Hear me out, I put a little thought into this. I don’t mean one unending long season to replace our current seasons.
So the reason we have seasons is because competition happens in events. A ladder is supposed to be more like an event than just some unending, ongoing thing because the matches on that ladder, the resulting changes in ranking, are the events. So making a bunch of short seasons throughout the year makes that more apparent in a quick and easy way. You can say “I hit Top 500 in Season 18”. Season 18 was an event.
Everyone knows that, but that has not been ideal because nobody actually talks about seasons like that. We’re treating the ladder as if it’s some unending ongoing event. And that’s wrong and thinking incorrectly about what SR means is one of the main contributors to bad player behavior.
So, a small change to Quick Play and Comp to distinguish between the two very different goals of Ranking and Matchmaking may smooth things over a bit. Here’s an idea to fix the two:
Normal Play/Matchmaking Mode (Replaces what we call Quick Play now) -
- Uses MMR from Comp ladder. Options include: 1) No Visible Tiers (GM/M/Diamond/Plat/etc) but small visible MMR number, 2) Both visible tiers and small visible MMR number, but either way there is no “SR” as we know it today from Comp. That’s deleted. The MMR is a small plain number in like Arial font that you see when you mouse over your name (a la StarCraft 2). There should be no penalty to your MMR from leaves/disconnects/etc and the algorithm should take into account as many factors as possible (the way it does right now in Comp below Diamond). Imo, MMR should be visible, players have always asked for that. They just shouldn’t dress it up and confuse people about what that number means. Playing for a higher MMR is great. It doesn’t mean you’re better, it means you will get better because you’re playing tougher opponents. That’s all. The goal here is Matchmaking . Everything is done in service of matchmaking (aside from showing you your MMR, that’s for transparency’s sake… and people like numbers). You don’t punish players for leaving matches by placing them with players who aren’t at their level (in either direction). That disrupts the other players’ experience. If a player of equivalent skill level as Seagull is to play, they should always be paired with other players at that level for good matches, no matter how many times they’ve disconnected from a game (or even lost, but we’ll get to that in a second). Otherwise punishing them by putting them with Masters players (because of reduced MMR) is actually punishing the Masters players. Suspensions/bans/etc are okay too since they don’t affect the MMR.
As opposed to MMR, SR on the other hand is some proprietary thing thought up on the spot that isn’t as “peer reviewed” in other games/industries like MMR is. It’s a “Ranking” focused conversion of MMR. Well, let’s stop ranking people that way because MMR is not about rank the way video game companies use it. Let’s go back to MMR and what MMR is intended to do: Make good matches.
In place of Competitive Mode the way we have it now:
Competitive Mode -
- Now this will bring up a Menu which brings up in-game periodic tournaments/ladders. Weekly or monthly for example. Within each such event , you will have a ranking or result (From 1 to whatever). This is what the new “SR” will be and this is where current seasons will evolve into… into periodic competitive events. They could run an annual/biannual ladder simultaneously with monthly events, weekly tournaments, etc whatever. The word “ladder” should be used for ladder events. The goal here is Ranking first and foremost, moreso than matchmaking. You can use MMR from Normal Play to seed tournaments or whatever, to help make good matches, but nothing else from it is seen again as then Ranking, in the form of “SR” or just raw placement (1st to Last) takes over.
Blizzard already tries to combine the two. MMR makes your matches, SR reflects your ranking/result. But it does not seem the two are as “untied” as we would think. With each dip or gain of SR, the level of the players you are paired with also change, so clearly MMR is changing right alongside SR.
You might ask, “so what?” What’s wrong with using competitive event results (i.e, SR) to make matches? Isn’t that what we do in the playoffs of most sports? (I.e, #1 in Western Conference vs. #1 in Eastern Conference in NBA, NFC vs AFC in Football, etc). Yes, that works and we want that, but only in small doses. Imagine if the playoffs never ended, the superbowl never came, the finals never came, it was just a repeating loop of playoffs non-stop the whole year. That’s the equivalent to what’s happening with current OW competitive seasons.
It raises people’s blood pressure when they simply want to play OW and get better at the game but not outright compete as if a championship was on the line each and every game. In our case, what’s on the line is a slippery slope whereby you go on one losing streak and you can find yourself being paired up with a drastically different caliber of players than even a few hours ago. Have you, as a player, changed in skill level to the tune of 200-500 SR in just 24 hours? No. Yet the game makes you think you did and it makes people upset. People want consistent matches. You can be at a 3000 SR level and spend all day competing at that level and losing at that level, legitimately. Meaning, you’re still 3000 SR but you’re just not better than it. But if you actually lose at that level all day, you won’t be 3000 anymore, even though your skill level is still there and hasn’t gone anywhere in the last few hours. Let me repeat myself: If you woke up a season-long 3000 SR player and you lose 20 close games (which is certainly possible because of the sheer number of variables at play in any given match of 6v6 OW) by the end of the day, you have not changed much as a player to deserve a severely different MMR (matchmaking rating). Yes if this were a tournament you’d have failed out of it by now, but it isn’t. And nobody thinks that in any one day tournament, a player improves drastically overnight. If an 8th seeded player wins 1st place, nobody thinks that player literally started Game 1 as 8th seeded and then somehow improved their skill level over the course of a day to become 1st. No, they were already at that caliber before the tournament even began and the inverse is true. They’re still at the same caliber at tourney’s end. You just can not change that much in 24 hours as a human being.
Hold the phone. I’m mistakenly treating SR as MMR, right? It makes sense only if I replace “SR” with “MMR”, right? Well, everyone already treats SR as MMR so everyone is making that mistake. If everyone else is misinterpreting you, then perhaps you should rephrase yourself rather than think everyone else is wrong for misinterpreting you. And I quite literally do mean everyone, if they took a poll I bet over 90% of players would answer questions as if SR is MMR.
Role queue has made this way better. In fact role queue is the first step towards such a change. I’d even go so far as to say a separate hidden MMR per hero per map may be necessary for fine tuning the matchmaking (and then you can display one MMR per class, one overall MMR, or all the MMRs). And it is, of course, very possible. Nothing about this requires more problem solving than Blizzard already has done, it’s just… reorganizing.