I’ll be blunt…I have watched over 300+ hours of progamers, none of them popped off to anywhere near the level I did in any of their games in GM or top 500…ever…I think you need to go watch some bronze to top 500 videos to see what mismatched MMR really looks like. I just climbed another 120 or so and I started a fight 2v6 killed two in the time my teammate took to die and then killed the rest solo, solo pushed the cart, then the enemy respawns hit and I killed 3-4 more before my team got back.
That’s not something that is nearly impossible in plat and above, and can pretty much only done by GM/top 500. winning a fight that is started 2 down is already pretty uncommon, winning fights 4 down before the fight starts and then continuing and cleaning up their team two times in a row is only possible with horrendous mismatches.
I am not complaining about the climbing…I’ve already gone up roughly 400 in just a couple afternoons, but I question whether this is really the best way to handle smurfs that need to be pushed to a higher MMR/rating. If the MMR is already so high why can’t they just put me up against plats by now. you’d think with all the wins and stomping it would be time again, but no instead, it looks like I have 3-4 more hours of play to get to plat.
Luckily I am finally out of silver/low gold so I’ve been pulled back from popping off at levels above what we see in pro games down to a more reasonable oh I’m just carrying 2-3 people’s worth.
it’s not even good practice it’s just burning approximately 6? 9 hours of my time? I don’t really keep track. I do other stuff at the same time. But as a method of keeping players engaged and playing more I guess it’s ok, but doesn’t seem like a good or fair method to me. At least if I were up against plat players by now I could start trying to learn the characters I plan to play on this account. however there is nothing to learn playing at this low rank except that you need to be supplying primary dps regardless of role because no one is doing any damage. I really am curious whether ana players can maintain 80-90% win rate in low ranks because it seems like it would be extraordinarily hard. But maybe they just don’t heal and go full on kill the enemy team. I feel like they will win the games in which they have a second main healer, but…
sometimes I think you could be right, but I only see hanzos killing 4 every fight and hitting extremely hard shots that a gold would never hit when I’m on an alt account and outperforming. I don’t think that’s coincidence I think they match a high MMR player to match me. If I just am sure to underperform and keep my win rate even then those players don’t ever appear
It sort of does. In the case of iddqd (allegedly) they stated that his MMR on his bronze account matched that of his main after 15 games.
This is possible, but it’s also possible that you will be placed in higher ranked matches where you’re the lowest SR player. Toxicity occurs regardless of MMR - it’s an uncontrollable variable.
They already do. Once the system determined I was a smurf I got much more SR per win than I lost for a loss. Sure, it takes time, but this is to prevent errors in MMR calibration. If you can perform consistently for a large number of games then it will determine you deserve a higher rank.
That’s nowhere near a large enough sample size to justify gaining that much SR.
I believe they already do introduce test games every now and then. I’ve seen it myself plenty of times, but I’d need to check more sources for this.
No it’s not that I’m good. Owl players pop off similarly in low rank games if they try.
Over 500 point difference is outclassed and 1000 is being worth 5 of the enemy team in most games. Anyway i guess they just don’t want boosting to be easy. I was forgetting people do that.
Why should they be different? Both types (in my case a) outperformers and b) smurfs) have an internal MMR (or any kind of performance metric) which is higher than their current SR. Both should be treated the same way by the matchmaker. In the sense of the OP, thats “mirroring” their MMR to create a 50% matchup.
I know the debates weve had on the forums in the past and the claims that MMR stays very close to SR. However, im not so dogmatic about that. There is certain evidence that this is not always the case. For example, i heard that smurfs get huge SR adjustments for games, and that these adjustments are incremental, meaning, if they go on a streak, the adjustment increases from game to game. This is one thing that would support the thesis that there is some performance-based value (be it MMR or another value) which is decoupled from their SR, because that value acts as a “memory” for how well they did in recent games (SR adjustment calculation is not solely based on a per-game basis).
If we do have cases where MMR (or whatever value) is not close to SR, and if matchmaking takes MMR into calculation, then we can have cases where MMR mirroring is in effect, as the OP is reporting.
According to Blizzard (via this very thoroughly documented article) MMR might not even exist in Competitive any more. If it does exist, it matches SR in all cases other than disconnection penalties or decay.
That’s PBSR, and it’s not an account flag, it’s an adjustment based on the calculated win chance, and an analysis of the statistics you put forth in just that game. (see article)
According to the article, PBSR is intended to be relatively small, and again, based on statistical performance of a single match, compared to the average statistics for the hero you played of the people in a similar SR/MMR.
I can’t actually find where he says MMR may not be used anymore. I’d appreciate it if you can link that.
Nope, that’s MMR itself. It uses your MMR to calculate your win chance, and your SR will change more/less quickly dependent on how different they are. Also, all my accounts are diamond+ so there’s no PBSR involved for me.
Jeff says here that smurfs are moved out of ranks quickly as MMRs on them will match the same as that of the main account of the smurf. It’s kind of an account flag in a way.
That’s because of all of the following at the same time:
1 - The new account “uncertainty”. New accounts have much larger SR/MMR gains and losses after completing their placements. You’ll see them with base gains or losses in excess of 50+ after a single match (not even factoring in “PBSR”) and those base gains/losses taper down as that account plays more games, and then by around game 50 or so, the base gains/losses taper to around 25.
2 - Performance-enhanced MMR gains on a win (what people like to call PBSR but I see it as a misnomer) since that explanation was made at a time when it was still active for all ranks (April 2017)
3- Winstreak bonuses (which manifested itself in seeing the maximum 150 SR gain on a win), which are now nerfed
Dafran recently did an unranked-to-GM stream I think. I didn’t check his win/loss record for that account, but however fast he did it is about how fast it can be done in these current conditions.
