MMR purpose is to maximize profits

Competitive Discussion
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SR, the “Skill” Rating, is a meaningless number. Anyone who has played for any length of time knows that you will find a HUGE range of actual skill at any give SR. This is because of the MMR mechanism - your HIDDEN “match maker rating”. The stated purpose of MMR is to quickly ID smurfs and protect the general community and their game play from being ruined by said smurfs. That’s not the whole story.

With the MMR system in place, 12 players are selected from the same approximate SR and these two teams are balanced out based upon cumulative MMR to try to predict (not force) a 50% win rate. It is a given that on each team, someone is the best, someone is the worst. Games come down to whether or not your team’s best is better then the other team’s best. These are the carry roles and no one ever wants to be stuck in that spot.

Basically, serious players are grouped with casual players to “even out MMR”. Really what this means it that serious players get stuck carrying casuals.

The alternative, a flat, organic SR that is the ACTUAL skill rating for player. The negative side of this is an increased barrier to entry and casual players get smashed by serious players and it will take a lot of said smashing for players to find their true, accurate SR. After that, it’s smooth sailing and, hypothetically, fair games where EVERYONE on BOTH teams is close the same actual skill.

That will never happen. With all the lore and comics and hoopla surrounding Overwatch, the VAST majority of the community are casual players. That’s where the money is at. A single SR rating would result in a lot of casual players quitting out of frustration. Hence we have competitive mode without a scoreboard, nice shiny medals to protect the under-performers from criticism and a Skill Rating that we can never actually see.

It’s amazing to me that an eSport based on this ridiculous competitive setup is being taken seriously by anyone.

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2

Totally agree. Match Making Rating handicaps matches. Blizzard is using long term players as crutches for new players. They sacrifice our mobility in the ranking system to make the game marketable.

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3

Honestly, the real problem isn’t teammates.
It’s the ridiculous smurfing problem, turning good players into their own rank into underperformers, especially in Diamond. Even a Top 500 tryharding will get placed into high diamond…

Why Blizzard is showing no signs of fixing this, I have no idea… Wait a minute…

MONEY.

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More insane conspiracy theories :roll_eyes: . I wish Blizzard would clean this dumpster fire of a forum up so we could actually talk about competitive without it constantly being derailed by this lunacy.

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Maximizing the experience of the majority the player base for a commercial game. Clearly insane.

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Matchmaking is done by MMR alone. SR does not factor into it.

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20753625906 “If you do decay, it only affects your current displayed skill rating. This decay does not affect the internal matchmaking rating we use, so we can still place you in fair matches.” – Scott Mercer

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20758686566#post-2

https://twitter.com/playoverwatch/status/850435344457543680 Note however, that the second sentence, “Also players’ displayed icon …” is no longer valid. Players’ icons now change as a player loses SR.

https://twitter.com/ww/status/867570441182826499

Those who would like a conspiracy theory free explanation of how the system works, please see:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/how-competitive-skill-rating-works-season-9/14009

which can be summarized by:

MMR is a (hidden) number that typically goes up when you win, and down when you lose. How much it goes up and down is a complicated formula, based on many factors, but the essential truth of wins are good and losses are bad is certain.

That MMR is then used to match people with and against people of similar MMR, in an attempt to create a 50% match. Here is the key part:

If a player’s MMR is wrong and too low, then the odds to win will be greater than 50%, and the player will win more games than he loses, which will cause his MMR to rise over many games played. He will then be placed with stronger and stronger opponents (and stronger and stronger allies) until his MMR is correct, and his win percentage approaches 50% (with some random oscillation around 50%).

Once a player finds himself trapped in a rating range, the only way to break out is to improve as a player and play enough games to overcome any random factors.

What is SR then? SR is a visible and friendlier approximation of MMR. It has no more meaning with respect to matchmaking than tier icons. However, except for top players who have decayed, MMR and SR are closely linked, so inspecting SR typically gives a reasonable estimate of a player’s MMR.

