb up from 2200 to my current rank.

Hitting Plat when you’re a Silver or Gold player back when winstreaks were a thing (same time when I hit Diamond as a Plat) doesn’t mean that the ranks are the same. In fact, that’s exactly why winstreaks were removed, because people would get a few lucky games and get boosted out of the rank they belong in.

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i gave up on being angry about smurf accounts and the broken matchmaking that is the consequences of it.

i just join the club

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