None of my accounts are new. The one that’s in masters now was created in season 5, and regularly hovered all around diamond, and even fell into plat the previous couple seasons. This season, I was gaining around 26+ SR per win and losing less than 20 per loss.
MMR is most probably based on your performance relative to your rank and the game you’re in. Sure, as your mmr rises you will gain more SR, but I feel that PBSR is a more short term variation. The system will find matches based on your MMR and adjust your SR gains accordingly. If you perform better, your MMR rises and you gain more SR. This takes at least 15 games as shown in the previous post. If this is the same as PBSR, then I don’t see why the devs would make a distinction between the two. I think PBSR gives you a small amount of additional SR extra dependent on your performance in each game, whereas MMR gains looks at your entire season history. I could be wrong.
Scott Mercer says here that they tried to make it only kick in now when the matchmaker was certain that there was a discrepancy between current SR and MMR, i.e. a smurf. The maximum 150SR gain is very unlikely to come through nowadays unless you’re a diamond+ on a bronze account.
yeah I’m going…going to be in plat by mid-next week, and I can already feel that my ashe can barely win at 2300 and is like 2500 max, same with my widow. sniping is hard to carry with compared to mccree or soldier where I feel the games are super easy until around 2800…
It’s just I had to play way too many games in silver and low gold…even with 70% win rate…and it’s too hard to maintain 90% unless I always fill because as your MMR goes up you get harder games, where your teammates are heavy~~
I swear that’s what happens. anyway not a big deal. yesterday I had 100% win rate over 7 games, but that’s cause I’m not only playing at around a diamond level but also filling every team comp’s needs…
I have a feeling if 2/2/2 lock really comes that suddenly it won’t be so hard to carry low mmr players because at least you will have a team comp with 2 underperforming players instead of getting 2 underperforming players and then having 3 of your teammates swap to dps as if that’s going to help (to be honest though I think optimal might be switching one teammate to dps and leaving one realiable player on both heal and tank so you have all bases covered). However, that’s not what happens. they switch to 4-5 dps and are practically trying to lose. even if my orisa would normally carry 70-80% of the time they just see the dps dying over and over and believe the game is unwinnable without more dps
Not sure if my situation is the same as yours. But I have been pulling good Zenyatta plays since yesterday (for the very least, for a measly Silver, my play was really good). I got important backline picks, timed my transcendence and discord much better, kept my teammates alive, and almost always had a card at game end dedicated to myself (either gold healing, gold damage, gold elims, trans healing, defense assist, or offense assist) and I’m also starting to get more and more POTG as Zen! Which I consider huge in a rank where DPS heroes constitute at least 3 out of 6 members of the team.
Anyway, my SR is currently sitting at 1800+. Weirdly enough, one of my games last night, I was matched with 4 bronze + 1 silver players with average of 1200+ SR. Enemy team also had the same SR average but they have 4 silver and 2 bronze players. Most of them had their career profile private but one of them who was on my team, his SR was 1084. Not that I’m complaining because I was taking their snipers (Widow, Hanzo, Ashe) out on a walk. We did end up losing the game because one teammate left, followed by the other two, leaving myself and the other two teammates to fight 6 people.
All in line with I have discovered myself, especially the “mmr reset” within a few days of not touching the game, playing less also makes the game a lot mroe unsure. Discovered that when I only play 1-2 games every two days, I get an 60%+ win rate on average regardless of SR.
Under the section titled “But I just read this post from a developer, and it said matchmaking is based on SR, not MMR”
An alternate (but acceptable) hypothesis, in which I completely believe new posts (and declare obsolete inconvenient old posts) would be the following: MMR does not exist anymore. Posts describing MMR in competitive are obsolete. Match making is based on SR alone (48), except in the case of decayed players, where there is a specific hack in the code to use their “internal skill rating” instead of their “displayed skill rating” in match making. I’m not ready to change my whole post to support this hypothesis, as it hasn’t been explicitly endorsed by Blizzard, though it would be the correct conclusion if you ignore posts from February 2018 or earlier.
What would not be a reasonable conclusion is that matchmaking is based on some amalgamation of SR and MMR that ends up rigging matches or breaking the system. Regardless of what we call the number used to make matches, it goes up when you win, down when you lose, and is a single number.
OP nailed the flaws in the system perfectly. People call it “finding a fair match” but the result is that you will get balanced out, even if you deserve to be higher than, say, Silver.
Look around in Silver once. You can see some players of Platinum skill all over the place. Balanced out by some utter wood tier players that literally stand still while getting shot at.
That is not a competitive system. That is a system trying it’s hardest to make an even match, while doing a horrible job of getting players to the ranks that would actually create even matches naturally.
Three years later now with all these alt accounts and smurfs, trolls and throwers… “even match” is the worst possible scenario for getting people to their proper ranks. Because you could be a Plat skill in Silver, only to get balanced out by an opposing Plat skilled player. Instead of ranking up out of there as you should, you’re stuck in “even match” after “even match.” Winning about half. Going nowhere.
The problem is, youre just taking it as if without questioning, why is their such a wide skill gap at every rank? Do smurfs have a adverse affect on matchmaking since both teams SR are affect. Leavers affect SR, throwers have a effect on it. The fact that their is a solo queue throws the matchmaker off by miles as their is no consistency. One match you can have a good Rein to make space for you, next match you can be matched with a hog that will spend the entire match feeding to no end. Both have affects on your SR outside of your own control.
Somebody put the anaology best, its like playing chess but 5 other people also have a piece on the board you have no influence over and they can play their pieces however they please and you’ll still get a personal ranking based on that