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Or not.
:cactus: :cactus:

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You keep saying this but it cannot be true. It may be true for the decayed gms but not for the 99.999% of the ladder. Blizzard has stated that they changed the match making a while back to have both individual and team average SR closer. A GM playing bronze to GM at 1600 is still matched with other players close to 1600 not other GMs or even golds but his MMR has to be as high as it can be for a silver player. In my opinion SR has to be a factor in match making. MMR is just used to find that magical 50-50 win probability by finding 12 players close in SR and reaching an average MMR that is similar for both teams.

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You mean the money that was already spent when buying the game? :roll_eyes:

If you’re talking loot boxes, then I’d like to point out that those are independent of competitive mode. People who enjoy QP or the Arcade modes don’t have to go into competitive mode at all to use skins/sprays/icons.

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10

When a GM is on a silver account, he has the MMR of a silver player. This MMR is catastrophically below his true skill, so he totally demolishes his opponents. No smurf GM is put on the enemy team to balance the match. He is not forced to carry sub 500s to balance the match. He is matched with, and against, silvers, because the matchmaker thinks he is silver.

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This can’t be true in a literal sense, because decayed GMs are matched with GMs, not diamonds.

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12

So you are saying that when you start at 500SR and win 40 games in a row your MMR is the same as it is with a silver player that has been silver for 8 seasons?

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It would take less than 40 games to get to 1600, but yes.

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14

It absolutely is, and we know because GMs aren’t the only people have been decayed.

In past seasons, everyone’s SRs were dropped after placements, while their MMRs were untouched. This was explicitly stated by Blizzard to “let everyone climb” at the beginning of the season.

The average win-rate is 50% (obviously, by logic this required). Everyone can’t REALLY climb. But when they lower your SR under your MMR, the bonus gains makes your SR quickly climb even with a 50% win-rate. You gain more on wins, less on losses. Blizzard thought this might make people enjoy comp more, since their SR goes up as they play.

Really people just hated being placed low, and they turned it off, but it did give insights to the system. Primarily, the exact same effects that happened to decayed players happened to everyone else. If you placed late into a season, you’d be with a bunch of people with higher SR, because that was where your MMR was.

That’s because their MMR is around 1600. When people do these challenges, they get on an account intentionally ranked low. The matchmaker doesn’t magically know a GM player has stepped on. All it sees is the player winning, so it keeps increasing their MMR as they win. They don’t jump from silver to masters MMR because they played well in a few games.

P.S. MMR’s purpose is NOT to “quickly ID smurfs”. It is literally how good the match maker thinks you are at the game. That is its purpose.

A smurf, by definition, is a player/account that intentionally played poorly to lower their MMR and trick the system.

MMR tries to find a 50/50 game by grouping people with the same MMR together in a game. SR isn’t used at all.

Are you actually and alt of Cuthbert? Or perhaps you just read his thread and believed it. You are repeating his ideas which have been thoroughly debunked.

You blame casual players, but it seems you are the one not ready for a competitive system. Any higher ranked player could get on your account and easily climb until they got close to whatever their real rank is. The system isn’t holding you down, you need to get better.

Competition is inherently harsh. You cannot win without making someone else lose. You cannot climb without making someone else fall.

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15

I don’t know what you are talking about. This account is high plat and is played by a diamond player. It got placed to low plat because of leavers in the first two placement games. The handicapping MM system is able to level out an 800SR skill difference so well that I’ve played freaking 140 games to get this account to 2944 career high. It took me 30 games to get over 2600. 76 of the 140 games were one-sided stomps, wins or losses. About 25 were good games, 8 had leavers and the rest stunk some other way. It is no way possible that everyone in those games had similar MMR with all those throwers.

Do you happen to be Kaawumbas alt account?

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Well, if you start from 500SR and win your next 30-40 games in a row you really do not need magic to figure out the player does not belong to said rank… :stuck_out_tongue:

Which leads to the next question, how much higher can your MMR be compared to your SR? With a decayed GM it could be 1500SR. Let’s say that is the limit. Why isn’t the GM who started at 500 and is now at 2300 after a record of only wins at 3800 MMR playing against masters? What you are saying is that his MMR never gets much above his SR because only MMR is used by match making. Now, wouldn’t that be an awfully bad system at recognising skill?

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Sorry not sure why I thought I read a gold rank. Maybe I clicked the wrong name? The point is, no matter where you land, a higher ranked player could get on your account and climb.

Would you believe that people sometimes have bad games? They are tired, frustrated, tilted. They are filling a role they aren’t good at. Etc.

I guarantee if you streamed the next 30 games you play, you’d have some bad ones too.

No, but we agree on a lot since we both accept what the hard evidence says about match making, instead of coming up with irrational conspiracies. Where certain bad players are “help up” at unfair SRs, while good players like yourself are unfairly “held down”.

Kaawumba wish he was as good as me :wink:

Stop for a moment and think about this, the system is not making a person play 40 games before it decides they can go up in rank.

As said person is on this win-streak, they keep climbing (faster than 40 games to get 1000 SR too…). Just because they were able to win a bunch at 500SR doesn’t mean they’ll win at 1500SR. So their MMR keeps being increased, and they continue playing games to be tested.

What’s the alternative? Should a win-streak in bronze skip you to gold or plat? No, that would be stupid. If you are on a win-streak in bronze, you’ll rapidly climb to silver. If you continue winning, you’ll rapidly climb to gold, and so on. At some point, once you stop winning all the time, you’re rank will settle. But both a platinum and GM player could crush bronze games with little effort, and it would be hard to differentiate who was who if you watched the video.

All the matchmaker knows is “they are too good for THIS rank”, so it bumps you up a little at a time until it finds the right spot.

What are you trying to say? Do you think beating gold players at 2300 should get you a masters level MMR at 3800?

Are you just trying to split hairs over how fast someone should climb in rank? I mean, I could get on an account with 500 SR and win 5 games in a row and have a “record of only wins”. Does that mean the account should be put in masters?

Win-streaks used to be a bigger thing in the system, that is getting on a streak could move your SR (and MMR) up/down much faster. People didn’t like it, felt like streaks were more often random luck that messed with their rank, rather than proof of them being significantly missraked, and Blizzard toned them down a lot.

You are making no sense what-so-ever. MMR is the only measure of your skill the match maker has. It’s relationship to SR is irrelevant.

Just like Elo, you have one number that represents skill and goes up when you win (and down when you lose). Is this not the type of ranking system you want?

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Your MMR is not fixed. Buying a new account does very little for you unless you are super-casual and only play your 10 placement matches. In which case RNG has an almost equal influence on your MMR/SR as you do…because you are not playing enough games to make it accurate.

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Too much here to answer to with a phone. I disagree with you and your “hard evidence” that MMR is used only to match against similar MMRs. My experience on several accounts is that it is used as a balancing factor around a certain SR but even though it would be only the way you think it is, it would be an unfair system to the players. According to what you said the system would actively match a player with MMR higher than SR with and against other players that have MMR higher than SR (so basically a good player would play only with the strongest players of his rank). That also is wrong and unfair. Everyone should have an equal chance in climbing the ladder, not equal chance of winning each game. Understand? The system you describe actively tries to slow down the climbing of good players. It’s like there are layers inside the tiers. Good 2600 players and bad 2600 players. In my opinion you should face the average of a certain rank until you climb to a rank where the average is your skill ceiling. Another way to find that average of a rank is to use MMR as a balancing factor creating an equal average MMR for both teams (by placing players with MMR lower than SR to teams of players with MMR higher than SR).

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yeah its funny how elo is used in chess, bridge, league of legends, csgo, wow, virtually any competitive game in the world. Cant believe people take overwatch seriously omegalul

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